Seminar schedule The Holocaust: An Integrative History hi31Z

Seminar schedule

The Holocaust: An Integrative History HI31Z

Dr Anna Hájková

Room H325

[e-mail]

Books recommended for purchase:

Doris Bergen, The Holocaust: A Concise History (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009).

Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final

Solution in Poland (New York: HarperPerennial, 1993).

Jan Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne Poland

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

Marion Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1999).
Film we will watch:

Grey Zone (2001)

Outline:
1. October 6: Introduction: What was the Holocaust and why does one study it?

Primo Levi, If This Is a Man (another edition is named Survival in Auschwitz), motto poem.

Ruth Klüger, Still alive: A Holocaust girlhood remembered (Feminist Press: New York, 2001), ch. The camps.

Hayden White, “Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth,” in Probing the Limits of Representation, ed. Saul Friedländer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992): 37-53.

(Saul Friedländer, Introduction, in Ibid, pp. 1-21.)
2. October 13: Antisemitism and Jews and Gentiles in Nazi Germany

Bergen, ch. 1.

Kaplan, ch. 1 and 2 (pp. 17-73).

Excerpts from Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933-1941 (New York: Random House, 1999), selection.

3. October 20: Emigration and refugees

Kaplan, ch. 5.

Presentation: selected articles from Sybille Quack, ed. Between Sorrow and Strength: Women Refugees of the Nazi Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
4. October 27: Persecution of social outsiders and murder of the disabled

Michael Burleigh, “Psychiatry, German Society and the Nazi “Euthanasia” Programme,” in The Holocaust: Origins, Implementation, Aftermath, ed. Omer Bartov (London: Routledge, 2000): 43-62.

Beth Griech-Pollele, “Image of a Churchman-Resister: Bishop von Galen, the Euthanasia Project and the Sermons of Summer 1941,” Journal of Contemporary History 36,1 (2001).
Presentation: Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).
5. November 3: Pioneers of the Genocide [will be rescheduled]

Susanne Heim/Götz Aly, Architects of Annihilation: Auschwitz and the Logic of Destruction, selection

Presentation: Götz Aly, Final solution: Nazi population policy and the murder of the European Jews, transl. Allison Brown and Belinda Cooper (London: Arnold, 1999).
6. November 10: no class, reading week
7. November 17: Operation Barbarossa, barbarization of warfare, and the emergence of the Final Solution

Christian Gerlach, “The Wannsee Conference, the Fate of German Jews, and Hitler's Decision in Principle to Exterminate All European Jews,” Journal of Modern History 70,4 (1998): 759-812.

Browning, Ordinary Men, selection
Presentation: Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann, War of extermination : the German Military in World War II, 1941-1944 (New York: Berghahn, 2000).
8. November 24: The local populations and persecution of Jews [date will change]

Jan Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne Poland

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

Jan Grabowski, “Rural Society and the Jews in Hiding: Elders, Nights Watches, Firefighters, Hostages and Manhunts,” Yad Vashem Studies 40 (2012).

Bergen, pp. 119-127.
Presentation: for instance Barbara Lambauer, Otto Abetz et les Francais, ou l’envers de la Collaboration (Paris: Fayard, 2001)
9. December 1: Jewish Councils

Isaiah Trunk, Judenrat: the Jewish councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi occupation (New York: Stein and Day, 1977).

Essays from Dan Diner, Beyond the conceivable: Studies on Germany, Nazism, and the Holocaust (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
Presentation: Beate Meyer, A Fatal Balancing Act: The Dilemma of the Reich Association of Jews in Germany, 1939-1945 (New York/Oxford, Berghahn: 2013).
10. December 5: Field Trip to London
11. January 12: Ghettos and everyday life

Eva Mändlova-Roubíčková, We're Alive and Life Goes On: A Theresienstadt Diary, trans by Zaia Alexander (New York: H. Holt, 1998), entries for 1941-1943 (scanned and circulated)

Anna Hájková, “Sexual Barter in Times of Genocide: Negotiating the Sexual Economy of the Theresienstadt Ghetto,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 38, no. 3 (spring 2013): 503-533
12. January 19: Sexual Violence: Stories and Silences

Doris Bergen, “Sexual Violence in the Holocaust: Unique and Typical?” in Lessons and Legacies VII: The Holocaust in International Perspective, ed. Dagmar Herzog (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2006): 179-201.

Monika Flaschka, “Only Pretty Women Were Raped:” The Effect of Sexual Violence on Gender Identities in the Concentration Camps in Sexual Violence Against Jewish Women During the Holocaust, eds. Sonja M. Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2010): 77-93.
Presentation: essays by Robert Sommer and Regina Mühlhäuser in Dagmar Herzog, ed. Brutality and Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe's Twentieth Century (New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

Elizabeth Heinemann, Sexuality and Nazism, JSH.

13. January 26: Prisoner society in the camps

Nikolaus Wachsmann, “The dynamics of destruction: The development of the concentration camps, 1933-1945,” in Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany: The New Histories, Jane Caplan and Nikolaus Wachsmann, eds. (London & New York: Routledge, 2009): 17-43.

Jane Caplan, “Gender and the Concentration Camps,” in Caplan/Wachsmann, pp. 82-107.

Liana Millu, Smoke over Birkenau (New York: Jewish Publication Society, 1991): 177-197.

Memoir?
Presentation:

Hermann Langbein, People in Auschwitz

or

Jorge Semprún, What a Beautiful Sunday! (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982).

Film: Grey Zone
14. February 2: Perpetrators and guards

Sereny, Into that Darkness: An Examination of Conscience (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), selection

Presentation: Elissa Mailänder, book
15. February 9: Resistance

Hermann Langbein, People in Auschwitz (Chapel Hill: University of North Caroline Press & USHMM, 2003): ch. Resistance (240-272).

Lenore Weitzman, Women of Courage: The Kashariyot (Couriers) in the Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust, in Lessons and Legacies VI, ed. Jeffry Diefendorf (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996): 112-154.
Presentation: Gad Beck, An Underground life: Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin, trans. Allison Brown (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999).

OR

Nechama Tec, Defiance: The Bielski Partisans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).

16. February 16: no class, reading week
17. February 23: Mixed marriages and people with mixed background

Beate Meyer, “The Mixed Marriage: A Guarantee of Survival or a Reflection of German Society during the Nazi Regime?” in Probing the depths of German antisemitism: German society and the persecution of the Jews, 1933-1941 ed. David Bankier (New York: Berghahn, 2000): 54-77.

Selection from Klemperer diaries.

Ingeborg Hecht, Invisible Walls: A German Family Under the Nuremberg Walls, trans. J. Maxwell Brownjohn (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), selection.

Presentation: Nathan Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Berlin (New York: Norton, 1996).
18. March 2: Persecution of homosexuals

Geoffrey J. Giles, “‘The Most Unkindest Cut of All’: Castration, Homosexuality, and Nazi Justice.” Journal of Contemporary History 27, no. 1 (1992): 41-61.

Wolfgang Röll, “Homosexual Inmates in the Buchenwald Concentration Camp.” Journal of Homosexuality 31, no. 4, (1996): 1-28.

Wanda Półtawska, And I am afraid of my dreams, trans. Mary Craig (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1987), selection

Clips of video interviews from the University of Southern California Visual History Foundation.
Presentations:

Insa Eschebach, ed., Homophobie und Devianz (Berlin: Metropol, 2012).

19. March 9: Going into Hiding

Kaplan, ch. 8.

Marie Jalowicz Simon, Gone to the Ground (London: Clerkenwell Press, 2015).
Presentation: Richard Lutjens, Jews in Hiding in Nazi Berlin, 1941-1945 (PhD Dissertation, Northwestern University, 2012.)
20. March 16: Artistic representation: Film

Sara Horowitz, “But is it Good for the Jews? Spielberg's Schindler and the Aesthetics of Atrocity,” in Spielberg's Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler's List ed. Yosefa Loshitsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997): 119-139.

Village Voice review of the film
Presentation: Lassner, Mintz

(last meeting of the spring term)

21. April 26: Artistic representation: Literature

Art Spiegelmann, Maus, volume one

Marianne Hirsch, “The Generation of Postmemory,” Poetics Today 29:1 (Spring 2008).

(or alternative)

22. May 3: Revision session