Peter Novick

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Peter Novick (born July 26, 1934 in Jersey City , NJ , † February 17, 2012 in Chicago ) was an American historian .

Academic career and work

Novick received his doctorate from Columbia University in 1965 with a study on épuration published in English in 1968 and in French in 1985 . After only a short teaching position at the University of California (Santa Barbara) , he moved to the University of Chicago , where he held a professorship for history from 1966 until his retirement in 1999. Novick died in 2012.

Novick's most famous work is That Noble Dream. The 'Objectivity Question' and the American Historical Profession (1988), which is considered to be the standard work on the history of history in the United States to this day. In it, Novick traces the intellectual and institutional history of the discipline from the 1880s to the dispute over the Marxist historian David Abraham in the first half of the 1980s, whereby he primarily advocates the function of concepts of historiographical-empirical " objectivity " or their dependence on dominant political, social and cultural influences (contested by the advocates of “objectivity”). For Novick - despite the triumph of an "empirical-objectivist alliance" in the Abraham controversy - all claims to an "objectivity" of the discipline have proven to be hollow and tied to external interests and have lost their cohesiveness:

“But as of the 1980s, hardly anybody was listening. Sensibilities were too diverse to be gathered together under an ecumenical tent. As a broad community of discourse, as a community of scholars united by common aims, common standards, and common purposes, the discipline of history had ceased to exist. Convergence on anything, let alone a subject as highly charged as 'the objectivity question', was out of the question. "

Novick became known to a broader public through his study The Holocaust in American Life (1999, 2003 as After the Holocaust. Dealing with Mass Murder ), which was awarded the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize in 2000 and which criticized the - so Novick - "perverse sacralization of the Holocaust " in American society. His assumption in That Noble Dream that political, social and cultural factors shape “objective” historical narratives was tested here using the example of the “development of 'Holocaust awareness' in the USA.” According to Novick - here based on Maurice Halbwachs - Public, collective memory is even more susceptible to these influences than professional history:

“In a sense, collective memory is rather ahistorical or even antihistorical. To understand something historically means to be aware of its complexity, to have sufficient distance, to see it from several perspectives, to accept the ambiguity (also the moral ambiguity) of the motives and behavior of the protagonists. The collective memory simplifies; it sees events from a single, interested perspective; does not tolerate ambiguity; reduces the events to mythical archetypes. (…) If we examine the memory of the Holocaust in the United States with Halbwachs' approach and link the memory to interests today, we are led to the question of what those interests were, how they were determined, and who determined them. We will ask ourselves how these interests made the memory of the Holocaust appear inadequate, useless or even harmful in one epoch and as appropriate and desirable in another epoch. "

Novick counts the cold war to be one of the influencing factors for the development and ruptures of the “Holocaust consciousness”. With the desired integration of West Germany into NATO and the anti-communist formation of American society, the most important organizations of American Jews for fear of the “Association of Jews with Communism “prevented them from discussing the Holocaust until the end of the 1960s, and the majority of American Jews at this time were forward-looking and not interested in highlighting ethnic differences; the Middle East conflict , which after the 1973 Yom Kippur War at the latest produced a specific “Holocaust interpretation pattern” with which “any legitimate criticism of Israel was to be pushed aside as irrelevant”; and finally assimilation and disintegration processes in the Jewish communities of the USA, which would have awakened the need for a unifying symbol of Jewish identity.

Fonts (selection)

  • The Resistance versus Vichy. The Purge of Collaborators in Liberated France , New York 1968.
  • That noble dream. The 'Objectivity Question' and the American Historical Profession , Cambridge 1988.
  • The Holocaust in American Life , Boston 1999.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/13/us/peter-novick-wrote-divisive-holocaust-book-dies-at-77.html nytimes
  2. ↑ Novick, Peter, That Noble Dream. The 'Objectivity Question' and the American Historical Profession, Cambridge 1988, p. 621.
  3. ^ Novick, Noble Dream, p. 628.
  4. ↑ Novick, Peter, After the Holocaust. Dealing with the mass murder, Munich 2003, p. 352.
  5. ^ Novick, After the Holocaust, p. 9.
  6. ^ Novick, After the Holocaust, pp. 14ff.
  7. ↑ Novick, Nach dem Holocaust, p. 126. Novick, on the other hand, refers to the frequency of “invocations of the Holocaust” (ibid., P. 127) in the discourse of American communists: “Nobody talked more about the Holocaust than the followers of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg . The Rosenbergs themselves often spoke of it. (...) There hardly seems to have been a public event in favor of the Rosenbergs at which the Holocaust was not constantly referred to. Often - even at her funeral - the 'Song of the Warsaw Ghetto' was sung. "(Ibid., P. 129.)
  8. ↑ See Novick, After the Holocaust, pp. 351f.
  9. ↑ Novick, After the Holocaust, p. 206.See also ibid, p. 201.
personal data
SURNAME Novick, Peter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American historian
DATE OF BIRTH July 26, 1934
PLACE OF BIRTH Jersey City
DATE OF DEATH 17th February 2012
Place of death Chicago