Holocaust
Studies: A Journal of Culture and History
Abstracts of
articles in Issue 14.3
- Thomas Blüger, Following
the Virgin Mary through Auschwitz: Emergent Antisemitism within Pre-Shoah
Marian Dogma
- As the son of someone who survived the Holocaust,
as well as being a Catholic priest for more than twenty two years, it
has always been my hope to investigate whether there was an active political
ideology at play within Roman Catholic theology at the time of the Nazis.
In this paper I explore whether there was an, as yet unnamed, pathology
within Roman Catholic consciousness that pertained to the veneration
of the Virgin Mary, giving ideological justification for ignoring the
plight of the Jews at the time of the Shoah.
- David Bertolini, The Architecture of Auschwitz-Birkenau and the
Nazi Fantasy
- In this article I examine the aesthetic properties
of rural German architecture, Nazi ideology, and their manifestation at
the death camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Architecture sutures together the
gap between the ideological demands made on a people and the reality of
those demands in their execution and spatial expression. Jacques Lacan’s
theory of the Real and Slavoj Žižek’s theory of fantasy
as the support for reality provide the theoretical framework from which
I examine the architecture used at the camps. I posit a theory connecting
the horror of the death camps, Nazi architecture, Volkish thought, and
the Nazi utopian city of Auschwitz. I conclude that the convergence of
these historical, architectural, and ideological aspects are evident in
the buildings at Auschwitz I and Birkenau, and reveal how the practices
of daily Nazi life and antisemitism work together to become a fantasy
that sustains the consistency and meaning of Nazism.
- David Tollerton, ‘A
New Collection of Holy Scriptures’? Assessing Three Ascriptions
of the Sacred to Holocaust Testimony within Jewish Theology
- This article is concerned with the suggestion
made by three Jewish theologians that Holocaust testimonies represent
sacred texts. It is shown that among these thinkers – Eliezer Berkovits,
Irving Greenberg and Melissa Raphael – the methods of, and motivations
for ascribing the holy to such literature are diverse in nature. Also
considered is the question of whether this is an ultimately problematic
phenomenon within the reception of testimony. For it is seen that sacralising
these texts has the potential to create hierarchies in which some Holocaust
experiences more than others resonate with theological narratives of
the event’s relationship with religious tradition.
- Zeno Ackermann, Struggling with the Rhetoric
of Exemption: Figurations of the Holocaust in Contemporary British Novels
- It is certainly not an established convention
to speak of ‘the British Holocaust novel’. Indeed, many would
see such a label as a contradiction in terms. Within the last two decades,
however, a surprising number of British novels have dealt with the Holocaust.
This article reads a fairly wide selection of such novels, arguing that
they represent attempts to overcome a deeply entrenched tension in the
British discourse of remembrance: the tension between a definitive national
tradition of continually re-presenting the Second World War on the one
hand, and the firmly established exemption of Britain from involvement
in the Holocaust on the other. Analysing different fictional strategies
for translating the Holocaust into British ‘memory culture’,
the essay traces a development that leads from gestures of substitution
to gestures of investigation, that is, from a literary practice of de-realisation
and counter-historical spatial extension of the Holocaust towards literary
endeavours of discovering traces of the Holocaust even in the Britain
of today.
- Jan Lánícek, ‘To Get
a Refusal Would Result in an Unfortunate Loss of Prestige’: The Czechoslovak
Government-in-Exile and the Holocaust
- This article examines the response of the Czechoslovak
government-in-exile to the persecution of the Jews of Europe during World
War II. The first
part focuses on the diplomatic negotiations between the Czechoslovak
authorities and International Jewish organisations, negotiations which
document the
Czechoslovaks’ willingness to deal with Jewish issues only when this
did not contradict or threaten to contradict other priorities. It also
argues that knowledge of the Jewish persecution was on occasion suppressed
so as not to overshadow the suffering of the Czechoslovaks. The second
part offers a critical analysis of the exiles’ decision-making process
with regard to the Jewish plight, suggesting that the Holocaust was in
fact used to serve the exiles ’ high
political objectives.