Narrative, Testimony, Fiction

2016 ◽  
pp. 162-176 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jakob Lothe

‘Narrative, Testimony, Fiction: The Challenge of Not Forgetting the Holocaust’, written by Jakob Lothe, explores the individual unconscious and its relationship to collective memory. In his essay, Lothe posits the interrelation between memory and forgetting as emblematic of Holocaust testimonies and fictional narratives, and serves to remind us of the epiphenomenal relationships to be found, and cultivated, across survivor literature.

Comunicar ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 18 (35) ◽  
pp. 25-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michel Clarembeaux

Film education in the digital age should be based on three closely-related and complementary fundamentals: to see, to analyze and to make films with young people; three basics that must interact and support each other. The concept of creative analysis could be the glue the binds this subject together, making it coherent and efficient for educational purposes. If cinema is an art, it is above all the art of memory, both individual and collective. This article suggests that we can join the pedagogy of film education to the citizen’s desire to perpetuate memory and preserve cultural heritage. The author describes various types of films to prove this hypothesis, and at the same time indicates the economic and cultural dimension of the media. The essay starts with an approach to film education in the digital age. Later, it analyzes certain aspects of films of memory, referring specifically to the typology of standpoints of film-makers and the treatment of their sources. Lastly, there is a reflection on the convergence of the concept of creative analysis, promoted by film education, and the production of videos by young people dedicated to the individual or collective memory. This convergence matches European Union proposals concerning the production and creation of audiovisual media from this viewpoint. La educación para el cine en la era digital debería apoyarse en tres polos complementarios y estrechamente asociados: ver, analizar y hacer películas con jóvenes. Estos tres polos han de potenciarse mutuamente. El concepto de análisis creativo podría ser la argamasa que diera coherencia y eficiencia al dispositivo educativo. Si el cine es un arte, es sobre todo el arte de la memoria, tanto colectiva como individual. Este artículo sugiere que es posible hacer converger la pedagogía de la educación cinematográfica y la voluntad ciudadana de perpetuar la memoria, al tiempo que se protege el patrimonio cultural. El autor propone una serie de películas para ilustrar estos planteamientos, que ponen de relieve la dimensión económica y cultural de los medios de comunicación, respondiendo en esta convergencia a las más recientes directrices de la Unión Europea sobre creación y producción, desde esta perspectiva, de medios audiovisuales. El trabajo se inicia con una aproximación a la educación para el cine en la era digital. Posteriormente se recogen algunas singularidades de las «películas de la memoria», aludiendo concretamente a la tipología de los puntos de vista de los realizadores y al tratamiento de sus fuentes. Por último, se refleja el encuentro entre el concepto de «análisis creativo», fomentado por la educación cinematográfica, y la realización de videogramas hechos por jóvenes y dedicados a la memoria individual o colectiva.


Author(s):  
Laila Niedre ◽  
Gunta Ošeniece

The purpose of this article is to reveal the Latvian cultural space of the 1930s, how it appears in present-day reminiscences of Baltic Germans, people with German heritage residing in Latvia, or their descendants. The data consists of extended interviews recorded as a part of the Latvian Academy of Culture project “Latvija – Heimatland” (2017–2019). One of the project objectives is to register and explore the reminiscences of this social group. The article analyses the accounts of 22 people residing in Latvia and 14 in Germany. These are accounts of events experienced either by themselves or their family members. It covers a time when the community of Latvians and Germans residing in Latvia was polarised by national interests, and the decade ended with Baltic Germans emigrating, followed by the Soviet occupation of Latvia. The Latvian cultural space of the 1930s is indirectly described by quotes from the respondents that relate to the resettlement in 1939 (Umsiedlung in German). The reminiscences illuminate cultural space components such as social practices, symbols, languages, and their use, traditions, and cuisine. The individual memories of Baltic Germans and their descendants significantly contribute to how the Latvian cultural space of the 1930s is already seen through collective memory, which includes monuments, written work, and art. They outline the lifestyle of this specific minority group, diversity of cultures, and interaction between them in Latvia, as well as a theme of Latvia as the lost motherland.


The article describes visitors’ interpretation and understanding of the narrative about the Holocaust in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Visitors comments were the material for the analysis, used methodology was discourse analysis. Different discourses were singled out in visitors’ comments. Differences between visitors’ comments given in different years were ascertained. Age differences and differences among narratives of various groups of the Museum visitors were shown. It can be concluded that the Museum fulfills various functions. Besides being a place of commemoration, it accomplishes its educational function and serves as a source of information about the Holocaust.


Author(s):  
David L. Weddle

After Roman destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70CE, Jewish tradition reimagined animal sacrifices as devotional acts, such as prayer, fasting, and study of Torah, as well as giving up individual desires to fulfil God’s will. Rabbis interpreted the story of Abraham’s binding Isaac for sacrifice (the Akedah) as the model of absolute obedience to divine commands (mitzvoth) and as the basis for the election of the Jewish people to bear witness to the one God. Their commentary, however, included the horrified reaction of Sarah’s scream to the news of Abraham’s act, ending in her death, indicating dissent from sacrifice as religious ideal. Rabbinic tradition transferred the site of sacrifice from temple to synagogue in rituals of High Holy Days, to the family table in Passover and Sabbath rituals, and to the individual will in submission to Torah. In the mystical teaching of Kabbalah, God sacrifices to create the world and Jews are called to sacrifice to redeem the world (tikkun olam). Such vocation of redemptive suffering was called into question by the Holocaust, and some contemporary Israeli poets refer to the Akedah in expressing misgivings about calls to sacrifice in defense of Israel.


Horizons ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-84
Author(s):  
Marie L. Baird

AbstractJohann Baptist Metz has exhorted Christian theologians to discard “system concepts” in favor of “subject concepts” in their theologizing. This revisioning of Christian theology recovers the primacy of the uniqueness and irreplaceability of the individual from totalizing doctrinal formulations and systems that function, for Metz, without reference to the subject. In short, a revisionist Christian theology in light of the Holocaust recovers the preeminence of the inviolability of individual human life.How can such a revisioning be accomplished in the realm of Christian spirituality? This article will utilize the thought of Emmanuel Levinas to assert the primacy of ethics as “first philosophy” replacing ontology, and by implication the ontological foundations undergirding Christian spirituality, with the ethical relation. Such a relation is the basis for a new Christian spirituality that posits the primacy of merciful and compasionate action in the face of conditions of life in extremity.


2009 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 375-395 ◽  
Author(s):  
Siobhan Kattago

Since 1989, social change in Europe has moved between two stories. The first being a politics of memory emphasizing the specificity of culture in national narratives, and the other extolling the virtues of the Enlightenment heritage of reason and humanity. While the Holocaust forms a central part of West European collective memory, national victimhood of former Communist countries tends to occlude the centrality of the Holocaust. Highlighting examples from the Estonian experience, this article asks whether attempts to find one single European memory of trauma ignore the complexity of history and are thus potentially disrespectful to those who suffered under both Communism and National Socialism. Pluralism in the sense of Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin is presented as a way in which to move beyond the settling of scores in the past and towards a respectful recognition and acknowledgement of historical difference.


2015 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 92-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan Poblete

This essay seeks to illuminate a different, more encompassing kind of transition than that from dictatorship to post-dictatorship (and its attendant forms of memory of military brutal force and human rights abuses) often privileged by studies of political violence and social memory. The focus is twofold: first, to describe a transition from the world of the social to that of the post-social, i.e. a transition from a welfare state-centered form of the nation to its neoliberal competitive state counterpart; and secondly, to analyze its attendant memory dynamics. The double articulation of collective memory under neoliberalism, the deep and recurring violence it has involved at both the social and the individual level, and its self-articulation as a social memory apparatus are apparent in two Chilean films exploring the logic (Pablo Larraín’s Tony Manero) and the history (Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia de la luz) of the implementation of this neoliberal memory apparatus in Chile. Este trabajo intenta iluminar una transición más amplia que aquella entre dictadura y post-dictadura ( y sus correspondientes formas de memoria sobre la violencia militar o los abusos a los derechos humanos) que suele ser el objeto de estudio de los trabajos sobre violencia política y memoria social. Mi interés es doble: primero, describir una transición del mundo social al post-social (es decir, una transición desde una forma de estado-nación centrada en el estado de bienestar a su contraparte neoliberal y competitiva; y en segundo lugar, analizar sus correspondientes formas de memoria. La doble articulación de la memoria colectiva bajo el neoliberalismo, la profunda y recurrente violencia presente, tanto a nivel social como a nivel individual, y su autoarticulación como un aparato de la memoria social son evidentes en las dos películas chilenas Tony Manero de Pablo Larraín y Nostalgia de la luz de Patricio Guzmán que exploran la lógica y la historia de la implementación de este aparato de la memoria neoliberal en Chile.


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