Pub Date : 2020-10-01DOI: 10.1080/25785648.2020.1832311
B. Langford
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.
劳伦斯·兰格(Lawrence Langer)在其1983年的论文《舞台和银幕上大屠杀的美国化》(The Americanization of The Holocaust on Stage and Screen)中提出了一个论点，该论点随后被众多学者扩展和放大，即大屠杀在美国文化中被确立为一个中心“位置”，特别是在主流小说和戏剧表现形式中，它在一种广泛肯定的文化话语中得到了恢复，这种文化话语决定性地(如果不是倾向地)发现了救赎。个人能动性和历史事件中的道德意义这些概念不仅不适用，而且无关紧要。因此，“美国化大屠杀”需要一个“范畴错误”，促使美国大屠杀的表现提供意义——关于宽容和民主政治的公民教训，面对激进邪恶的人类社会宣言，等等——主要与美国公众和政治文化的意识形态偏好有关，其修复倾向总是倾向于崩溃为媚俗。兰格认为，古德里奇-哈克特/史蒂文斯改编的《安妮日记》和1978年的迷你剧《大屠杀》是大屠杀美国化的关键载体;斯皮尔伯格的《辛德勒的名单》(1993)在最近的作品中占据了中心位置。本文将兰格的原始主张(以美国人文主义文学批评传统为基础)与随后提出的“美国化论点”的更深远的主张进行了区分，并将他的立场与最近的学者的观点进行了对比，后者认为大屠杀的表现将不同意见和自我批评引入了美国生活，而不是肯定的;或者美国大众艺术的范例，如好莱坞电影，实际上比兰格认为的更复杂、更多元。本文认为昆汀·塔伦蒂诺的《无耻混蛋》(2009)是一部重新定义流行电影标准的作品，其具体目标是拆除纳粹种族意识形态、种族灭绝暴力、暴政和虐待狂与“美国”价值观之间的防火墙——最终以彻底修改兰格原始构想的方式“美国化”大屠杀。
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Pub Date : 2020-10-01DOI: 10.1080/25785648.2020.1821525
Joanne Weiner Rudof
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.
本文追溯了劳伦斯·兰格(Lawrence L. Langer)职业生涯的演变，从美国文学教授开始，到他转向大屠杀文学，并最终被公认为世界上最重要的大屠杀文学和大屠杀视频证词学者之一。他在大屠杀艺术、媒体和历史方面的专业知识也包括在内。平行历史的成立，成长和发展的耶鲁大学的福图诺夫视频档案大屠杀证词进行了审查。讨论了兰格和福图诺夫视频档案之间的共生关系，以及两者对大屠杀研究领域的影响和贡献。
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Pub Date : 2020-10-01DOI: 10.1080/25785648.2020.1820133
Dawn Skorczewski, D. Stone
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.’
Jan Karski是波兰流亡政府的信使，他秘密进入华沙犹太区和伊兹比卡中转营，观察那里的苦难。他仔细记录了他的访问，周游世界，告诉各国领导人他所看到的。卡斯基是大屠杀最重要的目击者之一，他的经历被无数次记录在案。然而，到目前为止，还没有对Karski的访谈进行比较研究。卡斯基的英雄故事版本在多大程度上有所不同?这有关系吗?这个案例告诉我们关于大屠杀“名人见证”的什么?在本文中，我们追溯了一个众所周知的大屠杀故事的变化，以说明即使是一个非常完善的故事，分为三个完善的小故事，也会因收集叙述的存档机构和进行每次采访的采访者而发生重大变化。我们的调查显示了档案对口述证词和叙事历史的影响。这些影响总是口头证词设置的一部分，但在像Karski这样的知名受访者的情况下，他们在不同的背景下作证了很多次，他们尤其明显。在17年的时间里，在非常不同的机构和一般的环境中，Karski的证词说明了内部的异质性，这是他作为一个人、一个知识分子和一个证人的发展所不可或缺的，以及“外部”的异质性，这是由采访机构和采访者的方法塑造的。我们从大屠杀证词的“接触区”研究Karski采访的制作，以确定他的故事细节如何随着听众的变化而变化。尽管有人认为卡斯基的“表演”随着时间的推移变得越来越呆板，但我们发现恰恰相反:他变得更加活跃，自信，并且在他最后一次采访时，准备好完全扮演“名人证人”的角色。
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Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/25785648.2020.1782067
Michael Becker, D. Bock
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Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/25785648.2020.1785086
Markus Streb, Ole Frahm
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.
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Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/25785648.2020.1794608
Michael Becker, D. Bock
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.
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Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/25785648.2020.1785671
Imke Hansen
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.
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Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/25785648.2020.1785089
Bożena Shallcross
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.
{"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}
Pub Date : 2020-04-02DOI: 10.1080/25785648.2020.1742497
Nathalie Ségeral
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.
{"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}
Pub Date : 2020-04-02DOI: 10.1080/25785648.2020.1741853
H. Duffy
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.
{"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}
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