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The History Fiction Divide

We study the past for many different reasons and in many different ways, of which the historical way or rather the historians’ way is only one. The police and the courts, psychoanalysts and ethnographers, archaeologists and antiquarians confront pasts different from that (or those) posited by historians and use different methods for studying them. In this essay I raise some differences and similarities between a historical and a literary way of dealing with the communal past. This has special relevance for anyone working in the field of Holocaust studies, because it was thought for a long time that an artistic or literary treatment of this event posed two dangers: fictionalisation (or endowing real events an imaginary or fantastic air or aspect) and aestheticisation (or making the evil of this event fascinating and even perversely attractive).