In this course we will look at how the Shoah (Holocaust) has been represented in various genres, including memoirs or testimony by survivors, in fiction and drama, as well as in film and other artistic media. The Shoah, the systematic murder of six million European Jews from 1939 to 1945 by the Nazi German state and its allies, was an event unprecedented in the history of the world and has come to be seen as a manifestation of absolute evil.
There is much ongoing debate whether it is appropriate to describe the Shoah as something beyond human understanding, for to do so might suggest that what cannot be explained is ultimately not worthy of study and so not subject to rational discussion. Equally, it is argued that the Shoah must be studied and its causes understood if an event of this magnitude is to remain unique and never be allowed to happen again. Discussion of the Shoah raises questions about the presence of G-d, or G-d’s absence from, the world; questions which are unusual in the context of twentieth-century literature but essential in a study of a people for whom G-d is central to their historical identity. And the Shoah completely undermined Europe’s sense of its intellectual and moral accomplishments and so has caused an ongoing crisis in Western sensibility.
The Shoah can be described as the defining event of twentieth-century history, possibly even world history, and so the issues it raises are central to humanity’s understanding of itself. While this course does not aim to provide a study of the Holocaust as a whole, a subject more suited to history, politics and sociology, it will attempt, through the study of various literary and other artistic texts, to provide students with an overview of responses from those who endured and survived the horror as well as from those who have written about the Shoah from an historical distance.
This course will seek to address questions on the appropriateness of representing the Holocaust at all, especially in fiction and film; the role of memoir as literature; the efficacy of film as a way of educating a wider public about this catastrophic event; and whether invocations to “never forget” and on “man’s inhumanity to man” are merely rhetorical devices or have real significance in the world after Auschwitz.
The course will attempt to situate Holocaust literature within the context of a Jewish literary tradition of lament as well as a flourishing Yiddish tradition in the decades preceding this churban, a disaster which destroyed this vital part of Central and East European culture. Students will study some early Yiddish tales, especially those from the Chassidic tradition, as well as other pre-War writings before looking at the principal survivor chroniclers of the Shoah, including Eli Wiesel, Primo Levi, Ruth Kluger, Paul Celan. Other authors to be studied include those writing about the Holocaust from an historical distance, such as Cynthia Ozick, Amir Guttfreund, Martin Amis, Arthur Miller. Films to be discussed include Schindler’s List, The Pianist, Europa Europa, Fateless (all based on real events); Night and Fog, Shoah (documentaries); as well as film footage of various events from the Shoah. Students will also be introduced to the works of visual artists who perished in the death camps and to music and song composed during and after the Holocaust.
- Teacher: gtimmer, Glen Timmermans