The collection Catastrophe and Meaning by Moishe Postone and Eric Santner is as much an investigation into the ways in which historians have attempted to understand the Holocaust as it is an exploration of how it has eluded such efforts. In speaking to the problems and ongoing debates in the history and historiography of the Holocaust, the essays collected in the volume provide a new perspective on the dimensions of the genocide itself, reminding us of its effects in the present and pointing to the ways in which they will persist in the future.

As editors, Postone and Santner have assembled a highly distinguished group of scholars to engage with some of the most difficult and debated issues in the study of the Holocaust, dividing the volume into sections on anti-Semitism (with essays by Saul Friedländer and Shulamit Volkov), the Holocaust and modernity (Anson Rabinbach, Dan Diner, Moishe Postone), victimhood and identity (Omer Bartov, Frank Trommler, Debórah Dwork), and trauma and representation (Froma Zeitlin, Dominick LaCapra, Geoffrey Hartman, Paul Mendes-Flohr). The result is a volume that provides a highly lucid and insightful survey of the stakes of current debates, while also prompting critical questions as to how issues have been framed and offering insight into new avenues of investigation.

Of particular interest in this context is Anson Rabinbach’s provocative essay “‘The Abyss that opened up before us’: Thinking about Auschwitz and Modernity.” In examining interpretations of the Holocaust that rely on establishing a link between modernity and genocide, Rabinbach traces such explanations to German-Jewish émigré intellectuals during World War II, most notably Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their Dialectic of Enlightenment. While the emphasis on the “modernity” of mass murder might be thought to neglect the specific German context of the Holocaust, he convincingly argues that their work in fact combines the universal and the particular in attempting to “rescue” reason from National Socialism, which sought to mobilize enlightenment to serve the ends of counterenlightenment in the creation of a new, alternate modernity. Such a reading points to the continued validity of their analysis in examining more recent genocides whose particular circumstances are quite different from those of the Holocaust, but whose underlying dynamics are remarkably similar.

Such questions of rupture or continuity, the particular and the universal, both of historical events and their explanations, are the subject of Postone’s essay “The Holocaust and the Trajectory of the Twentieth Century.” Examining the extent to which the Holocaust can be integrated into a discourse of larger historical patterns and processes leads Postone to confront the question of whether the Holocaust can and should be historicized, and what such a historicization would entail. In an exhaustive analysis (which finds itself in a compelling conversation with Diner’s essay “The Destruction of Narrativity”), Postone attempts to outline ways of conceiving of the present and future that he insists must also remain true to the past; in short, generating meaning that does not neglect the lingering consequences and specific historical circumstances of catastrophe. He arrives at an analysis of the Holocaust, in which capital becomes a key critical category, concluding that “Jews became objects of the displaced fury generated by the far-reaching and pervasive effects of the historical dynamics of capitalism, the victims of a fetishized, perverse attempt to liberate humanity from the historical process.” In formulating this position, he also outlines a possible trajectory for the analysis of the Holocaust, making a larger epistemological and methodological point by reminding us of the critical potential of an awareness of the persistence of the past in the present and the challenge of reading both the spectral and the specific.

While an important element of Postone’s approach to reading the veiled presence of the past in the present, psychoanalysis and the rhetoric and complexities of mourning are the explicit subject of Frank Trommler’s incisive essay “Stalingrad, Hiroshima, Auschwitz: The Fading of the Therapeutic Approach.” In it he sees Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich’s The Inability to Mourn as having helped to introduce Freudian categories into public discourse, which became informed by a “therapeutic approach” centering on notions of “working through” and “mourning” in response to collective responsibility. This process was furthered by a number of factors, Trommler argues, including emotional needs, a longing for victimhood among Germans, anti-Semitism, and the fear of “nuclear Holocaust” in the 1980s. However, with the rise of the third generation of the postwar period and the increasing distance to the Holocaust, the language of therapy has given way to that of memory culture and any popular notion of redemption has largely migrated into the aesthetic realm. The legacy of the therapeutic approach Trommler outlines would appear to be one of tensions that are unresolved, but perhaps necessarily so, as witnessed by a number of heated public debates about Germany’s relation to its past. As he concludes: “In the 1990s it became clear that there is no restitution of an earlier normality, or a closure concerning the encounter with Auschwitz.”

Indeed, if there is one thing this volume makes clear, it is the simultaneous dilemma and opportunity inscribed in this lack of closure. The tensions in the way in which we relate to the Holocaust, and connect (or draw a line between) the past and the present more generally, are both what complicate and bring about new ways of conceptualizing history and critically reflecting on the construction of meaning, especially of that which might seem the most senseless. In this volume a group of leading scholars has offered highly insightful essays that demonstrate how challenging such a task is, yet also how necessary.