Bearing witness: (auto-)biography in Holocaust literature

Abstract

In this discussion-based, upper-level college course students will read literary fiction and historical-philosophical investigations of the Holocaust. We will focus on (auto-)biography as a form of bearing witness in the genre known as Holocaust Literature. Discussions will be centered around questions pertaining to the origin of antisemitism, the rise of totalitarian regimes in Europe in the early twentieth century, and the role that literary fiction plays in the moral imperative of bearing witness to the atrocities of the Holocaust. We will read the autobiography of Stefan Zweig, a text that traces the history of an entire generation of German Austrian and Ashkenazi Jewish intellectuals between 1880 and 1945; the family biography of a Sephardic Jewish family in Ottoman Salonika, roughly in the same years; the works of survivors of the infamous Nazi concentration camp in Auschwitz such as the Polish intellectual Tadeusz Borowski and the Italian writer Primo Levi; the Holocaust poetry of Romanian-born, German-speaking author Paul Celan; the memoir of the Slovenian writer Boris Pahor; and the theoretical texts that analyze the rise of Fascism and of totalitarian regimes by Umberto Eco and Hannah Arendt, in particular Eco’s definition of eternal fascism and Arendt’s texts on totalitarian propaganda, the Eichmann trial, and what she called the banality of evil. A viewing of Roberto Benigni’s academy-award winning film Life is Beautiful will conclude the semester. Students will learn about the Holocaust with the help of multiple media: we will use maps; videos of interviews with Holocaust survivors, archived by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; film; as well as literary, historical, and philosophical texts. After an introduction to the history of the Holocaust, the course will be organized in 4 different units, each focusing on a different topic: biographies, antisemitism and the rise of fascism, holocaust literature, the aftermath of the Holocaust.