Saul Friedländer

**Saul Friedländer** (, born October 11, 1932) is a Czech-born Jewish historian and a professor emeritus of history at UCLA.

## Early life

Saul Friedländer was born in Prague to a family of German-speaking Jews. He grew up in France and survived the Holocaust by hiding in a Catholic boarding school in Montluçon, near Vichy in France. While hiding, he became a Catholic.

His parents tried to flee to Switzerland, were arrested instead by Vichy French _gendarmes_, sent to the Germans and gassed at Auschwitz. Friedländer did not know what happened until 1946, when he became a Zionist. In 1948, Friedländer immigrated to Israel on the Irgun ship _Altalena_. After high school, he served in the Israel Defense Forces. From 1953 to 1955, he studied political science in Paris.

## Career

Friedländer served under Nachum Goldman, then President of the World Zionist Organization and the World Jewish Congress. In 1959, he served under Shimon Peres, then the vice-minister of defense. In 1963, he received his PhD from the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, where he taught until 1988.

Friedländer taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at Tel Aviv University. In 1969, he wrote a biography of the SS officer Kurt Gerstein. In 1988, he became Professor of History at UCLA. Friedländer later became left-wing, active in the Peace Now group.

In 1998, Friedländer led the Independent Historical Commission (IHC) appointed to investigate the German media company Bertelsmann under Nazi Germany. The 800-page report, _Bertelsmann im Dritten Reich_, written with Norbert Frei, Trutz Rendtorff and Reinhard Wittmann, was published in October 2002. It confirmed that Bertelsmann worked with Hitler. Bertelsmann subsequently expressed regret "for its conduct under the Nazis, and for later efforts to cover it up".

## Awards

- 1981: Friedländer was awarded the Andreas Gryphius Award for Literature (Düsseldorf) for his memoir _When Memory Comes_, after its publication in German.
- 1983: He was awarded the Israel Prize for history.
- 1988: He delivered the Gauss Seminars at Princeton University.
- 1997: He was awarded the National Jewish Book Award for _Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution_.
- 1998: He was awarded the Geschwister-Scholl-Preis for his work, _Das Dritte Reich und die Juden_. He was also awarded the Shazar Prize of the Israeli Historical Association and the Geschwister-Scholl-Preis (Munich) for _Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution_, after its translation into Hebrew.
- 1999: He was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship.
- 2000: He was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
- 2007: He was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade.
- 2008: For his book _The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945_, he was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, and the 2007 Leipzig Book Fair Prize for Non-fiction. He was also awarded the Bruno Kreisky Prize for Life Work by the Karl Renner Institut (Vienna) in 2008.
- 2009: He received the Award for Scholarly Distinction from the American Historical Association.
- 2012: He gave the First "Humanitas" Lecture in Historiography, Trinity College, Oxford: "Trends in the Historiography of the Holocaust."
- 2014: He received the Dan David Prize for contributing to "History and Memory" and the Edgar de Picciotto International Prize from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (Geneva) for lifetime achievement.
- 2019: He addressed the Bundestag on the International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
- 2021: He was awarded the first Ludwig Landmann Prize by the Jewish Museum Frankfurt and the Balzan Prize for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

### Books

Friedländer's books have been translated into 20 languages.

||Publications|
| --- | --- |
|* _Pius XII and the Third Reich: A Documentation_, New York: Knopf, 1966. Translated by Charles Fullman, from the original _Pie XII et le IIIe Reich, Documents_, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1964. * _Prelude to downfall: Hitler and the United States 1939–1941_, London: Chatto & Windus, 1967. * _Kurt Gerstein: The Ambiguity of Good_, New York: Knopf, 1969. * _Reflexions sur l'Avenir d'Israel_, Paris: Seuil, 1969. * _L'Antisémitisme nazi: histoire d'une psychose collective_, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1974. * _Some aspects of the historical significance of the Holocaust_, Jerusalem: Institute of Contemporary Jewry, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1977. * _History and Psychoanalysis: an Inquiry Into the Possibilities and Limits of Psychohistory_, New York: Holmes & Meier, 1978. * _When Memory Comes_, New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1979. (Noonday Press, Reissue edition 1991, ). * _Reflections of Nazism: an essay on Kitsch and death_, New York: Harper & Row, 1984. * _Memory, history, and the extermination of the Jews of Europe,_ Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. * _Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939_, New York: HarperCollins, 1997. * _The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945_, New York: HarperCollins, 2007; London : Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007. * _Nachdenken über den Holocaust_, Munich: Beck, 2007. * _Den Holocaust beschreiben_, Göttingen: Wallstein,  2007. * _Franz Kafka: Poet of Shame and Guilt_, New Haven: Yale University Press,  2013. * _Reflexions sur le Nazisme. Entretiens avec Stéphane Bou_, Paris: Seuil, 2016. (September 2016) * _Where Memory Leads. My Life_, New York: Other Press, 2016. (September 2016) * _Proustian Uncertainties. On Reading and Rereading In Search of Lost Time_, New York: Free Press, 2020. * _Blick in den Abgrund. Ein Israelisches Tagebuch_, Munich: C.H. Beck, 2023.||

### Edited books

||Publications|
| --- | --- |
|* _Arabs & Israelis: a Dialogue_ Moderated by Jean Lacouture, New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1975 (moderated by Jean Lacouture, co-written by Mahmoud Hussein and Saul Friedländer). * _Visions of apocalypse: end or rebirth?,_ New York : Holmes & Meier, 1985 (co-edited by Saul Friedländer, Gerald Holton and Leo Marx). * _Probing the limits of representation : Nazism and the "final solution",_ Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1992 (edited by Saul Friedländer). * _Bertelsmann im Dritten Reich_, co-edited by Norbert Frei, Trutz Rendtorff, Reinhard Wittmann & Saul Friedländer, C. Bertelsmann Verlag, 2002, . * _Ein Verbrechen ohne Namen_, co-written by Norbert Frei, Sybille Steinbacher, Dan Diner and Saul Friedländer, 2022 (with a preface by Jürgen Habermas).||

## Related pages

- Shira Klein
- Havi Dreifuss
- Shimon Redlich
- Izabella Tabarovsky

## Further readings

- Geulie Ne'eman Arad, (ed.), _Passing Into History_ (_History & Memory_, 9) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997)
- Dieter Borchmayer and Helmuth Kiesel, (eds.), _Das Judentum im Spiegel seiner kulturellen Umwelen: Symposium zur Ehren Saul Friedländer_ (Neckargemünd: Mnemosyne, 2002)
- Karolin Machtans, _Zwischer Wissenschaft und autobiographishen Text: Saul Friedländer und Ruth Klüger_ (Göttingen: Niemayer, 2009)
- Christian Wiese and Paul Betts, (eds.), _Years of Persecution, Years of Extermination: Saul Friedländer and the Future of Holocaust Studies_ (London: Continuum, 2010)
- _The Journal of Holocaust Research,_ _37_(1), 2023.

## Infobox (writer)

- **name**: Saul Friedländer
- **image**: Saul Friedlander.jpg
- **caption**: Friedländer in 2008
- **birth place**: Prague, Czechoslovakia
- **occupation**: Essay, Essayist, historian, Professor of History at UCLA
- **nationality**: Israel, Americans, American
- **period**: 20th century, Holocaust, Nazism
- **genre**: Essay, historical
- **spouse**: Orna Kenan
- **children**: Eli, David, Michal
- **native name**: שאול פרידלנדר
- **native name lang**: he