Holocaust Studies

Personal testimony by survivors of genocide or persecution has long constituted the gold standard for learning about human-inflicted tragedy. The physical presence of a survivor captivates audiences and lends immediacy to catastrophes that seem both unfathomable but also eminently repeatable. The Holocaust looms large as an example. The most aggressive efforts at preserving live testimony have centered on assembling archives of video testimonies. This transformation of live testimony into a different medium generates two key questions:
1. What value can personal testimony have when disembodied and presented in a medium more manipulable by the audience (via editing, selective viewing, etc.)?
2. How can mediated survivor testimonies serve as tools for preventing and counteracting prejudice?

As survivors of genocides pass away, their firsthand testimonies increasingly will be accessible primarily through video archives. The preservation of memory through video archives also exacts a price. Once a survivor’s testimony enters the archive, it risks becoming ossified as a static monument. The video preserves the definitive record not only of that survivor’s life, but it also endures as an instantiation of archetypal narrative templates that channel perceptions into familiar storylines. As these narrative patterns become embedded as expectations, they risk obscuring or marginalizing the complex panoply of ways the survivors dealt with their situations.

This project takes Holocaust survivor testimonies as its point of departure in assessing the pedagogical challenges and opportunities of video testimonies. Discussions focus on three types of mediated testimony: early non-fiction televised chronicles of Holocaust survivors (particularly the first appearance of a survivor, on the 1953 U.S. television series This Is Your Life); archival video testimonies; and “unsettled testimony” consisting of less structured, first-person testimonies that reveal the challenges of discursive representation. The final category includes testimonies of Holocaust survivors independently recorded by the author. Each type of testimony offers distinct advantages and limitations in reducing prejudice and increasing productive engagement with the global immigration crises that many politicians continue to foment into nativism and xenophobia.

Critical examination of each medium of testimony leads to recommendations regarding how to provide more thorough, nuanced understanding of refugees and immigrants in the present. Testimony from immigrants could put into practice several key lessons gleaned from Holocaust survivor testimony. At the micronarrative level, individual testimonies can provide counterexamples to categorical generalizations about immigrants. Attention at this level focuses on providing detailed context and background to demonstrate how immigrants do not necessarily align with how they are categorized by media and politicians. At the mesonarrative level, the diversity of narratives can activate themes and characterizations absent or suppressed in collective portrayals of immigrants. Metanarrative testimony reframes immigrants by offering new narratives that can reframe the role of immigrants in society, suggesting storylines that treat immigrants as contributors rather than invaders.

This book shows how scholarly studies of prejudice, identity formation, and genocide studies can shed light on global examples of religious hatred. The book is divided into four parts, focusing respectively on: theories of prejudice and violence; historical developments of antisemitism, Islamophobia, and race; contemporary Western antisemitism and Islamophobia; and, prejudices beyond the West in the Islamic, Buddhist, and Hindu traditions. Each part ends with a special focus section.

Key features include:
- A compelling synthesis of theories of prejudice, identity, and hatred to explain Islamophobia and antisemitism.
- An innovative theory of human violence and genocide which explains the link to prejudice.
- Case studies of both Western antisemitism and Islamophobia in history and today, alongside global studies of Islamic antisemitism and Hindu and Buddhist Islamophobia
- Integrates discussion of race and racialisation as aspects of Islamophobic and antisemitic prejudice in relation to their framing in religious discourses.
- Accessible for general readers and students, it can be employed as a textbook for students or read with benefit by scholars for its novel synthesis and theories.

The book focuses on antisemitism and Islamophobia, both in the West and beyond, including examples of prejudices and hatred in the Islamic, Hindu, and Buddhist traditions. Drawing on examples from Europe, North America, MENA, South and Southeast Asia, and Africa, Paul Hedges points to common patterns, while identifying the specifics of local context.
Religious Hatred is an essential guide for understanding the historical origins of religious hatred, the manifestations of this hatred across diverse religious and cultural contexts, and the strategies employed by activists and peacemakers to overcome this hatred.

Reinhard Kleist' s graphic novel The Boxer tells the story of Holocaust survivor Harry Haft and his participation in forced boxing matches in Nazi concentration camps. Throughout the work, Kleist works against clear delineations of right and wrong by offering what I term 'nuancing gestures'. Haft is a morally complex protagonist who works against the image of the heroic and sanctimonious survivor, and Kleist identifies other characters that challenge comforting notions of good and bad. The work uses visual correspondences between panels to highlight cycles of interpersonal violence, showing how issues of complicity are carried forward later in life. Furthermore, the graphic novel depicts in vivid detail how traumatic intrusions disrupt Haft' s daily life. This article explores how The Boxer' s particular stylistic rendering of moral ambiguity, complicity, and the longer lasting effects of trauma raises new insights about how the medium of comics can navigate a sensitive and complex Holocaust narrative.

While hiding in Latin America, Klaus Barbie was condemned to death for war crimes by the military tribunal of Lyon in 1952 and in 1954. The former Nazi officer, head of the Gestapo in Lyon and its environs during the Second World War, was judged again in France, this time in person, thirty-three years later. Following the trial, Barbie was condemned to a life sentence in prison for crimes against humanity. That said, Barbie's trial cannot be reduced to merely the length of time it took (between May and July 1987), to place (the Tribunal of Lyon), or to the action (of judging a man for crimes against humanity). This article analyzes the Barbie trial as a narrator of the Holocaust to the French population, from the preparation of the trial in Germany in the 1970s, then in France after the extradition of Klaus Barbie in 1983. The construction, at once juridical, political, and media-related, of such an object of transmission often came into contact with the memory of the Resistance and of its hero, Jean Moulin. The mechanisms by which the Barbie trial was thus configured enable us to do a specific case study of the interactions at work, which can be applied more generally when it is a question of judging crimes of the past, issues of collective and individual memory, the involvement of historical figures, and media discourse.

This article focuses on the precariousness of everyday life of half-Jews during the Nazi-regime in Vienna. Marriages between Jews and non-Jews as well as the presence of their half-Jewish children represented an antagonism that was a permanent threat to the integrity of the Nazi regime. According to the Nuremberg Laws, half-Jews were either defined as Mischlinge of the first degree or as Geltungsjuden, depending on their denomination. Even though they were in most cases exempt from deportation, the plans to include them in the Final solution were never fully given up. Particularly during the last years of the war – after the majority of the Austrian Jewish population had been deported – the protection of half-Jews became more precarious and even trivial infractions against Nazi laws could lead to imprisonment and deportation.

The vast majority of Holocaust victims and survivors were Ashkenazim. Their main language was Yiddish. Yiddish is very close to German, the main difference being that the former is written in Hebrew letters, while the latter in Latin ones. Postwar Europe' s moral foundation is Holocaust remembrance. But this remembrance to be effective, it must be active in the absence of Holocaust survivors. A way to ensure that could be the novel school and university subject of Yiddish for reading purposes. As a result, researchers and interested Europeans would start reading documents and books in Yiddish again. Germany' s premiere cultural organization, Goethe-Institut, is uniquely well-placed and morally obligated to facilitate the relaunch, popularization and cultivation of the skill to read Yiddish-language sources and publications for both the sake of research and for pleasure.

How did Primo Levi come to terms with what the historian Enzo Traverso has called ‘the end of the Jewish modernity’? How did he react to the fading out of that tradition which, between the Enlightenment and the Second World War, saw the European Jews playing a central role in the critical consciousness of the Western world? What was his relationship with Zionism? Did he ever acknowledge the Nakba? To address these questions, my article analyses the different positions that Levi took on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the awkward coincidence of the publishing of Se non ora, quando? and the 1982 Lebanon War, and what his tormented and passionate relationships with Israel reveals about the Italophone Jewish experience.
Much has been written on Levi’s Jewish identity, but his complex attitude toward the question of Palestine/Israel is relatively underexplored. Starting from Levi’s writings and interviews on the subject, my essay will therefore investigate the impact that this thorny question had on the Italian Jewry. I will structure my essay as follows: first, I will give a brief account of how the changing historical circumstances, like the foundation of Israel, the Eichmann trial, and the Six-Day War, have shifted the geopolitical position of the Jewish intelligentsia (both inside and outside Italy); second, I will analyse Levi’s struggle to find a position within this shifting scenario; finally, I will study how Levi’s public interventions fed back into Italian Jewish community.

More than fifty years after subjection to anti-Jewish persecution, Holocaust survivors embody divergent responses to the conflict that endangered their existence. Narrative analysis of oral and written testimonies by survivors reveals three major modes of creatively reclaiming personal agency: avoiding violence by delimiting the realm of control, embracing violence through forcible dispensation of justice, and expanding agency by exercising personal ability in the economic realm. The first-person narratives of Jewish survivors illustrate this autopoeisis, or creative redirection of conflict. The testimonies reveal transformation as an ongoing process of working through rather than working out conflict, an approach that accords well with the Judaic moral principle of tikkun olam, the imperative to repair a fractured world.

I have held this book back many years.  It is now time for it to see the light of day (being part of the larger work, A Great And Terrible Love:  A Visionary Journey from Woodstock’s Sorceries to God’s Paradise).  With the gained perspective of years it needed some adding to.

Of course for a Poet to stand among the people of Israel—that Israel which cleaves to its King, Messiah, as well the children of that apostate Jewry who spurned Him—and speak truly to both camps without fear of man, this must needs be—simultaneously—an act of war and of love.  The prophetic office in Israel closed when the last prophet, John son of Zebedee (Matthew 10:2), finished writing the apocalyptic vision and prophecy given him around 95 CE—the culmination of all Old and New Covenant prophecy—so what I write is not “immediate” prophecy given me, yet as a student of prophecies the prophetic word of those who came before us is in my mouth.  Paul the apostle of Messiah put it like this, “For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him?  But we have the mind of Christ” (1 Corinthians 2:16), and John was instructed by the angel, “the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy” (Revelation 19:10).  The word of our prophets is precious to us who heed them.

I say this is war because of the tearing down of spiritual/intellectual strong holds many have invested their lives building and defending.  To err in this area of theology and vision allows actual blood to be spilled, much blood, precious blood.  We Jews know this first hand, the Arabs also.  But the Christian—and some of the Jewish—West do not; it mostly just sits in its easy chairs in front of the TV and drinks in the fruit of its unseeing.  A storm coming will turn these chairs over.

I do not know how many of my own family have perished because of the blind and blinding rabbinate, and when I say “perished” I mean in the prophesied Gehenna of eternal Hell, so this is no idle theology with me, and I mean it to be war, that the falsity plaguing my people may be challenged on the world stage, what I call, “Apocalypse Field, global arena of consciousness”.  Will my opponents resort to the old tricks of murder, slander, and lies?  What do I care, for I am given a heart and tongue to speak by Him who is Lord of poets, and there could be no power against me were it not given from above, so I will bear this testimony and love not my life even if it be unto the death.  I mean to cut down the lies and hatred that have cost the eternal lives of so many Jews I cannot count them.

What I say is in accord with both the Old Covenant (Tanakh) and the New Covenant Scripture (B’rit Chadashah), despite the opposition of some, both Christians and Jews.  These things impact the wider world also, as Gentile believers in Yeshua (Jesus) our Messiah are grafted into the spiritual faith of Israel, from which flows the river of eternal life to all nations—the ancient promise to Abraham fulfilled.

Mark you, the poet’s pen is not filled with lifeless ink.  It is a sword of the Spirit of YHWH, and His vessel.  It is among the foremost weapons of the Apocalypse—if so be it have the wind of Heaven filling its sails, and speeding its missiles, even as Heaven’s power sped David’s stone into the brain of the giant.

In the spring of 1944, the Yiddish poet and partisan Avrom Sutzkever was airlifted into the unoccupied Soviet Union. With him he brought more than new information about the Holocaust. He brought a distinct approach to witnessing, one that summoned Soviet Jews, and refugees especially, to tell him their stories in response. Sutzkever’s testimony differed from other important testimonial publications that appeared in
the Soviet media at the time. In the latter, we find a stylistic and conceptual separation between the voice of Jewish victim and Jewish advocate, observer and interpreter of catastrophe. By contrast, Sutzkever’s work, the epic poem “Kol nidre” in particular, emphasizes dialogue and reciprocity among different witness perspectives. His writing also
ascribes dignity and poetic beauty to the voice of the Jewish victim from Poland-Lithuania. In this essay, these observations about Sutzkever’s writing are set in conversation with
epistolary responses to the author from Soviet Jewish refugees.

הצורך לתעד ולספר את קורות השואה מצא לו אפיקים שונים, המהווים בסיס לחקר התקופה ולשימור זיכרונה. שני המאמרים שלהלן עוסקים בסוג ייחודי של כתיבת זיכרונות מתקופת השואה, שטרם נחקר. מדובר ברבנים (או למדנים) ניצולי שואה, אשר העלו את זיכרונותיהם והגותם על השואה לא כיצירה בפני עצמה, אלא כמבוא לספר קודש שכתבו (חידושי תורה, ספרי הלכה, דרוש, מחשבה ופרשנות). המבוא כתוב בזיקה אל הספר, אך גם עומד בפני עצמו.
המאמר סוקר גם את מסד הנתונים שהפיקה המכללה ירושלים העוסק במבואות כטקסטים לחקר השואה.

This study explores the basic transformations of the Holocaust-memory in France on the basis of French fiction films that are to be identified as part of cinematography of the Holocaust. The chosen approach that can be described as a history of memory referring to models of collective memory in cultural science studies. The aim is to specify the change of collective memory at the level of the particular filmic narratives and - by doing so – to identify and to analyze the long term development and ruptures in the French culture of remembrance since 1945. 
The empiric part of this study is preceded by methodological reflections that on the one hand permit a clear and differentiating application of the terms used in the current cultural studies of collective memory. On the other hand this chapter should help to conceive the material of research “Fiction Film” as primal source for historical science. The investigation is divided into five chronological parts and involves altogether a sample of 50 films into the general study before electing cases for deeper analyses.
The first section (1945-69) which is generally well covered by the research to date is paying particular attention to the creation and the formation of different formations of collective memory in France, a process that has left its prints in the early films about the Holocaust. The focus is laid on the complex relationship of national memory and other political collective memories as well as particular social memories which is forming the background of the creation of a Holocaust-memory in a strict sense at the begin of the 1960ies.
The second – primarily concerning the 1970ies – section is dealing with a central momentum of modification of collective long term memory in France. The cinema of this period is to understand as prominent forum of discourses which does not only reflect the ongoing transformation from Résistance dominated memory into a Holocaust dominated memory but also significantly stimulating this shift. Film as one influencing value in a public-democratic sphere of collective memory is documenting on various (visual + narrative) levels the decline of the herocentric national remembrance towards a transnational victim based Holocaust memory. In the following third period which is located in the 1980ies and 1990ies this fundamental transformation is continuously specified and at the same time showing consequences. In the broader context of continuous medialization and politicization of the Holocaust on an international level the study is concentrating on three elements of the transformation in collective Holocaust remembrance: Universalization, Americanization and Victimization.
The fourth section is for a moment dislocating its focus, as it turns from the production of French film to the public and intellectual reception of the most successful international Holocaust films in the 1990ies as well as the continued dispute over the appropriate representation of the Holocaust.
The last part of the empiric part is locating and defining current tendencies in the filmic representation of the Holocaust in French cinema. The author is taking into account films presented until the year 2010.
Besides a general description of the sometimes very divergent evolution of the cinematic-taking reference to the Shoah in France, the study continues to relate selected examples to general phenomena of social intercourse with the past, especially the "Patrimonialisation" (Pierre Nora), and the Sacralization and the Re -politicization of history.
The diachronically oriented investigation - so far are sparse on the subject of research - and the wide coverage radius of empirical data prove - regarding the reconstruction and analysis of individual changes and constellations of collective memory formation - as very fruitful. Result of the present study is a extended and comprehensive history of the Holocaust Memory in France since 1945.

On February 12-13, 2020, the International Research Conference on Holocaust Remembrance and Representation was held in Stockholm, Sweden, arranged by the Inquiry on a Museum abou the Holocaust (Ku 2019:01). There, researchers from around the world met and discussed how to establish a museum about the Holocaust in Sweden, per the Swedish government's mandate in January 2019. This paper is an abstract of the first of two panel discussions held during the conference: "What is a Holocaust Museum?" As the title of the paper indicates, an overwhelming theme of this panel discussion was that a Holocaust museum should not only be a site of conservation, but also of conversation.

Im Jahr 2012 erwarb das Archiv der KZ-Gedenkstätte Mauthausen (AMM) eine Sammlung von insgesamt 74 Briefen eines Unteroffiziers des Kommandanturstabs im Konzentrationslager Mauthausen. Autor der Briefe ist der SS-Unterscharführer Karl Wurm, gerichtet sind sie an seine spätere Frau Friederike Lonauer. Die erworbenen Briefe umfassen eine Zeitspanne von fünf Jahren und sind von unterschiedlichen Stationen von Wurms Dienst in der SS aus geschrieben worden: Polen, Russland, Oranienburg, Linz und – schließlich – ein einzelner Brief aus dem US-amerikanischen Internierungslager Marcus W. Orr in Salzburg, besser bekannt als das Lager Glasenbach. Der Briefwechsel dokumentiert somit die Karriere des Unterscharführers Wurm in der SS über einen längeren Zeitraum hinweg und bettet seine Zugehörigkeit zum Kommandanturstab des KZ Mauthausen in einen breiteren historischen Zusammenhang ein.

“’Mein liebstes Weibi!’ Die Briefe des SS-Unterscharführers Karl Wurm an seine Frau”, en: Gregor Holzinger (Hg.), Die zweite Reihe. Täterbiografien aus dem Konzentrationslager Mauthausen. Viena, New Academic Press, 2016.

Im Gegensatz zu den Aktivitäten der Einsatzgruppen, die nach dem
Angriff auf die Sowjetunion am 22. Juni 1941 in Hunderten von Orten
Massenerschießungen von Juden durchgeführt haben, ist die Geschichte
der bereits im September 1939, nach dem Angriff auf Polen, operierenden Einsatzgruppen weniger bekannt. Die Herausgeber dieses Bandes versuchen, das zu ändern, indem sie sämtliche Berichte dieser Einheiten in einem durchaus gut edierten Band präsentieren. Damit zeigen sie unter anderem, dass beim Angriff auf Polen die Juden nicht das einzige Hauptziel des Terrors der Deutschen waren, sondern in etwa demselben Maße wie diese Polen und andere nichtdeutsche Zivilisten verfolgt und ermordet wurden. Die Angreifer haben sich besonders vor den polnischen Nationalisten und der katholischen Kirche gefürchtet.
Durch das Studium dieser Dokumente wird auch deutlich, dass der Judenmord erst nach einigen Monaten zur Hauptaufgabe der Besatzungspolitik geworden ist, wobei man den Einfluss des rassistischen Antisemitismus auf die Wahrnehmung des Kriegsgeschehens und das Handeln der Einheiten bereits im Herbst 1939 nicht unterschätzen sollte. Die Zahl der nach dem Angriff auf Polen ermordeten Zivilisten war zwar deutlich geringer als jener, die knapp zwei Jahre später von den in den sowjetischen Gebieten operierenden Einsatzgruppen erschossen wurden, sie war jedoch trotzdem erschreckend hoch. Die Herausgeber gehen davon aus, dass bis Frühjahr 1940 über 60.000 Personen im besetzen Polen ermordet wurden und dass die in sieben Einsatzgruppen hinter der Wehrmacht wirkenden etwa 2.700 Funktionäre an diesem Mord maßgeblich beteiligt waren.

Dorothee Wein, Volker Mall und Harald Roth dokumentieren 62 Jahre nach Ende der NS-Barbarei erstmals den Bau des Militärflughafens bei Hailfingen/Tailfingen, auf dessen Gelände später das Außenlager des KZ Natzweiler im Elsass errichtet wurde. Doch sie zeigen noch mehr. Sie folgen den Spuren von 1945 bis heute und beschreiben den Umgang der Justiz und der Bevölkerung mit den Verbrechen, die im Zusammenhang mit dem Bau des Flugplatzes und im KZ-Hailfingen/Tailfingen passierten.

"English summary: The interpretation of Dutch Jewish Council Records

The main question in this thesis is: how do we interpret historical documents if we do not know the exact context in which they were created? It is a basic question for researchers and it will be all the more important in the digital age if we want to secure digital sustainability. The problem is demonstrated from the example of the Jewish Council Records that are part of the Information Bureau archives, at the Red Cross in The Hague. On these paper index cards a large amount of personal and procedural information was recorded by staff of the Jewish Council during the occupation of the Netherlands. On the appr. 180000 cards nearly every individual Jewish person was registered individually. After the war, the same card system was used by the Netherlands Red Cross as a basis for tracing the victims and to determine their fate.

Recreating the context
If we want to read the information on the cards and understand the meaning of the scribbled notes, we have to recreate the procedures that created these records. The card in itself is only the end product of a complicated chain of administrative events in a paper bureaucracy. The procedures changed many times and were scarcely documented. This means that the paper network has to be reconstructed, that existed when the records were created. The implication is that all the archives that may hold key-information have to be analysed. In that way the context of the Jewish Council records can be reconstructed. Context is required to interpret the information on these records. There are two layers of context. The first is the archives of the Information Bureau of the Red Cross and consists of deportation lists, personal files and other collections that were connected tot the Jewish Council Records after the war. The second level are the external archives that hold context information are scattered all over the Netherlands, but are mainly at NIOD-Amsterdam, National Archives the Hague and in local municipal archives.

How to obtain robust digital sustainability
To obtain robust digital sustainability, a detailed analysis of the interconnection of all these files is necessary. This analysis should be part of the meta-data. The paper bureaucratic network has to be reconstructed, and the remaining context-carriers have to indentified. Isolated digitisation of complex systems like the Jewish Council Records will lead to digital representations that cannot be interpreted. This is in fact what happened already, when microfilmed copies of the Jewish Council Records were transferred to ITS-Arolsen in the 1950’s. This organisation provided copies to Yad Vashem. Now all these microfilms are digitised and made available to institutions like the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. These ‘orphaned’ digital files have no metadata attached about the creation, history and interrelations with other archives. Researchers will not be able to use the full potential of these files, because the context-environment was lost.
It is also argued that the new historian of the paperless information age will not understand the way a paper bureaucracy works. If this problem is not addressed, misunderstandings will arise interpreting the products of a paper bureaucracy: deportation list and file-card etc.

The thesis provides a detailed description of all the interrelations between internal (in the Red Cross Information Bureau archives) and external archives. It also analyses the way the German occupying authorities exerted their rule over the information that was provided to the Jewish council. The German authorities were conducting a war against the Jews and used their power to restrict the communication of the Jewish council and to destabilise the day-to-day practice of the Jewish council."

Statistical data and photographic portraits are two techniques of explanation frequently used to narrate both the magnitude and the specificity of mass death. Numbers offer a census of the dead while photographic portraits promise an intimate glimpse into the specificity of lives lost. This paper analyzes the use of photographic portraits
in an installation in the so-called Central Camp Sauna building at the
Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum (ABSM). I analyze the portraits as
objects whose meaning and uses have been structured by their history
of material transformations, including their material condition in
the ABSM installation. I argue that the material relations between the
portraits and the other aesthetic elements of the installation tether
the evidentiary function of the photographs to the symbolic task of
representing absent – and thus abstract – others. This tethering of
faces and narratives makes visible a tension between the one and the
many, documenting the specificity of individual victims as well as symbolizing both the broader losses of community and the collectivizing
character of mass violence.

Although some scholarship has discussed the argumentative tactics of Holocaust deniers and how they persuade some audiences to reject seemingly obvious factual events, no research has addressed how Holocaust survivors themselves confront this direct challenge to their lived experience. Using videotaped oral testimonies in the Shoah Foundation Institute’s Visual History Archive (the world’s largest such collection), this study examines how survivors meet the challenge of Holocaust denial in Germany and in the United States.
Close analysis of the argumentative tactics embedded in survivor testimony reveals that survivors craft narratives with richer dimensions than acknowledged in the twisted historiography of Holocaust denial. Survivors attest not only to the facticity of external events but also to affective memory, chronicling how they process and adapt to trauma. This affective dimension of testimony suggests that survivors’ narratives employ more complex layers of argumentation than simply claiming correspondence to particular historical incidents. [In press--upload coming soon!]