scholarly journals Is Experiencing History Possible? Between “Dark Tourism” and “the Holocaust Industry:” The Case of Terezín

2019 ◽  
pp. 123-134
Author(s):  
Urszula Kowalska-Nadolna
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Fundamental Question ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Dark Tourism ◽  
Utopian Vision ◽  
Actual Reality ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Terezin Concentration Camp ◽  
Educational Sources ◽  
Past Experiences

The article focuses on the representation of Terezín (Theresienstadt) concentration camp in contemporary Czech literary, historical, and educational sources. We should treat the ways of presenting Terezín in Czech public space as a beginning of the discussion about the popular, mass need for “adapting” memory about past experiences to the abilities of a new recipient. The basis for the following considerations is the 2009 novel by Jáchym Topol, The Devil’s Workshop (original title: Chladnou zemí), that presents the process of the revitalization of Terezín concentration camp, which seems to be another stage of a theatricalization or reconstruction of memory. The fundamental question is: How far is it from the Topol’s utopian vision to the actual reality, full of commercialized or institutionalized memory?

“Floating Melodies and Memories” of the Terezín Memorial

Transfers ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 138-141
Author(s):  
Chia-ling Lai
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Czech Republic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Dark Tourism ◽  
The Czech Republic ◽  
Will To Live ◽  
Worldwide Phenomenon ◽  
The Will ◽  
Musical Heritage

As Andrea Huyssen observes, since the 1990s the preservation of Holocaust heritage has become a worldwide phenomenon, and this “difficult heritage” has also led to the rise of “dark tourism.” Neither as sensationally traumatic as Auschwitz’s termination concentration camp in Poland nor as aesthetic as the forms of many modern Jewish museums in Germany and the United States, the Terezín Memorial in the Czech Republic provides a different way to present memorials of atrocity: it juxtaposes the original deadly site with the musical heritage that shows the will to live.

Epilogue

2019 ◽  
pp. 261-266
Author(s):  
Philipp Nielsen
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Life ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
German Government ◽  
German Jews ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Camp System ◽  
German Jewish

THE GERMAN GOVERNMENT might have intended to eliminate Jewish life in Germany, and it succeeded in depriving of their German lives the individuals who illustrated the (im)possibilities of Jews being engaged on and with the German Right in this book. Yet it did not succeed in ending their lives altogether. The majority of the German Jews appearing on these pages managed to survive the Holocaust, through emigration, hiding, or perseverance in the concentration camp system. After the Holocaust they gave testimony, archived their records, and collected those of others. Without their efforts this book on German Jewish conservatives would not exist; and though it ends with their emigration—all but one never returned to Germany for any lengthy period of time—their individual stories were not over. By briefly recounting their lives after 1938, I want to conclude by paying them my respects....

Virtual Testimony and the Digital Future of Traumatic Past

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amit Pinchevski
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Refugee Camps ◽  
American Psychologist ◽  
Steel Wires ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Wire ◽  
Institute Of Technology ◽  
Camp Life ◽  
The U.S

At the base of all Holocaust testimony projects lies a common commitment: to record and preserve the stories of those who survived the catastrophe as told in their own voices. When it comes to survivors’ testimonies, the messenger is as important as the message. The first to subscribe to this reasoning was the American psychologist David Boder, who in 1946 set out to interview survivors in refugee camps across Western Europe. Equipped with what was then the state- of- the- art technology—an Armour Model 50 wire recorder—Boder went on to produce what was the first audio testimony of the Holocaust. The wire recorder, developed in the 1940s by Marvin Camras, Boder’s colleague at the Illinois Institute of Technology, for the U.S. military, was a portable and remarkably durable device that utilized thin steel wires rolled into spools to produce an electromagnetic recording (see Fig. 4.1 below). As Boder later commented, the device “offered a unique and exact means of recording the experiences of displaced persons. Through the wire recorder the displaced person could relate in his own language and in his own voice the story of his concentration camp life.” Studying wire- recorded narratives led him to devise a “traumatic index” by means of which “each narrative may be assessed as to the category and number of experiences bound to have a traumatizing effect upon the victim.” Boder’s 1949 monograph, I Did Not Interview the Dead, invites readers to find indications of trauma implicit in selected transcripts of recorded narratives. The premise seems to be that, to the extent that such traumatic impact exists, it should be discoverable textually. Yet the same technology that made Boder’s project ingenious was also the reason for its relative obscurity. Wire recording was soon to give way to tape recording, consequently condemning Boder’s wire spools to obsolescence and the testimonies they held to near oblivion. The short- lived medium precluded access to the recorded material.

Clinical/Abnormal Perspectives

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
George R. Mastroianni
Keyword(s):  
Posttraumatic Stress Disorder ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Stress Disorder ◽  
Holocaust Survivors ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
German Population ◽  
Psychological Consequences ◽  
World War ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Dominant Paradigm

Chapter 4 focuses on the considerable psychological literature devoted to the question of the role played by psychopathology in the Nazi movement and the Holocaust. Both the Nazi leaders and the German population as a whole were thought by some to exhibit signs of psychopathology. The dominant paradigm in psychology before, during, and shortly after World War II was psychoanalytic, and Freudian analyses were common. The notion that psychopathology played a significant role in either Nazism or the Holocaust has largely been abandoned. The psychological consequences of the horrific experiences to which many Holocaust survivors were subjected led to the identification of a disorder called by some “concentration camp syndrome.” Our modern-day understanding of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) owes a considerable debt to the legacy of Holocaust survivors.

From Ravensbrück to Berlin: Will Lammert’s Monument to the Deported Jews 1957/1985

Images ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 140-163
Author(s):  
Natasha Goldman
Keyword(s):  
East Germany ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
East Berlin ◽  
Western Art ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
History Of ◽  
Deutsche Demokratische Republik ◽  
Changing Attitudes ◽  
Art Style

In 1985 one of the earliest memorials dedicated to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust was installed in East Berlin. The Monument to the Deported Jews was an arrangement of thirteen bronze figures in expressionist style. Will Lammert, the artist, originally designed the figures for the base of his monument for Ravensbrück in 1957. The artist died in 1957, however, before finalizing his design for the monument. Only two figures on a pylon were installed at the concentration camp in 1959. The figures meant for the base of the Ravensbrück memorial were unfinished, but were nonetheless cast in bronze by the artist’s family. Thirteen of those figures were installed on the Große Hamburger Straße in 1985 by the artist’s grandson, Mark Lammert. This essay analyzes the Große Hamburger Straße monument in three ways: first, it returns to the literature on the Ravensbrück memorial in order to better understand the role that the unfinished figures would have played, had they been installed. I argue that they originally were most likely meant to depict “Strafestehen”—or torture by standing—at Ravensbrück. Secondly, it aims to explain why and how Lammert’s seemingly expressionist memorial would have been acceptable to East Germany in 1959. While Western art historical attitudes toward East Germany up until the 1990s assumed that Soviet socialist realism was the de facto art style of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR), some elements of expressionism were being theorized in the late 1950s, at precisely the time when Lammert designed the Ravensbrück monument. Finally, I analyze the role that a monument for Ravensbrück plays in this particular neighborhood of Mitte, Berlin: standing silently, they are no longer legible as women being tortured by standing. Instead, the sculptures signify, at the same time, the deported Jews of Berlin and the harrowing aftermath of their deportations, the improbable return of the deported Jews, and the changing attitudes toward the history of the neighborhood in which the sculptural group is located.

It’s Still There

boundary 2 ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-143
Author(s):  
Paula Rabinowitz
Keyword(s):  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Georges Perec ◽  
Visual Examination ◽  
Nazi Concentration Camp ◽  
Alain Resnais ◽  
Television Shows ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Chantal Akerman ◽  
History Of

Daniel Blaufuks’s video Als Ob/As If formally interrogates the history of Holocaust imagery using a close visual examination of the 1944 “Staged Nazi Film” shot in Thereseinstadt. Layering his footage from present-day Terezín with a number of earlier films and television shows shot at or about the Nazi concentration camp, he contemplates the role of the image, both still and moving, in the creation of memory and history of the Holocaust. His video and phototextual book connect to literary explorations of the Czech concentration camp—by Georges Perec, W. G. Sebald, and Jiří Weil—as well as cinematic documentaries about the Nazi murder of European Jews by Alain Resnais, Claude Lanzmann, and Jean-Luc Godard. By focusing on contemporary Terezín, Blaufuks also brings to light aspects of memorialization within post-totalitarian societies investigated by filmmakers Petra Epperlein and Chantal Akerman, as well as by scholars of the Holocaust and post-Soviet Eastern Europe.

The Surveillant Gaze: Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon

October ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 147 ◽  
pp. 95-116
Author(s):  
Martin Blumenthal-Barby
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
General Sense ◽  
Nazi Concentration Camp ◽  
Black And White ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The One ◽  
Sociohistorical Context ◽  
The Village

Michael Haneke's 2009 The White Ribbon is set in the village of “Eichwald.” Eichwald cannot be found on any German map. It is an imaginary place in the Protestant North of Eastern Germany in the early twentieth century. What is more, Haneke tells his black-and-white tale as the flashback narration of a voice-over narrator—a series of defamiliarizing techniques that lift the diegetic action out of its immediate sociohistorical context, stripping it of its temporal and topographical coordinates. Against this backdrop, is it possible to hear the name “Eichwald” without being reminded of, on the one hand, Adolf Eichmann, Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer and one of the key architects of the Holocaust, and, on the other, the Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald? To be sure, Eichwald is not Buchenwald, and no 56,000 humans are being murdered here. Yet why this peculiar terminological fusion? What characterizes Eichwald, this model of a society in which adults have no names but merely function as representatives of a particular class and profession: the Baron, the Pastor, the Teacher, the Steward, the Midwife, etc.? What distinguishes this village that appears to be largely isolated from the outside world, this village that outsiders rarely enter and from which no one seems to be able to escape? What identifies this prison-like community with its oppressive atmosphere, its tiny rooms and low ceilings, its myriad alcoves, niches, windows, and hallways that evoke a general sense of “entrapment” and incarceration? This world in which even the camera appears to be shackled, to never zoom, hardly to pan or tilt, thus depriving the image of any dynamism, any mobility? Who—in this confining milieu—are the guards, who the detainees? And what characterizes the putatively illicit activities that appear to lie at its enigmatic center and around which the entire film seems to revolve?

Comedy in the Holocaust: the Theresienstadt Cabaret

1996 ◽  
Vol 12 (48) ◽  
pp. 299-308
Author(s):  
Roy Kift
Keyword(s):  
Concentration Camp ◽  
The Czech Republic ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The World ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Opera Singers ◽  
The University ◽  
Stage Play ◽  
The Military

The concentration camp in Theresienstadt in the Czech Republic was unique, in that it was used by the Nazis as a ‘flagship’ ghetto to deceive the world about the real fate of the Jews. It contained an extraordinarily high proportion of VIPs – so-called Prominenten, well-known international personalities from the worlds of academia, medicine, politics, and the military, as well as leading composers, musicians, opera singers, actors, and cabarettists, most of whom were eventually murdered in Auschwitz. The author, Roy Kift, who first presented this paper at a conference on ‘The Shoah and Performance’ at the University of Glasgow in September 1995, is a free-lance dramatist who has been living in Germany since 1981, where he has written award-winning plays for stage and radio, and a prizewinning opera libretto, as well as directing for stage, television, and radio. His new stage play, Camp Comedy, set in Theresienstadt, was inspired by this paper, and includes original cabaret material: it centres on the nightmare dilemma encountered by Kurt Gerron in making the Nazi propaganda film, The Fuhrer Gives the Jews a Town. Roy Kift has contributed regular reports on contemporary German theatre to a number of magazines, including NTQ. His article on the GRIPS Theater in Berlin appeared in TQ39 (1981) and an article on Peter Zadek in NTQ4 (1985).

scholarly journals Jewish Doctors’ Challenges in the Death Camps: Ethical Dilemmas? Choiceless Choices? The Human Condition?

Conatus ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 341
Author(s):  
Ross Halpin
Keyword(s):  
Ethical Dilemmas ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
Personal Traits ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Will To Live ◽  
Past Experiences ◽  
Significant Factors ◽  
The Human Condition

Most commentators have focused on ethical dilemmas and the idea that they were core to the actions of and decisions by Jewish doctors in SS concentration camps and ghettos during the Holocaust. While I recognize Jewish doctors did face ethical dilemmas, in this article, I shift my attention to include two other significant factors: choiceless choices, defined by the eminent Holocaust historian Lawrence Langer as “crucial decisions [that] did not reflect options between life and death, but between one form of abnormal response and another, both imposed by a situation that was in no way of the victim’s own choosing,”  and the human condition, whereby decisions and actions were triggered by personal traits and past experiences in response to particular situations and circumstances. Inherent in all three factors is the tenaciousness of reality and how the abhorrent conditions, immorality, inhumanity and evilness cast a shadow over every moment of the Jewish doctor’s life. My thesis is that decision-making was not one-dimensional but multi-dimensional. For the Jewish doctor every incident became a source of dread and tragedy. They were often not trained to treat some diseases or perform surgery and lacked experience to work in such conditions and cope emotionally and psychologically. I will attempt to show that how a person responds to an ethical dilemma is based on his or her own experiences and reasoning, and how they reacted to sudden and inexplicable incidents that threatened life or impacted survival induced abnormal actions and decisions. As Jewish doctors they were driven to be healers, to be normal, but they were forced by circumstances to kill or become perpetrators, acting abnormally. Tragically the abnormal became the norm. The Jewish doctors were professionally trained and culturally socialized to continue their roles as doctors. Nevertheless, they were human and were driven by the innate will to live.

scholarly journals Ludobójstwo w świetle wybranych relacji więźniów obozów koncentracyjnych Auschwitz, Majdanek, Stutthof i Gross-Rosen

2020 ◽  
pp. 251-263
Author(s):  
Lucyna Sadzikowska
Keyword(s):  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
Former Prisoners ◽  
The Holocaust

The article is devoted to the analysis of testimonies, accounts, memoirs, ego-documents by concentration camp prisoners of Auschwitz, Majdanek, Stutthof, and Gross-Rosen. Thesource material kept in the said KLs’ archives contains a multitude of individual histories of survivors of the genocide, either described in detail or concisely noted down. What the authorfocuses on is the variety of those testimonies to suffering and tragedy of people incarcerated in concentration camps. At the same time, she observes that for the former prisoners, decades after leaving the camps, the Shoah and hell are synonymous with genocide. The most common terms used by them to describe genocide are: mass extermination, the Holocaust, Annihilation, hell, the Shoah, hideous violence, total annihilation – both physical and moral.

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