Commentary

1 I use the term 'Holocaust' instead of the more accurate or at least less metaphori cal term 'Genocide' in order to index the problem raised by efforts to represent ade quately and assess the historical significance of the suffering of the victims of this event. This is the crucial historiographical problem. As for the perpetrators of the Holocaust, the Nazis and their collaborators, they do not constitute a peculiarly difficult historiographical problem. In fact, their story is all too tellable. And it is instructive, therefore, that one difference between the history of the perpetrators and that of the victims is conceived to be the narratability of the former and the non-narratability of the later. In my view, the problem here has to do with the nar rowness of the conception of narration that is being used. In many respects, the Nazi period in the history of Germany and of European society in general does not constitute an especially difficult historiographical problem. History is full of tyrannies and genocides, and it is only the extent, speed, and intensity of the Nazi drive to destruction that give it its historical uniqueness. The problem of the moral posture to be assumed by the historian hardly bears debating. How to remember the Reich - what value to assign to it as an index of Germany's and our humanity - these are political and moral problems. What happened in Germany during the rise and fall of the Third Reich is a historiographical problem of no special difficulty. Questions of tact, attitude, posture and above all value - specifically, the value to be assigned to the suffering of the victims.

2 As Catherine Gallagher says of the social function of the novel, stories are pre sumed to be about 'somebody'. They are not about just 'anybody' and are certainly never about 'nobody'. Anybodies and nobodies are dealt with by statistics and typological classification.