Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/25785648.2021.1899510
Heidi J. S. Tworek
ABSTRACT In Germany, far-right groups have revived Nazi terminology like Lügenpresse (lying press) or Systempresse (system press) to decry the media today. German politicians, journalists, and the public have turned to numerous methods to try to combat the reinsertion of Nazi language into everyday German life. One key method is the law. Prior to the 2017 German election, the German parliament swiftly passed the Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz (Network Enforcement Law, NetzDG for short). While English-language press has often called this act a hate speech law, it actually enforces 22 statutes of extant German speech law online. Spearheaded by the SPD-led Justice Ministry, NetzDG represented the most public effort by the German government to push back against the AfD, the far right, and the rise of hate speech in Germany. NetzDG attracted huge global attention as the first major law to fine American-based social media companies for not adhering to national statutes. This article examines why German politicians turned to law as a way to combat the rise of the far right. I explore how NetzDG represented German political understandings of the relationship between freedom of expression and democracy and argue that NetzDG followed a longer historical pattern of German attempts to use media law to raise Germany's profile on the international stage. The article examines the irony that NetzDG was meant to defend democracy in Germany, but may have unintentionally undermined it elsewhere, as authoritarian regimes like Russia seized upon the law to justify their own curtailments of free expression. Finally, I explain the difficulties of measuring whether NetzDG has achieved its goals and showcase a few other approaches to the problems of information in democracies.
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Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/25785648.2021.1904671
J. Ward
ABSTRACT The six contributions to Volume 35, Number 2 of The Journal of Holocaust Research (2021), ‘Confronting Hatred: Neo-Nazism, Antisemitism, and Holocaust Studies Today,’ were first presented at events organized by Janet Ward (University of Oklahoma) and Gavriel Rosenfeld (Fairfield University), including a seminar at a conference of the German Studies Association (October 2019, in Portland, Oregon), and a roundtable at the American Historical Association’s annual meeting (January 2020, in New York City). By inviting a group of German and American scholars to collaborate and explore the complicated continuities between the fascist past and today, amid the rise of populism, racism, antisemitism, and white ethno-nationalism in the United States, Germany, and beyond, we deepened our collective understanding of the connections and challenges for our teaching, scholarship, and public outreach. Mindful of the need for a more effective scholar-activist approach, this JHR special issue offers the first grouping of research emanating from our discussions; and our other, equally urgent focus, ‘Fascism in America, Past and Present,’ is currently a work-in-progress (coedited by Gavriel Rosenfeld and Janet Ward).
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Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/25785648.2020.1858584
Sandra Meiri, Odeya Kohen Raz
ABSTRACT This article proposes an historical reading of Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese, 2010) that weaves a complex and puzzling narrative, swaying between the protagonist's dreams and memories (his involvement as an American soldier in the liberation of Dachau and the reprisals carried out there) and his concocted fantasy of revenge and heroism as a US Marshal. The purpose of this fantasy is to veil the enormity of the trauma he suffered while encountering the dead victims of Dachau and the guilty conscience that stemmed from it. Through dreams, the film renders its protagonist's personal tragedy—a chain of events involving the death of his family, for which he feels guilty—and exploits his subjectivity to disquiet public consciousness regarding the United States' resistance to saving the Jews from their horrific and tragic fate under the Nazi regime. The protagonist's dreams and recollections of the Dachau reprisals are rendered as a sort of going back in time to remember, reflect, and wish that the US had acted differently, that US soldiers had arrived in time to save those who needed saving. This going back in time, employing every possible visual and aural device analogous to the dream work, or to a distorted memory, establishes an ethics that resonates with the Lacanian ethics of psychoanalysis according to which the subject must acknowledge her or his own desire to be able to make a free choice, and with the ethics of resentment à la resistance fighter and Auschwitz survivor Jean Améry, which opposes any kind of reconciliation, forgiveness, atonement, or even revenge. By criticizing historical and social indifference to the horrors of the Holocaust, the film also resists every ploy of narrative war films that center on themes of heroism, salvation, and redemption.
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Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/25785648.2020.1858583
J. Flaws
ABSTRACT Employing a model of spatial analysis that examines the smells, sights, and sounds emanating from the Treblinka death camp, I chart a ‘zone of sensory witnessing’ that extended beyond Treblinka’s boundaries for many kilometers into the surrounding countryside. This research vastly expands the number of known and potential witnesses to Treblinka by putting the voices of Jewish survivors, German camp personnel, and local Polish residents in conversation with one another. This methodology privileges the fact that each person within the zone of sensory witnessing, when stripped of their relative power dynamics, possessed a body capable of experiencing similar sensory phenomena, and I explore the recollections and testimonies of these individuals to describe the process by which sensory witnessing occurred both inside and outside the camp. Furthermore, how these witnesses interpreted what they experienced – as well as how this then affected, and often changed, their daily lives for the duration of the camp’s existence – provides another example of just how widely sites of atrocity in the Holocaust actually reached. Specifically, it shows how sensory witnessing during the Holocaust altered patterns of behavior, even for those witnesses not directly targeted during the genocide. More broadly, this research offers a counternarrative to Nazi imagery presenting death camps as isolated and clean killing factories; positing instead that the reality for anyone within the zone of sensory witnessing consisted of brutal, horrific sensory experiences that were universally unpleasant, invasive, and widespread. Above all, this case study serves as a reminder that historical spaces once existed as sites of vivid, multisensorial reality, and as a result, genocide never occurs in obscurity.
{"title":"Sensory Witnessing at Treblinka","authors":"J. Flaws","doi":"10.1080/25785648.2020.1858583","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785648.2020.1858583","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Employing a model of spatial analysis that examines the smells, sights, and sounds emanating from the Treblinka death camp, I chart a ‘zone of sensory witnessing’ that extended beyond Treblinka’s boundaries for many kilometers into the surrounding countryside. This research vastly expands the number of known and potential witnesses to Treblinka by putting the voices of Jewish survivors, German camp personnel, and local Polish residents in conversation with one another. This methodology privileges the fact that each person within the zone of sensory witnessing, when stripped of their relative power dynamics, possessed a body capable of experiencing similar sensory phenomena, and I explore the recollections and testimonies of these individuals to describe the process by which sensory witnessing occurred both inside and outside the camp. Furthermore, how these witnesses interpreted what they experienced – as well as how this then affected, and often changed, their daily lives for the duration of the camp’s existence – provides another example of just how widely sites of atrocity in the Holocaust actually reached. Specifically, it shows how sensory witnessing during the Holocaust altered patterns of behavior, even for those witnesses not directly targeted during the genocide. More broadly, this research offers a counternarrative to Nazi imagery presenting death camps as isolated and clean killing factories; positing instead that the reality for anyone within the zone of sensory witnessing consisted of brutal, horrific sensory experiences that were universally unpleasant, invasive, and widespread. Above all, this case study serves as a reminder that historical spaces once existed as sites of vivid, multisensorial reality, and as a result, genocide never occurs in obscurity.","PeriodicalId":422357,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Holocaust Research","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128831090","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}
Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/25785648.2020.1863637
Barnabas Balint
ABSTRACT This article develops a comprehensive understanding of the ways in which teenage Hungarian Jews responded to persecution in Auschwitz-Birkenau by examining survival mechanisms through the lens of young people and their accelerated development into adults. Rejecting traditional approaches that view young people as passive victims, it argues that they employed a variety of mechanisms more commonly associated with adults for survival, rooted in their fitness to work; the strength of their individual and collective memories, emotions, and imagination; and their ability to maintain and forge family and other relationships. Building on recent trends in Holocaust research exploring the complexities of Jewish agency, this article recognizes that each young person responded in his or her own individual way to the dehumanizing environment of Auschwitz-Birkenau. As such, there was no single, standard experience of persecution or survival for young people. There are, however, common themes that deserve closer examination, based on a wide range of first-hand survivor testimonies. Exploring these themes, not only does this article recognize the actions of young Hungarian Jews in Auschwitz-Birkenau, but it also seeks to reconceptualize survival by acknowledging both the physical and mental ways that were the domain of adults in normal times yet became the norm for young people in their mechanisms to cope in the camp. In doing so, it advances a more humane and subjective understanding of their experiences and builds a more accurate and realistic history of survival.
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Pub Date : 2020-10-01DOI: 10.1080/25785648.2020.1818421
Sara R. Horowitz
Sarah Kofman’s belated memoir, Rue Order, Rue Labat, narrates the experiences of a hidden Jewish child in Paris, living out the war in a vexed relationship with two mothers – her biological mother, a Polish immigrant and wife of an Orthodox rabbi, on the one hand; and a Catholic French woman who saves them, on the other. Reading the memoir alongside literary reflections by other child survivors, such as Aharon Appelfeld and Louis Begley, the article focuses on the snippets of literary, cinematic, and artistic analysis published elsewhere that Kofman has interpellated into the autobiographical details. Taken together, these critical readings and the personal narratives gesture towards the internalization and aftereffects of the Shoah for hidden children.
莎拉·科夫曼(Sarah kaufman)迟来的回忆录《秩序街，拉巴特街》(Rue Order, Rue Labat)讲述了一个隐藏在巴黎的犹太孩子的经历，她在与两个母亲的烦恼关系中度过了战争——她的生母是一位波兰移民，是一位东正教拉比的妻子;另一边是一位拯救他们的法国天主教妇女。阅读这本回忆录以及其他幸存儿童的文学反思，如Aharon Appelfeld和Louis Begley，这篇文章的重点是在其他地方发表的文学、电影和艺术分析的片段，这些片段是科夫曼在自传细节中提出的。总的来说，这些批判性的阅读和个人叙述表明了对隐藏儿童的大屠杀的内化和后果。
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Pub Date : 2020-10-01DOI: 10.1080/25785648.2020.1824321
L. Langer
ABSTRACT The essay offers a chronological account of my introduction to Holocaust reality, beginning with visits to Dachau in 1955, Mauthausen in 1963 and the main camp at Auschwitz and Auschwitz/Birkenau in 1964, at a time when little was known about the concentration camps and the gassing procedures in the deathcamps. The sites would not become tourist destinations for many years, and in fact at Dachau there were only two other visitors present and at Mauthausen and Auschwitz-Birkenau none. Such a sense of desolation is unrecapturable today, and I was forced to deal with the knowledge that I was standing alone on some of the largest cemeteries in Europe. I focus on how I slowly learned to absorb the magnitude of the catastrophe we call the Holocaust, especially the murder of European Jewry. Viewing the crematorium and small (unused) gas chamber at Dachau, standing inside the used one at Mauthausen, and contemplating the ruins of crematoria and gas chambers at Birkenau quickly teaches one the value and the limitations of the imagination in trying to conjure up the fate of the victims and the cruelty of their killers. I was helped in this endeavor by attending the war crimes trials in the summer of 1964 of SS General Karl Wolff in Munich and an array of Auschwitz personnel at their prolonged trial in Frankfurt. Listening to testimony from shattered survivors while sitting no more than fifty feet away from their tormentors, remorseless creatures like Oswald Kaduk and Wilhelm Boger, left me much to reflect on, and these comprise a large part of the essay. History was made more personal for me by these experiences, and they became an unforgettable foundation for what would eventually become a lifelong effort to find ways of challenging the validity of what still today is often referred to as an unimaginable experience.
{"title":"My Life with Holocaust Death","authors":"L. Langer","doi":"10.1080/25785648.2020.1824321","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785648.2020.1824321","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The essay offers a chronological account of my introduction to Holocaust reality, beginning with visits to Dachau in 1955, Mauthausen in 1963 and the main camp at Auschwitz and Auschwitz/Birkenau in 1964, at a time when little was known about the concentration camps and the gassing procedures in the deathcamps. The sites would not become tourist destinations for many years, and in fact at Dachau there were only two other visitors present and at Mauthausen and Auschwitz-Birkenau none. Such a sense of desolation is unrecapturable today, and I was forced to deal with the knowledge that I was standing alone on some of the largest cemeteries in Europe. I focus on how I slowly learned to absorb the magnitude of the catastrophe we call the Holocaust, especially the murder of European Jewry. Viewing the crematorium and small (unused) gas chamber at Dachau, standing inside the used one at Mauthausen, and contemplating the ruins of crematoria and gas chambers at Birkenau quickly teaches one the value and the limitations of the imagination in trying to conjure up the fate of the victims and the cruelty of their killers. I was helped in this endeavor by attending the war crimes trials in the summer of 1964 of SS General Karl Wolff in Munich and an array of Auschwitz personnel at their prolonged trial in Frankfurt. Listening to testimony from shattered survivors while sitting no more than fifty feet away from their tormentors, remorseless creatures like Oswald Kaduk and Wilhelm Boger, left me much to reflect on, and these comprise a large part of the essay. History was made more personal for me by these experiences, and they became an unforgettable foundation for what would eventually become a lifelong effort to find ways of challenging the validity of what still today is often referred to as an unimaginable experience.","PeriodicalId":422357,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Holocaust Research","volume":"44 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":"117184333","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}
Pub Date : 2020-10-01DOI: 10.1080/25785648.2020.1822624
Noah Shenker
ABSTRACT Lawrence Langer has played a foundational role in foregrounding the importance of examining Holocaust testimonies in their own right, as singularly textured personal remembrances, not only as historical sources to be read for their transcripts by historians and other scholars of the Holocaust. At its centre, Langer’s body of work over five decades emphasizes the anti-redemptive experiences and ‘choiceless choices’ of those who survived the Holocaust. He underscores how testimony can begin to reveal what life was like for witnesses under circumstances that systematically undermined moral and ethical values. Rather than imposing heroic or healing narratives on testimonies, his analytical approach is directed towards training our eyes and ears to how witnesses express the anguished, humiliated, and shattered aspects of their experiences. While it is impossible for anyone other than a survivor to fully comprehend what he or she went through, Langer makes the compelling case that interviewers and audiences are nonetheless obliged to try to understand survivors, all the while acknowledging the impossibility of doing so. In that sense, Langer foregrounds the paradoxical nature of giving and receiving testimonies. He advocates for modes of intimately conducting and interpreting testimonies with witnesses without being appropriative of their experiences; while deeply invested in receiving the testimonies of others, he nonetheless recognizes the experiential rift that separates witnesses from those who bear witness to their recollections. This essay foregrounds the importance of Langer’s explorations of the lacunae and tensions that mark testimonies, particularly as they manifest in the interplay between ‘common memory’ and ‘deep memory.’ Langer’s analysis of that dynamic profoundly shapes not only the ways we document and interpret testimonies of the Holocaust, but also those of other genocides.
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Pub Date : 2020-10-01DOI: 10.1080/25785648.2020.1820132
Gabriel N. Finder
One of the first publications of the Central Jewish Historical Commission (Centralna Żydowska Komisja Historyczna, CŻKH) in Poland after the Holocaust was a multilingual folio volume of photos, Zagłada żydostwa polskiego: Album zdjęć; Extermination of Polish Jews: Album of Pictures, published in 1946. This article aspires to recover this relatively unknown album from near-oblivion and situate it in the history of Holocaust photography while shedding light on its distinguishing features. Most of the album's photos were taken by German photographers. With this in mind, the author argues that the aim of the album's editor, Gerzon Taffet, and the CŻKH was to use German-produced photos in their possession, with all of their inherent limitations, to document Nazi anti-Jewish crimes in Poland and to bring an international mass audience, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, closer to the horrors of the Nazi persecution and murder of Polish Jews. At the end of the album, however, Taffet and the CŻKH inserted photos taken by Jews that extol Jewish resistance in an attempt to subvert the ‘German gaze’ that permeates the album with the ‘Jewish gaze.’
大屠杀后，中央犹太历史委员会(Centralna Żydowska Komisja Historyczna, CŻKH)在波兰的首批出版物之一是多语言的对开本摄影集，Zagłada żydostwa polskiego: Album zdjęć;《灭绝波兰犹太人:画册》，1946年出版。这篇文章渴望从几乎被遗忘中恢复这张相对不为人知的专辑，并将其置于大屠杀摄影的历史中，同时揭示其独特的特征。相册中的大部分照片都是由德国摄影师拍摄的。考虑到这一点，作者认为，该相册的编辑Gerzon Taffet和CŻKH的目的是利用他们拥有的德国制作的照片，尽管这些照片存在固有的局限性，来记录纳粹在波兰的反犹太罪行，并使国际大众，犹太人和非犹太人，更接近纳粹迫害和谋杀波兰犹太人的恐怖。但是，在相册的最后，塔菲特和CŻKH插入了犹太人拍摄的赞美犹太人抵抗的照片，试图用“犹太人的凝视”颠覆弥漫在相册中的“德国凝视”。
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Pub Date : 2020-10-01DOI: 10.1080/25785648.2020.1829822
J. Geddes
ABSTRACT In this paper, I explore Primo Levi’s command to his readers to ‘consider if’ the Muselmann is still a human, suggesting that such consideration requires an ongoing bracketing of resolution of the question it raises. Next I draw a connection between the bracketing of judgment of camp inmates that both Levi and Lawrence Langer call for, in Levi’s idea of ‘the gray zone’ and Langer’s idea of ‘choiceless choice.’ While the terms point to different phenomena, they share the idea that while we must dwell on and consider the testimonies of the camps, we are in no position to pass judgment on those who were there. Finally I turn to Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz to argue that while Agamben’s book offers perhaps the most sustained reflection on the Muselmann in print, and might be seen as fulfilling Levi’s command to ‘consider if,’ he refuses to bracket resolution of the question of the Muselmann’s humanity and merges the conflicting options Levi commands us to continue considering.
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