Holocaust
Studies: A Journal of Culture and History
Abstracts of
articles in Issue 14.2
- Helene Sinnreich, ‘And it was
something we didn’t talk about’: Rape of Jewish Women during
the Holocaust
- This article focuses on the sexual abuse
of Jewish women by German men during the Holocaust. It rejects
the myth that laws forbidding Rassenschande would prevent the rape of
Jewish women
and argues that genocidal conditions provided fertile soil for
such abuses. It examines some of the reasons that scholars have shied
away from discussing
this issue.
- Geoffrey Short, Teaching the Holocaust in Predominantly Muslim
Schools
- Investigations into how the Holocaust is
taught in UK secondary schools have tended to focus on problems
resulting from inappropriate teaching, inadequate resourcing or the allocation
of
insufficient time. No research has examined how aspects of the student
body, such as its ethno-religious identity, might frustrate the
efforts of teachers. This lack of research is troubling, for if, as has
been claimed,
antisemitism is spreading among the UK’s Muslim population, there
has to be concern over the way the Holocaust is taught in predominantly
Muslim schools. On the basis of interviews with 15 secondary school
teachers, this article suggests that the concern is largely unwarranted.
- Andy Pearce,
The Development of Holocaust Consciousness in Contemporary Britain,
1979-2001
- This article seeks to summarise how history
and memory of the Holocaust has evolved in Britain from the
late 1970s to the creation of Holocaust Memorial Day in 2000. Through
reconstructing
events and turning points, the paper demonstrates the development
of British Holocaust consciousness while also placing it within a broader
international context. It is argued that Holocaust Memorial
Day marked
the apex of a complex process but did not herald the end of
British “memory-work”;
indeed, it is suggested that there is a pressing need to reconsider
how the day was created and continues to function.
- Mark Ward Sr, 'Ordinary Communicators': A
Demonstration Proposal for Synthesizing the Browning and Goldhagen Theses
- In a previous article the author deconstructed
the social science of the Goldhagen Thesis according to its
chosen analytical frameworks of cognitive anthropology and symbolic interactionism.
By
the standards of those disciplines Goldhagen's controversial
conclusion—that
German perpetrators enacted an 'eliminationist antisemitism'
unique to their national culture—is called into question by his
lack of discourse analysis. The criticism, however, is unfair if the
cognitive-cultural
models of past societies cannot be recovered. The present article
proposes one solution by arguing that 'ordinary German' autobiographies—a
genre that has emerged only in recent years—constitute analyzable
natural discourse. Then after examining four such autobiographies
and suggesting they share indications of a key underlying cultural model,
the author demonstrates how such a datum might be interpreted
through
the framework of communication theory to link perpetrator cognition
to behaviour.
- Peter Davies, The Obligatory Horrors:
Translating Tadeusz Borowski’s Holocaust Narratives into German
and English
- This article explores the English and
German translations of Tadeusz Borowski's Holocaust narratives,
suggesting that the translations raise questions about the status of
literature
and testimony in the different cultural contexts into which
they are translated. It argues that consideration of translation should
be central
to any discussion of Holocaust writing, rather than being relegated
to the margins.