scholarly journals From Fordism to Post-Fordism: Representation of Work in the Films about Nazi Concentration Camps

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ewa Mazierska
Keyword(s):  
Concentration Camps ◽  
Normal Life ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Holocaust Film ◽  
Nazi Camps ◽  
Free People

FROM FORDISM TO POST-FORDISM: REPRESENTATION OF WORK IN THE FILMS ABOUT NAZI CONCENTRATION CAMPS Nazi concentration camps in cinema, as well as in other media, tend to be represented as an aberration from the human norm. Watching films about the camps (the mainstay of the Holocaust film), we get the impression that there is a clear division between life in a camp and normal life. The inclusion of walls and barbed wire, marking the boundary between the prisoners' world and that of free people, as well as between camp and non-camp stages of the characters' lives confirm this impression. I also regard camps as extraordinary. This extraordinariness has a double meaning. In some aspects Nazi camps deviated qualitatively from ordinary institutions and everyday practices. In others, they were different in a sense of intensifying certain aspects of practices tested in other historical circumstances or even regarded as normal and...

Beyond a Court of Law: Holocaust Film and the Tensions in Primo Levi’s ‘Grey Zone’

2019 ◽  
pp. 174387211986877
Author(s):  
Adam Brown
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Ethical Dilemmas ◽  
Grey Zone ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Holocaust Film ◽  
Holocaust Films ◽  
Nazi Camps

The influence of Primo Levi’s writing on the ‘grey zone’ has only sharpened over the last decade, not only in terms of its broader application to human rights contexts beyond the Holocaust, but also through a greater focus on the question of how to understand the behaviour of so-called ‘privileged’ prisoners in the Nazi camps and ghettos. History has shown a court of law to be an inadequate setting for negotiating the complexities of the ethical dilemmas forced on victims in extremis, and substantial problems of judgement and representation have plagued efforts to understand these liminal figures elsewhere. This article examines the tensions within Levi’s writings and maps these onto attempts to represent the ‘grey zone’ in Holocaust films. Engaging in particular with Margarethe von Trotta’s critically acclaimed feature film Hannah Arendt (2012) and Tor Ben-Mayor’s lesser known documentary Kapo (1999), I highlight how these distinct approaches to depicting ‘privileged’ Jews expose the fraught nature of portraying victim complicity on screen.

Stanislaw Sreniowski, From a Book of Madness And Atrocity

2008 ◽  
pp. 312-316
Author(s):  
Jacek Leociak
Keyword(s):  
Common Fate ◽  
Normal Life ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Town

The title of this text, From the Book of Madness and Atrocity, published here for the first time, indicates its generic and stylistic specificity, its fragmentary, incomplete character. It suggests that this text is part of a greater whole, still incomplete, or one that cannot be grasped. In this sense Śreniowski refers to the topos of inexpressibility of the Holocaust experience. The text is reflective in character, full of metaphor, and its modernist style does not shun pathos. Thus we have here meditations emanating a poetic aura, not a report or an account of events. The author emphasises the desperate loneliness of the dying, their solitude, the incommensurability of the ghetto experience and that of the occupation, and the lack of a common fate of the Jews and the Poles (“A Deserted Town in a Living Capital”; “A Town within a Town”; “And the Capital? A Capital, in which the town of a death is dying . . . ? Well, the Capital is living a normal life. Under the occupation, indeed . . . .”).

Dov Levin and Zvie A. Brown, The Story of an Underground: The Resistance of the Jews in Kovno in the Second World War, trans. Jessica Setbon. Jerusalem: Gefen, 2014. 496 pp.

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
World War ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Armed Resistance ◽  
Second World ◽  
And Training

This chapter reviews the book The Story of an Underground: The Resistance of the Jews in Kovno in the Second World War (2014), by Dov Levin and Zvie A. Brown, translated by Jessica Setbon. The Story of an Underground is about the Jews of Kovno (Kaunas) who founded an underground movement during the Holocaust. The armed underground developed a plan to escape to the forests and join the partisans. The ghetto was liquidated in the summer of 1944. Many of the remaining Jews were sent to the Stutthof and Dachau concentration camps. The book highlights the dilemmas of Jewish armed resistance such as difficulties in obtaining weapons and training, some of the failures of the resistance, and some of the positive aspects of those who thought differently from members of the armed resistance.

scholarly journals The Holocaust in Slovak Drama

2017 ◽  
pp. 197-210
Author(s):  
Dagmar Kročanová
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
Rare Occurrence ◽  
World War ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Slovak Society ◽  
Dramatic Characters ◽  
Second World

The article discusses several Slovak plays with the theme of the Holocaust; namely Ticho (Silence) by Juraj Váh, Holokaust (Holocaust) by Viliam Klimáček, and Rabínka (The Woman Rabbi) by Anna Grusková. It also briefly refers to Návrat do života (Return to Life) and Antigona a tí druhí (Antigone and Those Others) by Peter Karvaš, both mediating traumas from concentration camps. Two plays (Ticho and Návrat do života) were written and staged immediately after the Second World War. Karvaš’s Antigona is a rare occurrence of the theme in Slovak drama during the Communism (in the early 1960s), whereas Klimáček’s and Grusková’s plays are recent, both staged in 2012. The article focuses on several aspects of these five plays: on dramatic characters representing “victims”, “witnesses” and “culprits” (Panas, quoted in Gawliński 2007: 19); on references about and/or representation of the Holocaust in dramatic texts; and on the type of the conflict(s) in the plays. It also mentions specific approaches of respective authors when dealing with the theme of the Holocaust, as well as with the relevance of their reflection of the theme for Slovak society in respective periods.

scholarly journals ’PARLO…’: A CATALAN VOICE FROM THE HOLOCAUST: WRITER AND SURVIVOR OF MAUTHAUSEN JOAQUIM AMAT-PINIELLA SHATTERS FRANCOIST MANDATED SILENCE

2007 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-86
Author(s):  
Maureen Tobin Stanley
Keyword(s):  
Affective Responses ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
Fictional World ◽  
Nazi Occupation ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Compensatory Damages ◽  
Sense Of Justice ◽  
Poetic Work

Following the retreat to France of half a million Spaniards in the winter of ’38/39 and as a result of the Nazi occupation, 10,000-15,000 Spaniards were deported to concentration camps. Among them was the writer Joaquim Amat-Piniella (1913-1974). His novel K.L. Reich, whose title alludes to the stamp impressed on all objects within the Nazi Reich’s concentration camps, creates a fictional world that reflects the realities within Mauthausen. That author writes in a draft (without date), that with this story his wish was not to focus on the horrors, but rather to document (“manar un record”), and to relate the historical catastrophes of “cruelty, misery, suffering, but also hope.” His poetic work Les llunyanies (The Far Away Lands) also reveals what Amat denoted as his “white hour,” an awakening of conscience and consciousness, the insistence on what is human and humane precisely because he was able to endure four and a half years of brutality. In addition to his novel and poetry, Amat-Piniella’s political efforts following his liberation promoted the reconciliarion that resulted from a sense of justice. With his poetry, this native of Manresa expressed the gamut of his affective responses to Mauthausen. With K.L. Reich, Amat-Piniella gives voice to the Republicans whose exile led to a concentrationary sentence. With his activism, he did everything possible to vindicate the ex-prisoners and obtain for them their due “indemnización” (compensatory damages) and thus overcome the obstacles imposed by the repressive forces. In spite of numerous hurdles, Amat was triumphant.

Holocaust Film before the Holocaust: DEFA, Antifascism and the Camps

2008 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-134
Author(s):  
David Bathrick
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
The Third ◽  
Feature Films ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Holocaust Film ◽  
Diary Of Anne Frank

AbstractThe period prior to the 1970s has frequently been portrayed internationally as one of public disavowal of the Jewish catastrophe politically and cinematically and as one in which there was a dearth of filmic representations of the Holocaust. In addition to the Hollywood productionsThe Diary of Anne Frank(1960), Stanley Kramer’sJudgment at Nuremberg(1961) and Sidney Lumet’sThe Pawnbroker(1965), one often spoke of just a few East and West European films emerging within a political and cultural landscape that was viewed by many as unable or unwilling to address the subject. This article takes issue with these assumptions by focusing on feature films made by DEFA between 1946 and 1963 in East Berlin’s Soviet Zone and in East Germany which had as their subject matter the persecution of Jews during the Third Reich.

The Pink Triangle

2021 ◽  
pp. 125-162
Author(s):  
Craig Griffiths
Keyword(s):  
Gay Men ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Gay Liberation ◽  
The West ◽  
German State ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nazi Persecution

This chapter is about how the memory of persecution decisively shaped 1970s homosexual politics. First, the chapter explores the ‘rediscovery’ of the Nazi persecution of homosexuals, explaining how the model of the Holocaust was sometimes appropriated as part of this process. The chapter then shows how memory of this persecution, combined with the experience of contemporary discrimination, produced a profound alienation on the part of left-wing gay men from the West German state. Following an analysis of how the pink triangle became a transnational symbol, this chapter evaluates discourses of victimhood in gay liberation. Though the pink triangle was reclaimed from its origins as a badge of shame in the concentration camps, it never became an unequivocal symbol of pride. Finally, the chapter explores how, in the late 1970s, activists of all stripes, the commercial gay press, and the first openly gay parliamentary candidates coalesced around making the history of past persecution a central plank in their efforts to insert themselves into the West German mainstream.

scholarly journals Sexualization of Female Perpetration in Fictional Holocaust Films: A Case Study of The Reader (2008)

Genealogy ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 52
Author(s):  
Sabine Elisabeth Aretz
Keyword(s):  
Female Victims ◽  
Female Perpetration ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Female Perpetrators ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Holocaust Film ◽  
Holocaust Films ◽  
The One

The publication of Bernhard Schlink’s novel The Reader (1995) sparked conversation and controversy about sexuality, female perpetrators and the complexity of guilt regarding the Holocaust. The screen adaptation of the book (Daldry 2008) amplified these discussions on an international scale. Fictional Holocaust films have a history of being met with skepticism or even reject on the one hand and great acclaim on the other hand. As this paper will outline, the focus has often been on male perpetrators and female victims. The portrayal of female perpetration reveals dichotomous stereotypes, often neglecting the complexity of the subject matter. This paper focuses on the ways in which sexualization is used specifically to portray female perpetrators in The Reader, as a fictional Holocaust film. An assessment of Hanna’s relationship to Michael and her autonomous sexuality and her later inferior, victimized portrayal as an ambiguous perpetrator is the focus of my paper. Hanna’s sexuality is structurally separated from her role as a perpetrator. Hanna’s perpetration is, through the dichotomous motif of sexuality throughout the film, characterized by a feminization. However, this feminization entails a relativization of Hanna’s culpability, revealing a pejorative of her depiction as a perpetrator. Consequently, I argue that Hanna’s sexualized female body is constructed as a central part of the revelation of her perpetration.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document