Hurgar el silencio. Sobre el pasado pasado de la historia presente

Abstract

This paper explores some historian's interpretations on the "silence" about the Holocaust after World War II in the German University in general and the German historiographical profession in particular. Through the analysis of some of these perspectives, we intend to discuss how far the theoretical inflexion identified with the Holocaust is represented in the diagnoses which historiography has produced about its own field. The main hypothesis on which this paper is built proposes that, in spite of a lively theoretical debate over the nature of time and experience as basic categories of historical understanding, which takes on the Holocaust as its epochal water shedding event, historiography eludes a deeper revision of its explanatory narratives. As a consequence, a gap is produced between the perception of the necessity of a renovation of the discipline's bases and the categories that are in fact applied in the task of interpretation.