Search

Copyright of Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Holocaust: Studies & Materials is the property of Association Polish Center for Holocaust Research / Stowarzyszenie Centrum Badan nad Zaglada Zydow and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article analyses the differences and similarities between documentation centres active in the aftermath of the Holocaust both in France and in Poland. While in Poland the task was from 1945 assigned to the Central Jewish Historical Commission, in France, the Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation quickly overtook the lead on other minor centres established by Communist Jews or Bundists. The paper focuses on the links between those institutions, through contacts between members, exchanges of documentation, and parallel publications and exhibits. It shows that despite quite different political conditions, men and women working in these institutions shared a similar vision of transmission of history and memory of the Holocaust. They managed to implement their vision pa 19.03.2019 rtly thanks to their transnational links that helped transcend political and material difficulties.

The present study understands comedy in relation to the Holocaust as an attempt by Germany's third and fourth generations to create alternative forms of commemoration. Analyzing the country's history of coming to terms with the Shoah, it highlights that recent forms of subversive satire are reacting to a crystallization in official memory politics through counter-discourse to political correctness and the defenders of moralism. The article finds that it is possible to combine comedy and Holocaust memory if Jewish victimhood is not spoofed and the limitations of official memory politics are debunked. Finally, it contends that not every historical assessment based on a local/national context can serve as a global blueprint. The recognition of national historical guilt and the establishment of distinct collective memories are still crucial for understanding specific pasts. Accordingly, German popular culture referring to the Nazi past differs from u.s. comedy dealing with the Holocaust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The vast majority of Holocaust victims and survivors were Ashkenazim. Their main language was Yiddish. Yiddish is very close to German, the main difference being that the former is written in Hebrew letters, while the latter in Latin ones. Postwar Europe's moral foundation is Holocaust remembrance. But this remembrance to be effective, it must be active in the absence of Holocaust survivors. A way to ensure that could be the novel school and university subject of Yiddish for reading purposes. As a result, researchers and interested Europeans would start reading documents and books in Yiddish again. Germany's premiere cultural organization, Goethe-Institut, is uniquely well-placed and morally obligated to facilitate the relaunch, popularization and cultivation of the skill to read Yiddish-language sources and publications for both the sake of research and for pleasure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the differences and similarities between documentation centres active in the aftermath of the Holocaust both in France and in Poland. While in Poland the task was from 1945 assigned to the Central Jewish Historical Commission, in France, the Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation quickly overtook the lead on other minor centres established by Communist Jews or Bundists. The paper focuses on the links between those institutions, through contacts between members, exchanges of documentation, and parallel publications and exhibits. It shows that despite quite different political conditions, men and women working in these institutions shared a similar vision of transmission of history and memory of the Holocaust. They managed to implement their vision pa 19.03.2019 rtly thanks to their transnational links that helped transcend political and material difficulties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why to go back to 1985 to discuss present-day key concerns of international relations from the perspective of World War II history during the Cold War? The May 5, 1985 Bitburg cemetery celebrations, when US president altogether with German chancellor (Helmut Kohl) paid tribute to WWII veterans (of both sides of the conflict) was an example of the Ronald Reagan administration's public relations fiasco: the "Great Communicator" failed to refer to WWII history in a manner that would save him from harsh criticism. Importantly, the 1985 debate concerning the Bitburg ceremony and the moral aspects of a homage to German (Axis) WWII soldiers gave an incentive to "Historikerstreit" in Germany, a dispute regarding WWII history in a manner comparable to Holocaust responsibility as a collective burden carried by Germans. The Bitburg cemetery, since the 1930s a monument (Kolmeshöhe Ehrenfriedhof) to WWI German military victims, and then to their younger colleagues during WWII (Wehrmacht and, controversially, Waffen-SS) remained a broadly commented upon focal point of Cold War disputes, allowing such questions that might bring about a possibility of ground-breaking change in present-day political rivalries caused by failed (or successful) Cold War propaganda related to WWII choices. The Bitburg case presents itself as a particularly illustrative one and could also shed more light on the post-Soviet Russian effort to increase its influence by relying on the myths of the "Great Patriotic War". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim. This paper focuses on the question to what extent the Netanyahu-Morawiecki joint declaration of June 27, 2018, was indeed a moral one. Ignoring the realpolitik versus ideal politics discourse, our goal is to find out whether solely on an ethical level one canjudge the moral qualities of the political concession. Concept. To conduct an ethical judgement process, we took the following steps: (I) A review of the Israeli narrative. (II) A review of the Polish narrative. (Ill) An account of some moral shortcomings in both the Israeli as well as the Polish narratives. Eventually, these steps enabled us to reach a certain moral conclusion regarding the Polish Israeli declaration. Cognitive value. We conclude that the Polish Israeli joint declaration was indeed a moderate compromise that could enable positive forces on both sides to strengthen their national narratives - not necessarily on account of each other. Furthermore, it could also serve as a mechanism that can elevate Holocaust research as well as universal understandings of lessons that can be learnt from the darkest age of human history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In light of current research on official amnesia and the remembrance of the Hungarian Holocaust, this article explores the forgetting strategy and memories of the Holocaust in the 1960s, as articulated in the literary public realm and largely forgotten Hungarian female Holocaust memoires and fictional narratives. The first section of this paper demonstrates the articles about the genocide, the compulsion of the remembrance published in the weekly periodical Élet és Irodalom between 1960 and 1968, and raises questions related to memory processes, the issue of the taboo of the genocide, and the traumatized "Jewish" identity in the Hungarian literary public in this period. The second part of the paper focuses on the relationship between the process of memory and remembrance of the Holocaust and the modes of representation in female narratives. It examines Hungarian female testimonies, memoires, fictional works, and docu-fictions that were published by Edith Bruck, Katalin Vidor, Boris Palotai, Elisabeth Senesh, Judit Fenákel and Magda Szabó, all of which confront the Hungarian traumatic past with the present, commemorating the silent victims of the Holocaust. This study argues that these narratives work as forgotten female texts to undermine prevailing public memory and thus can be interpreted as alternative narratives or counter-narratives of the past within a so-called counter-memorial discursive space articulated during the 1960s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research project is situated in the Europe-wide discussion on historical remembrance and the challenges of Anti-Semitism today. The specific emphasis of the study is Holocaust remembrance in Religious Education. The research project asks how the topic of Holocaust remembrance and Anti-Semitism is dealt with within Religious Education in the curriculum of secondary schools in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Going beyond the theoretical and mostly normative discourse, the emphasis is set on the empirical investigation of the practice of Religious Education focusing on Anti-Semitism. This was examined in all three countries via an online questionnaire. This approach provides an overview, statistical and qualitative data about various ways of teaching Holocaust remembrance and about Anti-Semitism in courses of Religious Education at schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the passing of the last testimonies, Holocaust remembrance and Holocaust education progressively rely on digital technologies to engage people in immersive, simulative, and even counterfactual memories of the Holocaust. This preliminary study investigates how three prominent Holocaust museums use social media to enhance the general public’s knowledge and understanding of historical and remembrance events. A mixed-method approach based on a combination of social media analytics and latent semantic analysis was used to investigate the Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube profiles of Yad Vashem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Auschwitz–Birkenau Memorial and Museum. This social media analysis adopted a combination of metrics and was focused on how these social media profiles engage the public at both the page-content and relational levels, while their communication strategies were analysed in terms of generated content, interactivity, and popularity. Latent semantic analysis was used to analyse the most frequently used hashtags and words to investigate what topics and phrases appear most often in the content posted by the three museums. Overall, the results show that the three organisations are more active on Twitter than on Facebook and Instagram, with the Auschwitz–Birkenau Museum and Memorial occupying a prominent position in Twitter discourse while Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum had stronger presences on YouTube. Although the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum exhibits some interactivity with its Facebook fan community, there is a general tendency to use social media as a one-way broadcast mode of communication. Finally, the analysis of terms and hashtags revealed the centrality of “Auschwitz” as a broad topic of Holocaust discourse, overshadowing other topics, especially those related to recent events.

This essay seeks to examine the effects of the Holocaust on Italian national identity, and how it has been influenced by revisionist interpretations of the period. It is focused heavily on Italy, but also acknowledges the transnational nature of the Holocaust and its widespread devastation. There was a lack of early historiography on the topic owing to the focus on Germany’s substantially larger role in the atrocity, which meant that Italy was widely viewed as an innocent bystander, rather than as a perpetrator. However, recent historiography has revealed that Italy’s role is much more complex than popular memory indicates, which has had an impact on how it is commemorated. Hence, this paper explores how these commemorations have developed, including the begrudged taking of responsibility for anti-Semitic actions that occurred on Italian soil.

International organizations have increasingly become engaged in developing transnational memory frames for the Holocaust. Based on document analysis and interviews with transnational norm entrepreneurs, this article explores the role and interaction of three organizations: the European Union, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and UNESCO. It employs the multi-level governance approach to analyze how Prime Minister Göran Persson and a 'progressive' alliance of Western politicians initially 'uploaded' a Swedish initiative to the EU and the UN system. In the EU, however, East-Central European norm entrepreneurs have increasingly pushed for greater emphasis on Stalinist crimes, which has reinforced the totalitarian paradigm and effectively undermined Holocaust remembrance. In contrast, the battle over the possible link between Holocaust remembrance, collective identity and political legitimacy is absent from the UN system. The UN and UNESCO have transformed the Holocaust into a universal code for the need to protect human rights and democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In post-humanist studies of identity, otherness and exclusion - conducted within the de-anthropocentrism of the humanities - questions arise about the condition of non-human subjects (animals, plants, things) that gain the cultural and social status of Others. As non-human entities, they have a socializing value, cement interpersonal relations, attract people to certain places. They have performative, integrative and co-creating abilities. The posthumanistic "turn towards things" opens the room for the construction of their social (auto) biographies, a development which already has been taking place in contemporary children's literature. The problem of the creation of (auto)biographies of non-human subjects is presented in this article on the example of the picture book Otto: The Autobiography of a Teddy Bear by Tomi Ungerer. The artist gives the non-anthropomorphized plush toy the status of a non-human subject and an active actor of social life as a medium of unofficial memory of the Holocaust. Ungerer consciously and innovatively uses the key determinants of the posthuman discourse, including intimate childhood experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the rhetorical strategies of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008) and the politician and Israeli Parliament member Ahmed Tibi with regard to Holocaust remembrance. The article compares the rhetorical strategies that these writers use to express messages linked to the Holocaust. The main questions examined in the article are: How should we characterize the construction of the ethos and different types of topoi in their rhetoric, and is there a difference between their rhetorical strategies in the context of Holocaust remembrance, bearing in mind that both are considered anti-Zionists? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the progress of memory studies worldwide, the central role of memory has rarely been a topic of interest in Greek historiography. The aim of this article is to reconstitute the spatiality of the Holocaust in the micro perspective of the sites of memory of Second World War in Greece. The “biographies” of these sites of memory reveal the complicated historical, political, and aesthetic axes on which Jewish memory is being constructed, a point that I find very interesting to highlight, as sites of memory always seem to have changing lives and many dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article provides an overview of education after and about Auschwitz (Holocaust education)* in Germany in both theory and practice, with particular attention to three critical areas. The first is the status of research in, as Adorno famously phrased it, “education after Auschwitz” within the context of contemporary Germany. German society is pluralistic, and is built on the third and fourth generations of young Germans since the National Socialist Era. These Germans cannot and do not want to be identified as perpetrators, but they must deal with a strong and growing right-wing extremist movement. The second area, given these challenges, is the fact that Holocaust education can fail. And finally, the European dimension of Holocaust remembrance means teaching about Auschwitz in the context of a general effort to resist inhumanity, as well as attempts to identify the connections between learning after and about Auschwitz, on the one hand, and learning and understanding human rights as a European and global vision on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores current trends in the representation of the Holocaust in Israeli popular culture through the analysis of the successful satirical television program: The Chamber Quintet. The article argues that the show's subversive and challenging interpretations of traditional Holocaust commemorations, indicates a major change in the collective memory of the Holocaust. The article explores the cultural role of the show's sketches relating to Holocaust memory by using three perspectives of analysis. The first is a historical-sociological perspective that deals with the development of Holocaust commemoration in Israel. The second perspective deals with the conflict between popular cultural practices and the conventions of Holocaust remembrance. The third perspective deals with the problematic relationship between the content (Holocaust memory) and the form (the genre of humor). Combining these perspectives reveals a dialectical discourse that connects prior voices with new modes of Holocaust representation in popular culture. The article suggests that the use of the popular medium and the genre of humor undermine the program's content. This process indicates a situation of deadlock in collective memory in which new voices criticize the traditional commemoration but can offer no alternative and subvert their own criticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the passing of the last testimonies, Holocaust remembrance and Holocaust education progressively rely on digital technologies to engage people in immersive, simulative, and even counterfactual memories of the Holocaust. This preliminary study investigates how three prominent Holocaust museums use social media to enhance the general public's knowledge and understanding of historical and remembrance events. A mixed-method approach based on a combination of social media analytics and latent semantic analysis was used to investigate the Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube profiles of Yad Vashem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Auschwitz–Birkenau Memorial and Museum. This social media analysis adopted a combination of metrics and was focused on how these social media profiles engage the public at both the page-content and relational levels, while their communication strategies were analysed in terms of generated content, interactivity, and popularity. Latent semantic analysis was used to analyse the most frequently used hashtags and words to investigate what topics and phrases appear most often in the content posted by the three museums. Overall, the results show that the three organisations are more active on Twitter than on Facebook and Instagram, with the Auschwitz–Birkenau Museum and Memorial occupying a prominent position in Twitter discourse while Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum had stronger presences on YouTube. Although the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum exhibits some interactivity with its Facebook fan community, there is a general tendency to use social media as a one-way broadcast mode of communication. Finally, the analysis of terms and hashtags revealed the centrality of "Auschwitz" as a broad topic of Holocaust discourse, overshadowing other topics, especially those related to recent events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]