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.

Works

Books

Friedländer's books have been translated into 20 languages.

  Publications List (year in ascending order) 
 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 List (year in ascending order) 
 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.

References

Category:1932 births
Category:Living people
Category:Jewish academics
Category:Historical studies
Category:Israeli historians
Category:Holocaust survivors