Search

Discourse with Shadows, first published in 1958, is a stark, yet compassionate look at the lives of four Nazi concentration camp survivors and of a friend who returns to Frankfurt from England to locate a missing relative and her son Johann. Driven by their long-repressed anger, the group carries out the murder of a Nazi woman who often attended the tortures at the concentration camp; dire consequences follow which threaten the group of friends.From the dustjacket: The scene is Frankfurt at the late war's end: living there are four survivors of a Nazi concentration camp—and Franz Grünwald, who has spent the years since 1935 in England and has now returned to his former home town in search of a relative. We shall only add that the author displays here—in a first novel—such a power of sympathetic imagination as seems to us quite extraordinary. This is an extremely moving book; and while terror and wickedness are never far away, and no attempt is made to see things other than as they are, the total effect given is not only of compassion but also of beauty.

In February of 1945, during the final months of the Third Reich, Eva Noack-Mosse was deported to the Nazi concentration camp of Theresienstadt. A trained journalist and expert typist, she was put to work in the Central Evidence office of the camp, compiling endless lists—inmates arriving, inmates deported, possessions confiscated from inmates, and all the obsessive details required by the SS. With access to camp records, she also recorded statistics and her own observations in a secret diary. Noack-Mosse's aim in documenting the horrors of daily life within Theresienstadt was to ensure that such a catastrophe could never be repeated. She also gathered from surviving inmates information about earlier events within the walled fortress, witnessed the defeat and departure of the Nazis, saw the arrival of the International Red Cross and the Soviet Army takeover of the camp and town, assisted in administration of the camp's closure, and aided displaced persons in discovering the fates of their family and friends. After the war ended, and she returned home, Noack-Mosse cross-referenced her data with that of others to provide evidence of Nazi crimes. At least 35,000 people died at Theresienstadt and another 90,000 were sent on to death camps.

The bestselling Holocaust memoir about finding purpose and strength in times of despair—selected as a Library of Congress “10 Most Influential Books in America”This stunning gift edition of “one of the great books of our time” (Harold S. Kushner) features new photos, end papers, and Frankl's never-before-published speeches and letters.Hailed as “an enduring work of survival literature” by the New York Times, Viktor Frankl's account of his time in the Nazi concentration camps—and his insights into our ability to find meaning despite great adversity—has offered solace and guidance to generations of readers since it was first published in 1946. This stunning hardcover gift edition features previously unpublished material—including letters, speeches, essays, and an 8-page photo insert—that reveal Frankl's enduring lessons on perseverance and strength in even greater depth.At the heart of Frankl's theory of logotherapy (from the Greek word for “meaning”) is a conviction that the primary human drive is not pleasure, as Freud maintained, but rather the discovery and pursuit of what the individual finds meaningful. Today, as new generations face new challenges and an ever more complex and uncertain world, Frankl's classic work continues to inspire us all to find significance in the very act of living, in spite of all obstacles.With more than 16 million copies sold in over 50 languages, this timeless masterpiece is “one of the outstanding contributions to psychological thought” (Carl Rogers) and offers inspiration for coping with suffering and finding your purpose.

Why has shame recently displaced guilt as a dominant emotional reference in the West? After the Holocaust, survivors often reported feeling guilty for living when so many others had died, and in the 1960s psychoanalysts and psychiatrists in the United States helped make survivor guilt a defining feature of the'survivor syndrome.'Yet the idea of survivor guilt has always caused trouble, largely because it appears to imply that, by unconsciously identifying with the perpetrator, victims psychically collude with power. In From Guilt to Shame, Ruth Leys has written the first genealogical-critical study of the vicissitudes of the concept of survivor guilt and the momentous but largely unrecognized significance of guilt's replacement by shame. Ultimately, Leys challenges the theoretical and empirical validity of the shame theory proposed by figures such as Silvan Tomkins, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Giorgio Agamben, demonstrating that while the notion of survivor guilt has depended on an intentionalist framework, shame theorists share a problematic commitment to interpreting the emotions, including shame, in antiintentionalist and materialist terms.