/lit/ - Literature

No "red-pill" bullshit please, though.

Why should I believe what's written in history books?

>>7526256
>everything Gass related

I hope the effort I'm putting into this post indicates to any mods that it's not a fucking /pol/ thread. /his/ is awful for actual scholarship. There are real historians here. Plz don't ban.

Is anyone here knowledgeable about the historiography of the Holocaust?

I ask because I've only read bits and pieces of it, but honestly, from some of the better critiques of revisionists I've seen - which basically amount to Mattogno, who is relatively mainstream and has been praised even by Holocaust historians, some stuff highlighted by Ernst Nolte, also mainstream, and criticisms of the eye-witness accounts of the camps, some of which actually were frauds - I do have some doubts. Or I'm starting to. Mostly about exaggerations, not about the reality of the thing altogether.

My "political" alignment on the whole issue is with Norman Finkelstein, so I'm in kind of an odd spot: I think his "Holocaust industry" is a real thing, so I could see it skewing facts, but I also think it actually happened because Finkelstein's entire fucking family was in it. Also, Finkelstein was close friends with Hilberg, who was actually a revisionist HIMSELF in adjusting some of the accepted numbers. It's just so murky. Like, fine, maybe the revisionists are right about one thing - the exaggerations of the eye-witnesses, and many eye-witnesses being frauds. But then why does Hilberg, I think a great and conscientious historian, cite them indiscriminately? He cites retarded shit sometimes. Does that undermine the entire book?

Currently I'm reading three books: Vidal-Naquet, Pressac, and Lipstadt. Got them from a footnote in Trouillot's _Silencing the Past_, a book on the anthropological construction of historical memory. I'm familiar with Pressac through cursory knowledge that he repented from revisionism after being associated with Faurisson, and I know Vidal-Naquet well enough from his other scholarship to know he's a great historian. Lipstadt seems the weakest of the bunch. Trouillot sums them up by saying that Pressac actually interfaces with the claims of the revisionists, while Lipstadt basically just goes "I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU'D DOUBT THAT! YOU EVIL, EVIL MAN!" which is worthless for my purposes, and Vidal-Naquet is somewhere between. The latter of which was very surprising to me because I know his other work, and led me to believe that there is more room in this kind of thing for emotional bias than not.

I just have some questions:

- Where has the debate gone since the Historikerstreit? I'm thinking of reading the debate between Nolte and Furet first, which I just learned about yesterday. I know Furet's other work as well, so I am interested to see how he handles this.

- What is the mainstream, preferably non-Lipstadt-type consensus of response to claims that eyewitness accounts are often cartoonish? Some of these are just fucking stupid, honestly. MAJOR ones too. I can't find any systematic defence of some of them.