scholarly journals Whose Memory is it Anyway? An Exploration of Forgotten Voices of the Holocaust

Author(s):  
Jessica Pollock

During the Holocaust, Hitler and his Nazi Party were responsible for the systematic annihilation of millions of Jews, as well as the callous slaughter of additional minority groups such as Roma, Sinti, homosexuals, the physically handicapped, mentally ill and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Nevertheless, in Western consciousness, the Holocaust has essentially become synonymous with Jewish history and destruction. As a result, the non-Jewish victim experience has been effectively diminished in popular culture. This MRP draws on literature in cultural memory studies and survivor testimonies available on YouTube to analyze the power struggle between non-Jewish minority groups that were persecuted in the Holocaust and their Jewish counterparts to understand why the former appears excluded from mainstream Holocaust narratives. The goal: to emphasize that the Holocaust was not merely a Jewish tragedy, but a profound calamity for humankind.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Pollock

During the Holocaust, Hitler and his Nazi Party were responsible for the systematic annihilation of millions of Jews, as well as the callous slaughter of additional minority groups such as Roma, Sinti, homosexuals, the physically handicapped, mentally ill and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Nevertheless, in Western consciousness, the Holocaust has essentially become synonymous with Jewish history and destruction. As a result, the non-Jewish victim experience has been effectively diminished in popular culture. This MRP draws on literature in cultural memory studies and survivor testimonies available on YouTube to analyze the power struggle between non-Jewish minority groups that were persecuted in the Holocaust and their Jewish counterparts to understand why the former appears excluded from mainstream Holocaust narratives. The goal: to emphasize that the Holocaust was not merely a Jewish tragedy, but a profound calamity for humankind.


Author(s):  
Donna Krolik Hollenberg

Rhea Tregebov’s self consciousness as a woman facilitated her developing self consciousness as a Canadian Jew, a process recorded in her five books of poetry. In the course of this work, her reflections on the social meanings of motherhood are particularly important. When insights about the parent-child bond are transferred to reflections about the meanings of modern Jewish history, particularly the Holocaust, the poet’s understanding of her role is extended. The result is an ambitious collection of elegies in which she changes the structure of mourning specific to that genre.


Conatus ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 233
Author(s):  
Sheena M Eagan

The National Socialist Physicians League (or NSDÄB), was a professional medical organization founded upon the same ideologies that shaped the broader National Socialist agenda. Despite the vast historical and ethical literature focused on physician involvement in Nazi atrocities during the Holocaust, little attention has been paid to the NSDÄB. However, the establishment of this group is important to understanding the forces shaping physician participation in the Nazi party. Physicians often look to professional medical organizations as a source of moral guidance; thus, ideologies of racism and the active harassment of ethnic or racial minority groups by this professional organization may have contributed to the establishment of this behavior as not only permissive but normal. This article will explore how this organization contributed to normalizing, desensitizing and legitimizing behavior that could not be justified by any normative theory of professional medical ethics.


2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-68
Author(s):  
Jessica Ortner

Memory is not only a biological capability but also a social practice of constructing the past, which is carried out by social communities (e.g., the nation state, the family, and the church). Since the 1980s, memory studies has intertwined the concept of cultural memory with national narratives of the past that are to legitimize the connection between state, territory, and people. In the present time of growing migratory movements, memory studies has abandoned this “methodological nationalism” and turned its attention towards dynamic constructions of cultural memory. Indeed, memories cross national and cultural borderlines in various ways. The cultural memory of the Jewish people, ever since its beginning, has been defined by mobility. As the exile and forty years of wandering in the wilderness preceded the Conquest of Canaan and the building of the temple, the cultural memory of the Jewish people has always been based on the principle of extraterritoriality. The caesura of the Holocaust altered this ancient form of mobility into a superimposed rediasporization of the assimilated Jews that turned the eternal longing for Jerusalem into a secularized longing for the fatherland. This article presents examples of German-Jewish literature that is concerned with the intersection between the original diaspora memory, rediasporization and longing for a return to the fatherland. I will analyze literary writings by Barbara Honigmann and Vladimir Verlib that in a paradigmatic manner navigate between memory of the Holocaust, exile and the mythological past of Judaism, and negotiate the question of belonging to diverse territorial and mobile mnemonic communities.


Author(s):  
Katarzyna Chmielewska

The intelligentsia and the Holocaust. Dispersing the imageThis paper in the field of cultural memory studies addresses the workings of memory, or more precisely – a politics of memory whereby the image of the intelligentsia and its role in the Holocaust vanishes from the collective consciousness. The relative visibility of peasants denouncing Jews, murdering them and plundering their property is accompanied by an invisibility of the intelligentsia and its essential role in reinforcing the exclusion and antisemitic patterns of behavior before the Holocaust which facilitated direct involvement in these events, as well as an invisibility of the intelligentsia’s own participation in the events of the Holocaust. Inteligencja i Zagłada. Rozpraszanie obrazuTekst z zakresu badań nad pamięcią kulturową dotyczy pracy pamięci, a właściwie polityki pamięci, w której ramach ze społecznej świadomości znika obraz inteligencji i jej roli podczas Zagłady. Względnej widzialności chłopskiego wydawania Żydów, ich mordowania i grabienia towarzyszy niewidzialność inteligencji i jej kluczowej roli w reprodukowaniu wykluczenia i wzorów antysemickich poprzedzających Zagładę i umożliwiających bezpośrednie zaangażowanie w wydarzenia, a także jej własnego udziału w Zagładzie.


2021 ◽  
pp. 153270862199758
Author(s):  
Eloise Florence

This article investigates the possibilities for experiential encounters with ruins in Berlin to complicate the dominant articulations of the cultural memory of Allied bombing attacks on German cities during the Second World War. Building on works that seek to disrupt normative models of cultural memory of the bombings, and entangling them with existing literature that uses new materialism to engage the sensorial nature of memory site-encounters, I examine my own fieldwork visits the ruins of Anhalter Bahnhof—a former train station—as an entanglement of both. Specifically, I investigate how encountering Anhalter through this entangled method allows the site to emerge as haunted. Encountering Anhalter as haunted might complicate the linear temporality that underpins enduring the narrative that the Allies’ actions during the war were completely ethical because they are largely framed as a response to— ergo following—the Holocaust.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirsti Salmi-Niklander ◽  
Sofia Laine ◽  
Päivi Salmesvuori ◽  
Ulla Savolainen ◽  
Riikka Taavetti

This collection focuses on difficult memories and diverse identities related to conflicts and localized politics of memories. The contemporary and history-oriented case studies discuss politicized memories and pasts, the frictions of justice and reconciliation, and the diversity and fragmentation of difficult memories. The collection brings together methodological discussions from oral history research, cultural memory studies and the study of contemporary protest movements. The politicization of memories is analyzed in various contexts, ranging from everyday interaction and diverse cultural representations to politics of the archive and politics as legal processes. The politicization of memories takes place on multiple analytical levels: those inherent to the sources; the ways in which the collections are utilized, archived, or presented; and in the re-evaluation of existing research.


2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura M. F. Bertens

Abstract This paper explores strategies for constructing and perpetuating cultural memory through music videos, using Beyonce’s Formation (2016) and Janelle Monae’s Many Moons (2008) and Q.U.E.E.N. (2013) as case studies. The medium’s idiosyncrasies create unique ways of communicating and remembering, explored here within a framework of Cultural Studies and Memory Studies. Easy dissemination and the limited length of most videos ensure a large, diverse audience. The relative freedom from narrative constraints enables the director to create original imagery, and most importantly, the medium allows an intricate blending of performance and performativity; while the videos evidently are performances, they are strongly performative as well, not only with respect to gender and ethnicity but in significant ways also cultural memory. A close reading of Beyonce’s video Formation shows how she explicitly does the cultural memory of the New Orleans flooding. The videos by Monae are shown to produce counter-memories, relying heavily on the strategy of Afrofuturism. As such, these densely woven networks of visual symbols become palimpsests of black lived experience and cultural memory, passed on to millions of viewers.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olaf Krysowski ◽  
Natalia Szerszeń

The book, which shows the works of Juliusz Słowacki from the perspective of cultural memory, belongs to memory studies. It aims to follow the relations between memory, reminiscence and commemoration, as well as to describe the relations and interdependencies between individual and collective memory, memory, biography and history in the poet’s works. The authors, in an innovative and multi-faceted manner, reconstruct ideas, formulas and notions, which develop a sui generis philosophy of memory in Słowacki’s works.


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