Since the 80s and 90s, a lot of questions have come up about memory, and about who can "tell the story" of the Holocaust. This is primarily because the 80s and 90s were the time that many witness accounts were surfacing, since many of the survivors were nearing the end of their lives.

Henry Rousso, arguably the foremost French historian of the Second World War, has written a number of books since his seminal "Vichy Syndrome" of 1987. Just a quick look at his bibliography shows how his thoughts have shifted since the 80s:

"Vichy, a past that won't move on" (1994)

"The Spector of the Past: Interview with Philippe Petit" (1998)

"Vichy: Event, Memory, History" (2001)

"The Last Catastrophe" (2012)

Rousso has been particularly insistent that memory should not become an obsession as it becomes a polarizing force in memorial events, museums, and in schools. Indeed, the past 15 years has seen enormous growth in the amount of museum projects, educational programs, and commemorative sites in France and in Europe in general. I'll point to a couple of these:

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (Berlin, 2004)

Le Mémorial de la Shoah (Paris, 2005)

The Museum of Jewish Heritage (New York, NY 1997)

Jewish Museum Munich (Munich, 2007)

POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews (Warsaw, 2013)

These massive, state-funded memorial projects and institutes are all very very recent, and this is just a quick list off the top of my head. The shift, as you can see in Rousso's bibliograhpy, has favored the functions and purposes of commemoration, and the potential backlash. Many have seen these national enterprises as actually exacerbating anti-semitic acts and mentalities in Europe. Bruno Chaouat of the University of Minnesota has recently been investigating the Dieudonné affair in France (an episode of Holocaust denial, if you're unfamiliar with it) and links it to Holocaust education in schools. On the other hand, others like Pierre Birnbaum point to the long history of anti-semitism in Europe (and in France in particular) and says that we are now experiencing a particularly aggressive manifestation of a long term form of hatred.

With the turn to memorialization, scholars have equally interested themselves in the present. Jay Winter has said that any act of memory is necessarily performative, meaning that there can be no "objective" study of the near-past. Rousso now directs the Institut d'histoire du temps présent - The Institute of the History of the Present - and has stated clearly in "The Last Catastrophe" that historians have a responsibility to engage in the present and the near-past.

This is pretty cursory, and I know there are most likely other scholarly debates happening around the causes/results of the Holocaust that I'm not aware of. But what I've sketched here is the historiography of Holocaust studies - the types of reflections the study of that event have engendered in the field of history itself, rather than the questions about the event itself that remain unanswered.

I'll end with a short anecdote: At a conference, a Holocaust historian spoke for an hour or so about the difficultly of understanding daily life in concentration camps. First, he said, there are very few documents. Second, even if there were, how can we understand such trauma if we haven't lived through it? And finally, for those who did live through it and have survived, what are we to make of their testimony, which can only speak for the individual - at one, perhaps two camps - but cannot speak for the whole?

After the talk (which was very good), an older woman identified herself as a camp survivor, and told the historian that he was wrong, that she could tell the story of the camps.

Of course she was absolutely right, and so was he!