Holocaust
Studies: A Journal of Culture and History
Abstracts of articles in Issue 12.3
- Judith Woolf, Throwing Down
the Screen of Literature: Can Criticism Engage with Genocide?
- This article argues that a literary equivalent
to Roland Barthes’ punctum
might play a part (albeit a brief and inevitably in some sense fictive
part) in enabling us to throw down the screen of literature which
helps to shield us from the immediacy of realities ‘so utterly outside
our experience ’.
- Ruth Gilbert, Ever After: Postmemory, Fairy Tales and the Body
in Second-Generation Memoirs by Jewish Women
- This article focuses on four recent texts that
raise questions about the relationship between memory and, in Marianne
Hirsch’s
term, ‘postmemory’, for the children of Jewish Holocaust
survivors, the so called ‘second generation’. Readings of
Anne Karpf’s The War After (1996), Lisa Appignanesi’s Losing
the Dead (1999), Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation (1998) and Hoffman’s
recent meditation on Holocaust memory, After Such Knowledge (2005) form
the basis of this discussion. Each text addresses how the past shapes
a sense of self but they also all problematise the idea that memory constitutes
a secure way of understanding one’s own story. They thereby create
narratives of the self that recognise the often provisional, unstable
nature of both memory and subjectivity. This article reflects on
these themes by exploring two, interwoven, strands that recur throughout
these
texts: the use of fairy tales as a structuring motif and the way
in which postmemory is experienced as a story that is written on the
body.
- Caroline Sharples, Reconstructing the Past: Refugee Writings on
the Kindertransport
- The transportation of 10,000 Jewish children
from Nazi-occupied Europe between 1938 and 1939 remains one of the most
celebrated acts of recent British history. This article analyses the
memoirs of the former refugees themselves and sets out the case for re-examining
popular representations of the scheme, addressing the diversity of experience
for the children once in England, the hardships and emotional upheaval
encountered during this stage of their young lives and looking at some
of the limitations of the Kindertransport itself..
- Sophie Roberts, Jews, Vichy and the Algiers
Insurrection of 1942
- In November 1942, several hundred residents of Algiers rose
up in rebellion against the Vichy regime. Eighty-five per cent of
them were Jews. This insurrection paved the way for the Allied invasion
of
North Africa and the opening of the second front in Italy. This article
offers a narrative of those events and through this examines the
impact of Vichy legislation on the Jews of Algeria and their responses.
The
formation of the Jewish underground in Algiers and their collaboration
with the COI (later the OSS) in planning for the Allied offensive
are given particular attention. This article also demonstrates that
despite
the crucial role that the Jewish insurrection played in the Allied
landings, the rights of the Jews of Algiers were not restored under
post-Vichy
regimes and some of the insurgents continued to suffer at the hands
of the authorities.
- Dina Porat, The Richard Wagner and Adolf Hitler Connection: Ideology
or Fascination?
- The question at the centre of this study is
whether or not Adolf Hitler’s fascination with Richard Wagner, the man and the
musician, originated in Wagner’s antisemitism. Based on primary
sources, this study points in another direction, indicating that Hitler
considered his attitude to Wagner to be a private, even intimate, matter;
and that it was the exhilaration he felt when obsessively listening to
Wagner’s operas that made him feel worthy and capable of becoming
a redemptive leader, as he saw his role. Moreover, he used the
artistic experience and the Germanic contents of the operas in order
to channel
public feelings, especially during the Nazi party rallies, into
a sense of racial superiority and national destiny, the results of which
were
disastrous for Germany and the world at large.
- Book Reviews
- Doris Bergen, War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust;
Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, Holocaust: A History; Donald
Bloxham and Tony Kushner, The Holocaust: Critical Historical Approaches;
Reviewer: Tom Lawson; David Silberklang (ed.), Yad Vashem Studies;
Reviewer: David Cesarani; Mona Sue Weissmark, Justice Matters:
Legacies of the Holocaust and World War II ; Reviewer: Sharon Lamb