It’s Still There

boundary 2 ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-143
Author(s):  
Paula Rabinowitz
Keyword(s):  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Georges Perec ◽  
Visual Examination ◽  
Nazi Concentration Camp ◽  
Alain Resnais ◽  
Television Shows ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Chantal Akerman ◽  
History Of

Daniel Blaufuks’s video Als Ob/As If formally interrogates the history of Holocaust imagery using a close visual examination of the 1944 “Staged Nazi Film” shot in Thereseinstadt. Layering his footage from present-day Terezín with a number of earlier films and television shows shot at or about the Nazi concentration camp, he contemplates the role of the image, both still and moving, in the creation of memory and history of the Holocaust. His video and phototextual book connect to literary explorations of the Czech concentration camp—by Georges Perec, W. G. Sebald, and Jiří Weil—as well as cinematic documentaries about the Nazi murder of European Jews by Alain Resnais, Claude Lanzmann, and Jean-Luc Godard. By focusing on contemporary Terezín, Blaufuks also brings to light aspects of memorialization within post-totalitarian societies investigated by filmmakers Petra Epperlein and Chantal Akerman, as well as by scholars of the Holocaust and post-Soviet Eastern Europe.

scholarly journals Lived experience and the Holocaust: spaces, senses and emotions in Auschwitz

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 27-58
Author(s):  
Nikolaus Wachsmann
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Construction Sites ◽  
Nazi Concentration Camp ◽  
Spatial History ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
History Of

This article examines lived experience during the Holocaust, focusing on Auschwitz, the most lethal Nazi concentration camp. It draws on spatial history, as well as the history of senses and emotions, to explore subjective being in Auschwitz. The article suggests that a more explicit engagement with individual spaces�prisoner bunks, barracks, latrines, crematoria, construction sites, SS offices�and their emotional and sensory dimension, can reveal elements of lived experience that have remained peripheral on the edges of historical visibility. Such an approach can deepen understanding of Auschwitz, by making the camp more recognisable and by contributing to wider historiographical debates about the nature of Nazi terror.

scholarly journals Mnemonic Populism: The Polish Holocaust Law and its Afterlife

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kornelia Kończal
Keyword(s):  
Significant Other ◽  
The Past ◽  
Cultural Foundations ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Heated Debate ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Relationship

In early 2018, the Polish parliament adopted controversial legislation criminalising assertions regarding the complicity of the ‘Polish Nation’ and the ‘Polish State’ in the Holocaust. The so-called Polish Holocaust Law provoked not only a heated debate in Poland, but also serious international tensions. As a result, it was amended only five months after its adoption. The reason why it is worth taking a closer look at the socio-cultural foundations and political functions of the short-lived legislation is twofold. Empirically, the short history of the Law reveals a great deal about the long-term role of Jews in the Polish collective memory as an unmatched Significant Other. Conceptually, the short life of the Law, along with its afterlife, helps capture poll-driven, manifestly moralistic and anti-pluralist imaginings of the past, which I refer to as ‘mnemonic populism’. By exploring the relationship between popular and political images of the past in contemporary Poland, this article argues for joining memory and populism studies in order to better understand what can happen to history in illiberal surroundings.

From Ravensbrück to Berlin: Will Lammert’s Monument to the Deported Jews 1957/1985

Images ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 140-163
Author(s):  
Natasha Goldman
Keyword(s):  
East Germany ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
East Berlin ◽  
Western Art ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
History Of ◽  
Deutsche Demokratische Republik ◽  
Changing Attitudes ◽  
Art Style

In 1985 one of the earliest memorials dedicated to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust was installed in East Berlin. The Monument to the Deported Jews was an arrangement of thirteen bronze figures in expressionist style. Will Lammert, the artist, originally designed the figures for the base of his monument for Ravensbrück in 1957. The artist died in 1957, however, before finalizing his design for the monument. Only two figures on a pylon were installed at the concentration camp in 1959. The figures meant for the base of the Ravensbrück memorial were unfinished, but were nonetheless cast in bronze by the artist’s family. Thirteen of those figures were installed on the Große Hamburger Straße in 1985 by the artist’s grandson, Mark Lammert. This essay analyzes the Große Hamburger Straße monument in three ways: first, it returns to the literature on the Ravensbrück memorial in order to better understand the role that the unfinished figures would have played, had they been installed. I argue that they originally were most likely meant to depict “Strafestehen”—or torture by standing—at Ravensbrück. Secondly, it aims to explain why and how Lammert’s seemingly expressionist memorial would have been acceptable to East Germany in 1959. While Western art historical attitudes toward East Germany up until the 1990s assumed that Soviet socialist realism was the de facto art style of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR), some elements of expressionism were being theorized in the late 1950s, at precisely the time when Lammert designed the Ravensbrück monument. Finally, I analyze the role that a monument for Ravensbrück plays in this particular neighborhood of Mitte, Berlin: standing silently, they are no longer legible as women being tortured by standing. Instead, the sculptures signify, at the same time, the deported Jews of Berlin and the harrowing aftermath of their deportations, the improbable return of the deported Jews, and the changing attitudes toward the history of the neighborhood in which the sculptural group is located.

The Surveillant Gaze: Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon

October ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 147 ◽  
pp. 95-116
Author(s):  
Martin Blumenthal-Barby
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
General Sense ◽  
Nazi Concentration Camp ◽  
Black And White ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The One ◽  
Sociohistorical Context ◽  
The Village

Michael Haneke's 2009 The White Ribbon is set in the village of “Eichwald.” Eichwald cannot be found on any German map. It is an imaginary place in the Protestant North of Eastern Germany in the early twentieth century. What is more, Haneke tells his black-and-white tale as the flashback narration of a voice-over narrator—a series of defamiliarizing techniques that lift the diegetic action out of its immediate sociohistorical context, stripping it of its temporal and topographical coordinates. Against this backdrop, is it possible to hear the name “Eichwald” without being reminded of, on the one hand, Adolf Eichmann, Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer and one of the key architects of the Holocaust, and, on the other, the Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald? To be sure, Eichwald is not Buchenwald, and no 56,000 humans are being murdered here. Yet why this peculiar terminological fusion? What characterizes Eichwald, this model of a society in which adults have no names but merely function as representatives of a particular class and profession: the Baron, the Pastor, the Teacher, the Steward, the Midwife, etc.? What distinguishes this village that appears to be largely isolated from the outside world, this village that outsiders rarely enter and from which no one seems to be able to escape? What identifies this prison-like community with its oppressive atmosphere, its tiny rooms and low ceilings, its myriad alcoves, niches, windows, and hallways that evoke a general sense of “entrapment” and incarceration? This world in which even the camera appears to be shackled, to never zoom, hardly to pan or tilt, thus depriving the image of any dynamism, any mobility? Who—in this confining milieu—are the guards, who the detainees? And what characterizes the putatively illicit activities that appear to lie at its enigmatic center and around which the entire film seems to revolve?

scholarly journals Hungarian Women’s Holocaust Life Writing in the Context of the Nation’s Divided Social Memory, 1944-2014

2015 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 54-81
Author(s):  
Louise O. Vasvári
Keyword(s):  
Oral History ◽  
Intergenerational Transmission ◽  
Social Memory ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Traumatic Memory ◽  
Mothers And Daughters ◽  
Child Survivors ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
History Of ◽  
Holocaust Narratives

In this paper, in commemoration of the seventieth anniversary year of 1944 in Hungary, I explore selected women’s Holocaust diaries, memoirs, letters, and other less studied documents, such as recipe books, all written during the war, which can provide invaluable resources for understanding the experiences of the victims of war, by personalizing the events and helping to write the obscure into history. At the same time, such documents allow historical voices of the period to provide testimony in the context of the divided social memory of the Holocaust in Hungary today.  I will first discuss several Hungarian diaries and “immediate memoirs” written right after liberation, among others, that of Éva Heyman who began writing her diary in 1944 on her thirteenth birthday and wrote until two days before her deportation to Auschwitz, where she perished. I will then discuss two recently published volumes, the Szakácskönyv a túlélélésért (2013), which contains the collected recipes that five Hungarian women wrote in a concentration camp in Austria, along with an oral history of the life of Hedwig Weiss, who redacted the collection. Finally, I will refer to the postmemory anthology, Lányok és anyák. Elmeséletlen történetek [‘Mothers and Daughters: Untold Stories’] (2013), where thirty five Hungarian women, some themselves child survivors, others daughters of survivors, write Holocaust narratives in which their mothers’ lives become the intersubject in their own autobiographies, underscoring the risks of intergenerational transmission, where traumatic memory can be transmitted (or silenced) to be repeated and reenacted, rather than worked through.

scholarly journals Pamięć religijna społeczności lokalnych — przykład Jedwabnego

2017 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 161-184
Author(s):  
Zuzanna Bogumił
Keyword(s):  
Social Function ◽  
Local Memory ◽  
The Past ◽  
National Monument ◽  
The People ◽  
Parish Community ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
History Of ◽  
Monuments And Memorials

This article looks on Jedwabne and the debate on Polish involvement in the Holocaust from the perspective of the Jedwabians. The author shows that until the erection of the national monument to the murdered Jews in Jedwabne in 2001, the Jedwabians’ memory of their Jewish neighbors was a part of local memory. Jedwabians commemorated the Jews in accordance with their frames of memory. The point is that the people in Jedwabne are first of all a members of parish community, so their memory is religious in nature. This has a profound effect on their relationship to the past and their perception of the role of monuments and memorials. By reconstructing the history of the erection of selected monuments in Jedwabne, the author shows which events of the past Jedwabians want to commemorate and what social function is played by memory of the commemorated events. She also considers to what degree memory of the group’s past lies at the base of the Jedwabians’ contemporary identity.

scholarly journals Verbal images of evil and (in)humanity during and after the Holocaust

2018 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Geddes
Keyword(s):  
Crucial Role ◽  
Intimate Relationship ◽  
Dual Role ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Primo Levi ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Charlotte Delbo ◽  
Bear Witness

In this paper, I explore images of evil and (in)humanity in the works of Primo Levi and Charlotte Delbo – verbal images that they encountered within Auschwitz and those that they created afterwards to try to bear witness to what happened there. Verbal images played a crucial role for Levi and Delbo in their efforts both to maintain a sense of their own humanity during their time in the concentration camp and to depict the extent to which inmates’ humanity was diminished and degraded by the Nazis. Thus, verbal images helped them both to maintain a sense of their own humanity and to depict the effort to destroy it. This dual role of verbal images found in their testimonies suggests that there is an intimate relationship between evil, images, and (in)humanity during and after the Holocaust – one that we would do well to consider. 

scholarly journals Sisyphean Unproductivity in Narrative Film

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 296-320
Author(s):  
Juan Velasquez
Keyword(s):  
Film Studies ◽  
Formal Analysis ◽  
Labour Productivity ◽  
Chantal Akerman ◽  
Charles Chaplin ◽  
History Of ◽  
Narrative Film ◽  
Human Desire ◽  
The Relationship

This article examines the relationship between labour, productivity and film. The purpose of this intervention is to suggest that narrative film can show us the unproductive tendencies that humans carry within them but that cannot always make themselves known. These leisurely desires erupt as musicality, ecstasy, and the undoing of the self when we carry out the repetitive gestures of work. This article compares Camus's freedom and Georges Bataille's sovereignty as they share an interest in anti-futurity and anti-productivity and it uses these concepts to propose worker's ecstatic escapes from labour as Sisyphean unproductivity. Using this theoretical framework, I carry out a comparative and formal analysis of Sisyphus (Marcell Jankovics, 1974), Modern Times (Charles Chaplin, 1936), The Apartment (Billy Wilder,1960) , Saut ma ville (Chantal Akerman, 1971) and Dancer in the Dark (Lars von Trier, 2000). While the field of film studies has highlighted the role of cinema as a tool for propagating ideologies of productivity, the scenes examined suggest that film also has a history of subverting ideologies of productivity through repetitive, Sisyphean unproductivity. By updating the plight of the Greek hero to 20th and 21st century capitalism, these directors uncover a fundamental, yet impossible, human desire for non-productive activities This re-centering of the unproductive could be useful in future academic re-categorizations of the working class through its desires to not work, that is, it provides preliminary materials for understanding class identities through their deformation, and not just their formation.

Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry Volume 1

2004 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
18Th Century ◽  
Yiddish Literature ◽  
Jewish Experience ◽  
Jewish Settlement ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Polish Society ◽  
History Of ◽  
Basic Characteristics ◽  
Selection Of

This book explores central themes in Jewish and European history. Launching what was to become a comprehensive and vigorous forum for discussion of all aspects of the Jewish experience in Poland, this first volume established the pattern of bringing together work by established and younger scholars from many countries. The book begins with a discussion of the reconstruction of the history of pre-Ashkenazic Jewish settlement patterns in the Slavic lands. It examines the fundamental security and the economic and political power which the Jews possessed in 16th–18th century Poland and investigates the basic characteristics of the Jewish experience in Poland. It then investigates the changes in the attitude of Polish society toward the Jews in the 18th century. Further attention is given to Polish–Jewish relations and the January uprising, the assimilation of Jews in the Kingdom of Poland, and the role of Hasidism. It next looks at Yiddish literature in Poland between the two World Wars, the underground movement in Auschwitz, Polish–Jewish dialogue and relations, and the response of the Western Allies to the Holocaust. The latter part of the volume examines a selection of published works.

Munkács

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel C. Heilman
Keyword(s):  
The Holocaust ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Migration

The history of this dynasty, the problem of its succession and the complex transition to an imported leader, the abdication of that new leader and the search for a replacement as well as the role of Zionism, the Holocaust, and migration in the dynasty’s fate are discussed. The dramatic occasion of the transition from father to a son who replaced him closes the chapter.

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