SOURCE: "The Uses of the Holocaust," in Partisan Review, Vol. LXI, No. 4, Fall, 1994, pp. 700-04.

In the following excerpt, Young discusses some of the ways Friedländer and the other contributors to Probing the Limits of Representation address the difficulties of writing about the Holocaust.

"The history of the Holocaust sits uneasily amidst other events of its time," Michael Marrus wrote in The Holocaust and the Historians. "How do we write Holocaust history? Since by writing it, we automatically locate it within some tradition, some epoch, how do we choose one? Is it only Jewish history? Or German? Is it European or more generally Western?" To which we might add, is it part of World War Two history, or in the words of another historian, Lucy Dawidowicz, a separate "war against the Jews"? Do we tell it from the perspective of the perpetrators, the victims, or the bystanders...