Haunted Laughter addresses whether it is appropriate to use comedy as a literary form to depict Adolf Hitler, The Third Reich, and the Holocaust. Guided by existing theories of comedy and memory and through a comprehensive examination of comedic film and television productions, from the United States, Israel, and Europe, Jonathan Friedman proposes a model and a set of criteria to evaluate the effectiveness of comedy as a means of representation. These criteria include depth of purpose, relevance to the times, and originality of form and content. Friedman concludes that comedies can be effective if they provide relevant information about life and death in the past, present, or future; break new ground; and serve a purpose or multiple purposes-capturing the dynamic of the Nazi system of oppression, empowering or healing victims, serving as a warning for the future, or keeping those who can never grasp the real horror of genocide from losing perspective.

This book provides a social and cultural history of Jewish art in Nazi Germany, with a focus on the Jewish artists, art critics, and audiences in Nazi Bavaria. From the time of its conceptualization in the autumn of 1933 until its final curtain call in November 1938, the Jewish Cultural League in Bavaria sustained three departments: music, visual arts, and adult education. The Bavarian example steps outside the highly professional cultural milieu of Jewish Berlin, and instead looks at relatively unknown efforts of Bavarian Jewish artists as they used art to define what it now meant, to them, to be Jewish under Nazism. Insightful and engaging, this book is ideal for advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, and scholars interested in social and cultural histories of Jews in Germany.

This book discusses the active relationship among the mechanics of memory, visual practices, and historical narratives. Reflection on memory and its ties with historical narratives cannot be separated from reflection on the visual and the image as its points of reference which function in time. This volume addresses precisely that temporal aspect of the image, without reducing it to a neutral trace of the past, a mnemotechnical support of memory. As a commemorative device, the image fixes, structures, and crystalizes memory, turning the view of the past into myth. It may, however, also stimulate, transform, and update memory, functioning as a matrix of interpretation and understanding the past. The book questions whether the functioning of the visual matrices of memory can be related to a particular historical and geographical scope, that is, to Central and Eastern Europe, and whether it is possible to find their origin and decide if they are just local and regional or perhaps also Western European and universal. It focuses on the artistic reflection on time and history, in the reconstructions of memory due to change of frontiers and political regimes, as well as endeavours to impose some specific political structure on territories which were complex and mixed in terms of national identity, religion and social composition. The volume is ideal for students and scholars of memory studies, history and visual studies.

"In this insightful book, Stephanie Homer interrogates how different genre conventions (memoir, autobiographical fiction and novels) influence the representation of the Kindertransport. Her theoretical approach is sophisticated, her selection of texts judicious and representative. Homer's contribution to the study of the reception history of the Kindertransport is important and timely." (Bill Niven, Professor of Contemporary German History, Nottingham Trent University) "An immensely valuable intervention into studies of Kindertransport representations, this book invites readers into the ambiguities of memory. With clarity and confidence, the book explores the liberating creative potential of autobiographical fiction and polyphonic fictional voices which have reimagined the places and perspectives on Kindertransport as a migratory experience and literary compulsion. The book makes an important contribution to our understanding of Kindertransport literature as a genuinely transnational genre of witnessing and re-witnessing." (Dr Simone Gigliotti, Senior Lecturer in Holocaust Studies, Royal Holloway, University of London) With the dwindling number of Kindertransportees alive today, the living memory of this rescue operation is being transformed into cultural memory, a trend noticeable in the publication of popular Kindertransport fiction since the beginning of the twenty-first century. This change in memory invites the following questions: how is the child refugee's experience remembered, represented and reimagined in literature? And, consequently, what understanding of the Kindertransport is being transmitted to the following generations? Drawing on understandings of genre, narratology and empathy, this book examines works in English, German and Dutch from three literary genres: memoirs and autobiographical fiction by Kindertransportees and recent fiction by authors with no first-hand experience of the Kindertransport. This study exposes the various conventions, tensions and reader expectations attached to each genre and how these influence the author's construction of the text and, in turn, the nature of the representation. This topical research engages in debates at the heart of current discussions on Holocaust and Kindertransport memory, such as the limits of representability, the "unspeakability" of trauma, and issues of ethics and aesthetics.

Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl is the most widely read text about the Holocaust, yet it reveals only one example of the tragic consequences of the Nazi policy to eliminate the Jews. This casebook enriches Anne Frank's remarkable personal account with a variety of historical documents that illuminate the political and social context of anti-Semitism in Germany and the Holocaust. It includes an account of the Frank family's life in Germany before emigrating to Holland; first-person accounts of Anne's last seven months in deportation and concentration camps; other Holocaust narratives in the form of memoirs, letters, and children's diaries; an excerpt from Zlata's Diary, the story of a young girl caught in the war in Bosnia which has been compared to Anne Frank's; official Nazi pronouncements on "The Final Solution" to the Jews; and newspaper reports and editorials of the horrific events occurring between 1939 and 1945. All of these materials will help the student to better understand the historical context of Anne's experience, and the teacher to select appropriate materials to sensitize students to this period in history. Documents and discussion materials are organized into chapters on the Frank family history, including a chronology; the Jews in Holland; children in the Holocaust and their rescuers; a narrative overview and chronology of anti-Semitism in modern Germany; the Holocaust; and other Holocaust stories. Kopf also addresses the psychological issues of adolescent development so dramatically illustrated in Anne's diary and looks at her writing as carefully crafted literature. Each chapter contains study questions, topics for research papers and class discussions, andlists of further reading for exploring the historical as well as the personal issues leading to and culminating in the Holocaust. This is an invaluable source for interdisciplinary, English, and world history classes.

For decades scholars have pored over Hitler's autobiographical journey/political treatise, debating if Mein Kampf has genocidal overtones and arguably led to the Holocaust. For the first time, Hitler's Mein Kampf and the Holocaust sees celebrated international scholars analyse the book from various angles to demonstrate how it laid the groundwork for the Shoah through Hitler's venomous attack on the Jews in his text. Split into three main sections which focus on 'contexts', 'eugenics' and 'religion', the book reflects carefully on the point at which the Fuhrer's actions and policies turn genocidal during the Third Reich and whether Mein Kampf presaged Nazi Germany's descent into genocide. There are contributions from leading academics from across the United States and Germany, including Magnus Brechtken, Susannah Heschel and Nathan Stoltzfus, along with totally new insights into the source material in light of the 2016 German critical edition of Mein Kampf. Hitler's views on Marxism, violence, and leadership, as well as his anti-Semitic rhetoric are examined in detail as you are taken down the disturbing path from a hateful book to the Holocaust.

In the last years, the discussion around what is fascism, if this concept can be applied to present forms of politics and if its seeds are still present today, became central in the political debate. This discussion led to a vast reconsideration of the meaning and the experience of fascism in Europe and is changing the ways in which scholars of different generations look at this political ideology and come back to it and it is also changing the ways in which we consider the experience of Italian fascism in the European and global context. The aim of the book is building a general history of Fascism and its historiography through the analysis of 13 different fundamental aspects, which were at the core of Fascist project or of Fascist practices during the regime. Each essay considers a specific and meaningful aspect of the history of Italian fascism, reflecting on it from the vantage point of a case study. The essays thus reinterrogates the history of Fascism to understand in which way Fascism was able to mould the historical context in which it was born, how and if it transformed political, cultural, social elements that were already present in Italy. The themes considered are violence, empire, war, politics, economy, religion, culture, but also antifascism and the impact of Fascism abroad, especially in the Twenties and at the beginnings of the Thirties. The book could be both used for a general public interested in the history of Europe in the interwar period and for an academic and scholarly public, since the essays aim to develop a provocative reflection on their own area of research.

The recent rise of global antisemitism, Holocaust denial, and American white nationalism has created a dangerous challenge to Holocaust public memory on an unprecedented scale. This book is a timely exploration of the ways in which next-generation Holocaust survivors combine old and new media to bring newer generations of audiences into active engagement with Holocaust histories. Readers have been socialized to expect memorialization artifacts about the Holocaust to come in the form of diaries, memoirs, photos, or documentaries in which gender is often absent or marginalized. This book shows a complex process of remembering the past that can positively shift our orientations toward others. Using gender, performance, and rhetoric as a frame, Lisa Costello questions public memory as gender neutral while showing how new forms of memorialization like digital archives, YouTube posts, hybrid memoirs, and small films build emotional connections that bring us closer to the past.

German Jews and Migration to the United States, 1933-1945 is a collection of first-person accounts, many previously unpublished, that document the flight and exile of German Jews from Nazi Germany to the USA,. The authors of the letters and memoirs included in this collection share two important characteristics: They all had close ties to Munich, the Bavarian capital, and they all emigrated to the USA, though sometimes via detours and/or after stays of varying lengths in other places of refuge. Selected to represent a wide range of exile experiences, these testimonies are carefully edited, extensively annotated, and accompanied by biographical introductions to make them accessible to readers, especially those who are new to the subject. These autobiographical sources reveal the often-traumatic experiences and consequences of forced migration, displacement, resettlement, and new beginnings. In addition, this book demonstrates that migration is not only a process by which groups and individuals relocate from one place to another but also a dynamic of transmigration affected by migrant networks and the complex relationships between national policies and the agency of migrants.

This book is about the experiences of Jewish children who were members of armed partisan groups in Eastern Europe during World War II and the Holocaust. It describes and analyze the role of children as activists, agents, and decision makers in a situation of extraordinary danger and stress. The children in this book were hunted like prey and ran for their lives. They survived by fleeing into the forest and swamps of Eastern Europe and joining anti-German partisan groups. The vast majority of these children were teenagers between ages 11 and 18, although some were younger. They were, by any definition, child soldiers, and that is the reason they lived to tell their tales. The book will be of interest to general and academic audiences. There is also great interest in children and childhood across disciplines of history and the social sciences. It is likely to spark considerable debate and interest, since its argument runs counter to the generally accepted wisdom that child soldiers must first and foremost be seen as victims of their recruiters. The argument of this book is that time, place, and context play a key role in our understanding of children's involvement in war and that in some contexts children under arms must be seen as exercising an inherent right of self-defense.

Beginning with the roots of anti-Semitism in early Christian Europe, this book traces the evolution of the Jewish stereotype as the evil "other," which culminated in Adolf Hitler's war against the Jews, wherein he sought to eliminate through mass murder every Jewish man, woman and child. It includes most recent scholarship on the Holocaust which reflects the recent rise of Neo-Nazism, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia throughout the West, including the United States. This third edition of Historical Dictionary of the Holocaust contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 600 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, issues, and events that led to the murder of six-million Jews, and millions of other groups by Nazi Germany. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the Holocaust.

Albert Speer was Hitler's architect before the Second World War. Through Hitler's great trust in him and Speer's own genius for organisation he became, effectively from 1942 overlord of the entire war economy, making him the second most powerful man in the Third Reich. Sentenced to twenty years imprisonment in Spandau Prison at the Nuremberg Trails, Speer attempted to progress from moral extinction to moral self-education. How he came to terms with his own acts and failures to act and his real culpability in Nazi war crimes are the questions at the centre of this book.

Based on years of archival research, 'The Doctors of the Warsaw Ghetto' is the most detailed study ever undertaken into the fate of more than 800 Jewish doctors who devoted themselves, in many cases until the day they died, to the care of the sick and the dying in the Ghetto. The functioning of the Ghetto hospitals, clinics and laboratories is explained in fascinating detail. Readers will learn about the ground-breaking research undertaken in the Ghetto as well as about the underground medical university that prepared hundreds of students for a career in medicine; a career that, in most cases, was to be cut brutally short within weeks of them completing their first year of studies.

This is the extraordinary story of the author's twenty year quest to find gold coins which his father's family buried in their backyard in Poland just prior to being deported by the Nazis into concentration camps. His father survived the war but died when the author was a teenager, leaving him only with the knowledge that he had buried coins somewhere in Poland, and no information about his family. During his quest, Biederman uncovers many interesting and disturbing facts about his father and mother and their families, such as the fact that his father was the third person on Oskar Schindler's list and had a chance meeting with Adolph Hitler, and that his mother was selected as a cook for the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele. The book details the author's quest to unearth his family's past and his father's treasure and continues with his parent's amazing post-war years in Europe and their eventual arrival in North America.

The Spanish Civil War has been the most important, decisive and traumatic event in contemporary Spain, but also one of the most iconic events in the recent history of the Western world. However, musicology has not devoted a great deal of attention to the war of 1936-1939 until very recently. This volume is the first collective book dedicated to music and the Spanish Civil War. The contributions, drawn from musicologists, historians and anthropologists from Spain, Mexico, Australia, and the United States, explore the songs at the front, war soundscapes, propaganda and music policies, censorship, music in prisons, different music genres, exiled composers and critics, musical diplomacy, memory, and Spanish Civil War as a topic in contemporary music.

In recent years, historical witnessing has emerged as a category of "museum object." Audiovisual recordings of interviews with individuals remembering events of historical importance are now integral to the collections and research activities of museums. They have also become important components in narrative and exhibition design strategies. With a focus on Holocaust museums, this study scrutinizes for the first time the new global phenomenon of the "musealization" of the witness to history, exploring the processes, prerequisites, and consequences of the transformation of video testimonies into exhibits.

Takes a broad perspective of the Holocaust, both in terms of the different groups involved as well as over time with coverage of both roots going back into biblical times and coming up to the present day increase in antisemitism and anti-Roma sentiment, allowing readers to get a long and deep perspective on the Holocaust. Offers the perfect long-view textbook for the numerous courses on the Holocaust. One of few textbooks on the Holocaust despite the numerous books on the subject, and very good at giving the long perspective that can be missing from other books.

Takes a broad perspective of the Holocaust, both in terms of the different groups involved as well as over time with coverage of both roots going back into biblical times and coming up to the present day increase in antisemitism and anti-Roma sentiment, allowing readers to get a long and deep perspective on the Holocaust. Offers the perfect long-view textbook for the numerous courses on the Holocaust. One of few textbooks on the Holocaust despite the numerous books on the subject, and very good at giving the long perspective that can be missing from other books.

May God Avenge Their Blood: a Holocaust Memoir Triptych presents three memoirs by the Yiddish writer Rachmil Bryks (1912-1974). In "Those Who Didn't Survive," Bryks portrays inter-war life in his shtetl Skarzysko-Kamienna, Poland with great flair and rich anthropological detail, rendering a haunting collective portrait of an annihilated community. "The Fugitives" vividly charts the confusion and terror of the early days of World War II in the industrial city of Lodz and elsewhere. In the final memoir, "From Agony to Life," Bryks tells of his imprisonment in Auschwitz and other camps. Taken together, the triptych takes the reader on a wide-ranging journey from Hasidic life before the Holocaust to the chaos of the early days of war and then to the horrors of Nazi captivity. This translation by Yermiyahu Ahron Taub brings the extraordinary memoirs of an important Yiddish writer to English-language readers for the first time.

This is a book about an online community of the Second Generation (2g), children of Holocaust survivors. Created in 1995, " e List" was the brainchild of Paul Foldes, a 2g electrical engineer and consumer attorney turned businessman. Knowing that online communities were an opportunity to reach beyond local meetings, he founded e List even before the web existed. Created when internet communication was just beginning for most people, it was the rst to break local and national barriers to become a truly international, Englishspeaking, 2g framework. Based on a free internet platform, with moderators working on a volunteer basis, it required no funding. e "Second Generation" had nally come into its own. e book tells the story of the List and its members over a quarter of a century.