Personal Engagement and the Study of the Holocaust, (ed. with Katrin Stoll) (original) (raw)
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The Holocaust. Voices of Scholars (ed.)
The book presents the reflections of these scholars and public figures whose work involves the subject of the Holocaust. We asked them to write about difficulties they have faced, and we posed several questions to them: Do the analytical tools of the scholar, the researcher, the philosopher, the sociologist, the artist, prove weak or ineffective in dealing with the Holocaust? More than sixty years after the liberation of Auschwitz, are we intellectually and emotionally baffled by the genocide the Nazis committed there? If so, what are the paths taken to overcome this? How and why continue work on this most perplexing subject?
This book is a collection of seventeen scholarly articles which analyze Holocaust testimonies, photographs, documents, literature and films, as well as teaching methods in Holocaust education. Most of these essays were originally presented as papers at the Millersville University Conferences on the Holocaust and Genocide from 2010 to 2012. In their articles, the contributors discuss the Holocaust in concentration camps and ghettos, as well as the Nazis’ methods of exterminating Jews. The authors analyze the reliability of photographic evidence and eyewitness testimonies about the Holocaust. The essays also describe the psychological impact of the Holocaust on survivors, witnesses and perpetrators, and upon Jewish identity in general after the Second World War. The scholars explore the problems of the memorialization of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union and the description of the Holocaust in Russian literature. Several essays are devoted to the representation of the Holocaust in film, and trace the evolution of its depiction from the early Holocaust movies of the late 1940s – early 1950s to modern Holocaust fantasy films. They also show the influence of Holocaust cinema on feature films about the Armenian Genocide. Lastly, several authors propose innovative methods of teaching the Holocaust to college students. The younger generation of students may see the Holocaust as an event of the distant past, so new teaching methods are needed to explain its significance. This collection of essays, based on new multi-disciplinary research and innovative methods of teaching, opens many unknown aspects and provides new perspectives on the Holocaust
On first learning that the Scrolls of Auschwitz, the testimony of the Sonderkommando found buried near the crematoria at Birkenau in the extermination camp itself, were to be analysed as literary documents, my reaction was an involuntary but resounding 'no'. Here, in its own way, was surely 'the surfeit of memory' that Charles Maier (1993) had talked about. Not only did it seem almost impossible to view the Scrolls as texts when their very materiality was so charged, but I also could not help but wonder how Nicholas Chare and Dominic Williams could mobilize their cognitive skills without also letting loose a school of other, less welcome, sensibilities. The Scrolls, I found myself initially thinking, belonged more in a reliquary than academic seminar. In the event (2010), Chare and Williams's meticulous scholarship and deep sensitivity rendered such misgivings redundant and I dismissed my own first instincts as those of someone, a child of survivors, with a heightened engagement with testimony. Yet as I began to reflect more on the question, it seemed to me that such instinctual responses should not immediately be evicted but were themselves material that merited analysis because they touch on powerful ideas about how Holocaust research can and should be conducted, and speak of the existence of an underworld of unruly feelings that, by being exposed to the light of scrutiny and discussion, can help deepen and enrich Holocaust scholarship.