When Memory Comes, Where Memory Leads

The following essay titled ‘When Memory Comes, Where Memory Leads’ is included in the first section of the Festschrift collected in honor of Saul Friedländer upon his 90th birthday. It is an attempt to present his two autobiographic volumes, published in 1978 when he was 46 years old and in 2016 when he was 85 years old. Friedländer tells his life story in an open, candid manner, sharing with the reader a deep discrepancy between two seemingly contradicting levels. On one level, he reflects on the evolution of his academic work and the circumstances that gave birth to his best-known books after years of distancing himself from any possible connection to the history of the Holocaust and the Nazi regime. Eventually, he became a world-renowned scholar of these two vast issues, and his books were translated into a host of languages upon publication, with numerous prizes bestowed upon him. On the other level–the personal one–he mercilessly details his lifelong, deep-seated fear of being abandoned, the loss of his parents, wandering among Catholic institutions, constant changes of his first name as an obstacle on his way to building a solid identity, personal crises, and years-long treatment, operations, and medications. Alongside being a francophone and an atheist, the deep-down core of his identity, as he defines it, is being a Jew bearing the indelible mark left by the Holocaust. Despite this, the books he authored became milestones, especially his magnum opus, the two-volume Nazi Germany and the Jews, a masterpiece combining personal testimonies with documentation, depicting the full picture of German-occupied and controlled countries during World War II while offering insights that help understand the innermost feelings of Jews at the time.