scholarly journals Painful Neutrality: Screening the Extradition of the Balts from Sweden

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-92
Author(s):  
Lars Kristensen ◽  
Christo Burman
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Traumatic Event ◽  
Historical Event ◽  
Trauma Studies ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
Moving Images ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Baltic

Abstract The article deals with the extradition of Baltic soldiers from Sweden in 1946 as represented in Per Olov Enquist’s novel The Legionnaires: A Documentary Novel (Legionärerna. En roman om baltutlämningen, 1968) and Johan Bergenstråhle’s film A Baltic Tragedy (Baltutlämningen. En film om ett politiskt beslut Sverige 1945, Sweden, 1970). The theoretical framework is taken from trauma studies and its equivalent within film studies, where trauma is seen as a repeated occurrence of a past event. In this regard, literature and moving images become the means of reaching the traumatic event, a way to relive it. What separates the extradition of the Baltic soldiers from other traumas, such as the Holocaust, is that it functions as a guilt complex related to the failure to prevent the tragedy, which is connected to Sweden’s position of neutrality during World War II and the appeasement of all the warring nations. It is argued that this is a collective trauma created by Enquist’s novel, which blew it into national proportions. However, Bergenstråhle’s film changes the focus of the trauma by downplaying the bad conscience of the Swedes. In this way, the film aims to create new witnesses to the extradition affair. The analysis looks at the reception of both the novel and film in order to explain the two different approaches to the historical event, as well as the two different time periods in which they were produced. The authors argue that the two years that separate the appearance of the novel and the film explain the swing undergone by the political mood of the late 1960s towards a deflated revolution of the early 1970s, when the film arrived on screens nationwide. However, in terms of creating witnesses to the traumatic event, the book and film manage to stir public opinion to the extent that the trauma changes from being slowly effacing to being collectively ‘experienced’ through remembrance. The paradox is that, while the novel still functions as a vivid reminder of the painful aftermath caused by Swedish neutrality during World War II, the film is almost completely forgotten today. The film’s mode of attacking the viewers with an I-witness account, the juxtaposition and misconduct led to a rejection of the narrative by Swedish audiences.

The Long Shadows of Vilna

2019 ◽  
pp. 150-204
Author(s):  
Jelena Subotić
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
International Justice ◽  
World War ◽  
Baltic Region ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Soviet Occupation ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Soviet Communism ◽  
The Baltic ◽  
Jewish Populations

This chapter turns to the Baltics. It focuses in particular on the case of Lithuania, the country with the highest numbers of both prewar Jewish populations and Jewish victims in the Holocaust in the Baltic region. Lithuania is also the country that has most aggressively pursued a strategy of memory conflation, by which the Holocaust and the Soviet occupation of Lithuania are considered, together, as a “double genocide” and not as distinct historical events with their own tragic trajectories and consequences. Lithuania has also been at the helm of a creative use of post-World War II architecture of international justice, where the state is prosecuting individuals for genocide—not for the Holocaust, but for the “genocide” of Soviet occupation. This chapter begins with the overview of the Holocaust in the Baltic states, then describes Holocaust remembrance practices in the Baltics during Soviet communism, and finally analyzes postcommunist strategies aimed at explicitly using the legal and political structure designed to deal with crimes of the Holocaust to instead criminalize the Soviet past.

scholarly journals Nathalie Skowronek « a la recherche de Max » : Construction litteraire et autometatextualite dans les ouvrages de la 3e generation de la Shoah

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 187-208
Author(s):  
José Luis Arráez
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Historical Event ◽  
World War ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Scientific Papers ◽  
Moral Narrative ◽  
Insight Into

The third generation survivors of the World War II genocide of the European Jews withstand, analyse and create literary texts about the Holocaust, a historical event, which was not endured by them directly but experienced through scientific papers and creative literature. Thanks to Nathalie Skowronek, a novelist living in Brussels, and her publication of Max en apparence (2013) and La Shoah de Monsieur Durand (2015), we can gain some insight into the social and literary reality of Jewish genocide memory and into its intergenerational transmission. Firstly, we will carefully analyse the approach used by this author in the composition of a biographical text about her grandfather’s reconstruction of events. After that, using an intertextual approach, we will analyse formal and moral narrative considerations of the authoress which govern the literary reconstruction grandfather’s biography.

scholarly journals WAR TRAUMA IN THE CONTEMPORARY SERBIAN NOVEL: THE HOUSE OF REMEMBRANCE AND OBLIVIONBY FILIP DAVID, THE DELUSION OF ST. SEBASTIANBY VLADIMIR TABAŠEVIĆ, THE DOG AND THE DOUBLE BASSBY SAŠA ILIĆ

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 278-300
Author(s):  
Miloš Živković ◽  
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Traumatic Stress ◽  
Psychiatric Treatment ◽  
Double Bass ◽  
War Trauma ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Post Traumatic Stress ◽  
World War ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Post Traumatic

The paper discusses the literary shaping of war traumas in the novels “The House of Remembrance and Oblivion” by Filip David, “The Delusion of St. Sebastian” by Vladimir Tabašević and “The Dog and the Double Bass” by Saša Ilić. The manner in which the Holocaust influences the life of Albert Weiss and the lives of other characters, decades after World War II, and the mystical contemplation of the meaning of evil stand out as the most important themes of David’s novel. The interpretation of “The Delusion of St. Sebastian” proceeds via the protagonist Karl and his attitude to the language he learned during the war. The war induces dissociative identity disorder, the protagonist’s adoption and subsequent overcoming of the victim’s position. The analysis of Ilić’s work focuses on the protagonist of the novel “The Dog and the Double Bass”, Filip Isaković, and his post-traumatic stress disorder, as well as psychiatric and anti-psychiatric treatment methods.

scholarly journals “It felt better to stay quiet”

Barnboken ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mateusz Świetlicki
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Role Model ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
Ways Of Coping ◽  
Young Readers ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
Coping With Trauma

This article analyzes Kathy Kacer’s Masters of Silence (2019), a novel about Marcel Marceau – the renowned mime artist who during the war cooperated with the French Resistance – and two fictional Jewish siblings struggling with the trauma of losing their parents, anti-Semitism, and the suppression of identity in a Catholic convent in southern France. The author examines the narrative techniques used by Kacer, including the combination of fiction with history and some elements of the biography of Marceau, and demonstrates that she not only shares the next-generation memory of World War II with her young readers but also depicts nonverbal ways of coping with trauma as potentially effective and empowering. Whereas Kacer’s indifference to historical dates may be connected to her determination to portray Marceau as an adolescent role model, the novel is a successful narrative about trauma and the Holocaust history, and the depiction of Marceau’s acts of resistance does not overshadow the young protagonists who do not just quiver and follow the instructions of the adults but mainly try to gain agency. 

Tragedy and Transference in D.M. Thomas's The White Hotel

2013 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Sheils ◽  
Julie Walsh
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Case History ◽  
Traumatic Event ◽  
Original Text ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
Historical Fact ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Tragic Drama

In the novel The White Hotel, D.M. Thomas's superimposition of a Freudian-style case history onto a traumatic event of World War II explores both the necessity and the gratuitousness of representing trauma. The novel's primary device of relating the sexual fantasies of its protagonist Lisa Erdman/‘Frau Anna G.’, depicted as being a psychoanalytic patient of Freud's, to the massacre of over 30,000 Jews at Babi Yar in 1941, is an enduringly controversial one. The notoriety of Thomas's novel though, stems not only from its difficult treatment of the sexual desire of a victim of the Shoah, but also from the critical disbelief regarding the author's production of an original text. In this article we suggest that these sites of controversy are intimately linked. Allegations that Thomas was guilty of literary theft – of plagiarizing a more ‘authentic’ account of the historical events at Babi Yar – resonate with criticisms of the novel's gratuitous representations of sex. Ultimately, however, it is through this gratuitousness, evident in the novel's formal commitment to repetition, that Thomas's work invites reflection on the difficulty of an ethics of representation by implicating the aesthetic concerns of literature with those of psychoanalysis and historical fact. Specifically, we shall suggest that Thomas's positioning of the term anagnorisis – a critical term referring to the moment of recognition or clarification in tragic drama – is central to this project.

Was There a Soviet Policy for Evacuating the Jews?: The Case of the Annexed Territories

Slavic Review ◽  
1980 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben-Cion Pinchuk
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Large Population ◽  
World War ◽  
Soviet Government ◽  
Soviet Policy ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Baltic

As a result of the Soviet annexation of the Baltic States, eastern Poland, Bessarabia, and Northern Bucovina in 1939-40, the Soviet Union was left with the largest Jewish population in Europe. Given this large population, the fact that the Soviet Union had the greatest number of Jews who survived World War II has aroused the interest of researchers and drawn attention to the role of Soviet policy in the rescue of Jews during the Holocaust. Some of the reasons for the survival of Jews in Soviet-annexed territories seem obvious. In contrast to other European countries, only part of the USSR was occupiéd by German armies. Therefore, Jews could find refuge in the unoccupied regions. This simple and generally sufficient explanation is not the only one which has been offered, however. Some Western scholars have argued that the Soviet government had a specific policy designed to rescue Jews from the danger of annihilation. Soviet propaganda, particularly that aimed at Western audiences, maintained that millions of Jews owed their lives to Soviet rescue operations during the Holocaust.

scholarly journals Multimodal Stylistics in Graphic Novel: Understanding the Visual Language Syntax in Art Spiegelman’s Maus

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-51
Author(s):  
Baishalee Rajkhowa
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Comic Book ◽  
Graphic Novel ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
Traumatic Experiences ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
Verbal Language ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Words And Images

Maus (2003) by Art Spiegelman is a graphic novel of unfolding his father, Vladek's, World War II ordeal and how he survived the holocaust. It is a gripping story of Spiegelman's own parents' experience in Poland during 1930s when Nazis invaded and persecuted the Jews. With a broken language, gaps in communication and visual strategy, Maus takes the readers across Europe unravelling the experiences of World War II and the Nazi Concentration camps. The characters are depicted as anthromorphic animals; the Nazis as cats, the Jews as mice and the Polish as pigs. It can be named as an autobiography or a memoir featuring a metareferential frame story with an author as narrator (Art) who tells his father (Vladek) that he wishes to write a comic book and so incited him to tell about " his life in Poland and the war" (Spiegelman, 2003). A graphic novel is written in a comic strip format which uses a combination of text and illustration in order to tell a story. The linguistic elements in a graphic narration are important as words and images cannot be analysed in similar terms. Multimodal stylistics represents this in the light of lexical and grammatical aspects of the verbal language. Maus (2003) represents a story of the holocaust and the traumatic experiences of Vladek.  It is a heteroglossic text with the presence of foreign languages and an authorial voice. The novel not only gives a different meaning but also an altogether different perspective to the verbal and visual significance.

scholarly journals Rethinking the Traumatic Memory of the Holocaust in Literature (Based on Monika Schneiderman’s Work “Fałszerze pieprzu. Historia rodzinna”)

2021 ◽  
Vol 40 (45) ◽  
pp. 170-180
Author(s):  
Uliana Yevchuk
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Human Values ◽  
Traumatic Memory ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
History Of

The article analyzes the attempt to reconstruct the historical memory of the Holocaust in the novel by Polish writer Monika Schneiderman “Fałszerze pieprzu. Historia rodzinna”. The writer questions the issue of Polish-Jewish relations, the responsibility and guilt of Holocaust witnesses to its victims. The author, who has a complex identity, seeks to find out for herself why her Polish family did not show enough sympathy for the suffering of Jews during World War II, including her Jewish relatives. As such indifference on the part of Poles to Holocaust victims was quite common, Monica Schneiderman tries to explain this by examining the relations between societies who lived side by side for centuries in the pre-war period, concluding that the two neighbouring nations lived in separate communities that were not open to each other. Based on the reproduction of the history of her own family, the author seeks answers to difficult questions of universal human values – perception and understanding of others, empathy, compassion. In her works Monica Schneiderman shows the need to include these recently “closed” but extremely important topics in the public discourse.

scholarly journals Dwa sanatoria / dwa uniwersytety

Schulz/Forum ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Józef Olejniczak
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Great War ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The University ◽  
The Great War

The starting point of the paper is Jacques Derrida’a reflection on the university today presented in his lecture on the „Unconditional University.” Then the author analyzes some passages from Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain to demonstrate that the novel has been based on the picture of the university during the anti-positivist reaction. In Mann’s novel, the Sanatorium is an allegory of the University, while the protagonist, Hans Castorp, is a student seeking Mentors and the Truth. Schulz’s story, “Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass,” has been interpreted as inspired by The Magic Mountain, since arguably it includes some traces of the „sanatorium – university” parallel. The paper refers also to Paweł Huelle’s novel Castorp, which tells a story of Mann’s character during a period of his studies in Gdańsk, anticipating the events described in The Magic Mountain. All the three texts – by Mann, Schulz, and Huelle – are connected by the debates characteristic of the humanities before the Great War (Mann, Huelle) and before World War II and the Holocaust (Schulz).

Painted Memories

2007 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 26-29
Author(s):  
mayer kirshenblatt ◽  
barbara kirshenblatt-gimblett
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War ◽  
Daily Diet ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Yom Kippur ◽  
Root Vegetables

Mayer Kirshenblatt remembers in words and paintings the daily diet of Jews in Poland before the Holocaust. Born in 1916 in Opatóów (Apt in Yiddish), a small Polish city, this self-taught artist describes and paints how women bought chickens from the peasants and brought them to the shoykhet (ritual slaughterer), where they plucked the feathers; the custom of shlogn kapores (transferring one's sins to a chicken) before Yom Kippur; and the role of herring and root vegetables in the diet, especially during the winter. Mayer describes how his family planted and harvested potatoes on leased land, stored them in a root cellar, and the variety of dishes prepared from this important staple, as well as how to make a kratsborsht or scratch borsht from the milt (semen sack) of a herring. In the course of a forty-year conversation with his daughter, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, who also interviewed Mayer's mother, a picture emerges of the daily, weekly, seasonal, and holiday cuisine of Jews who lived in southeastern Poland before World War II.

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