SOURCE: "The Horror and the Words," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4672, October 16, 1992, p. 10.

Cheyette is an English literary critic, nonfiction writer, and educator who has written extensively on racism—particularly anti-Semitism—in literature. In the following review of Probing the Limits of Representation, he discusses some of the major issues confronting historians and other writers who seek to account for Nazism and the Holocaust.

In recent trials of neo-Nazi publishers who "deny" the existence of the Holocaust, the historical record was dismissed by their defence lawyers as "mere opinion" and their denial was claimed as no less legitimate than other accounts of the Final Solution. Probing the Limits of Representation—which began life in 1990 as a conference at the University of California, Los Angeles—examines the implications of a historical relativism which reduces history to opinion and rejects the testimony even of those who witnessed Nazi atrocities...