Holocaust
Studies: A Journal of Culture and History
Abstracts of articles in Issue 8.2
- Teaching the Holocaust in Academia: Educational Mission(s) and
Pedagogical Approaches by Rachel Feldhay Brenner
- This essay examines a few possible approaches to
teaching the Holocaust, while focusing especially on teaching testimony.
The testimony
signifies an unmediated encounter with the horror of the Holocaust
and presents a stark, horrifying reality that undermines the American
ethos of affirming
optimism. The feminist Holocaust scholarship suggests an unbiased
approach to women’s testimonies. The reader-response theory helps
to identify a pedagogical approach that reinforces the mission of strengthening
the ethical
world-picture without trivialising the Holocaust experience.
I suggest that the analytical reading of the testimony is helpful in
developing a dialogic and
emphatic approach to the text. Such an emphatic dialogue allows
for the discussion of humane existence in the post-Holocaust world. The
essay concludes
with a description of a university course intended to study the
testimonies of the Holocaust as a dialogic/analytical encounter, which
leads to the
reassessment of the ethics of post-Holocaust reality.
Appropriating Auschwitz: The Zwirowisko Crosses by
Charles Turner
Source Report: The Diary of a Refugee Aid Worker:
Reverend H J McLachlan in Czechoslovakia, 1938–39 by CR Kotzin
- The author reproduces the original diary of Rev.
H J McLachlan, edited with a short contextual introduction, which records
his relief and
rescue work in Czechoslovakia in 1938/39. A Unitarian Minister,
McLachlan was one of many volunteers who responded to the refugee crisis.
The diary records
his month in Czechoslavakia, his contacts with fellow aid workers
and individual refugee cases, coupled with McLachlan’s personal
response both emphatic and antipathetic. The limitations of the wider
Christian response to
the refugee crisis are demonstrated by the financial and organisational
constraints under which McLachlan and his colleagues worked.
Student Section: Empathy and the Ethics of Reading in
Primo Levi, Jorge Semprun and Bernhard Schlink by David Dwan
- This article considers the negotiation of an ethics
of reading in the work of Levi, Semprun and Schlink. It focuses on empathy,
a particular
problematic which both invokes and dismantles the old dualisms – emotion
and cognition, prejudice and reason – that appear to structure moral
being. These authors criticise empathy for its interpersonal action, which
restricts understanding to the level of the individual at the expense of the
socio-political whole. Empathy, is also subjected to an immanent critique,
suggesting that moral identification can be brought to a self-contradictory
extreme. Here Levi introduces the traditional distinction between scientific
‘knowing’ and hermeneutic ‘understanding’ as a means
of disciplining the empathetic imagination. But such distinctions are challenged
by the temporality that characterises moral being: is an empathetic
understanding prior to and constitutive of all knowing? Even
if one disregards
this question, empathy must be re-installed and its integrity
defended by all three writers, in order to resist the instrumentalisation
of the Holocaust and
its victims.
Book Reviews:
- One Man’s Mission in the Cause of Memory by Leon
Zelman with Armin Thurnher
- Breaking Crystal: Writing and Memory after Auschwitz by
Efraim Sicher (ed.)
- The Contract of Mutual Indifference: Political Philosophy
after the Holocaust by Norman Geras
- Nazi Family Policy, 1933–1945 by Lisa
Pine
- On Listening to Holocaust Survivors by Henry
Greenspan
- Mothers, Sisters, Resisters: Oral Histories of Women Who
Survived the Holocaust by Brana Gurewitsch
- National Socialism and Gypsies in Austria by Erika
Thurner