The Historian of ‘Holocaust Consciousness’

The late Anglo-Jewish historian David Cesarani not only led the development of modern ‘Holocaust consciousness’, he fairly overturned the study of the period in several ways.

These included a revision of the history of Bergen -Belsen concentration camp “showing how it had … only become involved with the Final Solution in the late stages of the war”.

More startling yet, said Cesarani’s friend and colleague Professor Dan Stone, delivering the introductory paper at a memorial conference he convened in April 2017, was his posthumously published book Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933–49.

In this, he first “stressed the extent to which public awareness, knowledge and, especially, commemoration of the Holocaust had become dangerously decoupled from scholarly knowledge” and then attempted “a myth-busting exercise: the Holocaust was not an ‘industrial genocide’ but a messy and brutal affair; the Nazis were not ‘ice-cold’ and ‘rational’ (as they liked to see themselves) but behaved reactively and chaotically; the murder of the Jews was not the only thing on their minds; indeed it could be and was shaped more by the circumstances of the war than by any plan to comb the continent of Europe in a straightforward and systematic way”.

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Professor Cesarani may well have felt that public Holocaust commemorations had become ‘decoupled’ from scholarship but his absence must have been felt more and more keenly in recent months.

He would surely have played an important role at recent events like the interment of Holocaust victims’ remains at Bushey Cemetery, London and would even now be giving a clear lead in the recent, increasing struggle against political antisemitism in the U.K.

As  observe  that the publication of these conference papers could not be more timely, I hear nothing but the echo of hollow laughter.

However, I feel compelled to point out in conclusion that almost four years since the death of Professor Cesarani, inter alia, the author of The Jewish Chronicle and Anglo-Jewry, that the JC’s current editor and staff daily pen the unending first drafts of the history of 21^st century antisemitism. And so it goes ….

** Dan Stone, Professor of Modern History and Director of the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London is a former editor of Patterns of Prejudice and edited the journal’s issue devoted to papers delivered at the conference he arranged in Professor Cesarani’s name.

© Natalie Wood (13 February 2019)