FSEM 100H3 | Holocaust in German and American Culture

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 Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich, Associate Professor of German

Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich, Associate Professor of German

Professor Hansen-Glucklich earned a Ph.D. in Germanic Languages and Literatures from the University of Virginia in 2011. She published a book, Holocaust Memory Reframed: Museums and the Challenges of Representation, with Rutgers University Press in 2014, and has published a number of articles and essays on the topics of Holocaust museums and memorialization, German Jewish life writing, and German literature and film. Dr. Hansen-Glucklich has taught as visiting faculty at the Universität Wien and the Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz, and has held fellowships at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. and with the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).