FSEM 100H3 | Holocaust in German and American Culture

THIS COURSE HAS CURRENTLY FILLED FOR FALL 2025.

This course begins with the question of how we ought to remember the Holocaust. Some see Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List as kitsch, for example, while others praise it as a monument to humanity. Are the monumental concrete steles of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin an appropriate way to remember the victims? Or do they reduce the victims to an anonymous mass? In order to approach an understanding of the Holocaust and its consequences and in order to acknowledge and pay tribute to the victims, we need certain tools: but what tools can we and should we use? How do we compare the relative claims and ambitions of historical analysis, personal testimony, literary and dramatic fiction, architectural monument, and popular film? This course will investigate the particular strengths and limits of a range of texts and images, facts and fictions that each in its own way claims to represent some “truth” of the Holocaust. We will also discuss the social and political context of these representations and consider the meaning of the Holocaust in contemporary German and American culture.

Photo of Marcel Rotter, Associate Professor of German

Marcel Rotter, Associate Professor of German

Ever since growing up in communist East Germany, I was interested in the workings of propaganda, visual communication, and public opinion forming. I have been teaching German since 1985, first in a high school, later at universities in Germany and the U.S. At UMW, I proposed this FSEM to explore with the students the culturally different approaches to commemorating the Holocaust in Germany and the United States. The comparison between memorials, museums, films, and books in the two respective countries - one having been the perpetrator, the other being home to a significant number of victims and their descendants – makes for interesting insights into how memory of traumatic events is formed.In addition to teaching this Freshman Seminar, I am usually traveling with our students to Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Poland to visit the sights of the Holocaust during Spring Break.

Photo of Jason James, Associate Professor of Anthropology

Jason James, Associate Professor of Anthropology

I received my Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California, San Diego. My research interests include nationalism, ethnicity, collective memory, socialism and post-socialism, and Germany. I teaches courses in collective memory, the anthropology of Europe, urban anthropology, and tourism. My book Preservation and National Belonging in Eastern Germany was published by Palgrave-Macmillan in 2012, and I am currently conducting research on the commemoration of slavery and the Civil War in Richmond as well as the process of integrating immigrants in Germany.