A long-overdue study of the East German view of the Holocaust over the years 1946-1989. Stated Memory: East Germany and the Holocaust investigates communist Germany's attempt to explain the Holocaust within a framework that was at once German and Marxist. The book probes the contradictions and self-deceptionsarising from East Germany's official self-understanding as an enlightened, modern society in which Jewishness did not constitute "difference" or otherness. The study examines East German historiography of the Holocaust, includingits reflection in schoolbooks; analyzes East German concentration camp memorials; discusses the situation of Jews who remained in East Germany; and surveys East German cinematic and literary responses to the Nazi murder of the Jews. The book shows that regardless of the sincerity of the individuals involved in constructing these various forms of memory, the state attempted to orchestrate Holocaust discourse for its own purposes. Thomas C. Foxis professor of German at the University of Alabama. He has written extensively on East German literature and the Holocaust.

Visual Propaganda, Exhibitions, and the Spanish Civil War is a history of art during wartime that analyzes images in various media that circulated widely and were encountered daily by Spaniards on city walls, in print, and in exhibitions. Tangible elements of the nation's past"monuments, cultural property, and art-historical icons"were displayed in temporary exhibitions and museums, as well as reproduced on posters and in print media, to rally the population, define national identity, and reinvent distant and recent history. Artists, political-party propagandists, and government administrators believed that images on the street, in print, and in exhibitions would create a community of viewers, brought together during the staging of public exhibitions to understand their own roles as Spaniards. This book draws on extensive archival research, brings to light unpublished documents, and examines visual propaganda, exhibitions, and texts unavailable in English. It engages with questions of national self-definition and historical memory at their intersections with the fine arts, visual culture, exhibition history, tourism, and propaganda during the Spanish Civil War and immediate post-war period, as well as contemporary responses to the contested legacy of the Spanish Civil War. It will be of interest to scholars in art history, visual and cultural history, history, and museum studies.

'My mind refuses to play its part in the scholarly exercise. I walk around in a daze, remembering occasionally to take a picture. I've heard that many people cry here, but I am too numb to feel. The wind whips through my wool coat. I am very cold, and I imagine what the wind would have felt like for someone here fifty years ago without coat, boots, or gloves. Hours later as I write, I tell myself a story about the day, hoping it is true, and hoping it will make sense of what I did and did not feel.' _From the Foreword Most of us learn of Auschwitz and the Holocaust through the writings of Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel. Remarkable as their stories are, they leave many voices of Auschwitz unheard. Mary Lagerwey seeks to complicate our memory of Auschwitz by reading less canonical survivors: Jean Amery, Charlotte Delbo, Fania Fenelon, Szymon Laks, Primo Levi, and Sara Nomberg-Przytyk. She reads for how gender, social class, and ethnicity color their tellings. She asks whether we can_whether we should_make sense of Auschwitz. And throughout, Lagerwey reveals her own role in her research; tells of her own fears and anxieties presenting what she, a non-Jew born after the fall of Nazism, can only know second-hand. For any student of the Holocaust, for anyone trying to make sense of the final solution, Reading Auschwitz represents a powerful struggle with what it means to read and tell stories after Auschwitz.

Responding to the increasingly influential role of Hannah Arendt's political philosophy in recent years, Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Total Domination: The Holocaust, Plurality, and Resistance, critically engages with Arendt's understanding of totalitarianism. According to Arendt, the main goal of totalitarianism was total domination; namely, the virtual eradication of human legality, morality, individuality, and plurality. This attempt, in her view, was most fully realized in the concentration camps, which served as the major "laboratories" for the regime. While Arendt focused on the perpetrators' logic and drive, Michal Aharony examines the perspectives and experiences of the victims and their ability to resist such an experiment. The first book-length study to juxtapose Arendt's concept of total domination with actual testimonies of Holocaust survivors, this book calls for methodological pluralism and the integration of the voices and narratives of the actors in the construction of political concepts and theoretical systems. To achieve this, Aharony engages with both well-known and non-canonical intellectuals and writers who survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. Additionally, she analyzes the oral testimonies of survivors who are largely unknown, drawing from interviews conducted in Israel and in the U.S., as well as from videotaped interviews from archives around the world. Revealing various manifestations of unarmed resistance in the camps, this study demonstrates the persistence of morality and free agency even under the most extreme and de-humanizing conditions, while cautiously suggesting that absolute domination is never as absolute as it claims or wishes to be. Scholars of political philosophy, political science, history, and Holocaust studies will find this an original and compelling book.

Based on first-hand diplomatic, political and journalistic sources, most unpublished, Mexico and the Spanish Civil War investigates the backing of the Second Republic by Mexico during the Spanish Civil War. Significant military, material and financial aid was given by the government of Lazaro Cardenas (19341940) to the Republic, which involved not only direct sales of arms, but also smuggling operations covertly undertaken by Mexican diplomatic agents in order to circumvent the embargo imposed by the London Committee of Non Intervention. This path-breaking account reveals the operations in Spain of Mexican workers, soldiers, artists and intellectuals -- such as later Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz and the Muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros -- as volunteers and propagandists for the Republican cause. Engagement with the Spanish Civil War also had a profound impact upon Mexico's domestic politics as support for the Republic was equated by Cardenas with his own revolutionary project. The defeat of the Republic in 1939 therefore had far-reaching repercussions for the post-1940 governments. Originally published to critical acclaim in Spanish, the work has been quoted and reviewed by many leading specialists on the Civil War, including Anthony Beevor, Angel Vinas, Santos Julia, and Pedro Perez Herrero. This book is essential reading for students and scholars specialising in contemporary European history and politics, Latin American studies, and all those with an interest in the Spanish Civil War and the Mexican Revolution.

Though it has been nearly seventy years since the Holocaust, the human capacity for evil displayed by its perpetrators is still shocking and haunting. But the story of the Nazi attempt to annihilate European Jewry is not all we should remember. Stealth Altruism tells of secret, non-militant, high-risk efforts by "Carers," those victims who tried to reduce suffering and improve everyone's chances of survival. Their empowering acts of altruism remind us of our inherent longing to do good even in situations of extraordinary brutality. Arthur B. Shostak explores forbidden acts of kindness, such as sharing scarce clothing and food rations, holding up weakened fellow prisoners during roll call, secretly replacing an ailing friend in an exhausting work detail, and much more. To date, memorialization has emphasized what was done to victims and sidelined what victims tried to do for one another. "Carers" provide an inspiring model and their perilous efforts should be recognized and taught alongside the horrors of the Holocaust. Humanity needs such inspiration.

Though it has been nearly seventy years since the Holocaust, the human capacity for evil displayed by its perpetrators is still shocking and haunting. But the story of the Nazi attempt to annihilate European Jewry is not all we should remember. Stealth Altruism tells of secret, non-militant, high-risk efforts by "Carers," those victims who tried to reduce suffering and improve everyone's chances of survival. Their empowering acts of altruism remind us of our inherent longing to do good even in situations of extraordinary brutality. Arthur B. Shostak explores forbidden acts of kindness, such as sharing scarce clothing and food rations, holding up weakened fellow prisoners during roll call, secretly replacing an ailing friend in an exhausting work detail, and much more. To date, memorialization has emphasized what was done to victims and sidelined what victims tried to do for one another. "Carers" provide an inspiring model and their perilous efforts should be recognized and taught alongside the horrors of the Holocaust. Humanity needs such inspiration.

Holocaust Education in Lithuania is based on a six-year, multi-sited ethnographic research project that was conducted to analyze the effects of the controversial policies of Holocaust education which were introduced as conditions of membership for access into post-Soviet western alliances. In order to understand how individuals take up transnational policies and programs intended to support democratization, Beresniova delves into rarely discussed issues. She looks at the means through which inherent cultural and political assumptions have had an impact on the ways in which memory and history are used in educational programs. She also scrutinizes the motivating factors for involvement in Holocaust education, such as the importance of community building, civic activism beyond the topic of the Holocaust, and the perceived power of the international community in dictating domestic education policy guidelines. Beresniova contends that educators must acknowledge the political and cultural elements in Holocaust education programs and policies, or risk undermining their own efforts. This book is recommended for scholars of anthropology, education, history, political science, and European studies.

During the early 1940s some 5,000 Christians of Jewish origin lived in the Warsaw Ghetto. In this remarkable book, which combines both memoir and historical analysis, Peter F. Dembowski describes their fate. He also brings to light the little known fact that within the Warsaw Ghetto were fully functioning Christian churches, including at first three and later two Roman Catholic parishes. Dembowski contends that Nazi ideology, particularly the Nuremberg Laws, destroyed the distinction between anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism. Jews were defined by, and persecuted because of, their race rather than their religious beliefs. As a member of a family of Christianized Jews with many friends who lived in the Warsaw Ghetto, Dembowski offers a rich portrait of Jewish Christians and their fate in the Ghetto. An interesting aspect of his account is his description of Jewish views toward Christian converts. Dembowski stresses the historical importance of counting baptized, practicing Christians among Jews in the Ghetto, as well as their difficult social situation within the Ghetto. At the same time, he is sensitive to the pain that Christian conversion caused both secular and religious Jews. important dimension to Holocaust studies. It will be welcomed by general readers and scholars alike.

In 1925, the three leading chemical firms in Germany - BASF, Bayer, and Hoechst - merged, together with some smaller firms, to become IG Farben. IG Farben became, like no other firm, synonymous with the participation of German industry in the most heinous crimes of the Nazi regime. This book deals in depth with one of IG Farben's leading factories, Hoechst, during the Third Reich. On the basis of long and meticulous archival research, including previously inaccessible company records, the author tries to describe and analyze the relationship between management and employees and the Nazi party and its organizations. The author shows the exclusion and persecution of employees, particularly Jewish employees. He traces the extent of Hoechst's involvement in the exploitation of forced labor, and its active participation in human experiments in several concentration camps. Throughout, he tries to shed light on the motivations of those responsible for this conduct.

By 1944 a large part of Eastern Europe had already been liberated by the Red Army, and the Allied forces were continuing to move in from the west after success at Normandy. Yet, in Lower Silesia, Germany more than sixty new forced labor camps were established, adding to the approximately forty camps that already existed. The inmates were Jews from Hungary and Poland who had been deported from the Lodz ghetto or who had been included on the infamous "Schindler's List." These camps became satellites of the Gross-Rosen concentration camp and were the last to be liberated. Throughout their existence, the Gross-Rosen camp and its satellites had a special relationship. This is why, although the process of genocide was proceeding at top speed, some Jews were diverted from the gas chambers and sent to work at Gross-Rosen. Auschwitz-Birkenau was the main provider of inmate slave laborers for the Gross-Rosen armaments, munitions, and other factories owned by giant private enterprises, such as Krupp, I.G. Farben, and Siemens. Jewish inmates were also used in the construction of Hitler's secret headquarters in the local Eulen Mountains and the secret underground tunnels used to store weapons. This book adds greatly to our knowledge of the complexity of German policy toward the Jews and forced labor. It not only describes the daily life of Jewish slave laborers but also traces Reich economic policy and the big corporations that used forced labor.

The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) pitted conservative forces including the army, the Church, the Falange (fascist party), landowners, and industrial capitalists against the Republic, installed in 1931 and supported by intellectuals, the petite bourgeoisie, many campesinos (farm laborers), and the urban proletariat. Provoking heated passions on both sides, the Civil War soon became an international phenomenon that inspired a number of literary works reflecting the impact of the war on foreign and national writers. While the literature of the period has been the subject of scholarship, women's literary production has not been studied as a body of work in the same way that literature by men has been, and its unique features have not been examined. Addressing this lacuna in literary studies, this volume provides fresh perspectives on well-known women writers, as well as less studied ones, whose works take the Spanish Civil War as a theme. The authors represented in this collection reflect a wide range of political positions. Writers such as Maria Zambrano, Merce Rodoreda, and Josefina Aldecoa were clearly aligned with the Republic, whereas others, including Mercedes Salisachs and Liberata Masoliver, sympathized with the Nationalists. Most, however, are situated in a more ambiguous political space, although the ethics and character portraits that emerge in their works might suggest Republican sympathies. Taken together, the essays are an important contribution to scholarship on literature inspired by this pivotal point in Spanish history.

What, exactly, does one mean when idealizing tolerance as a solution to cultural conflict? This book examines a wide range of young adult texts, both fiction and memoir, representing the experiences of young adults during WWII and the Holocaust. Author Rachel Dean-Ruzicka argues for a progressive reading of this literature. Tolerance Discourse and Young Adult Holocaust Literature contests the modern discourse of tolerance, encouraging educators and readers to more deeply engage with difference and identity when studying Holocaust texts. Young adult Holocaust literature is an important nexus for examining issues of identity and difference because it directly confronts systems of power, privilege, and personhood. The text delves into the wealth of material available and examines over forty books written for young readers on the Holocaust and, in the last chapter, neo-Nazism. The book also looks at representations of non-Jewish victims, such as the Romani, the disabled, and homosexuals. In addition to critical analysis of the texts, each chapter reads the discourses of tolerance and cosmopolitanism against present-day cultural contexts: ongoing debates regarding multicultural education, gay and lesbian rights, and neo-Nazi activities. The book addresses essential questions of tolerance and toleration that have not been otherwise considered in Holocaust studies or cultural studies of children's literature.

Valencia has traditionally been seen as somewhat exceptional within Spain: a prosperous, agricultural export-oriented economy dominated by small- and medium-sized farmers. This tranquil image of Levante feliz contrasts sharply with those of rebellious, proletarian Barcelona, or impoverished, feudal Andalusia, with which the CNT and the Spanish anarchist movement is most closely associated. However, this new study shows that Valencia in the 1920s and 1930s was anything but tranquil. The vertiginous growth of the CNT between 1918 and 1920 led to the province being a major target of government repression. The situation there was considered by one Interior Minister as more worrying than in Barcelona. Later, in the 1930s, urban Valencia became the focus of a fierce struggle between hard-line revolutionaries linked to the anarchist FAI and more moderate trade unions, whilst numerous local insurrections broke out in rural areas of the province. Eventually, these two factions would form an uneasy truce in time to lead the Valencian left in the battle to overcome the military coup of July 1936 and secure this vital economic region for the Republican side. In providing the first English-language study of this important movement, Dr Purkiss fills a significant gap in the historiography of the Spanish left. Drawing on a wide range of previously underused primary sources, he shows that not only was Valencia a hugely important source of anarchist support, but that the local movement was far more radical than has previously been thought. He thus provides a vital insight into the origins of the revolutionary and anti-clerical violence which swept the province in the early months of Civil War, introducing us to the 'expropriators' and 'men of action' whose activities terrified bourgeois Valencia in the 1930s. Published in association with the Canada Blanch Centre for Contemporary Spanish Studies.

Israeli youth voyages to Poland are one of the most popular and influential forms of transmission of Holocaust memory in Israeli society. Through intensive participant observation, group discussions, student diaries, and questionnaires, the author demonstrates how the State shapes Poland into a living deathscape of Diaspora Jewry. In the course of the voyage, students undergo a rite de passage, in which they are transformed into victims, victorious survivors, and finally witnesses of the witnesses. By viewing, touching, and smelling Holocaust-period ruins and remains, by accompanying the survivors on the sites of their suffering and survival, crying together and performing commemorative ceremonies at the death sites, students from a wide variety of family backgrounds become carriers of Shoah memory. They come to see the State and its defense as the romanticized answer to the Shoah. These voyages are a bureaucratic response to uncertainty and fluidity of identity in an increasingly globalized and fragmented society. This study adds a measured and compassionate ethical voice to ideological debates surrounding educational and cultural forms of encountering the past in contemporary Israel, and raises further questions about the representation of the Holocaust after the demise of the last living witnesses.

German and Italian fascist armies in the Second World War treated the Jews quite differently. Jews who fell into the hands of the German army ended up in concentration camps; none of those taken by the Italians suffered the same fate. Yet the protectors of the Jews were no philo-Semites, nor were they (often) great respecters of human life. Some of those same officers had sanctioned savage atrocities against Ethiopians and Arabs in the years before the war. Jonathan Steinberg uses this remarkable and poignant story to unravel the motives and forces underpinning both Fascism and Nazism. As a renowned historian of both Germany and Italy, he is uniquely placed to answer the underlying question; why?

This book re-examines one of the most intense controversies of the Holocaust: the role of Rezs Kasztner in facilitating the murder of most of Nazi-occupied Hungary's Jews in 1944. Because he was acting head of the Jewish rescue operation in Hungary, some have hailed him as a saviour. Others have charged that he collaborated with the Nazis in the deportations to Auschwitz. What is indisputable is that Adolf Eichmann agreed to spare a special group of 1,684 Jews, who included some of Kasztner's relatives and friends, while nearly 500,000 Hungarian Jews were sent to their deaths. Why were so many lives lost? After World War II, many Holocaust survivors condemned Kasztner for complicity in the deportation of Hungarian Jews. It was alleged that, as a condition of saving a small number of Jewish leaders and select others, he deceived ordinary Jews into boarding the trains to Auschwitz. The ultimate question is whether Kastztner was a Nazi collaborator, as branded by Ben Hecht in his 1961 book Perfidy, or a hero, as Anna Porter argued in her 2009 book Kasztner's Train. Opinion remains divided. Paul Bogdanor makes an original, compelling case that Kasztner helped the Nazis keep order in Hungary's ghettos before the Jews were sent to Auschwitz, and sent Nazi disinformation to his Jewish contacts in the free world. Drawing on unpublished documents, and making extensive use of the transcripts of the Kasztner and Eichmann trials in Israel, Kasztner's Crime is a chilling account of one man's descent into evil during the genocide of his own people.

This book explores portrayals of Anne Frank in American literature, where she is often invoked, if problematically, as a means of encouraging readers to think widely about persecution, genocide, and victimisation; often in relation to gender, ethnicity, and race. It shows how literary representations of Anne Frank in America over the past 50 years reflect the continued dominance of the American dramatic adaptations of Frank's Diary in the 1950s, and argues that authors feel compelled to engage with the problematic elements of these adaptations and their iconic power. At the same time, though, literary representations of Frank are associated with the adaptations; critics often assume that these texts unquestioningly perpetuate the problems with the adaptations. This is not true. This book examines how American authors represent Frank in order to negotiate difficult questions relating to representation of the Holocaust in America, and in order to consider gender, coming of age, and forms of inequality in American culture in various historical moments; and of course, to consider the ways Frank herself is represented in America. This book argues that the most compelling representations of Frank in American literature are alert to their own limitations, and may caution against making Frank a universal symbol of goodness or setting up too easy identifications with her. It will be of great interest to researchers and students of Frank, the Holocaust in American fiction and culture, gender studies, life writing, young adult fiction, and ethics.

The first volume of its kind, Dislocated Memories: Jews, Music, and Postwar German Culture draws together three significant areas of inquiry: Jewish music, German culture, and the legacy of the Holocaust. Jewish music-a highly debated topic-encompasses a multiplicity of musics and cultures, reflecting an inherent and evolving hybridity and transnationalism. German culture refers to an equally diverse concept that, in this volume, includes the various cultures of prewar Germany, occupied Germany, the divided and reunified Germany, and even "German (Jewish) memory," which is not necessarily physically bound to Germany. In the context of these perspectives, the volume makes powerful arguments on about the impact of the Holocaust and its aftermath in changing contexts of musical performance and composition. In doing so, the essays in Dislocated Memories cover a wide spectrum of topics from the immediate postwar period with music in the Displaced Persons camps to the later twentieth century with compositions conceived in response to the Holocaust and the klezmer revival at the turn of this century. Dislocated Memories builds on a wide range of recent and critical scholarship in Cold War studies, cultural history, German studies, Holocaust studies, Jewish studies, and memory studies. What binds these distinct fields tightly together are the contributors' specific theoretical inquiries that reflect separate yet interrelated themes such as displacement and memory. While these concepts link the multi-faceted essays on a micro-level, they are also largely connected in their conceptual query by focus, on the macro-level, on the presence and the absence of Jewish music in Germany after 1945. Filled with original research by scholars at the forefront of music, history, and Jewish studies, Dislocated Memories will prove an essential text for scholars and students alike.

This book charts the author's long journey of healing from the trauma caused by having to go into hiding as a child and having to deny that she was Jewish. It is not intended as an autobiography or a clinical paper on the healing process but as an account of a very personal inner journey. Marika Henriques records in words and images how she was shaped and her profession determined by historical events. She was born in Budapest in 1935. During the Holocaust in 1944, separated from her family, she became a hidden child. She was nine years old and those dark times had a profound and lasting effect on her. That being a Jew was shameful and had to be hidden remained deeply etched into her being for decades. Fascism was followed by communism after the war. Persecuted once more, now for her middle class background, she escaped, at the age of twenty-one, in 1956 during the Hungarian uprising. She crossed the border on foot amongst mine fields in temperatures of minus 25 degrees centigrade. Eventually she arrived as a refugee in England and in 1961 she married a Swedish Jew. In due course she found her vocation and became a Jungian psychotherapist. In doing, so she had to undergo psychoanalysis, during which the drawings and poems poured out of her as part of the healing process. Jung's ideas were an integral part of the process of understanding herself and her images. The drawings the drawings emerged unbidden and were drawn quickly, without fully understanding what they signified, but over the years she has stitched 19 of them as tapestries. The gentler pace of stitching was all a part of the healing process, and they are woven together with the drawings and poems in the book as she unfolds her story, the story of wounding and healing, herself and others. The culmination was a painstaking journey to return to her tradition and people. It started with a major surgery and ended twenty years later on the pulpit, the bimah, of a synagogue.

This investigation of Polish, Jewish, and German sources demonstrates the roles of music in occupied Poland. Its former citizens had their access to music controlled by the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda. It was rationed as other goods, depending on racial (i.e. also legal) status. Official music performances served as a propagandistic tool to further divide the Nazi-segregated population. Music played clandestinely embodied resistance. It restored the sense of community and helped save musicians persecuted as Jews, like Wladyslaw Szpilman. The documents analyzed in the monograph confirm the dehumanization of prospective victims, mixed with a narcissistic self-righteous view of Nazi songs and propaganda ultimately led to the organized presence of music in the Holocaust sites.