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During the Holocaust, Jews of all ages, nationalities, political beliefs and religious affiliations put pen to paper, often at risk of harsh punishment, heeding a powerful and widely felt impulse to document and record. Those diaries that survived have served as significant sources for Holocaust historians, and they constitute the focus of numerous scholarly works. Even in this well-trodden field, Amos Goldberg's new book, a welcome translation of his 2012 Hebrew monograph, offers a distinctive emphasis and methodological approach.
Goldberg is interested first and foremost in how diaries reflect the impact of trauma on individuals' internal consciousness. His is a ‘literary-psychoanalytic’ rather than a historical investigation, focused not on reconstructing the events from the text, but rather on understanding the ‘man’ in the text (the gender-neutral ‘human’ might have been more apt) (p. 20). Much existing historiography uses diaries to illustrate or amplify accounts of daily life under Nazi internment, or to portray the preservation of Jewish life under extreme conditions; the people depicted in such accounts remain ‘internally autonomous’ and succeed in preserving their ‘values and inner world against the horrors of the external catastrophe’ (p. 55). Goldberg's approach, by contrast, focuses on the ‘internal disintegration that shook the identity of the victims to the point of threatening to nullify their very human existence’ (p. x). Central to Goldberg's argument is the concept of trauma, as distinct from crisis. The paradigm of crisis — to which he suggests most scholarly and popular conceptions of the Holocaust adhere — is redemptive: crisis is understood as a turning point that marks the beginning of recovery and progress. Trauma, by contrast, is a fundamental rupture that precludes complete redemption. To look at diaries through the framework of trauma is to acknowledge the collapse of consciousness, identity and self that was experienced by victims of the