How Useful Is The Historical Controversy Between The Internationalists And Functionalists In Explaining The Holocaust?

Historical Controversy: The Holocaust

There are two large schools of thought in the historiography of the Holocaust and of Nazism: the functionalist versus the intentionalist approach. Can you explain your critique of both of these schools? What is your suggestion concerning the scapegoating, and why is it different in essence (if you can say that), from the above-mentioned two approaches? (Adam, 1976, 33-58) One would have to argue that there is no singular key to the explanation of the Holocaust. There are a number of factors, and often it's very difficult to give the appropriate weight to the different factors. Most people at the present time (for example, Christopher Browning or Friedlander) are neither functionalist nor intentionalist. They see a limited value to both approaches: that there are some elements that were planned, at least on some level, even if you cannot go back to 1923 and see an entire schema of the Holocaust laid out. There are those who would also argue that the dynamic of institutions, the functioning of institutions, the activity of bureaucrats on the middle and lower levels were significant phenomena - these are the things that are generally focused on by functionalists. (Adam, 1976, 33-58) So most people now would argue that there is not really a debate, and that the quotification of something as a debate between two schools is a sign of its professionalization within a discipline. This is something that's understandable, and also something one might want to counteract. (Adam, 1976, 33-58)

One way of counteracting it is by seeing what the combatants actually share, and what is invisible to them. I'll deal with the functionalist/intentionalist controversy indirectly, in two stages: first in terms of the contemporary debate (about which I've learned while I'm here) - the Zionist/post-Zionist debate in Israeli historiography. This certainly is very important. (Streit, 1994, 103-118) The post-Zionists are arguing that the very Zionist redemptive narrative blinded people to certain aspects of the Israeli past, including the ways in which relations between Israelis and Palestinians were much more complicated than would be implied by the “David and Goliath” narrative. And that the entire question of relationship to the Palestinians has to be rethought. (Bankier, 1988, 1-20)

One of the great moves in this enterprise was Benny Morris's book on the 1948 war. What is very interesting from the outside, however, is the way in which both the Zionists and the post-Zionists share a great deal. They share a focus, if not a fixation, on Israel, often in non-comparative ways. Their interest in the Holocaust is pretty much limited to the reactions of Zionist leaders to the Holocaust. What is not renewed in the entire debate is, for example, the question of world Jewry, including German Jewry, Yiddishkeit, the significance of the reconstruction of Yiddishkeit, and the importance of the Diaspora. You might say that within the Zionist narrative, the Diaspora was an erring that somehow showed the ...