Course Description
Over seven decades later, the world is still grappling with the Holocaust. How can an atrocity so extreme be comprehended, represented, or conveyed to non-witnesses and future generations? The testimonies of survivors have long been seen as a unique and critical contribution to the promulgation of Holocaust memory, as these testimonies can provide direct witness to the event. However, the default assumption that testimonies and memoirs are primarily litanies of facts rather than (literary) narratives is problematized when considering the witness accounts of child survivors, those of the ‘1.5 generation’: “too young to have had an adult understanding what was happening to them, but old enough to have been there” (Suleiman, 2002, p. 277). These accounts call into question the relationship between fact and memory, a line that is further blurred in the many works belonging to the genre known as “Holocaust Children’s Literature.” What is the function of such (semi-)fictional narratives in the transmission of knowledge and memory? And more crucially, what impact do they have on young readers developing an initial understanding of the Holocaust? In this course we will investigate these questions through an analysis of witness accounts from child survivors and popular works of juvenile and YA literature, exploring such themes as authenticity, empathy, and the ethics of teaching the Holocaust.
In this course students will build upon their previous historical knowledge of the Holocaust to consider critically ways in which the events of the Holocaust are represented, specifically in narrative media forms (literary and cinematic). The focus is on analyzing both fiction and non-fiction in terms of their relationship to the event (of the Holocaust) itself and their impact on the reader/viewer. All class discussions will be in English, but students enrolled in GER 400 will be expected to complete the majority of their reading and writing assignments in German.