The Journal of Holocaust Research最新文献

{"title":"Un-American? Or Just ‘Inglourious’? Reflections on the ‘Americanization of the Holocaust’ from Langer to Tarantino","authors":"B. Langford","doi":"10.1080/25785648.2020.1832311","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785648.2020.1832311","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In his 1983 essay ‘The Americanization of the Holocaust on Stage and Screen’, Lawrence Langer originated an argument subsequently expanded and amplified by numerous scholars, that the Holocaust’s establishment as a central ‘location’ in American culture, particularly as conducted by mainstream fictional and dramatic representations, is facilitated by its recuperation in the terms of a broadly affirmative cultural discourse that determinedly if not tendentiously discovers redemption, individual agency, and moral meaning in historical events to which such concepts are not only inapplicable but irrelevant. ‘Americanizing the Holocaust’ thus entails a ‘category error’ prompting American Holocaust representations to proffer meanings – civic lessons around tolerance and democratic politics, declarations of human sodality in the face of radical evil, etc. – relating primarily to American public and political culture’s ideological preferences, whose restorative propensity will always tend to collapse into kitsch. Langer identified the Goodrich-Hackett/Stevens adaptations of The Diary of Anne Frank and the 1978 mini-series Holocaust as key vectors of the Holocaust’s Americanization; Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) has generally taken center stage in more recent elaborations. This essay distinguishes Langer’s original proposition – grounded in a humanistic American literary-critical tradition – from the more far-reaching claims that have subsequently taken up the ‘Americanization thesis’, contrasting his position to recent scholarship arguing that Holocaust representations introduce dissentient and self-critical, rather than affirmative, strands into American life; or that the paradigms of American mass art such as Hollywood film are themselves in fact more complex and multi-valent than Langer believes. The essay considers Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009) as a work that repurposes the canons of popular film with the specific aim of dismantling the firewalls between Nazi racial ideology, genocidal violence, tyranny and sadism on the one hand, and ‘American’ values on the other – ultimately ‘Americanizing’ the Holocaust in ways that radically revise Langer’s original formulation.","PeriodicalId":422357,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Holocaust Research","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130528890","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Holocaust Testimonies: Problems Analyzed, Promises Fulfilled","authors":"Joanne Weiner Rudof","doi":"10.1080/25785648.2020.1821525","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785648.2020.1821525","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article traces the evolution of Lawrence L. Langer’s career beginning as a professor of American literature followed by his transition to Holocaust literature, and eventual recognition and stature as one of the world’s foremost scholars of Holocaust literature and Holocaust video testimonies. His expertise in Holocaust art, media, and history is included. The parallel history of the founding, growth, and development of Yale University’s Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies is examined. The resulting symbiosis between Langer and the Fortunoff Video Archive, as well as the influences and contributions of both to the field of Holocaust studies is discussed.","PeriodicalId":422357,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Holocaust Research","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130436006","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"‘I Was a Tape Recorder. I Was a Mailing Box.’: Jan Karski’s Interviews","authors":"Dawn Skorczewski, D. Stone","doi":"10.1080/25785648.2020.1820133","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785648.2020.1820133","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Jan Karski, a courier for the Polish government in exile, secretly entered the Warsaw ghetto and transit camp Izbica to observe the suffering there. Making a careful record of his visit, he traveled the world to tell its leaders what he had witnessed. Karski is one of the most significant witnesses of the Holocaust, whose experiences have been documented innumerable times. To date, however, no comparative study exists of Karski’s interviews. To what extent do Karski’s versions of his heroic story differ? Does it matter? What does this case teach us about Holocaust ‘celebrity witnessing’? In this article, we trace shifts in a well-known Holocaust narrative to illustrate how even a very well-established story, divided into three well-established smaller stories, changes significantly depending on the archiving institution that collects the account and the interviewers who conduct each interview. Our investigation demonstrates the effects of the archive on oral testimony and narrative history. These effects are always part of the oral testimony setting, but in the case of well-known interviewees such as Karski, who have testified a number of times in different contexts, they are especially evident. Conducted over a seventeen-year period in very different institutional and generic settings, Karski’s testimonies illustrate both internal heterogeneity, integral to his own development as a person, an intellectual, and a witness, and ‘external’ heterogeneity, shaped by the interviewing institution and the interviewer’s methodology. We study the production of Karski’s interviews from ‘the contact zone’ of Holocaust testimony to identify how the details of his story shift in relation to his listener. Although it has been suggested that Karski’s ‘performances’ become more wooden over time, we find the opposite: that he becomes more animated, sure of himself, and, by the time of his last interview, ready to fully inhabit the role of the ‘celebrity witness.’","PeriodicalId":422357,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Holocaust Research","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132172866","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Rethinking the Muselmann in Nazi Concentration Camps and Ghettos: History, Social Life, and Representation","authors":"Michael Becker, D. Bock","doi":"10.1080/25785648.2020.1782067","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785648.2020.1782067","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":422357,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Holocaust Research","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117246737","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"No One Wants to Draw the Muselmann? Visual Representations of the Muselmann in Comics","authors":"Markus Streb, Ole Frahm","doi":"10.1080/25785648.2020.1785086","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785648.2020.1785086","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article traces figures of the Muselmann in comics and graphic novels from 1942 to the present. The first observation is that depictions of the Muselmann in comics are rather rare. As in the arts, literature, and theory, they are often metaphorically supplemented by figures like the golem. Especially in comic books before MAUS—A Survivor’s Tale by Art Spiegelman (1986, 1991), genre conventions seem to prohibit the explicit mention of Muselmänner. But with the golem-like mud monster the Heap, we identify an early and disturbing reflection of the Muselmann. In action and war comics like ‘7 Doomed Men’ by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, the Muselmann appears as an atmospheric figure that contours the male heroes by pronouncing dichotomies like weak/strong or active/passive. MAUS eventually establishes a much more nuanced representation of the prisoner societies and the food situation in the concentration camps. Since then, the graphic novel, rather free of strict genre conventions, has enabled other renderings of the Muselmann, visible in publications like Aurélien Ducoudray and Eddy Vaccaro’s Young: Tunis 1911–Auschwitz 1945 or in the series Episodes of Auschwitz. These comics provide a differentiated description of prisoner societies, their modes of functioning and their inherent hierarchies. The article argues that there are different genre conventions at work here. In the early comics, they enable a rather indirect perspective on the Muselmann, while newer approaches refer to more common conventions of Holocaust representation and offer more nuanced depictions.","PeriodicalId":422357,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Holocaust Research","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123866603","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Muselmänner and Prisoner Societies: Toward a Sociohistorical Understanding","authors":"Michael Becker, D. Bock","doi":"10.1080/25785648.2020.1794608","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785648.2020.1794608","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In Holocaust discourse, Muselmänner are commonly depicted as mute, passive prisoners fated to die. We identify alternative representations in works of Jorge Semprún and Imre Kertész but also in a great number of other testimonies. Many of them were written by former Muselmänner. We argue for a sociohistorical turn in Muselmann discourse. Many testimonies show that Muselmänner were a constitutive part of the social structure of prisoner societies. Taking up a term from the camp language, we analyze the process of Muselmanization. We argue that the Muselmann must be understood as a processual and relational rather than an essentialist category. We propose to add a spatiotemporal approach to the analysis of prisoner societies. A close examination of particular blocks, barracks, or commandos and their changing function in the course of the camp system’s development yields unexpected insights into the social realities of Muselmänner and, in turn, into the inner workings of prisoner societies. We conclude that the Muselmann signifies that death and dying became defining factors of the social order of Nazi concentration camps.","PeriodicalId":422357,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Holocaust Research","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117183153","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Morality and the Muselmann: Mapping Virtues and Norms in Prisoners' Societies of Mauthausen and Auschwitz–Birkenau","authors":"Imke Hansen","doi":"10.1080/25785648.2020.1785671","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785648.2020.1785671","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The phenomenon Muselmann was a peculiarity of Nazi concentration camps. In survivor’s testimonies, the term appears frequently enough to assume that it denotes a particular, commonly recognized category of prisoners. It was probably the only category that was not defined by the Nazis’ system of triangle badges and functions. Instead, the prisoner community called specific prisoners Muselmann. In nearly every NS concentration camp, prisoners labeled their weakest fellows with a racist term and located them at the bottom of the hierarchy. My research explores the moral dimension of this label. Introducing Moral Foundations Theory to the topic, I map the domain of morality in NS concentration camps as presented by Auschwitz-Birkenau and Mauthausen survivors when they speak or write about Muselmänner. My analysis deepens the understanding of the relationship between Muselmänner and other prisoners. Engaging in moral history or history of morality, it offers a fresh perspective on the functioning of prisoners’ society in NS concentration camps. Doing so, it contributes to the discourse on stability and change of normative morality in extreme situations.","PeriodicalId":422357,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Holocaust Research","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132323793","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Muselmann and the Necrotopography of a Ghetto","authors":"Bożena Shallcross","doi":"10.1080/25785648.2020.1785089","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785648.2020.1785089","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article revises the status, function, linguistic origin, and experiential meaning of the emaciated figure of the Muselmann through a reading of Holocaust diaries, archival photography, as well as the post-Holocaust literature; the reading establishes certain similarities between the Muselmann and other victims of Nazi genocide. It reconstructs necrotopography as a common denominator of diverse Holocaust hostile spaces of confinement, in which dead bodies constitute the terrain’s main features. The article purports that death in the necrotopograhic spaces was caused by starvation and exploitation as well as by solitude and isolation. For a contemporary reader/viewer, necrotopography represents the return of the Holocaust affect in its most visceral way.","PeriodicalId":422357,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Holocaust Research","volume":"51 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122149323","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"(Re)Claiming Motherhood in the Wake of the Holocaust in Chava Rosenfarb’s ‘Little Red Bird’ and Valentine Goby’s Kinderzimmer","authors":"Nathalie Ségeral","doi":"10.1080/25785648.2020.1742497","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785648.2020.1742497","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT While saving women and children first is standard practice at times of historical upheaval, during the Holocaust women and children were often killed first, and pregnant mothers and small children were sent to the gas chambers upon arrival at the Nazi camps. This fundamental reversal of traditional values has not yet been granted enough attention, which is why this study examines two narratives that tell the survivor's story through the lens of motherhood and the woman's body. Valentine Goby's Kinderzimmer (2013) draws on archives and survivors' testimonies about a 'children's room' located in Ravensbrück between September 1944 and March 1945. Goby's narrator is modeled on Madeleine Roubenne, a French survivor, yet, interestingly, Goby rewrites Roubenne's story into a more 'successful' version of motherhood. The short story 'Little Red Bird' (2004), written in Yiddish by Jewish-Canadian author, Chava Rosenfarb, who is a Holocaust survivor herself, alludes to the Little Red Riding Hood and follows an Auschwitz survivor obsessed by her inability to bear children, which she attributes to being haunted by the ghost of her five-year-old daughter killed in Auschwitz. The story stages the destructiveness of PTSD through Manya's obsession with motherhood that results in her fantasy of stealing a baby from a maternity ward and her failure to assist her dying husband. Both narratives thus testify to the intrinsically gendered character of Holocaust experience and problematize gender in the context of Holocaust through examinations of (non-)motherhood and the female body. While for Rosenfarb's narrator, surviving means to counter the effects of Nazi policies that specifically targeted women for their reproductive capacities, for Goby's narrator foster motherhood enables survival. Both texts are thus read here in the light of the complicated re-gendering and cathartic/pathological aspects of motherhood brought about by Holocaust trauma.","PeriodicalId":422357,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Holocaust Research","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123616714","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Silence of the Mothers: Art Spiegelman's Maus and Philippe Claudel's Brodeck","authors":"H. Duffy","doi":"10.1080/25785648.2020.1741853","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785648.2020.1741853","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The present article offers a comparative reading of Spiegelman's Maus (1980–1991) and Claudel's Brodeck [Le Rapport de Brodeck] (2007). Separated by their formal differences and autobiographical/fictional contingencies, the two narratives are united by their postmodern aura. They also appear to promulgate the well-documented marginalization of the feminine perspective in Holocaust literature. I argue, however, that Maus and Brodeck simultaneously embrace and challenge the tradition of Holocaust writing that privileges the male perspective and reduces women to the stereotype of helplessness and silent domesticity. They achieve this by foregrounding the liminalization of women's experience of Nazi persecution and relating the distinctiveness of Jewish women's ordeal to their sexuality, and in particular to their roles as child bearers and main child carers. Additionally, Claudel's and Spiegelman's engagement with canonical texts of European culture (e.g. the myths of Philomela or Orpheus and Euridice) points to the entrenchment of gender stereotypes which ultimately contributed to the sexism of Nazi policies.","PeriodicalId":422357,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Holocaust Research","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130854869","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}