Imposters, Historians, and History

In recent years most of us have become aware of a loathsome practice that has come in the form of imposters stealing a slice of identity as Vietnam veterans, claiming service in a war they never saw up close. An alarming example of this came when Tim Johnson, then Toronto Blue Jays manager, used his war stories (here and here) to rally his stirrup-hosed troops as they did battle on the, er, baseball field. The confluence of sports and war has always been rhetorically fraught, never moreso than now when we are actually at war and a Pat Tillman can reveal to us the difference between the war on, say, the gridiron and that on the front lines.

Uncomfortably closer to home for those of us who are historians was the story of Joseph Ellis, the respected historian of early America, who also taught a Vietnam War class to his students at Mt. Holyoke College. He was able to weave stories of his war experience into his classroom, thus using a technique that many try to use to bring to life events on the written page. The only problem was, Joseph Ellis had never served in Vietnam. (The story is surely familiar to readers, but see here and a take on HNN here) He thus broke a trust that I daresay is even more significant than that between manager of a fourth place team and his players – that of teacher and student.

Now comes word of a similarly execrable trend – the sons and daughters of Holocaust survivors staking a proprietary claim of their own on the Shoah. In an eviscerating, but to my mind fair (keep in mind the point of Rebunk, folks), review of a group of books and essays by children of survivors of the Nazi death camps, Ruth Franklin tackles this topic.

I find this especially important because it tackles a series of significant questions for historians. First off, it reveals some of the most vacuous uses to which various forms of theory, postmodern and other, can be put to use. I’m not much of a theorist, and I suppose I could even be described as being hostile to most postmodernism (writing well is not a crime, people, and there are such things as facts and even truths). But I am especially hostile to theories that privilege one group of people over another when that first group does not have any legitimate claim on the privilege in question, in this case, the Holocaust. This ties in to my second issue, which is that no one has a proprietary claim on history. When people criticize the critics of the war, for example, veterans often get up and claim some special status. (Tom can and will give us more on this theme down the road, I am sure). But the problem is, while people own their own experiences, they do not own the larger history. Furthermore, a critical distance is often vital to doing good historical work. Participants are not always likely to be able to attempt to be objective. To be objective does not mean to avoid having opinions. History without interpretation is mere chronicling. But those opinions have to be informed by a serious and critical reading of the evidence. In C. Vann Woodward’s felicitous phrase, “The twilight zone between living memory and written history is one of the favorite breeding places of mythology.” Having lived through something does not necessarily make someone a historian of that event or era. Finally, it seems clear that some people out there are using this proprietary claim on history to shut down varying interpretations but their own. And yet how a son of a Holocaust victim has some interpretive insight on an event they never experienced, especially over scholars who may have devoted their lives to such questions, is beyond me. No one owns history. It is all of ours.