The historiography of the Holocaust in the last decades has been rich, complex, and fragmented into varied fields of research, methods, and languages. But similar to all historiographical bodies of work, it gave rise to several dominant conceptual categories that have informed, often indiscernibly and spanning interpretive differences, historians’ arguments and use of methods; these categories have also created boundaries of interpretive common sense. In this chapter I am seeking these dominant categories. My aim is not to provide a comprehensive historiographical overview, a task that has already been done in exemplary fashion; I therefore do not include all interpretations and points of view. It is also not my intention to focus on specific historiographical debates, however significant. Rather, my aim is to cut through surface debates to the heart of how historians understand, often implicitly, the Holocaust.

To pursue this goal, I enter in this and in the next chapter into a dialogue with Saul Friedländer's magnum opus The Years of Extermination, which is a sort of a summa of Holocaust research and historiography of the last generation and therefore an excellent source from which to identify dominant interpretive categories. The Years of Extermination has been received worldwide as an exemplary study that found the right balance of tone, narrative, and interpretation about the most difficult historical topic of all in the post-1945 period. The book has been a major scholarly and public event partly because it represents the apogee of an era of historical understanding of the Holocaust. The Holocaust, according to Friedländer, was determined by