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. 

Das ‚Etwas nach dem Nichts‘: Marie-Louise von Motesiczkys Gemälde Gespräch in der Bibliothek

2021 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 283-299
Author(s):  
Susanna Brogi ◽  
Elisabeth Gallas
Keyword(s):  
Crucial Role ◽  
Early Years ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Elias Canetti ◽  
Book Collections

Abstract Marie-Louise von Motesiczky’s painting Gespräch in der Bibliothek (Conversation in the Library) relates back to a specific historical constellation insofar as it highlights the interwoven stories of Elias Canetti, Franz Baermann Steiner, and the painter herself, but also of H. G. Adler during the early years of their British exile. Although the painting does not include and likely does not even explicitly refer to H. G. Adler, he saved Steiner’s library from destruction, which made him an integral part of the intellectual exchange that is depicted here, since the library plays a central role in the portrait. Numerous notes and letters in Steiner’s and Adler’s estates testify to the close net of all four protagonists. The article discusses the crucial role of book collections as a mainstay of the three authors’ self-conception and intellectual self-positioning in the wake of the Holocaust, and the continuing impact of this intellectual network visible throughout the dispersed papers of the authors and the painter.

scholarly journals Human Beings after Catastrophe: Poetical Portraits by Primo Levi and Tamiki Hara

2021 ◽  
pp. 99-120
Author(s):  
Veronica De Pieri
Keyword(s):  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Future Generations ◽  
Traumatic Experiences ◽  
Traumatic Memory ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human History ◽  
Primo Levi ◽  
Red Army ◽  
Bear Witness ◽  
Submission Date

January 27, 1945: the Red Army set Auschwitz concentration camp free, making this date the liberation day for thousands of inmates, victims of the Nazi’s idea of a master race. August 15, 1945: Emperor Hirohito announced the surrender of Japan on Japanese radio after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. XX century witnessed two of the most abominable atrocities of human history whose repercussions still affect not only German and Japanese societies, involved at first place, but also each individual’s consciousness too. Over the past decades different studies have been investigating these indelible marks on history on many levels: historical, political, sociological, psychological and even artistic approaches were called into question in the search for the truth about Shoah and atomic bombing catastrophes. This study offers a different perspective on the topic by comparing the poetical responses of two representatives of the so-called Shoah Literature and Atomic Bombing Literature: Primo Levi and Tamiki Hara. Both authors, although the space-related distance and the different nature of the traumatic experiences they witnessed, gave birth to similar poetical responses under the title of Se questo è un uomo (“If this is a man”) and Kore ga ningen na no desu (“This is a human being”).This research sets itself the ambitious goal to demonstrate how, regardless of territorial, cultural and stylistic boundaries, a similar human response toward catastrophe can be detached in the literary productions of Levi and Hara: a comparison on stylistic, figurative and expressive level reveals the analogous literary solutions adopted by the authors to depict human’s frailty in front of trauma. Both authors answer the literary imperative of writing: their commitment unveils the aim to bear witness and to convey memory to the future generations. Words, enriched by authors of allusive and critical meanings, represent an effective and necessary means to keep alive and to preserve the traumatic memory. The literature of the catastrophe, then, becomes a language that unites, rather than divides, different societies. It serves as an universal mouthpiece for victims’ experiences to prevent Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Nagasaki to happen again. Submission date: September 2017.

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.

The Role of Education in Preventing Nuclear War

1984 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 282-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Markusen ◽  
John Harris
Keyword(s):  
Citizen Participation ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Arms Race ◽  
Nazi Germany ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Nuclear Arms Race ◽  
Nuclear Arms

Arguing that education should play a crucial role in reducing the threat of nuclear war, Eric Markusen and John B. Harris turn first to history. They examine the role of education in the Holocaust of Nazi Germany and draw a thought-provoking parallel to the role of education in the nuclear arms race. They then discuss aspects of U.S. nuclear weapons policymaking and factors of psychological resistance that have limited citizen participation in decisionmaking. Finally, they explore the potential of education to help prevent nuclear war and describe ways that educators are rising to that challenge.

Cementing the Enemy Category: Arrest and Imprisonment of German Jews in Nazi Concentration Camps, 1933-8/9

2010 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 576-600 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kim Wünschmann
Keyword(s):  
Minority Group ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
Critical Stage ◽  
German Jews ◽  
Structure And Dynamics ◽  
Heterogeneous Groups ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
The Holocaust

Understandably, research has focused overwhelmingly on Jews in the camps of the Holocaust. But the nazis had been detaining Jews in concentration camps ever since 1933, at times in large numbers. Who were these prisoners? This article analyzes nazi policies that brought Jews into the concentration camps. It ventures into the inner structure and dynamics of one of the most heterogeneous groups of concentration camp inmates. By contrasting the perpetrators’ objectives with the victims’ experiences, this article will illuminate the role of the concentration camp as the ultimate means of pressure in the fatal process of turning a minority group into an outsider group: that is, the act of defining and marking the enemy which was the critical stage before the destruction of European Jewry. Furthermore, it will examine Jewish reactions to SS terror inside the camps.

scholarly journals Polityczność sztuki. Analiza pracy Zbigniewa Libery pt. LEGO. Obóz koncentracyjny z 1996 roku

2018 ◽  
pp. 81-96
Author(s):  
Magdalena Lorenc
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Public Policies ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Educational Policies ◽  
The Past ◽  
Artistic Activity ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Theoretical Foundations ◽  
Repeating Patterns

The objective of the paper is to analyze Zbigniew Libera’s Lego. Concentration Camp from 1996, which is considered to be one of the most important Polish works of art in the 1990s. Lego exemplifies the problem of the politicality of art which consists of art’s involvement in politics. The considerations on the permeation of the fields of politics and esthetics constitute a sig- nificant part of the work of French philosopher Jacques Ranciere, whose concepts provide the theoretical foundations for the analysis of Libera’s Lego. The juxtaposition of toys with the symbol of the Holocaust raises questions about the role of art in uncovering the discourse of power as understood by Michel Foucault, the influence of public policies (cultural, educational policies and the policy towards the past) on art and the borders of commercialization and trivialization of the symbols of collective memory. Libera’s Lego is a transgressive work, representing the trend of so-called critical art in modern Polish art. The artist used artistic methods to break the cultural taboo that concerns the presentation of the non-presentable. Libera showed the past and the present, the former by re- ferring to the topic of the Holocaust, indicating the pragmatism of the Nazi system, and the lat- ter by uncovering the laws of the teaching process, carried out by means of repeating patterns. Above all, however, Libera showed that artistic activity can be a form of expressing interests and can influence the shape of public policies.

scholarly journals Resistence in the Ghettos

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Say
Keyword(s):  
Religious Education ◽  
Psychological Health ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Cultural Events ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Physical And Psychological Health ◽  
The Way

This paper examines the nature and role of resistance in the ghettos during the Holocaust. The goal is to demonstrate that it was common throughout the ghettos, and took many different active and passive forms. The most commonly known forms are the active uprisings of several different ghettos, the most famous of which was in Warsaw, however, there were also other examples such as raids. Passive forms of resistance are less well known, but were integral for the physical and psychological health of the inhabitants. They include examples such as smuggling food, underground hospitals, religious education, and cultural events. By demonstrating the multiple ways in which Jews resisted the Nazis, this paper challenges the idea, held by certain scholars such as Raul Hilberg, that the Jews offered little in the way of resistance, and instead shows the crucial role that even the smallest acts of resistance had on maintaining the health of the inhabitants of the ghettos.

Lions and Lambs

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Noah Benezra Strote
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Federal Republic ◽  
Weimar Republic ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Postwar Germany ◽  
The Holocaust

Not long after the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust, Germans rebuilt their shattered country and emerged as one of the leading nations of the Western liberal world. This book analyzes this remarkable turnaround and challenges the widely held perception that the Western Allies—particularly the United States—were responsible for Germany's transformation. Instead, the book shows how common opposition to Adolf Hitler united the fractious groups that had once vied for supremacy under the Weimar Republic, Germany's first democracy (1918–1933). The book's character-driven narrative follows ten Germans of rival worldviews who experienced the breakdown of Weimar society, lived under the Nazi dictatorship, and together assumed founding roles in the democratic reconstruction. While many have imagined postwar Germany as the product of foreign-led democratization, this study highlights the crucial role of indigenous ideas and institutions that stretched back decades before Hitler. Foregrounding the resolution of key conflicts that crippled the country's first democracy, the book presents a new model for understanding the origins of today's Federal Republic.

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