Holocaust Literature

Course Overview

Course Description: In this course, you will learn about anti-semitism and the underlying causes and impacts that led to and resulted in the German persecution and annihilation of Jews and other “undesirable” people. Despite the horrific circumstances imposed by the German government, the human spirit found expression in artistic efforts in art, music and literature. You will gain an appreciation for the role that the arts, and literature in particular, can play in explaining and understanding the human condition and the ability of people to endure even the most severe hardship. Highly Recommended (not required): At least one study of literature This course was previously CUL-224354 Literature of the Holocaust.

Learning Outcomes: 

Required Reading:

Module 2

Summary: "Night offers a personal and unforgettable account of the appalling horrors of Hitler's reign of terror. Through the eyes of 14-year-old Eliezer, we behold the tragic fate of the Jews from the little town of Sighet. Even as they are stuffed into cattle cars bound for Auschwitz, the townspeople refuse to believe rumors of anti-Semitic atrocities. Not until they are marched toward the blazing crematory at the camp's "reception center" does the terrible truth sink in."(Source).


Module 3

Summary: "Maus recounts the horrors that the author’s father faced during the Holocaust and how he survived with the Jews protrayed [sic] as mice and the Nazis as menacing cats. It also weaves in the story of a fraught relationship between the two men and the legacy of generational trauma"(Source). 


Module 4

Summary: A memoir of Primo Levi's firsthand account of surviving the Nazi concentration camp, Auschwitz.

Summary: A biographical account of Irena Sendler, a young social worker in Warsaw, who rescued 2,500 children in Poland during World War II.



Optional Readings

Summary - "Victor Klemperer's diaries brings to light one of the most extraordinary documents of the Nazi period. The son of a rabbi, Klemperer was by 1933 a professor of languages at Dresden. Over the next decade he, like other German Jews, lost his job, his house and many of his friends.Throughout, he remained loyal to his country, determined not to emigrate, and convinced that each successive Nazi act against the Jews must be the last. Saved for much of the war from the Holocaust by his marriage to a gentile, he was able to escape in the aftermath of the Allied bombing of Dresden and survived the remaining months of the war in hiding. Throughout, Klemperer kept a diary. Shocking and moving by turns, it is a remarkable and important document"(Source).

Summary - "Sparking a flurry of heated debate, Hannah Arendt’s authoritative and stunning report on the trial of German Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann first appeared as a series of articles in The New Yorker in 1963. This revised edition includes material that came to light after the trial, as well as Arendt’s postscript directly addressing the controversy that arose over her account. A major journalistic triumph by an intellectual of singular influence, Eichmann in Jerusalem is as shocking as it is informative—an unflinching look at one of the most unsettling (and unsettled) issues of the twentieth century" (Source).


Assignments and Grading Scale


Grading scale

95.00 - 100.00 = A
90.00 - 94.99 = A-
86.00 - 89.99 = B+
83.00 - 85.99 = B
80.00 - 82.99 = B-
76.00 - 79.99 = C+
73.00 - 75.99 = C
70.00 - 72.99 = C-
67.00 - 69.99 = D+
64.00 - 66.99 = D
60.00 - 63.99 = D-
59.99 and under = F


Course Modules 

Note - Content is available for the individual modules when you click on the "v" icon after the title of the module

Module 1 - Defining Anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and an Introduction to Holocaust Literature

Module Outcomes:


"Authors who first wrote about the Holocaust were almost always victims of National Socialist persecution. Their texts usually took the form of diaries or letters. When they were written, the authors very rarely intended them to be published. Often, they appeared in published form after the end of the Second World War and, in many cases, after the writer had been killed in a Nazi camp or ghetto"(Source)


What is Antisemitism?

Antisemitism is not limited to the Holocaust.  Hatred of Jews is something that is occurring today across the world as well as going back thousands of years.  We will be contextualizing antisemitism in this course to what is discussed in the various genres of literature that you will read situated in one way or another with the Holocaust.

The two videos to the right from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.  Watching those videos will help provide you with a brief overview of some of the current incidents of violent attacks on Jews and some of the more "subtle" examples of what antisemitism is, and the other provides a history of antisemitism.

Overview of the Holocaust 


Optional Materials - Understanding the Holocaust:

Museum Sites (take some time to explore their virtual collections) and consider the major themes and/or collections that interest you and could inform your final paper for the course as well as the other modules.


What is Holocaust Literature?

As the quote at the top of this module explains, much of the literature of the Holocaust comes from diaries and letters - first person accounts of their experiences and thoughts before, during, and after the Holocaust. Literature of the Holocaust can also be from different genres and approaches to depicting the Holocaust experience.

"Literary responses to the Holocaust have significantly shaped global awareness of the Holocaust. While authors like Anne Frank, Elie Wiesel, and Primo Levi are household names, their works represent a small portion of a large archive of narrative responses to the genocide. These texts are written in dozens of languages and in numerous countries around the world" (Source).

Much of what you will read will cover sensitive topics and horrific accounts of the atrocities of the Holocaust. It may be difficult at times to read or view the course materials.  

Studying literature of the Holocaust is important for us to explore how art can emerge from horrific situations as well as appreciate the force of the human spirit which can find expression in the face of pain, suffering and death. Understanding the role of literature in helping us come to grips with the issues we face in other facets of our lives is powerful not only in the past but also in the context of current day issues. 

Another reason to study literature of the Holocaust is tied to one of the Nazi's book burning as part of their deliberate attempt to censor ideas in the books that did not align with the tenets of the Nazi regime. The video to the right, a Holocaust survivor and two historians discuss the book burnings and why literature is often targeted. 


Assignment 

No written assignment for this module.  This is designed to be an introduction to concepts and the basis of our first conversation.  After you have reviewed the content in this module (ideally within the first 2 weeks of the term), we will meet to discuss the content and the next modules and the parameters of the final project.


Module 2 - Diaries & Memoirs


"Jewish diaries were not always recognized as critical sources for the study of the Holocaust. Due to an early focus on perpetrators and official documents when the field of Holocaust studies first began, researchers tended to dismiss Jewish diaries as subjective and unreliable. But in recent decades, many scholars have shown how these concerns about personal diaries can be used to add valuable details to official accounts of events" (Source).

The Diary of Anne Frank is probably the most widely read and known diary of the Holocaust not only through the publication of the diary in 1947 by her father, Otto Frank, in the original Dutch and the title Her Achterhuis. You can find out more about the diary from a 1967 interview with Otto Frank about midway down the webpage under the heading "Anne's Wish Comes True".  For our course, there is an optional diary to read, but the focus will be on Elie Wiesel's seminal work, Night.

If this topic is of interest to you for your final project, you could consider reading and researching some of the diaries and memoirs listed on the Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust or the student guide to Holocaust diaries or this  collection of diaries from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.


Required Reading

Summary: "Night offers a personal and unforgettable account of the appalling horrors of Hitler's reign of terror. Through the eyes of 14-year-old Eliezer, we behold the tragic fate of the Jews from the little town of Sighet. Even as they are stuffed into cattle cars bound for Auschwitz, the townspeople refuse to believe rumors of anti-Semitic atrocities. Not until they are marched toward the blazing crematory at the camp's "reception center" does the terrible truth sink in."(Source).


Optional Reading

Summary - "Victor Klemperer's diaries brings to light one of the most extraordinary documents of the Nazi period. The son of a rabbi, Klemperer was by 1933 a professor of languages at Dresden. Over the next decade he, like other German Jews, lost his job, his house and many of his friends. Throughout, he remained loyal to his country, determined not to emigrate, and convinced that each successive Nazi act against the Jews must be the last. Saved for much of the war from the Holocaust by his marriage to a gentile, he was able to escape in the aftermath of the Allied bombing of Dresden and survived the remaining months of the war in hiding. Throughout, Klemperer kept a diary. Shocking and moving by turns, it is a remarkable and important document"(Source).


Assignment 

This will be the first critical analysis paper. Please consider the questions below to help you frame your analysis.


Module 3 - Poetry & Graphic Novels

"To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric." - Theodor Adorno from 1949 Cultural Criticism and Society and later "Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as the tortured have to scream… hence it may have been wrong to say that no poem could be written after Auschwitz” (Negative Dialectics, 1966).

"Poetry after the Holocaust has but one mission: to give reality to the unimaginable and existence to the dead in the memory and actions of the living" (Source).


When we consider the atrocities of the Holocaust, it might seem that the genre of poetry and the format of a graphic novel might not be appropriate literary devices to engage in such difficult topics. Is poetry and illustration simply too “beautiful” to be an appropriate medium for an engagement with the Holocaust? Is a graphic novel, basically a novel in comic strip format, a good vehicle to explore the Holocaust?  In this module, you will exclusively read and analyze poetry written before and after the Holocaust as well as read the graphic novel Maus by the son of a Holocaust survivor.  


Poetry

"Death Fugue" (Todesfuge) by Paul Celan (pseudonym for Paul Antschel) was one of the first poems about the Nazi camps to be published and is available online for free from the Poets.org.

“First They Came” by Martin Niemöller was really part of a confessional prose speech but is often thought of as a poem. It is available online from many different sources since there are many variations of the different groups for whom they came.  You can read it from the Amnesty International site. You might also want to read "Ovid in the Third Reich" by Geoffrey Hill.

"Bread" by Władysław Szlengel was written in 1941 and is available for free online. His other poem "Final Exams" was written around the same time and is available for free online.

"I Never Saw Another Butterfly" by Hana Volavkova is a collection of works of art and poetry by Jewish children who lived in the concentration camp Theresienstadt. Available for free online in this PDF.

"Never Shall I Forget" Elie Wiesel is available online from the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust.

"After Auschwitz" by Anne Sexton was written in 1973 and is available online from All Poetry.


Graphic Novels

Maus: A Survivor's Tale, is a graphic novel by American cartoonist Art Spiegelman, serialized from 1980 to 1991. It depicts Spiegelman interviewing his father about his experiences as a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor. The work employs postmodern techniques, and represents Jews as mice and other Germans and Poles as cats and pigs respectively. Critics have classified Maus as memoir, biography, history, fiction, autobiography, or a mix of genres. In 1992 it became the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize. 

Maus is not the only graphic novel about the Holocaust.  If this literary format is something that you would like to further explore, others can be found as part of different library collections.

Required Reading

Summary: "Maus recounts the horrors that the author’s father faced during the Holocaust and how he survived with the Jews protrayed [sic] as mice and the Nazis as menacing cats. It also weaves in the story of a fraught relationship between the two men and the legacy of generational trauma"(Source). 


Assignment

Consider some of the themes of identity; documentation of life in the ghettos/prisons/camps; oppression, discrimination, and persecution; genocide; roles - victim, persecutor, bystanders, survivors, or other themes that strike you and compare/analyze how these themes are expressed in the graphic novel and poems that you read for this module.  

Module 4 - Postwar Literature - 1st and 2nd Generation 



"The children of Holocaust survivors struggled to understand their parents’ trauma, but at the same time were affected by it. Second-generation literature often reflects this sense of inherited trauma. Marianne Hirsch calls this “postmemory”. Second-generation authors push out the boundaries of literature by combining different literary forms or subverting genre expectations" (Source).


Survivor accounts those of the children of survivors (also known as second generation survivors) are powerful and moving.  In the previous modules, you have read works from both the survivors and their children. In this module, you will look at post war accounts written that span the time of the Holocaust and also the after effects.  You will read both memoir and biography in this section and consider how the telling of these two different perspectives and genres influences the way(s) in which you have come to learn more about the literary approaches and themes of the Holocaust. It is important to note that memory and representation as well as family and individual survivor trauma play a very large role in the shaping and telling of these stories.


Required Readings

Summary: A memoir of Primo Levi's firsthand account of surviving the Nazi concentration camp, Auschwitz, and the guilt he felt.

Summary: A biographical account of Irena Sendler, a young social worker in Warsaw, who rescued 2,500 children in Poland during World War II.



Assignment

Consider the generational accounts and perspectives on the Holocaust.  How do the accounts by survivors and children of survivors align/diverge? You may draw on not only the books in this module but also the books and poems in the other modules to help you address this question. You might also consider the roles of not only survivors but also of those who were helpers, bystanders, and perpetrators as described in the works you have read.


Find out more about the Last Folio Art Exhibit from this PBS News Hour video.  

Module 5 - Individual Exploration of Holocaust Literature

This module will be built based upon your interests and individual research for your final paper.