scholarly journals Jewish Doctors’ Challenges in the Death Camps: Ethical Dilemmas? Choiceless Choices? The Human Condition?

Conatus ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 341
Author(s):  
Ross Halpin
Keyword(s):  
Ethical Dilemmas ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
Personal Traits ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Will To Live ◽  
Past Experiences ◽  
Significant Factors ◽  
The Human Condition

Most commentators have focused on ethical dilemmas and the idea that they were core to the actions of and decisions by Jewish doctors in SS concentration camps and ghettos during the Holocaust. While I recognize Jewish doctors did face ethical dilemmas, in this article, I shift my attention to include two other significant factors: choiceless choices, defined by the eminent Holocaust historian Lawrence Langer as “crucial decisions [that] did not reflect options between life and death, but between one form of abnormal response and another, both imposed by a situation that was in no way of the victim’s own choosing,”  and the human condition, whereby decisions and actions were triggered by personal traits and past experiences in response to particular situations and circumstances. Inherent in all three factors is the tenaciousness of reality and how the abhorrent conditions, immorality, inhumanity and evilness cast a shadow over every moment of the Jewish doctor’s life. My thesis is that decision-making was not one-dimensional but multi-dimensional. For the Jewish doctor every incident became a source of dread and tragedy. They were often not trained to treat some diseases or perform surgery and lacked experience to work in such conditions and cope emotionally and psychologically. I will attempt to show that how a person responds to an ethical dilemma is based on his or her own experiences and reasoning, and how they reacted to sudden and inexplicable incidents that threatened life or impacted survival induced abnormal actions and decisions. As Jewish doctors they were driven to be healers, to be normal, but they were forced by circumstances to kill or become perpetrators, acting abnormally. Tragically the abnormal became the norm. The Jewish doctors were professionally trained and culturally socialized to continue their roles as doctors. Nevertheless, they were human and were driven by the innate will to live.

An Answer to a Question that Cannot Be Answered: A Pragmatist Approach to Viktor Frankl’s and Primo Levi’s Theoretical Perspectives on Humor

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Jarno Hietalahti
Keyword(s):  
Human Condition ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
The Past ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives ◽  
The Future ◽  
Forms Of Life ◽  
Pragmatist Philosophy ◽  
The Human Condition

Abstract This article offers a pragmatist approach to concentration camp humor, in particular, to Viktor Frankl’s and Primo Levi’s conceptualizations of humor. They both show how humor does not vanish even in the worst imaginable circumstances. Despite this similarity, it will be argued that their intellectual positions on humor differ significantly. The main difference between the two authors is that according to Frankl, humor is elevating in the middle of suffering, and according to Levi, humor expresses the absurdity of the idea of concentration camps, but this is not necessarily a noble reaction. Through a critical synthesis based on pragmatist philosophy, it will be claimed that humor in concentration camps expresses the human condition in the entirely twisted situation. This phenomenon cannot be understood without considering forms of life, how drastic the changes from the past were, and what people expected from the future, if anything.

Friendship and Bullying

2021 ◽  
pp. 43-80
Author(s):  
Cathy Benedict
Keyword(s):  
Critical Literacy ◽  
Critical Reflection ◽  
Ethical Dilemmas ◽  
Lesson Plans ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The World ◽  
The Human Condition

Through a series of scaffolded lesson plans that begin in the classroom and then move out into the world, this chapter addresses friendship and bullying through the lens of critical literacy. Friendship has long been the sacrosanct goal of elementary socialization. This chapter calls into question the simplicity of the concept and weighs that against bullying. The texts used in this chapter begin “simply” enough, with books such as Tubby the Tuba and Ben’s Trumpet, but then moves into texts that push students to consider poverty and war as a form of bullying. Books such as Petar’s Song, The Harmonica, and finally Revolución afford opportunities for both critical reflection and musicking, while a reimagined version of Peter and the Wolf asks students to ponder ethical dilemmas grounded in loyalty, death, societal pressures, the human condition, nature, friendship, and sacrifice.

Becoming Ray Bradbury

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan R. Eller
Keyword(s):  
Human Mind ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
American Writer ◽  
Long Life ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Private Collections ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
The Human Condition

This book chronicles the making of an iconic American writer by exploring Ray Bradbury's childhood and early years of his long life in fiction, film, television, radio, and theater. It measures the impact of the authors, artists, illustrators, and filmmakers who stimulated Ray Bradbury's imagination throughout his first three decades. This biography follows Bradbury's development from avid reader to maturing author, making a living writing for the genre pulps and mainstream magazines. Unprecedented access to Bradbury's personal papers and other private collections provides insight into his emerging talent through his unpublished correspondence, his rare but often insightful notes on writing, and his interactions with those who mentored him during those early years. They also provide insight into his very conscious decisions, following the sudden success of The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man, to voice controversial political statements in his fiction. The book illuminates the sources of Bradbury's growing interest in the human mind, the human condition, and the ambiguities of life and death—themes that became increasingly apparent in his early fiction. It elucidates the complex creative motivations that yielded Fahrenheit 451. Revealing Bradbury's emotional world as it matured, the book highlights the emerging sense of authorship at the heart of his boundless creativity.

scholarly journals Hamlet, or about Death: A Romanian Hamlet directed by Vlad Mugur (2001)

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (35) ◽  
pp. 51-60
Author(s):  
Monica Matei-Chesnoiu
Keyword(s):  
Human Experience ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
First Century ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
National Theatre ◽  
The World ◽  
Existential Issues ◽  
The Human Condition

This essay looks at the 2001 Romanian production of Hamlet directed by Vlad Mugur at the Cluj National Theatre (Romania) from the perspective of geocriticism and spatial literary studies, analysing the stage space opened in front of the audiences. While the bare stage suggests asceticism and alienation, the production distances the twenty-first century audiences from what might have seemed difficult to understand from their postmodern perspectives. The production abbreviates the topic to its bare essence, just as a map condenses space, in the form of “literary cartography” (Tally 20). There is no room in this production for baroque ornaments and theatrical flourishing; instead, the production explores the exposed depth of human existence. The production is an exploration of theatre and art, of what dramatists and directors can do with artful language, of the theatre as an exploration of human experience and potential. It is about the human condition and the artist’s place in the world, about old and new, about life and death, while everything happens on the edge of nothingness. The director’s own death before the opening night of the production ties Shakespeare’s Hamlet with existential issues in an even deeper way than the play itself allows us to expose.

Julian Stryjkowski

1998 ◽  
pp. 381-384
Author(s):  
Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska
Keyword(s):  
Human Condition ◽  
Human Suffering ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Human Condition

This chapter presents an obituary for Julian Stryjkowski. Julian Stryjkowski is often referred to as a man who became a writer because of the tragic events of the war. He was the indirect chronicler of the Shoah, and the last guardian of the vast Jewish cemetery Poland was turned into during the war. Undoubtedly, the Holocaust gave him a strong and final impetus to record the vanished community in all its richness, but he had already started writing before the war. It is hard to say, however, what turns his career would have taken if not for the Holocaust. The main themes in Stryjkowski's writing are human suffering and tragic existence, troublesome friendships, frustrated loves, the influence of history upon the human condition, and most of all the problem of identity.

Experiment Human – On early concentration camp testimony

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Krochmalnik
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Self ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Race Ideology ◽  
The Human Condition

The atrocities that the prisoners in the concentration and extermination camps actually suffered in the 20th century can hardly be understood by outsiders like us today, especially if one takes a closer look at the experiences of the survivors, who offer cruel testimony on the human beast. This is also the case with the concentration camp testimonies in Daniel Krochmalnik’s contribution, which tell of the deadly experiments of the so-called ›Overman‹ and how he, inspired by the National Socialist master-race ideology, assumed an almost divine mission to exterminate everything human in his victims, so that death often seemed to be the only salvation. In view of such descriptions, which pervade the entire concentration camp literature, one inevitably has to ask oneself, as the author does, about the human condition and whether one can still place hope in people after all this – because the shocking experiences of the homo carceris in the concentration camps and gulags of the last century fundamentally shake the self-understanding of the human as a moral being, who can in fact transform into an angry beast at any time, especially under the influence of totalitarian systems of thought and rule as that Chapter »Homo homini lupus« shows. Nevertheless, in the end the author does not want to give up all hope in ›humanistic moral resources‹, even if the very existence of the »camp man« seems to contradict this.

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