Incompleteness in Holocaust Historiography

No empirical work of historiography is complete. The condition of incompleteness in such a literature is inherent in the sources themselves. An entire flow of events in all their complexity cannot be carried in the memory of witnesses. It cannot be stored with all of its attributes in remaining artifacts, and it is not replicated in all of its facets in contemporaneous records. All that has gone on in the world, which in theory is the whole of history, can be preserved only in fragments, and these leftovers constitute our material. The attempt to recapitulate anything at all is therefore