Ruminant Curiosity

2021 ◽  
pp. 160-180
Author(s):  
Jed Rasula
Keyword(s):  
Franz Kafka ◽  
World War Two ◽  
World War ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
Dry Land ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Theoretical Investigations ◽  
Ontological Foundation ◽  
The Right

The two subjects of this chapter are writers of German who did not live in Germany: Franz Kafka and W. G. Sebald (a self-proclaimed devotee of Kafka). Kafka’s fiction has achieved the distinction of having generated a category that far exceeds its literary basis: the “Kafkaesque.” Maurice Blanchot’s theoretical investigations of literature in its ontological foundation is consistently worked out with reference to Kafka, under the telling phrase “literature and the right to death.” Perspectives by other theorists (Adorno, Benjamin, Deleuze and Guattari, Calasso) help refine Blanchot’s case, revealing that the “seasickness on dry land” of Kafka’s work takes on a life of its own apart from any particular work—precisely enabling the Kafkaesque to escape or exceed the thematic parameters articulated by the writer Kafka. Sebald then become the carrier of this viral affliction, portraying himself in peregrinations that hover indeterminately amidst various genres, from the premodern anatomy to the postmodern essayism evident in his Rings of Saturn. Sebald, like so many before him, finds that the engagement with history (World War Two and the Holocaust in his case) can only be truly undertaken by fictive means.

Genocide: Clarifying Concepts and Causes of Cruelty

2010 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 513-526 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ernesto Verdeja
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
World War Two ◽  
World War ◽  
Mass Violence ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Holocaust

In the decades after World War Two, most scholars working on genocide focused on particular cases, providing historically detailed descriptions of the causes and patterns of mass violence but rarely branching out beyond a specific case. The study of the Holocaust is typical of this; the vast majority of works on the Nazi genocide had little comparative dimension and instead examined the ways in which anti-Semitism and certain policies condemned disfavored minorities to persecution and extermination. These earlier works are particularly important because they gave us rich understandings of the origins, sequencing, and dynamics of mass violence, as well as the roles of dehumanizing cultural views and ideologies that facilitated extermination. Nevertheless, multi-case studies were the exception, and generally received little attention in the social sciences.

scholarly journals The power of memory and the heritage of the World War Two in When You Return by Anna Mitgutsch

2021 ◽  
Vol 145 ◽  
pp. 45-62
Author(s):  
Aneta Jurzysta
Keyword(s):  
Family History ◽  
Sudden Death ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
War Crimes ◽  
Jewish American ◽  
World War Two ◽  
World War ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

The article is devoted to the image of World War Two in When You Return (Wenn du wiederkommst) (2010) by Anna Mitgutsch, a moving story of love, trust and betrayal, devoted to the protagonist’s response to the sudden death of her Jewish-American ex-husband Jerome. The article discusses the attitude to Jewish roots and the problem of remembering past events, especially memories of World War Two. In her novel the author combines family history with the history of the country, refers to the issue of cultural and collective memory, and especially to the specific Austrian memory of the events of the Holocaust and the long-standing tendency to diminish the guilt and to negate the participation of Austrians in war crimes.

scholarly journals This-worldly and other-worldly: a holocaust pilgrimage

2010 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 122-162
Author(s):  
Tina Hamrin-Dahl
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Jewish Community ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
World War ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
General Government ◽  
The World ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Town

This story is about a kind of pilgrimage, which is connected to the course of events which occurred in Częstochowa on 22 September 1942. In the morning, the German Captain Degenhardt lined up around 8,000 Jews and commanded them to step either to the left or to the right. This efficient judge from the police force in Leipzig was rapid in his decisions and he thus settled the destinies of thousands of people. After the Polish Defensive War of 1939, the town (renamed Tschenstochau) had been occupied by Nazi Germany, and incorporated into the General Government. The Nazis marched into Częstochowa on Sunday, 3 September 1939, two days after they invaded Poland. The next day, which became known as Bloody Monday, approximately 150 Jews were shot deadby the Germans. On 9 April 1941, a ghetto for Jews was created. During World War II about 45,000 of the Częstochowa Jews were killed by the Germans; almost the entire Jewish community living there.The late Swedish Professor of Oncology, Jerzy Einhorn (1925–2000), lived in the borderhouse Aleja 14, and heard of the terrible horrors; a ghastliness that was elucidated and concretized by all the stories told around him. Jerzy Einhorn survived the ghetto, but was detained at the Hasag-Palcery concentration camp between June 1943 and January 1945. In June 2009, his son Stefan made a bus tour between former camps, together with Jewish men and women, who were on this pilgrimage for a variety of reasons. The trip took place on 22–28 June 2009 and was named ‘A journey in the tracks of the Holocaust’. Those on the Holocaust tour represented different ‘pilgrim-modes’. The focus in this article is on two distinct differences when it comes to creed, or conceptions of the world: ‘this-worldliness’ and ‘other- worldliness’. And for the pilgrims maybe such distinctions are over-schematic, though, since ‘sacral fulfilment’ can be seen ‘at work in all modern constructions of travel, including anthropology and tourism’.

scholarly journals “Being Human”: Edward Bond’s Theories of Drama

Text Matters ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 307-329
Author(s):  
David Allen ◽  
Agata Handley
Keyword(s):  
Psychological State ◽  
Human Soul ◽  
World War Two ◽  
World War ◽  
Ground Zero ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The World ◽  
New Interpretation ◽  
Extensive Body ◽  
The Impact

The playwright Edward Bond has recalled the impact of seeing photographs of Nazi atrocities at the end of World War Two: “It was the ground zero of the human soul.” He argues we need a different kind of drama, based in “a new interpretation of what it means to be human.” He has developed an extensive body of theoretical writings to set alongside his plays. Arguably, his own reflections on “what it means to be human” are based in his reaction to the Holocaust, and his attempt to confront “the totality of evil.”Bond argues we are born “radically innocent.” There is a “pre-psychological” state of being. The neonate does not “read” ideology; it has to use its own imagination to make sense of the world. To enter society, however, the child must be corrupted; its imagination is “ideologized.” Bond claims that “radical innocence” can never wholly be lost. Through drama, we can escape “ideology” and recover our “autonomy.” It leads us to confront extreme situations, and to define for ourselves “what it means to be human.” The terms of Bond’s theory are Manichean (innocent-corrupt, autonomous-ideologized etc.). His arguments are based in the assumption that there is a fundamental “humanity” that exists prior to socialization. In fact, the process of socialization begins at birth. As an account of child development, “radical innocence” does not stand up to close scrutiny. Arguably, however, Bond’s work escapes the confines of his own theory. It can be read, not in terms of the “ideologized” vs. the “autonomous” mind, but rather, in terms of “conscious” and “unconscious.” In Coffee (2000), Bond takes character of Nold on a journey into the Dantean hell of his own unconscious. He does not recover his “innocence,” but, rather, he has to face the darkness of both history and the psyche.

scholarly journals Natural Rights, Under-Specified Rights, and Bills of Rights

2016 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 449-464
Author(s):  
Russell Hittinger
Keyword(s):  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Practical Purpose ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Constitutional History ◽  
World War Two ◽  
World War ◽  
Precise Nature ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Right ◽  
Case Basis

The lawers of antiquity defined justice as "giving to each what is his ius [due, right]": ius suum cuique tribuere. Until or unless someone can rightfully claim "that is owed to me [him, or them]" there is no issue of justice. For any practical purpose, the discourse of rights depends on our ability to recognize with some precision who owes what to whom. Bills and charters of rights typically enumerate things which the government owes to citizens or persons. Since World War Two, domestic and international declarations have emphasized obligations of states to recognize human or natural rights. However, these lists often include "rights" which are rather general and under-specified. Under-specified rights have two deleterious consequences for constitutionally limited governments. First, such "rights" inspire the belief that persons have rights prior to anyone knowing precisely what they are. Second, under-specified rights typically burden courts with the task of discovering on a case by case basis the precise nature of the right under dispute. Since bills or charters of rights aim to limit the government, we might doubt whether this purpose is really achieved when the government must specify the right on an ad hoc basis. These problems are investigated in light of U.S. constitutional history.

scholarly journals Is the Unspeakable Singable? The Ethics of Holocaust Representation and the Reception of Górecki's Symphony no.3

2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Moore
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
Musical Language ◽  
World War Two ◽  
World War ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Holocaust Representation ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Second World ◽  
New Hypothesis

Debates about Holocaust representation have long been haunted by the idea that the enormity and intensity of human suffering in the events of World War Two are ‘unspeakable’. In many such statements the capacity for cognition and the ethical dimension of aestheticisation are blurred – the Holocaust is ‘unspeakable’ both in the sense of being impossible to imagine in its full horror, but also morally inappropriate as the subject of artistic production. But do all forms of cultural representation of the Holocaust fail in the same way as words or to the same degree, in the eyes of those who would judge their merits according the tenet of unspeakability? This paper considers one particularly renowned work Henryk Górecki’s symphony no. 3 (Symfonia pieśni żałosnych) of 1976, discussing how it mediated both the global politics of Holocaust representation and the recuperation of victimhood in postcommunist Poland. Górecki claimed a subjectivity of failure in response to the challenge of representing the events of World War Two and has insisted that the symphony is not about war but about sorrow. The vocal lyrics are nonetheless profoundly thematised around war suffering, and the Second World War in particular - events he approached with a musical language of epic, pathos and redemption. In framing the subject of his work, he emphasised a Polish national suffering that both eschewed mention of specifically targeted groups of victims, and beckoned to Polish folk and catholic traditions. This article presents a new hypothesis about the success of Górecki’s work by considering it in relation to the ethical debates about Holocaust empathic response that have occurred in relation to historiographic, literary and filmic representation.

scholarly journals Holokaust jako ludobójstwo wyjątkowe

2020 ◽  
pp. 61-79
Author(s):  
Jacek Surzyn
Keyword(s):  
Mass Production ◽  
Human History ◽  
World War Two ◽  
World War ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Moral Problems ◽  
Moral Dimensions ◽  
The One ◽  
First Time

The article is dedicated to an analysis of the Holocaust uniqueness against the backdrop of other genocides. Most of all, the text follows the clues from Berel Lang, who interpretsthe Nazi Crime as a perfect genocide, that is, such a genocide that implemented its ideological assumptions fully for the first time in human history. What transpired then was in fact a comprehensive synthesis of “idea” and “actions.” Therefore, the relation between the Holocaust and other genocides turns out to be one-sided: the Holocaust is a genocide but no other genocide is the Holocaust. The category of genocide was, first of all, introduced into international circulation by a Polish lawyer of Jewish origin Rafał Lemkin during the final decade before the outbreak of World War Two. Genocide has become an almost universally acknowledged term, reinforced by the UN declaration of 1947. Mass crimes occurred in human history since the time immemorial. However, their character fundamentally changed with the advent of modernity, when powerful nation states within the framework of ideological postulates managed to give a new dimension to their politics, the one including actions meted out against entire communities: ethnic groups or nations. The Nazi crime of the Holocaust seems to be a unique exemplification of “modernity” (the term introduced in this sense by Zygmunt Bauman), that is, the combination of technicalisation and mass production with strong bureaucratic structure, which resulted in an unimaginable deed of murdering millions of Jews while utilising technical methods. The killing took a form of “production tasks,” which made the moral problems of responsibility and guilt appear in a different light. In the article an attempt is made to show implications stemming from the acceptance of the Holocaust’s uniqueness as “a perfect genocide,” both in its political and social as well as philosophical and moral dimensions.

scholarly journals Vulgar Imagery and Biological Themes: An Analysis of the Nazi’s Anti-Semitic Dialogue

Spectrum ◽  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Brown
Keyword(s):  
General Population ◽  
Political Party ◽  
World War Two ◽  
World War ◽  
Nazi Regime ◽  
German State ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Nazi Ideology ◽  
Occupied Territory ◽  
The Holocaust

During World War Two, the Nazi regime created a mechanized and systematic killing process with the intention of eliminating the “undesirables” of their occupied territory—now referred to as the Holocaust. While the true scale of this system was not openly publicized at the time, the motivation for its existence was an entrenched element of the Nazi ideology—the creation of a racially pure German state. The question stands as to how a political party could bring a nation in line with an ideology predicated on racism, ethnonationalism and the destruction of an entire people? This paper will provide an analysis of the type of language the Nazis used to do exactly that. Through studying their vocabulary, we find that their persistent use of biological themes and metaphors supported their self-defined “scientific anti-Semitism” and we can follow the effect this had on the general public. The Nazis were not the first group to push a violently discriminatory agenda upon their general population nor were they the last. By analyzing how they spoke on the topic we can see patterns and general themes emerge, giving us the ability to spot them in contemporary examples and helping us identify the emergence of dangerous movements before they take control.

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