Saul Friedländer

Saul Friedländer (born October 11, 1932) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning Czech-French-Israeli-American historian. [cite news| url=http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/07/business/media/07cnd-pulitzers.html?ex=1365307200&en=bd7dfc9218ef7f86&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink|title=Washington Post Wins 6 Pulitzer Prizes|publisher=New York Times|date=2008-04-07|accessdate=2008-04-07|author=RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA| quote=The prize for nonfiction writing went to Saul Friedlander for his book, “The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945.”]

Life

Born in Prague to German-speaking Jews, Friedländer grew up in France and survived the German Occupation of 1940–1944. From 1942 until 1944, Friedländer was hidden in a Catholic boarding school in Montlucon, near Vichy, posing as a Gentile. While in hiding, he considered converting to Roman Catholicism. His parents attempted to flee to Switzerland, were arrested instead by Vichy French "gendarmes", turned over to the Germans and were gassed at the Auschwitz death camp. Not until 1946 did Friedländer learn the fate of his parents.

After 1946, Friedländer started to take pride in being a Jew and became a Zionist. In 1948, Friedländer emigrated to Israel on the Irgun ship "Altalena". After finishing highschool, he served in the Israeli army. From 1953-55, he studied Political Science in Paris. Later, Friedlander served as secretary to Nachum Goldman then President of the World Zionist Organization and the World Jewish Congress. In 1959, he became an assistant to Shimon Peres, then vice-minister of defense. Late in the 1980s, Friedländer moved to the Left and was active in the Peace Now group.

In 1963 he received his Ph.D. from the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, where he taught until 1988. Simultaneuosly Friedlander taught at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and at Tel Aviv University. He first rose to fame in the 1960s through biographies of Kurt Gerstein and Pope Pius XII. Since 1988 he has been Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Views

Friedländer sees Nazism as the negation of all life, and as a type of death cult. He has argued that the Holocaust is such a horrific event that its horror is almost impossible to put into normal language. Friedländer sees the anti-semitism of the Nazi Party as unique in history, as he maintains that Nazi Anti-Semitism was distinctive for being “redemptive anti-semitism”, namely a form of anti-semitism that could explain all in the world and offer a form of “redemption” for the anti-Semitic.

Friedländer is an Intentionalist on the origins of the Holocaust question. However, Friedländer rejects the extreme Intentionalist view that Adolf Hitler had a master plan going back to the time when he wrote Mein Kampf for the genocide of the Jewish people. Friedländer, through his research on the Third Reich, has reached the conclusion that there was no intention to exterminate the Jews of Europe before 1941. Friedländer's position might best be deemed moderate Intentionalist.

In the 1980s, Friedländer engaged in a spirited debate with the West German historian Martin Broszat over his call for the "historicization" of Nazi Germany. In Friedländer’s view, Nazi Germany was not and cannot be seen as a normal period of history. Friedländer’s 1997 book, "Nazi Germany and the Jews" was meant as a reply to Broszat’s work. The second volume, "Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 : The Years of Extermination" appeared in 2007. Friedländer’s book is "Alltagsgeschichte" (history of everyday life), not of “Aryan” Germans nor of the Jewish community, but rather an "Alltagsgeschichte" of the persecution of the Jewish community.

Awards

* Friedländer was awarded the Geschwister-Scholl-Preis in 1998 for his work, "Das Dritte Reich und die Juden". In 2007 he was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade.
* MacArthur Fellowship [citeweb|title=UCLA astronomer Andrea Ghez named a 2008 MacArthur Fellow|url=http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/ghez-64006.aspx|publisher=UCLA|accessdate=2008-09-23] (1999)
*In 2008, Friedlander was awarded the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for "".

Work

*"", New York : Knopf, 1966 trans. Charles Fullman, from the original "Pie XII et le IIIe Reich, Documents", Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1964.
*"Prelude to downfall: Hitler and the United States 1939-1941", London, Chatto & Windus, 1967.
*"Kurt Gerstein, the ambiguity of good", New York : Knopf, 1969.
*"L'Antisémitisme nazi : histoire d'une psychose collective", Paris : Editions du Seuil, 1971.
*co-written with Mahmoud Hussein "Arabs & Israelis : a Dialogue" Moderated by Jean Lacouture, New York : Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1975.
*"Some aspects of the historical significance of the Holocaust", Jerusalem : Institute of Contemporary Jewry, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1977.
*"History and Psychoanalysis : an Inquiry Into the Possibilities and Limits of Psychohistory", New York : Holmes & Meier, 1978.
*"When Memory Comes", New York : Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1979. (Noonday Press, Reissue edition 1991, ISBN 0374522723).
*"Reflections of Nazism : an essay on Kitsch and death", New York : Harper & Row, 1984.
*"Visions of apocalypse : end or rebirth?," New York : Holmes & Meier, 1985.
*"Probing the limits of representation : Nazism and the "final solution"," Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1992.
*"Memory, history, and the extermination of the Jews of Europe," Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1993
*"Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933-1939", New York : HarperCollins, 1997.
*"", HarperCollins, 2007. Second Volume to the above.

Bibliography

*Baldwin, Peter "Reworking the Past: Hitler, The Holocaust, and the Historians' Debate", Boston, 1990.
*Bauer, Yehuda "Rethinking the Holocaust", New Haven [Conn.] ; London : Yale University Press, 2001.
*Kershaw, Ian "The Nazi Dictatorship : Problems and Perspectives Of Interpretation", London : Arnold ; New York : Copublished in the USA by Oxford University Press, 2000.

References

External links

* [http://www.research.ucla.edu/chal/99/highlights/article02.htm Friedlander's List]
* [http://www.history.ucla.edu/friedlander/ Saul Friedländer’s Home Page]
* [http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2220/is_n1_v38/ai_18125697 Review of Memory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe]
* [http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/journals/history/ham9-12.html On Saul Friedländer]