The Holocaust in Western Europe

2014 ◽  
pp. 205-234
Author(s):  
Peter Kenez
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
The Holocaust

Prześladowania Żydów w Holandii, Francji i Belgii, 1940–1945 w ujęciu porównawczym: podobieństwa, różnice, przyczyny

2015 ◽  
pp. 90-130
Author(s):  
Pim Griffioen ◽  
Ron Zeller
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
Local Police ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Anti Jewish ◽  
Police Forces

At the beginning of the occupation, France, Holland and Belgium found themselves in a similar situation. But when we look at the ratio of victims and survivors during the Holocaust in Western Europe, France and Holland are polar opposites: in France 25 percent of around 320,000 Jews did not survive the persecutions, whereas the ratio in Holland was 75 percent of 140,000. Belgium lies in the middle of the scale – 40 percent dead out of 66,000 Jews. In order to understand the source of these differences, the authors compare the methods applied by the occupation authorities and their anti-Jewish policies, the involvement and the size of the local police forces and German police, as well as the jurisdictional disputes between these formations.

scholarly journals Intelektualiści zachodnioeuropejscy od wybuchu II wojny światowej do współczesności

2015 ◽  
pp. 145-164
Author(s):  
Maria Tomczak
Keyword(s):  
Central Europe ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Eastern Bloc ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
World War 2 ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
New Formula

This study aims to show the forms of political involvement of Western European intellectuals. In doing so, the paper attempts to answer the question about the role they played in Western and Central Europe in the discussed period. The paper also demonstrates the cultural and political causes of their decline.streszczenieFor the intellectuals of Western and Central Europe, World War 2 was an extremely difficult period. The genocidal policies of the totalitarian states induced them to take a position, while at the same time depriving them of the ability to express their views publicly. This engendered a sense of helplessness; also, apart for a few exceptions, only emigrants could actually perform the function of intellectuals. Among those, an important role to play fell to two groups: German emigrants who distanced themselves from their nation, and Jewish emigrants, who addressed the subject of the Holocaust. After the war, the Iron Curtain also restricted the actions of intellectuals. It soon turned out that the tenor of spiritual life was set by left-wing authors, fascinated with the USSR. The fascination petered out after the disclosure of Stalin’s crimes in 1956. It was terminated definitively by the ruthless suppression of the Prague Spring. It was at that time that conservatism and right-wing intellectuals returned to Europe. Their aim was to reverse the trend and prevent Western Europe from drifting leftward. The change of the paradigm served to settle the scores with the leftist intellectuals. They were accused of subversive activities against the state and nation or treason. Also, in the intellectual circles there emerged a conviction that the previous formula had been exhausted. A new formula of activities of intellectuals was considered particularly in France, by authors of such eminence as R. Aron, M. Foucault, or P. Bourdieu. The deconstruction of the figure of the intellectual was completed by J.-F. Lyotard, who pronounced the death of intellectuals. Involvement of intellectuals remained a valid notion only in the countries of the Eastern bloc. In post-Cold War Europe, the decline of intellectuals became even more discernible. This was occasioned by a number of political and cultural factors. In this respect, particular role should be attributed to postmodernism which, by disproving the Enlightenment understanding of culture, undermined the role played by intellectuals.

Virtual Testimony and the Digital Future of Traumatic Past

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amit Pinchevski
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Refugee Camps ◽  
American Psychologist ◽  
Steel Wires ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Wire ◽  
Institute Of Technology ◽  
Camp Life ◽  
The U.S

At the base of all Holocaust testimony projects lies a common commitment: to record and preserve the stories of those who survived the catastrophe as told in their own voices. When it comes to survivors’ testimonies, the messenger is as important as the message. The first to subscribe to this reasoning was the American psychologist David Boder, who in 1946 set out to interview survivors in refugee camps across Western Europe. Equipped with what was then the state- of- the- art technology—an Armour Model 50 wire recorder—Boder went on to produce what was the first audio testimony of the Holocaust. The wire recorder, developed in the 1940s by Marvin Camras, Boder’s colleague at the Illinois Institute of Technology, for the U.S. military, was a portable and remarkably durable device that utilized thin steel wires rolled into spools to produce an electromagnetic recording (see Fig. 4.1 below). As Boder later commented, the device “offered a unique and exact means of recording the experiences of displaced persons. Through the wire recorder the displaced person could relate in his own language and in his own voice the story of his concentration camp life.” Studying wire- recorded narratives led him to devise a “traumatic index” by means of which “each narrative may be assessed as to the category and number of experiences bound to have a traumatizing effect upon the victim.” Boder’s 1949 monograph, I Did Not Interview the Dead, invites readers to find indications of trauma implicit in selected transcripts of recorded narratives. The premise seems to be that, to the extent that such traumatic impact exists, it should be discoverable textually. Yet the same technology that made Boder’s project ingenious was also the reason for its relative obscurity. Wire recording was soon to give way to tape recording, consequently condemning Boder’s wire spools to obsolescence and the testimonies they held to near oblivion. The short- lived medium precluded access to the recorded material.

Holocaust Cinema

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olga Gershenson
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Soviet Bloc ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
The Holocaust

The study of Holocaust representation in cinema is located at the intersection of film studies and Holocaust studies. The scope of issues dealt with in the field is defined by two sets of tensions: first, tensions between history and narrative, and second between Eastern and Western understanding of the Holocaust. The tension between history and narrative emerges in response to the famous dictum by Adorno that there is no poetry after Auschwitz. The filmmakers—and the scholars studying their films—must engage with the thorny questions about the representability of atrocities on screens. Consequently, a body of scholarship, grounded in the theories of visual culture and psychanalytical theory focuses on the challenges of portraying tragic history authentically and in ways that honors the victims. The question is to what extent can historical facts be fictionalized, and which genres of fiction and documentary are appropriate. Specifically debated is the representation of the Holocaust in comedy, fantasy, and other popular genres. Scholarship also deals with questions of memory—how do the cinematic representations reflect and shape our understanding of history and transmission of memory. The second set of tensions emerges as a result of complex history both during World War II and the Cold War, which divided the world into the “West”—including the United States, Western Europe, and Israel, vis-a-vis the “East,” that is, the Soviet bloc. Under Soviet rule, the story of the Holocaust was largely subsumed into that of the “Great Patriotic War,” silencing the fact that its victims were Jews. Consequently, representation of the Holocaust in Soviet and other East European national cinemas was censored. Alternatively, the Western narrative of the Holocaust was mainly concerned with stories of Nazi concentration and death camps, obfuscating the history of the Holocaust in the Soviet territories. Only recently has the Western historical narrative of the Holocaust started turning to the East and film scholarship expanded its focus to include Soviet and Soviet-bloc national cinemas. This scholarship also asks questions of representation, but mainly in the context of censorship and suppression, as well as of comparative analysis of the visual culture of the Holocaust in national cinemas. Such scholarship uncovers hitherto unknown films and also analyzes the Eastern and Western narratives of the Holocaust in the post–Cold War era. Finally, some scholarship on Holocaust films is also concerned with periodization, that is, discussing films in the context of the historical period in which they were produced and circulated, whether in a particular national context or comparatively. This bibliography makes note of periods, from early Holocaust cinema to current films.

Popular Understandings of the Past

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kees Ribbens
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Graphic Novels ◽  
First Century ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
World War ◽  
Comic Strips ◽  
Young Readers ◽  
Sensitive Topics ◽  
The Holocaust

This chapter presents an overview of the development of historical narratives combining visual and textual elements in comic strips and graphic novels. History comics developed strongly during the 1940s and 1950s and became popular, in particular among young readers in Western Europe and North America. Having gained increased cultural respectability, comics more recently also obtained an adult audience. Two internationally renowned educational comics from the Anne Frank House, published in the first decade of the twenty-first century, illustrate how comics are nowadays capable of representing sensitive topics from recent history, in particular World War II and the Holocaust. Yet, combining fact and fiction requires a balanced way of (re)presenting, involving discussions among historians and others on what may be possible and desirable in this specific war of making history public.

Imperial Incarcerations: Ekaterina Breshko-Breshkovskaia, Vinayak Savarkar, and the Original Sins of Modernity

Slavic Review ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 74 (4) ◽  
pp. 850-872 ◽  
Author(s):  
Choi Chatterjee
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
Global Perspective ◽  
Political Prisoners ◽  
British India ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Western Imperialism ◽  
Revolutionary Party ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Russian Empire

Based on a comparison of the prison experiences of Ekaterina Breshko- Breshkovskaia, member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party of Russia, and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, revolutionary and Hindu fundamentalist, I ask two central questions: How did Breshkovskaia's story about exile and punishment help establish the tsarist genealogy of the gulag in the western consciousness, while the suffering of political prisoners in British India, as exemplified by Savarkar, were completely occluded? How and why did the specificity of incarceration in the Russian empire eclipse systems of punishment designed by other European empires in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? In this article, I argue that the penumbra of modernity was darkened not only by the savagery of the Holocaust and the gulag but also by the brutal violence of western imperialism. Placing the Russian prison and exile system in comparative global perspective opens up new avenues of research in a field that has relied excessively on the intellectual binaries of a repressive Russia and a liberal western Europe.

scholarly journals Yiddish

Linguistics ◽  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Beider
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
System Level ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
Linguistic Basis

According to its main system-level characteristics, Yiddish belongs to the High German branch of West Germanic languages. During its development, it underwent an important influence of Hebrew. In modern times, we can distinguish three main varieties of Yiddish: (1) Western Yiddish in western German-speaking territories; (2) Yiddish spoken until the 20th century in Central Europe (Czech and East German lands), and (3) Eastern Yiddish in eastern Europe. From the point of view of Germanistics, it is appropriate to consider that the inception of Yiddish varieties corresponds to the Early New High German period (1350–1650). It was during that period that the Jewish vernacular idiom started to have system-level differences in comparison to the dialects spoken by German Christians, namely, in phonology and grammar. Before that period, differences surely existed in such domains, surface level for any language, as orthography and lexicon. The German dialects from southern Germany represent the linguistic basis for Western Yiddish. The medieval Bohemian dialect of German represents the linguistic basis for Yiddish spoken in Central Europe and eastern Europe. Due to permanent contacts with the Slavic Christian population, Eastern Yiddish underwent numerous changes in all of its systems due to the strong influence of Polish, Ukrainian, and Belarusian. It eventually branched into three subdialects: Lithuanian Yiddish, Polish Yiddish, and Ukrainian Yiddish. In modern times, in numerous countries the decline of the use of Yiddish as a living language was related to the assimilation of local Jews to the culture of the Gentile majority. At the end of the 18th century and during the 19th century it was the case in various German-speaking provinces of Central Europe and western Europe where local Jews abandoned Yiddish in favor to German. Similar shifts to the dominant non-Jewish languages took place during the 20th century in various western European countries. In the USSR, during the 1920s and the 1930s the shift to Russian was already well advanced. For those who survived the Holocaust, the assimilation accelerated during the following decades. In Poland, Lithuania, Hungary, and Romania, Yiddish-speaking communities were decimated by the Holocaust. In North America, most immigrant families shifted to English within a generation or two. Yet, because of a permanent influx of masses of native speakers between the 1880s and the 1920s, Yiddish was actively used until the mid-20th century even in certain secular Jewish groups. However, during the second half of the 20th century its decline was accelerated outside of certain Haredi groups.

Conclusion: The 1960s and Beyond

2015 ◽  
pp. 346-356
Author(s):  
David H. Weinberg
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
Summer Camps ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
Sports Clubs ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
New Institutions ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The One ◽  
The Impact ◽  
First Time

This concluding chapter addresses the impact of the Holocaust on established forms of collective Jewish identity and commitment in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. The profound rupture in both Jewish and general life during the war and the physical dislocation that followed meant that thousands of survivors in western Europe had to rediscover or discover for the first time their place among other Jews and among their fellow citizens. In attempting to find a new rationale for Jewish survival, leading Jewish figures of all stripes recognized that there could be no simple return to what they believed were the pre-war polarities of religious orthodoxy on the one hand and assimilationism on the other. With the aid of money from reparation payments and the guidance of organizations like the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), French, Belgian, and Dutch Jewish leaders created new institutions, such as Jewish community centres, summer camps, and sports clubs, to appeal to a mobile and unsettled population. While not all of these efforts were immediately successful, what slowly emerged were new forms of Jewish consciousness that enabled young men and women to express their commitment to a shared fate outside the traditional framework of formal religious and educational institutions.

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