‘A Hellish Nightmare’: The Swedish Press and the Construction of Early Holocaust Narratives, 1945–1950

2020 ◽  
pp. 163-187
Author(s):  
Antero Holmila
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Jessica Wiederhorn

Holocaust survivor and witness accounts began long before the Second World War ended. Diaries, journals, letters, notes hidden, buried, and stuffed into jars or between floor boards were mostly lost and destroyed, but those that have been recovered express desperation to tell, to document, to bear witness, and to commemorate. This article records the oral history of holocaust survivors. Together with the countless thousands of testimonies that would be recorded during the next sixty years, these eyewitness accounts would change the face of research and education, not only in the field of Holocaust studies but across academic boundaries. Together with the countless thousands of testimonies that would be recorded during the next sixty years, these eyewitness accounts would change the face of research and education, not only in the field of Holocaust studies but across academic boundaries. The second half of the twentieth century saw a renewed interest in holocaust narratives.


2018 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 968-997 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly A. Arkin

AbstractDrawing on ethnographic data from the mid-2000s as well as accounts from French Jewish newspapers and magazines from the 1980s onward, this paper traces the emergence of new French Jewish institutional narratives linking North African Jews to the “European” Holocaust. I argue that these new narratives emerged as a response to the social and political impasses produced by intra-Jewish disagreements over whether and how North African Jews could talk about the Holocaust, which divided French Jews and threatened the relationship between Jewishness and French national identity. These new pedagogical narratives relied on a very different historicity, or way of reckoning time and causality, than those used in more divisive everyday French Jewish Holocaust narratives. By reworking the ways that French Jews reckoned time and causality, they offered an expansive and homogenously “European” Jewishness. This argument works against a growing postcolonial sociological and anthropological literature on religious minorities in France and Europe by emphasizing the contingency, difficulty, and even ambivalence around constructing “Jewishness” as transparently either “European” or “French.” It also highlights the role played by historicity—not just history—in producing what counts as group “identity.”


Author(s):  
Krzysztof Rybak

The article investigates the ways of representing the Holocaust in children’s literature published in Poland in the 21st century (e.g. Joanna Rudniańska’s Kotka Brygidy and Smoke by Antón Fortes and Joanna Concejo). Phenomena such as anti-Semitism or death of the main character, called by researchers and critics inappropriate for a young audience, are analyzed with the use of the research on taboo in children’s literature (Bogusława Sochańska and Justyna Czechowska) as well as confronted with the threat of “traumatization” of the young reader (Małgorzata Wójcik-Dudek). The analysis proves that the Shoah only appears to be well-represented in children’s literature as many topics are still omitted.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thorsten Wilhelm
Keyword(s):  

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