Saul Friedländer

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Saul Friedländer, 2010

Saul Friedländer (also Saul P. Friedlander or Friedlaender , Hebrew שאול פרידלנדר; born on October 11, 1932 in Prague ; actually Pavel Friedländer ) is an Israeli historian and author .

Childhood and adolescence

Saul Friedländer was born as Pavel Friedländer in Prague on October 11, 1932, to a German-speaking Jewish family. His father Jan Friedländer (1897–1942) came from Prague, where he studied law at Charles University and later worked for an insurance company . His mother Elli (1905–1942) originally came from Ober-Rochlitz ( Horní Rokytnice ) in the Giant Mountains. Her father, Gustav Glaser from Politz (1863–1921, buried in Gablonz ), had achieved prosperity there through his own linen and cotton weaving mill. Friedländer's family was Jewish, but not religious.

Friedländer spent the first years of his life in Prague, where he attended an English private school from September 1938. His parents tried to flee with him across the Hungarian border in March 1939 , but they failed and had to return to Prague. Shortly after the occupation of Czechoslovakia , they made another attempt to escape and emigrated to France . Other family members also left the country.

Friedländer initially lived with his parents in Paris . The first time was very difficult for them because they had little financial means. Nevertheless, they were able to place him in boarding schools. He spent six months in a home for Jewish children in Montmorency , near Paris, before moving to another boarding school. After the occupation of France , the family left Paris in 1940 and spent the next two years in Néris-les-Bains , near Montluçon , which was in the unoccupied zone and was therefore subject to the Vichy regime .

When the arrest of foreign Jews began all over France after the occupation of the rest of France in 1942, Friedländer's parents decided to hide their son and chose a Jewish children's home near La Souterraine. But he only stayed very briefly, as the danger there was too great for him. After that, his parents decided to take Saul to a Catholic boarding school called Saint-Béranger, a boarding school of sodality , in Montluçon. There he was given the name Paul-Henri Ferland. He once tried to escape from Saint-Béranger to get to his parents, which succeeded, but had to go back afterwards. He was baptized Catholic in the Church of Notre-Dame in Montluçon at the beginning of October 1942 and was initially taken to a home in Montneuf. There he fell ill with bad larynx diphtheria from which he almost died. In September 1943 he returned to Montluçon and Saint-Béranger. As a student of Saint-Beránger, he dealt with the Catholic faith and finally decided to become a priest .

Friedländer's parents also tried to find a place to hide, but it became more and more difficult. Because of an illness, his father had to be hospitalized for a few days. Finally, in autumn 1942, they tried to flee across the Swiss border above the town of Novel , but were turned away and handed over to the French police. They first came to a camp in Rivesaltes before they were deported . They were probably murdered in Auschwitz concentration camp in 1942 . In Néris-les-Bains, after the parents had been caught, the French police also looked for Friedländer, but they were unsuccessful.

After the end of the war , a Jewish merchant was appointed as guardian for Friedländer. For the time being he stayed at the school in Saint-Béranger and at the end of the school year was to be transferred to the care of the guardian. He made a trip to Saint-Etienne and some time after returning he left Saint-Béranger for good and moved in with the guardian. It was not until 25 years later that he visited Néris-les-Bains again.

After the end of the war he became more and more concerned with his Jewish roots and dealt not only with Zionist ideas, but also with communist ones . In August 1946 he was in a Zionist youth camp in the Jura department on Lac de Chalain , where he was assigned to the Habonim group. After he left Saint-Béranger, he became a high school student and boarding school student in the senior class at Lyceé Henri-IV in Paris. At that time he occasionally attended meetings of communist youth organizations in the 5th arrondissement and the meetings of the Habonim. He identified with Zionist and communist approaches, but he soon moved away from communism and from autumn 1947 Zionism was his main concern. So at the age of fifteen he was determined to fight for Israel . But Habonim refused and refused him the trip there. He then falsified his date of birth, followed the youth organization Betar and began his journey to Israel on June 4, 1948, including on the ship Altalena . On his arrival in Israel he finally changed his name "Paul" to "Shaul" and as a compromise between the French spelling "Saül" and the previous "Paul" it became "Saul". When Friedländer arrived in Israel, he was initially in Nira for a few months before becoming an internal student at an agricultural school. There he learned Hebrew and dealt intensively with Jewish culture, which at that time was still relatively foreign to him. He also attended school in the Ben Shemen Children's and Youth Village for a few months before coming to Netanya to attend high school.

Studies and teaching

He then completed a three-year military service with the Israel Defense Forces from 1951 to 1953 and was assigned to a non-combat unit after training as a recruit due to a minor heart defect. He worked in an office in Jaffa and had the rank of staff sergeant .

He studied intermittently and graduated from the Institut d'études politiques in Paris in 1955 , before attending the University Institute for International Studies in Geneva on a scholarship and doing his doctorate in history there in 1963 , after he had decided to pursue a university career in 1961 . Between his studies he visited his uncle in Sweden south of Stockholm in 1956 and stayed there for a year. His uncle ran a home for mentally handicapped children in which he helped.

In the fall of 1967 he began teaching in Jerusalem and was Professor and Chairman of the Department of International Relations at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem from 1969 to 1975. He has also been Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles since 1988 , where he holds the Club Chair in Holocaust Studies and has also taught at Tel Aviv University , where he has held the Maxwell Cummings Chair of European History since 1975 . He also held guest lectures at various other universities, for example in 2006/2007 he was the first visiting professor at the Jena Center for the History of the 20th Century at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena . He was also Associate Professor and Professor of Contemporary History at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva from 1964 to 1988. He is also the founder and editor-in-chief of the historical journal History & Memory .

Friedländer is married and has three children, Eli, David and Michal, and four grandchildren. Mostly he lives in Los Angeles after giving up teaching in Tel Aviv.

Friedländer is one of the most famous and respected historians in Israel and has also held many positions there and was committed to the interests of the Israeli state by taking on various tasks for it. Among other things, he was secretary to the President of the World Zionist Organization from 1958 to 1960 and was a member of the board of the scientific department at the Israeli Defense Ministry from 1960 to 1961. He also took part in other discussions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict .

plant

Friedländer is a historian and deals primarily with Jewish history and the Holocaust . He is one of the most important historians in this field and has published several works on the subject. It is particularly important to him to focus on the victims of the Holocaust and their voices and not only to shed light on political developments, in contrast to Raul Hilberg, for example . He is convinced that Hitler did not want to murder the Jews from the start, but that isolation was the first goal and that the final decision to exterminate all Jews was not made until the end of 1941. The role of the Jews is central to him, so he sees material reasons as secondary, in contrast to Götz Aly . Friedländer also distances himself from Daniel Goldhagen and his view that German anti-Semitism of the 19th century led to the Third Reich and makes a clear distinction between this and later National Socialist anti-Semitism. In contrast, he sees “ideological fanaticism as the decisive driving force”.

In his work and the presentation of history, it is important for him not to become too abstract and lose the emotionality, but to work with it and also to express it. Because by abstraction, such acts would be trivialized and the view of the people behind them would be lost. For Friedländer, a new method of counteracting this was to make greater use of the victims' voices. The historian Martin Broszat has criticized this by accusing Friedländer of not being able to work objectively on such a topic as a Jew. But Friedländer replied to this accusation that many German historians of this generation were also involved and, for example, in the Hitler Youth . This discussion about the representation of the Holocaust with Broszat is known from their correspondence about the "historicization of National Socialism" in 1987.

Similarly, the question of the “literary quality” of Friedländer's work (especially with reference to The Third Reich and the Jews ) has already been discussed, for example at an interdisciplinary conference in the summer of 2011 that was organized by the Jena Center History of the 20th Century of the Friedrich-Schiller- University of Jena . For Hayden White , professor emeritus at Stanford University , Friedländer's success with historically interested audiences is due to this literary quality. Friedländer used the so-called "emplotment". White attributed Friedländer's work to a form that he called “aestheticizing writing”, that is, a writing style that brought literature and history together. Friedländer explained his style in his answer to White, however, with the incredible amount of data and sources. He also warned against trying to create a category between literature and the science of history, and emphasized the crucial difference: literature can and must be fiction, but history is not.

Furthermore, Friedländer wrote a work on Pius XII in 1964 . published and analyzed its role during the Second World War. In his opinion, this Pope “remained silent” when the Roman Jews were deported in 1943. He has also written an autobiography When Memory Comes , in which he deals with his childhood and youth.

In 1998 he took part in the debate on the peace prize speech by Martin Walser .

Friedländer spoke in front of the Bundestag of the Federal Republic of Germany on the occasion of the annual Holocaust Remembrance Day .

Awards (selection)

Friedländer has received several awards for his work. Among other things, he was the winner of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade 2007; Peace Prize - award presenter was Wolfgang Frühwald . Quotes from the reason for the award of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade : "The Börsenverein is honoring the epic narrator of the story of the Shoah, the persecution and extermination of the Jews during the time of National Socialist rule in Europe", ... "Saul Friedländer has the People burned to ashes lament and cry allowed, memories and names given. He gave the murdered back the dignity that had been stolen from them, the recognition of which is the basis of peace among the people. ”In a very personal acceptance speech on October 14th in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt , Friedländer quoted almost all of his parents and relatives from the most recent letters he had previously unpublished were killed in extermination camps.

He also received the Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for his work The Third Reich and the Jews. The Years of Destruction 1939–1945 , which is regarded as his most important work and was published in German in 1998 and 2006. In this he deals with the question of how the greatest crime in world history, the Holocaust, could happen in a highly developed people. It is considered to be "the first real total history of the Holocaust". His achievement of combining “scientific distance and objectivity with sensitivity to the suffering of the murdered and persecuted” was praised.

Other prizes included the Dan David Prize (2014), the Leipzig Book Fair Prize (2007, category: non-fiction / essay writing ), the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (1999), the Geschwister-Scholl- Prize (1998), the Yad Vashem Jacob Buchmann Award (1997), the National Jewish Book Award (1997), the Israel Prize (1983) and the Andreas Gryphius Prize (1980).

In 2021 he received the Ludwig Landmann Prize for his life's work and the Balzan Prize .

He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2000).

Works (selection)

  • Where the memory leads. My life. Translated from the English by Ruth Keen, Erhard Stölting. CH Beck Verlag, Munich 2016 ISBN 978-3-406-69770-8
  • Franz Kafka . Translated from the English by Martin Pfeiffer. CH Beck Verlag, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-406-63740-7
  • Describe the Holocaust. Towards an Integrated Story. Wallstein, Göttingen 2007, ISBN 978-3-8353-0185-6
  • The Third Reich and the Jews. (Original title: Nazi Germany and the Jews ), translated by Martin Pfeiffer
  • with Norbert Frei , Trutz Rendtorff , Reinhard Wittmann : Bertelsmann in the Third Reich. Bertelsmann, Munich 2002 ISBN 3-570-00713-8
  • with Jörn Rüsen (Ed.): Richard Wagner in the Third Reich. A Schloss Elmau symposium. Beck, Munich 2000 ISBN 3-406-42156-3
  • Kitsch and death. The reflection of Nazism . Translated from the French by Michael Grendacher. Hanser, Munich 1984 ISBN 3-446-13821-8
  • When the memory comes Autobiography. Translated from the French by Helgard Oestreich. Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, Munich 1979 ISBN 3-421-01826-X
    • Quand vient le souvenir Paris 1978 (French original of the autobiography)
  • Some aspects of the historical significance of the Holocaust. Ed. Institute of Contemporary Jewry, Hebrew University of Jerusalem 1977 (English).
  • History and Psychoanalysis, an Inquiry Into the Possibilities and Limits of Psychohistory. Holmes & Meier, New York 1978 (engl.)
  • Kurt Gerstein or the ambivalence of the good. Bertelsmann, Gütersloh 1968, from the French by Jutta Knust, Theodor Knust. CH Beck, Munich 2007 ISBN 978-3-406-54825-3
  • with Rainer Specht, Eberhard Jäckel : Pius XII. and the Third Reich. A documentation. Afterword by Alfred Grosser . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1965
  • Saul Friedländer, Harry Maòr : Prelude to Downfall. Hitler and the United States of America 1939–1941. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1965

literature

  • David Dambitsch: Inside and Outside - The Historian Saul Friedländer. Audiobook. Label: SMD NEO-SD.

Articles and interviews

Web links

Commons : Saul Friedländer  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Articles and interviews

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Alexander Cammann: Saul Friedländer: "That hurts me, certainly" . In: Die Zeit , No. 3/2011
  2. ↑ Friedländer: When the memory comes. Pp. 30-36.
  3. ↑ Friedländer: When the memory comes. Pp. 41-55.
  4. ↑ Friedländer: When the memory comes. Pp. 75-116.
  5. ↑ Friedländer: When the memory comes. Pp. 86-120; hagalil.com ; Retrieved May 25, 2011.
  6. ↑ Friedländer: When the memory comes. Pp. 141, 146, 153.
  7. ↑ Friedländer: When the memory comes. P. 165.
  8. ↑ Friedländer: When the memory comes. Pp. 167-183.
  9. ↑ Friedländer: When the memory comes. Pp. 17, 62.
  10. ↑ Friedländer: When the memory comes. Pp. 66-68
  11. ↑ Friedländer: When the memory comes. P. 150; novelguide.com (May 25, 2011); http://www.dasmagazin.ch/index.php/Die_ganze_Geschichte ( Memento from January 8, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) .
  12. ↑ Friedländer: When the memory comes. P. 108.
  13. ↑ Friedländer: When the memory comes. P. 15; hagalil.com
  14. ↑ Friedländer: When the memory comes. P. 162; hagalil.com
  15. ↑ Friedländer: When the memory comes. Pp. 39, 108
  16. ↑ spiegel.de ; Retrieved May 15, 2011
  17. ↑ taz.de ; Retrieved May 19, 2011.
  18. ↑ Alexander Cammann: Saul Friedländer: "That hurts me, certainly" . In: Die Zeit , No. 3/2011. doi: 10.1111 / j.1468-2303.2009.00497.x (May 27, 2011). Friedlaender-Biblio In: Die Zeit , No. 42/2007.
  19. ↑ Tell the Holocaust . In: unique online. No. 57, October 2011, accessed February 6, 2012.
  20. ↑ unique-online.de ; Retrieved February 6, 2012
  21. ↑ dradio.de , accessed on May 25, 2011.
  22. ↑ Saul Friedländer: The metaphor of evil. About Martin Walser's peace prize speech and the task of remembrance . In: Die Zeit , No. 49/1998
  23. ↑ Volker Müller: German Bundestag - Friedländer: Defending Israel's right to exist is moral ... Accessed October 30, 2019 .
  24. ↑ Continued memory of the history of the victims . Der Standard, October 20, 2007.
  25. ↑ friedenspreis-des-deutschen-buchhandels.de (PDF)
  26. ↑ Volker Ullrich: Political book: The work of Saul Friedländer. In: zeit.de. October 11, 2007, accessed December 15, 2014 .
  27. ↑ hagalil.com
  28. ↑ hagalil.com
  29. ^ Saul Friedländer receives Ludwig Landmann Prize , Jüdische Allgemeine, June 24, 2021
  30. ↑ Balzan Prize for Saul Friedländer , deutschlandfunkkultur.de, published and accessed on September 14, 2021.
  31. ^ Book of Members. (PDF) Retrieved on July 23, 2016 (English).
personal data
SURNAME Friedländer, Saul
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Ferland, Paul-Henri; Friedlander, Saul; Friedlaender, Saul P .; Friedländer, Pavel (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Israeli historian
BIRTH DATE October 11, 1932
PLACE OF BIRTH Prague