(2022) De historicus als implicated subject (original) (raw)
2022, BMGN-Low Countries Historical review, vol. 137
This paper is a contribution to the discussion file 'Uit de egelstellingen' (From the hedgehog positions) about integrity and levelling in the historiography of the Second World War, following the criticism of the thesis of Ad van Liempt about Albert Gemmeker, the camp commander of Westerbork. In my contribution , I situate the critique to Van Liempt’s approach to the Nazi past – both in his dissertation on Gemmeker (2019) and in his editing of the documentary series De Oorlog (The War, 2010) – in a broader debate about the Dutch historiography of the Second World War and the Shoah. I follow various attempts by Van Liempt and others to arrive at a ‘neutral’ historiography, in which moral considerations of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are deliberately set aside. I argue that this pursuit of a position, apparently exalted above all parties involved, denies that historians themselves are implicated in their historiography. Inspired by the work of Michael Rothberg, I show that the position of the bystander – as much as that of perpetrator, victim or resistance fighter – determines the dynamics of historical events. The same applies to the ‘implicatedness’ of historians in their writing of history as it unfolds in the present.
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