Seminar schedule
The Holocaust: An Integrative History HI31Z
Dr Anna Hájková
Room H325
Please note: Weeks nrs denote the actual term weeks!
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 5: 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.
2. October 12: 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 19: Emigration and refugees
Kaplan, ch. 5.
selected articles from Sybille Quack, ed. Between Sorrow and Strength: Women Refugees of the Nazi Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Rose Holmes and Laura Brade, “Troublesome Sainthood: Nicholas Winton and the Contested History of Child Rescue in Prague, 1938–1940,” History and Memory, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2017), pp. 3-40
Presentation, Rachel Pistol, Internment During the Second World War A Comparative Study of Great Britain and the USA (London: Bloomsbury, 2017).
Group 1 Sophie
Group 2 Daisy
5. November 2: Persecution of social outsiders, Sinti and Roma, 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.
Sibyl Milton, “Gypsies and the Holocaust,” History Teacher, 24,4 (Aug., 1991): 375-387.
Presentation: Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).
Group 2 Hayley
Group 3 Jason, Emma
6. November 9: no class, reading week
7. November 16: Medicine
Volker Rölcke, “Sulfonamide Experiments on Prisoners in Nazi Concentration Camps: Coherent Scientific Rationality Combined with Complete Disregard of Humanity,” S. Rubenfeld and S. Benedict, eds, Human Subjects Research after the Holocaust, 51-65.
Sari Siegel, “Treating an Auschwitz Prisoner-Physician: The Case of Dr. Maximilian Samuel,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 28,3 (2014): 450-481.
Paul Weindling, “The Origins of Informed Consent: The International Scientific Commission on Medical War Crimes, and the Nuremberg Code,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 75, 1, (Spring 2001): 37-71
Group 2 Taylor
Group 3 Dan, Paul Weindling, Victims and Survivors of Nazi Human Experiments: Science and Suffering in the Holocaust
Also group 3, Carwyn, Weindling, ed., From Clinic to Concentration Camp
8. November 23: 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.
Christopher 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).
Group 1 Stephen, Jo Ann
Group 2 Sophie
Group 3 Chris
9. November 30: The local populations and persecution of Jews
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: Barbara Lambauer/James Ward/etc
Group 1 Joss, Lambauer
Group 2 Chloe, Lambauer
Group 3 Adam
10. December 4: Field Trip to London
11. January 11: 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).
Group 2 Ruby
Group 3 Adie
12. January 18: 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
Alexandra Garbarini, “Family correspondents,” Numbered Days: Diaries and the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), ch. 4
presentation Isaiah Trunk, Lodz Ghetto
group 1 Rebecca
group 2 Megan
group 3 Matt
13. January 25: 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, JHS.
2017 issue of JHS
Zoe Waxman
Group 1 Kelly Alexia
Group 2 Zoe and Grace
14. February 1: 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
Group 1 Bronwyn
Group 2 Molly Bes
(Jorge Semprún, What a Beautiful Sunday! (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982).)
Film: Grey Zone
15. February 8: Perpetrators and guards
Sereny, Into that Darkness: An Examination of Conscience (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), selection
Presentation: Elissa Mailänder, book
Group 1 Alice
Group 2 Georgia
Group 3 Harrison
16. February 15: no class, reading week
17. February 22: 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).
Group 1 Joss
Group 2 Conor, Nechama Tec
Group 3 Cian
18. March 1: 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).
OR
Bryan Mark Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers
Group 1 Penny
Group 2 Molly Bra, Stoltzfus
Group 3 Leon
19. March 8: 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).
Group 2 Jennie
20. March 15: 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.)
Group 1 Laura
Group 2 Sarah
Group 3 Parina
21. April 22: 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)
Group 1 Hannah, Libby Saxton, Haunted Images.
Group 3 Jony, Lindeperg
22. May 2: Artistic representation: Literature
Art Spiegelmann, Maus
23. May 9: Revision session
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