The Holocaust
Theoretical Readings
This agenda-setting reader brings together both classic and new writings to demonstrate how concerns arising from the Nazi genocide shaped contemporary literary and cultural theory. Wide in its thematic scope, it covers such vital questions as:
- Authenticity and experience
- Memory and trauma
- Historiography and the philosophy of history
- Fascism and Nazi anti-Semitism
- Representation and identity formation
- Race, gender, and genocide
- Implications of the Holocaust for theories of the unconscious, ethics, politics, and aesthetics
The readings, which are fully contextualized by a general introduction, section introductions, and bibliographical notes, represent the work of many influential writers and theorists, including Theodor Adorno, Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Jean Baudrillard, Zygmunt Bauman, Walter Benjamin, Cathy Caruth, Jacques Derrida, Shoshana Felman, Saul Friedlander, Paul Gilroy, Lawrence Langer, Emmanuel Levinas, Primo Levi, Jean-François Lyotard, Hayden White, and James E. Young. This multidisciplinary anthology will be welcomed by students and scholars of the Holocaust.
The Drowned and the Saved / Primo Levi --
'Resentments' / Jean Améry --
Days and Memory Charlotte Delbo --
'The Camps' / Ruth Kluger --
Historicizing the Holocaust? --
'On the Public Use of History' / Jürgen Habermas --
'The "Final Solution": On the Unease in Historical Interpretation' / Saul Friedlander --
'Historical Understanding and Counterrationality: The Judenrat as Epistemological Vantage' / Dan Diner --
'The Uniqueness and Normality of the Holocaust' / Zygmunt Bauman --
'The European Imagination in the Age of Total War' / Omer Bartov --
The Origins of the Nazi Genocide / Henry Friedlander --
Nazi culture, fascism, and antisemitism --
'The Rhetoric of Hitler's "Battle" / Kenneth Burke --
'The Psychological Structure of Fascism' / Georges Bataille --
'Elements of Anti-Semitism' / Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno --
'The Fiction of the Political' / Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe --
'Anti-Semitism and National Socialism' / Moishe Postone --
'Ordinary Men' / Christopher Browning --
Race, gender, and genocide --
'Floods, Bodies, History' / Klaus Theweleit --
'Racism and Sexism in Nazi Germany' / Gisela Bock --
'The Unethical and the Unspeakable: Women and the Holocaust' / Joan Ringelheim --
'Women and the Holocaust: Analyzing Gender Difference' / Pascale Rachel Bos --
Psychoanalysis, trauma, and memory --
'Trauma and Experience' / Cathy Caruth --
'Trauma, Absence, Loss' / Dominick LaCapra --
'Trauma and Transference' / Saul Friedlander --
'History Beyond the Pleasure Principle: Some Thoughts on the Representation of Trauma' / Eric L. Santner --
'Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening' / Dori Laub --
Questions of religion, ethics, and justice --
'Thinking the Tremendum' / Arthur A. Cohen --
'To Mend the World' / Emil L. Fackenheim --
'Ethics and Spirit' / Emmanuel Levinas --
Eichmann in Jerusalem / Hannah Arendt --
'What is a Camp?' / Giorgio Agamben --
The Differend / Jean-François Lyotard --
'New Political Theology: Out of Holocaust and Liberation' / Gillian Rose --
Literature and culture after Auschwitz --
'Theses on the Philosophy of History' / Walter Benjamin --
'Cultural Criticism and Society' / Theodor W. Adorno --
'Meditations on Metaphysics' / Theodor W. Adorno --
'Writing and the Holocaust' / Irving Howe --
'Non-Philosophical Amazement: Writing in Amazement: Benjamin's Position in the Aftermath of the Holocaust' / Sigrid Weigel --
The Writing of the Disaster / Maurice Blanchot --
'Shibboleth' / Jacques Derrida --
'Language and Culture after the Holocaust' / Geoffrey H. Hartman --
'Representing Auschwitz' / Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi --
Modes of narration --
'The Moral Space of Figurative Discourse' / Berel Lang --
'Writing the Holocaust' / James E. Young --
'The Modernist Event' / Hayden White --
'Against Foreshadowing' / Michael André Bernstein --
'Deep Memory: The Buried Self' / Lawrence L. Langer --
'The Return of the Voice: Claude Lanzmann's Shoah' / Shoshana Felman --
Rethiking visual culture --
Reflections of Nazism / Saul Friedlander --
'Holocaust' / Jean Baudrillard --
'Anselm Kiefer: the Terror of History, the Temptation of Myth' / Andreas Huyssen --
'The Aesthetic Transformation of the Image of the Unimaginable: Notes on Claude Lanzmann's Shoah' / Gertrud Koch --
'In Plain Sight' / Lilliane Weissberg --
Latecomers: negative symbiosis, postmemory, and countermemory --
'Memory Shot Through with Holes' / Henri Raczymow --
'Mourning and Postmemory' / Marianne Hirsch --
'Negative Symbiosis: Germans and Jews after Auschwitz' / Dan Diner --
'The Countermonument: Memory Against Itself in Germany' / James E. Young --
Uniqueness, comparison, and the politics of memory --
'Two Kinds of Uniqueness: The Universal Aspects of the Holocaust' / Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg --
'What Was the Holocaust?' / Yehuda Bauer --
The Black Atlantic / Paul Gilroy --
'Thinking about Genocide' / Mahmood Mamdani --
'Dare to Compare: Americanizing the Holocaust' / Lilian Friedberg --
The Holocaust in American Life / Peter Novick.