The Art of Forgetting

2021 ◽  
pp. 120-152
Author(s):  
Banu Karaca
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Art World ◽  
Art Collections ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Wealth Tax ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Artistic Interventions ◽  
Socialist Art

Chapter 4 examines decivilizing moments that constitute silences in national art histories and yet are formative for the art world in Germany and Turkey. These silences include art collections that are historically related to the dispossession of minorities during the Holocaust in Germany and the Armenian genocide and subsequent discriminatory practices (e.g., the wealth tax for non-Muslims, 1942) in Turkey. The chapter traces the tensions that have arisen in Germany’s struggle to re-acquire modernist works purged from its institutions during the Third Reich, a process that has often been aided by capital that is itself of Nazi provenance. It shows how East Germany’s socialist art came to be seen as a deviation from the modern paradigm in a reunited Germany, so much so that it was declared aesthetically and morally bankrupt and equated to Nazi cultural production. It outlines similarly forgotten processes in Turkey, e.g., a series of works created during the Anatolian painting tours (1938–43). “Failing” to adequately represent Turkey’s modernization, they have been lost to this day. Discussing artistic interventions of Stih and Schnock (Berlin) and Dilek Winchester (Istanbul), it shows how artists break these silences on historical instances deemed unspeakable within the civilizing narrative of the state.

Hitler, for Example: Registers of National Socialist Exemplarity in Contemporary Germany

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-29
Author(s):  
Nitzan Shoshan
Keyword(s):  
National Socialism ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Moral Values ◽  
Moral Life ◽  
Far Right ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Moral Exemplars ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Third Reich

Abstract This article examines whether and how the figure of Adolf Hitler in particular, and National Socialism more generally, operate as moral exemplars in today’s Germany. In conversation with similar studies about Mosely in England, Franco in Spain, and Mussolini in Italy, it seeks to advance our comparative understanding of neofascism in Europe and beyond. In Germany, legal and discursive constraints limit what can be said about the Third Reich period, while even far-right nationalists often condemn Hitler, for either the Holocaust or his military failure. Here I revise the concept of moral exemplarity as elaborated by Caroline Humphry to argue that Hitler and National Socialism do nevertheless work as contemporary exemplars, in at least three fashions: negativity, substitution, and extension. First, they stand as the most extreme markers of negative exemplarity for broad publics that understand them as illustrations of absolute moral depravity. Second, while Hitler himself is widely unpopular, Führer-substitutes such as Rudolf Hess provide alternative figures that German nationalists admire and seek to emulate. Finally, by extension to the realm of the ordinary, National Socialism introduces a cast of exemplars in the figures of loving grandfathers or anonymous fallen soldiers. The moral values for which they stand, I show, appear to be particularly significant for young nationalists. An extended, more open-ended notion of exemplarity, I conclude, can offer important insights about the lingering afterlife of fascist figures in the moral life of European nationalists today.

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.

Social Psychology

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
George R. Mastroianni
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Social Cognition ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
The Third ◽  
Implicit Biases ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Critical Literature

Chapter 9 examines social-psychological approaches to understanding the Holocaust. Since Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments were published in the early 1960s, social-psychological formulations based on obedience and social influence have dominated the psychology of the Holocaust. There is also a significant critical literature that challenges some of the findings and interpretation of Milgram and Phillip Zimbardo as they apply to the Holocaust. Social cognition is the study of thinking as situated in a social milieu and offers a fruitful framework for considering the ways Germans thought about one another during the Third Reich. Modern approaches to prejudice and racism, especially the study of unconscious or implicit biases, may provide insight into anti-Semitic attitudes prevalent in Germany (and elsewhere) during the Nazi years.

The Nazi Empire

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher R. Browning
Keyword(s):  
Total Mass ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Mass Murder ◽  
The Third ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Physically Handicapped ◽  
Slavic Populations

This articles addresses genocide in the Nazi Empire. Genocide in the Nazi Empire issued from a confluence of traditions: anti-Semitism, racism, imperialism, and eugenics. None of these was unique to Germany, but they came together in a lethal combination in Germany under Nazi rule to provide the ideological underpinnings for three clusters of genocidal projects. The first was the ‘purification’ of the German race through the mass murder of the mentally and physically handicapped within the Third Reich and the expulsion and mass murder of ‘Gypsies’ from the Third Reich. The second was a demographic revolution or ethnic restructuring within the lands deemed to be Germany's future Lebensraum through the decimation, denationalization, and expulsion of the predominately Slavic populations living there. The third was the systematic and total mass murder of every Jew — the Holocaust.

scholarly journals Diagnoses That Matter: My Great-Grandmother's Murder as One Deemed 'Unworthy of Living' and Its Impact on Our Family

2017 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Hechler ◽  
Elizabeth C. Hamilton ◽  
Leo R. Kalkbrenner
Keyword(s):  
English Translation ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Disabled People ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Third Reich

This is an English translation of an article originally published in German on the T4 "euthanasia" program targeting disabled people during the Third Reich. The essay examines the contours of ableism in Germany that have allowed these killings to remain unreported and uncommemorated. The author focuses on the murder of his great-grandmother and its effects on four generations of his family. This essay provides a vital historical record as well as a model for reflecting upon and understanding the legacy of the Holocaust and the persistence of ableism.The original German essay was previously published in a series called Gegendiagnose. Beiträge zur radikalen Kritik an Psychologie und Psychiatrie. Psycho_Gesundheitspolitik im Kapitalismus. Vol. 1. Münster: edition-assemblage. August 2015. 

Nazism and the Third Reich in Recent HistoriographyMichael N. Dobkowski and Isidor Wallimann, eds., Towards the Holocaust: The Social and Economic Collapse of the Weimar Republic, Westport and London: Greenwood Press, 1983, 422 pp., cloth.Thomas Childers, The Nazi Voter: The Social Foundations of Fascism in Germany, 1919-1933, Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1983, xiv, 367 pp., cloth.Lawrence D. Stokes, ed., Kleinstadt und Nationalsozialismus: Ausgewählte Dokumente zur Geschichte von Eutin 1918-1945, Neumünster: Karl Wachholtz Verlag, 1984, 1032 pp., cloth.The Third Reich, 1933-1939: A Historical Bibliography, Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio Information Services, 1984, xii, 239 pp., cloth.Ian Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich: Bavaria 1933-1945, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983, xv, 425 pp., cloth.Hartmut Mehringer et. al., Die Parteien KPD, SPD, BVP in Verfolgung und Widerstand (=Bayern in der NS-Zeit V), Munich and Vienna: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, xvi, 677 pp.Elke Fröhlich, Die Herausforderung des Einzelnen: Geschichten über Widerstand und Verfolgung (=Bayern in der NS-Zeit VI), Munich and Vienna: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 262 pp.

1985 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-101
Author(s):  
Michael H. Kater
Keyword(s):  
Third Reich ◽  
Political Dissent ◽  
Social Foundations ◽  
The Third ◽  
Chapel Hill ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Economic Collapse ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
The University

The Public Secret

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Eaglestone
Keyword(s):  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
The Way

The knowledge of the murder of the European Jews was a public secret in the Third Reich. What is a ‘public secret’? How does it shape or reshape a society? The answers to these questions are key to understanding the Holocaust and other genocides. However, the public secret is elusive because of its nature: when it is at its most powerful, it cannot be explicitly discussed; when it no longer holds such power, people deny their knowledge of it and complicity in its concealment. Both the ‘subjective experience’ of the public secret and its wider meaning are beyond the limits of the discipline of history and are better elucidated obliquely through a work of fiction: in this case Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, a novel which reflects on the past in the way historians cannot. Significantly, the public secret and the consequences of complicity are important concepts for understanding the post-Holocaust world.

“This Story Is about Something Fundamental”: Nazi Criminals, History, Memory, and the Reichstag Fire

2015 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Carter Hett
Keyword(s):  
Third Reich ◽  
The Third ◽  
Political Interests ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
The 1960S

AbstractFor more than eighty years there has been controversy about who set the fire that destroyed the plenary chamber of the Reichstag fire on the evening of February 27, 1933—thereby handing the Nazis a pretext to gut the democratic Weimar constitution through the emergency “Reichstag Fire Decree.” Since the 1960s there has been a consensus among historians that the fire was set by Marinus van der Lubbe, a twenty-four-year-old Dutch journeyman stonemason supposedly acting alone—with no Nazi involvement. Few historians, however, have been inclined to investigate the motives behind the development of this single-culprit narrative, or the reasons for its generally positive reception among postwar German historians. With the aid of newly discovered sources, this article examines the legal and political interests that have underpinned this narrative. The single-culprit narrative was developed by ex-Nazis, whereas accounts of the Reichstag fire stressing Nazi complicity came almost invariably from former resistance fighters and victims of Nazism. Postwar historians responded to these accounts in much the same way they have responded to perpetrator and victim accounts of the Holocaust: with a markedly greater preference for those of the perpetrators. This tendency has shaped the debate over the Reichstag fire in the same way it has shaped other areas of research on the Third Reich.

scholarly journals The Controversy That Isn't: The Debate Over Daniel J. Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners in Comparative Perspective

1999 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-273 ◽  
Author(s):  
GAVRIEL D. ROSENFELD
Keyword(s):  
Third Reich ◽  
Comparative Perspective ◽  
Historical Understanding ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Media Hype ◽  
To Come ◽  
Nazi Past

This article attempts to explain the heated controversy sparked by Daniel Goldhagen's bestselling book Hitler's Willing Executioners, by comparing it with its most obvious precedent: the international furor in 1960–62 over William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Through such a comparison, the Goldhagen controversy emerges as a relatively shallow event, largely driven by the book's own weaknesses and by media hype, that provides little of value for a deeper historical understanding of the Holocaust. At the same time, however, Goldhagen's surprising popularity in Germany does, in fact, signal a possible shift in the Germans' long postwar struggle to ‘come to terms' with the Nazi past.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document