Holocaust Literature Day 1

1
Holocaust Literature Day 1

• Location of Germany in Europe
• Who were the Nazis?
• National Sozialistische Partei Deutschlands
• Began to get powerful as a political party in
  1930
• World War II was 1939-1945

2
The Holocaust

• What was the Holocaust?
• In the 1930s and 1940s
• How many people died?
• Why did the Holocaust occur?

3
Where did it happen?

• Why are some shown large and the others small?
• How many people died in the Holocaust?
• Who were they?

4
Why study the Holocaust?

• The Nazis targeted minorities.
• Systematic extermination
• Used modern technology
• Today the world still struggles with the lessons
  of the Holocaust.
• To learn that the inevitable ultimate result of
  ethnic hatred is forced expulsion and murder.

5
How did Hitler come into power?

• Used national pride to manipulate the electorate.
• Used their prejudices
• Important lesson hatred and fear is a way in
  which people can be manipulated by others. Used
  still by politicians.
• Important to learn what moves human nature, what
  drives us to violence.

6
How do we learn about the Holocaust?

• Through stories
• Through an art form
• Most common art form to tell us the story of the
  Holocaust is film.
• Fictional elements?

7
How does one represent the truth?

• A major question in this course.
• Not as simple as it seems.
• Does this mean that one should only write
  histories and film documentaries?
• How does one represent the killing of 10 million
  people?
• Is one not always showing a version or a side of
  the truth?

8
What do you want from this course?

• Get into groups of no more than 4 people.
• Write three things you want to learn about in
  this course on the green cards.
• Write at least one thing you would rather not
  like us to talk about in this course on the red
  card.

9
Do you know . . .

• What happened in the Warsaw ghetto? (raise your
  hand)
• What a Judenrat is? (raise your hand)
• What Kristallnacht was? (raise your hand)
• Who the Einsatzgruppen were? ( )
• What Lebensraum means?
• What the death marches were?
• Who Joseph Goebbels was?

10
Heinrich Heine Quote

• Famous German writer of the 19th Century
• Long before the Holocaust wrote
• When you start burning books, you will
  eventually burn people.
• Particularly apropos prophetic
• But also stresses importance of books, of
  learning and of narratives (films are also
  narratives).

11
What is the literature of the Holocaust?

• Not literature of writers exiled because of the
  Holocaust.
• Not literature that was burned by the Nazis.
• Not the literature promoted by the Nazis.
• We are looking at literature and other forms of
  narrative that explains what happened to the
  victims.

12
Important comment

• This course is not a debate about the Holocaust
  as a historical fact.
• The premise of the course is that the Holocaust
  did occur.
• Any debate is out of place.
• Holocaust denial has been discredited by the
  academic community.

13
Course content

• Literature and film
• Study of different representations of this
  phenomenon.
• Different genres (short stories, drama,
  autobiographical novels, documentaries, major
  motion pictures, etc.)
• Different perspectives determined by role of the
  author (victim or perpetrator), generation, and
  nationality.

14
Central question to ask yourself

• While viewing a film or reading a work, ask
  yourself Is this a proper and appropriate way
  to represent this? Why? Why not?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of this
  representation?
• What does this representation tell us about the
  Holocaust that others do not?

15
Why would it not be appropriate?

• Theodor Adorno Famous German philosopher and
  sociologist (mid-20th century) wrote
• It is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz
• What did he mean?

16
Is it better to be silent?

• Abraham Lewin
• It is hard for the tongue to utter such words,
  for the mind to comprehend their meaning, to
  write them down on paper.

• Perhaps because the disaster is so great there
  is nothing to be gained by expressing in words
  everything that we feel. Only if we were cabable
  of tearing out by the force of our pent-up
  anguish the greatest of all mountains, a Mount
  Everest . . . . Words are beyond us now. Our
  hearts are empty and made of stone.

17
Elie Wiesel

• Never forget, speak out.
• To give in to the silence is to give in to
  cynicism and to allow the very forces that caused
  the Holocaust the opportunity to gain the upper
  hand once again.