Stasis

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Eaglestone
Keyword(s):  
Nobel Laureate ◽  
Unborn Child ◽  
The Past ◽  
Working Through ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
The Holocaust

The idea of ‘working though’ the past has played a central role in many literary, historical, philosophical, and wider cultural debates about the Holocaust. However, this chapter argues that two major writers, in different ways and for divergent reasons, refuse ‘working through’ and aim instead at ‘stasis’: the Nobel laureate and survivor, Imre Kertész (with a focus on his Fateless and Kaddish for an Unborn Child) and the hugely celebrated German writer W. G. Sebald (focusing on his The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz). This stasis is a turn, in the name of memory, against the flexibility and fluidity of memory itself. However, its meaning for the two writers differs profoundly in relation to issues of trauma, evil, complicity, temporality, and responsibility. The chapter concludes by contrasting these with Otto Dov Kulka’s award-winning Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death.

A Biographical Case Study of a Victimizer's Daughter's Strategy: Pseudo-Identification With the Victims of the Holocaust

1992 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriele Rosenthal ◽  
Dan Bar-On
Keyword(s):  
Life Story ◽  
Psychological Consequences ◽  
Behavioral Sciences ◽  
The Real ◽  
Repair Strategy ◽  
The Past ◽  
Working Through ◽  
The Holocaust

Abstract Previous studies have shown that many children of former Nazi perpetrators either identify with their parents by denying their atrocities, by distancing them-selves emotionally from their parents, or by acknowledging their participation in the extermination process. Through a hermeneutical case study of the narrated life story of a Euthanasia physician's daughter, a type of strategy, which we defined as pseudo-identification with the victim, is reconstructed. The results of the analysis suggest that this is a repair strategy. Putting oneself in the role of one's parents' victim provides refuge from acknowledging possible identification with Nazism and its idols, as well as identifying oneself with the real victims of one's parents. In this case, the psychological consequences of this strategy are described: The woman still suffers from extermination anxieties which block further working through of the past. (Behavioral Sciences)

Silences: Helping Elderly Holocaust Victims Deal with the Past

1992 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 243-252 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruben Schindler ◽  
Chya Spiegel ◽  
Esther Malachi
Keyword(s):  
Later Life ◽  
The Elderly ◽  
Nazi Germany ◽  
Helping Professions ◽  
Easy Task ◽  
The Past ◽  
Working Through ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Bear Witness ◽  
Intergenerational Dynamics

Persons who have faced severe crises such as the Holocaust in Nazi Germany confront painful memories, guilt, and the perceived irrationality of their own survival, which represses thoughts and memories. There is no language to share the dark and difficult years of the past. Silence is their only voice of expression. In later life, when friends are gone, the need to share with others becomes urgent; to bear witness is vital. Helping persons share these experiences is no easy task. To engage the elderly with reminiscences, memory, bereavement, and the working through of guilt provide unusual challenges for the helping professions. Significant family events are also important opportunities for sharing the past. It is the children and grandchildren's desire to know that also prompts the sharing of past horrors and future hopes. They often enable the deepest silences to be shared and it is the elderly that often welcome this opportunity. Being sensitive to these intergenerational dynamics are important in helping elderly Holocaust victims deal with their past.

What’s Good for George Sánchez Is Good for Boyle Heights: Regenerative Scholarship, Urban Racism, Gentrification, and East LA Interchange

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gilbert Estrada
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Urban Pollution ◽  
Metropolitan Regions ◽  
The Past ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
Boyle Heights ◽  
Good For ◽  
Primary Focus ◽  
Deed Restrictions ◽  
Class Community

The inclusive ideals of George Sánchez have helped shape a new generation of academics who have promoted connections with nonacademic organizations. This article discusses how Sánchez has continued these efforts through his pivotal contributions to an award-winning documentary focusing on the multiethnic, working-class community of Boyle Heights: Betsy Kalin’s film East LA Interchange (2015). East LA Interchange’s greatest contribution to the generative scholarship Sánchez emphasizes is its critical analysis of modern urban problems, utilizing history as a tool for social change. The story of Boyle Heights is not just a history of a single working-class community with a diverse culture. It is also a tale of a neighborhood trying to solve real world problems such as gentrification, unaffordable housing, community displacement, and urban pollution. The film portrays these difficulties in the present while showing that they originated decades ago. Sánchez and East LA Interchange are at their best when they provide the historical contexts of contemporary problems, emphasizing that history is not only the study of the past. Rather, history is the unending dialogue between the past, present, and future, and any significant discourse on today’s urban ills must be rooted in the past. For students and others interested in the diverse communities common in many US metropolitan regions, East LA Interchange has much to offer regarding the issues of immigration, redlining, deed restrictions, political activism, freeway construction, living with racially and ethnically diverse community members, and the nationwide problem of gentrification. These themes, especially gentrification, are the primary focus of this article.

It was horrible, but we live now

Focaal ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 2016 (74) ◽  
pp. 97-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa J. Krieg
Keyword(s):  
High School ◽  
Field Study ◽  
Key Factors ◽  
Strange Matter ◽  
The Past ◽  
Holocaust Memorial ◽  
Personal Relation ◽  
The Holocaust

Based on an ethnographic field study in a museum and an evening high school in Cologne, this paper discusses experiences of young German adults in everyday encounters with the Holocaust, which are oft en accompanied by feelings of discomfort. Considering the Holocaust as an uncanny, strange matter contributes to understanding that distance and proximity are key factors in creating uncomfortable encounters. Distance from the Holocaust reduces discomfort, but where distance cannot be created, other strategies have to be put to work. This article underlines the significance of experience in an individual’s personal relation to the past for gaining an improved understanding of Holocaust memorial culture in Germany.

Populism and Memory: Legislation of the Past in Poland, Ukraine, and Russia

2021 ◽  
pp. 088832542095080
Author(s):  
Nikolay Koposov
Keyword(s):  
Soft Power ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Authoritarian Regimes ◽  
Crimes Against Humanity ◽  
National Narratives ◽  
Politics Of Memory ◽  
Democratic Culture ◽  
The Past ◽  
Initial Stage ◽  
The Holocaust

This article belongs to the special cluster “Here to Stay: The Politics of History in Eastern Europe”, guest-edited by Félix Krawatzek & George Soroka. The rise of historical memory, which began in the 1970s and 1980s, has made the past an increasingly important soft-power resource. At its initial stage, the rise of memory contributed to the decay of self-congratulatory national narratives and to the formation of a “cosmopolitan” memory centered on the Holocaust and other crimes against humanity and informed by the notion of state repentance for the wrongdoings of the past. Laws criminalizing the denial of these crimes, which were adopted in “old” continental democracies in the 1980s and 1990s, were a characteristic expression of this democratic culture of memory. However, with the rise of national populism and the formation of the authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regimes in Russia, Turkey, Hungary, and Poland in the 2000s and 2010s, the politics of memory has taken a significantly different turn. National populists are remarkably persistent in whitewashing their countries’ history and using it to promote nationalist mobilization. This process has manifested itself in the formation of new types of memory laws, which shift the blame for historical injustices to other countries (the 1998 Polish, the 2000 Czech, the 2010 Lithuanian, the June 2010 Hungarian, and the 2014 Latvian statutes) and, in some cases, openly protect the memory of the perpetrators of crimes against humanity (the 2005 Turkish, the 2014 Russian, the 2015 Ukrainian, the 2006 and the 2018 Polish enactments). The article examines Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian legislation regarding the past that demonstrates the current linkage between populism and memory.

Die Zukunft der Vergangenheit Richard Oelze (1900 – 1980) and Post-war Reflection

2017 ◽  
Vol 80 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-155
Author(s):  
Eleanor F. Moseman
Keyword(s):  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Nazi Regime ◽  
Critical View ◽  
Repressed Memories ◽  
The Past ◽  
Working Through ◽  
Word And Image ◽  
Visual Expression ◽  
Post War ◽  
Regime Analysis

Abstract The Surrealist artist Richard Oelze’s postwar enterprise was one of inner reflection and personal questioning linked to the broader project of coming to terms with the past. The essay takes a critical view of his artworks and his automatist Wortskizzen to assess the manner and extent to which Oelze utilizes his artistic practice as a mode of working through his, and Germany’s, complicity with the Nazi regime. Analysis of the Wortskizzen exposes how verbal probing informs Oelze’s visual expression of inner turmoil, while implied gaps and voids in paintings and drawings puncture space as well as time, illuminating memory and blending the past with the present. Oelze’s serious play with word and image in turn invites his viewers to release repressed memories through reflective contemplation.

The Legacy of Rita Levi-Montalcini: From Nerve Growth Factor to Neuroinflammation

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-20
Author(s):  
Domenico Chirchiglia ◽  
Pasquale Chirchiglia ◽  
Dorotea Pugliese ◽  
Rosa Marotta
Keyword(s):  
Nerve Growth Factor ◽  
Growth Factor ◽  
Neurological Diseases ◽  
Nobel Laureate ◽  
Negative Events ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Nerve Roots ◽  
Nerve Growth ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Endogenous Substances

Rita Levi-Montalcini was an extraordinary personality and with her profession she made a tremendous contribution to humanity. Doctor, Nobel laureate for medicine, neuroscientist, she contributed, thanks to her research, to improve the knowledge of the nervous system. She discovered the nerve growth factor, which is applied in various fields of neurology, concerning neurodegenerative diseases. She also studied, in relatively newer years, the mechanisms of neuroinflammation. This last is a research that has been developing in recent years and is based on the predominantly anti-inflammatory properties of endogenous substances that able to act not only on diseases of the nerves, neuropathies, on the nerve roots, and radiculopathies but also on migraine and other non-neurological diseases. Her long life was full of positive and negative events. Born in a Jewish family, she lived her life as a young woman through war, Nazi deportations, and the Holocaust. Despite the difficulties, she found time to do research in the medical field, organizing research laboratories with other scholars. She had a difficult life, interspread with pain, destruction, extermination of human beings but also rewarded by scientific discoveries. A “small” woman but a great neuroscientist.

Remembering the Past/Anticipating the Future: A Professor From the White Working Class Talks With a Survivor of the Holocaust About Our Troubled World

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (5) ◽  
pp. 323-337 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolyn Ellis ◽  
Jerry Rawicki
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Collaborative Writing ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Future ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Shed Light

This article extends the research of Jerry Rawicki and Carolyn Ellis who have collaborated for more than eight years on memories and consequences of the Holocaust. Focusing on Jerry’s memories of his experience during the Holocaust, they present dialogues that took place during five recorded interviews and follow-up conversations that reflect on the similarity of Hitler’s seizing of power in the 1930s to the meteoric rise of Donald Trump. Noting how issues of class and race were taking an increasingly prominent role in their conversations and collaborative writing, they also begin to examine discontent in the rural, White working class and Carolyn’s socialization within that community. These dialogues and reflections seek to shed light on the current political climate in America as Carolyn and Jerry struggle to cope with their fears and envision a hopeful path forward for their country.

scholarly journals Cinematic Memory and The Americanization of The Holocaust

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 138-146
Author(s):  
Barbara A. Nelson
Keyword(s):  
The Past ◽  
The Holocaust

Abstract Steven Soderbergh’s The Good German (2006), while grounding itself in WWII, casts a wide net as it attempts to examine the role of memory, the difficulty of assigning guilt, determining justice, defining the past, and writing history. Its nuanced treatment of these issues is enhanced by its complex ethnic characterizations and its contextualization among a group of WWII American cinematic classics. This ultimately leads to a shift in viewer reception aimed at creating greater understanding and empathy.

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