States in the early years of World War II. InPius XII and the Third Reich Friedländer presents Nazi diplomatic records and other documents that describe the Pope's relationship with Germany and his silence in the face of mounting evidence of the Holocaust. Friedländer argues that it was the combination of Pius XII's fear of Bolshevism, his deep-seated admiration for Germany, and an overestimation of his diplomatic power that accounted for his refusal to condemn the Nazi's genocidal actions. Kurt Gerstein documents the life of an SS officer who, though he was responsible for procuring and delivering Zyklon-B, the chemical used in the gas chambers, nonetheless tried to sabotage his own work and disseminate knowledge about the death camps. In Arabes et israéliens (1974; Arabs and Israelis), Friedländer and two Egyptian Arabs—Bahgat Elnadi and Adel Rifaat, jointly referred to as Mahmoud Hussein—analyze contemporary problems in the Middle East; the debate is moderated by French journalist Jean Lacouture. Friedländer's memoir, When Memory Comes, relates his struggle to come to terms with the Holocaust and with his Jewish identity, depicting events from his birth in Czechoslovakia prior to World War II as well as his life in Paris and contemporary Israel. Reflections of Nazism presents Friedländer's analysis of Nazi aesthetics and "the new discourse on Nazism." Examining such diverse works as Albert Speer's memoir Inside the Third Reich (1970), George Steiner's novel The Portage to San Cristóbal of A. H. (1979), and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's film Hitler: A Film from Germany (1978), he argues that many contemporary works of art and history concerned with Hitler and Nazism transform—in the very vividness of their language and images, and irrespective of authorial intention—the abject reality of murder and death into the seductive spectacle the Nazis valorized. The aestheticizing impulse of modern discourses on Nazism, Friedländer believes, diminishes the stark reality of the Holocaust and largely accounts for the continued fascination with Hitler and the Third Reich. Similarly, Probing the Limits of Representation (1992) collects essays by numerous thinkers, historians, and scholars on the difficulties of adequately and ethically representing the Holocaust in language and images. Growing out of a conference Friedländer organized at the University of California at Los Angeles in the spring of 1990, the volume includes work by Friedländer, Hayden White, Dominick LaCapra, Geoffrey Hartman, Anton Kaes, and many others.

Critical Reception

Friedländer's work has generally been well received. His historical works are frequently praised for their scholarship and insightful use of primary sources. Pius XII and the Third Reich and Prelude to Downfall, for example, are considered seminal works in their fields. Some reviewers, however, argued that his selection of documents in the former was biased, although Friedländer himself pointed out the need for material from the Vatican to balance the perspective he presents. Remarking on Prelude to Downfall, some historians described Friedländer's claim that he was the first to rigorously examine Hitler's policies toward the United States as disingenuous. Reviewers of Kurt Gerstein frequently praise the book as an insightful examination of a complex individual. However, a minority of commentators argue that Friedländer lapses into moralizing when he extends his discussion of "the ambiguity of good" to account for all of German society during the Nazi era. Friedländer's other works and edited volumes are also highly regarded, and he is considered a leading thinker on Nazism, the Holocaust, Israel, and Arab-Israeli relations. Noted for its focus on the problem of personal identity, When Memory Comes is frequently cited with Elie Wiesel's Night (1958) and Samuel Pisar's Of Blood and Hope (1979) and La ressource humaine (1983) as one of the most thoughtful and informative of the Holocaust memoirs. Critics note, in this and all of his works, his rancorless, carefully unbiased point of view in dealing with Nazi Germany and with the rights of Arabs living in Israel. On this latter point, Leon Wieseltier notes that "Throughout his life, Saul Friedländer has seen one nation's triumphant convictions quickly become another nation's oppressive facts. This often happened to the Jews, and it has happened to the Palestinians. Friedländer, who escaped the Nazis and fought the Arabs, has the courage to say so."