Seminar schedule
The Holocaust: An Integrative History HI31Z
Dr Anna Hájková
Room H325
anna.hajkova@warwick.ac.uk
Books recommended for purchase:
Doris Bergen, The Holocaust: A Concise History (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009).
Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final
Solution in Poland (New York: HarperPerennial, 1993).
Jan Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne Poland
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
Marion Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1999).
Film we will watch:
Grey Zone (2001)
Outline:
1. October 2: Introduction: What was the Holocaust and why does one study it?
Primo Levi, If This Is a Man (another edition is named Survival in Auschwitz), motto poem.
Ruth Klüger, Still alive: A Holocaust girlhood remembered (Feminist Press: New York, 2001),
ch. The camps.
Hayden White, “Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth,” in Probing the Limits of
Representation, ed. Saul Friedländer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992): 37-53.
(Saul Friedländer, Introduction, in Ibid, pp. 1-21.)
2. October 9: Antisemitism and Jews and Gentiles in Nazi Germany
Bergen, ch. 1.
Kaplan, ch. 1 and 2 (pp. 17-73).
Excerpts from Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933-1941
(New York: Random House, 1999), selection.
3. October 16: Emigration and refugees
Kaplan, ch. 5.
Presentation: selected articles from Sybille Quack, ed. Between Sorrow and Strength: Women
Refugees of the Nazi Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
4. October 23: Persecution of social outsiders and murder of the disabled
Michael Burleigh, “Psychiatry, German Society and the Nazi “Euthanasia” Programme,” in The
Holocaust: Origins, Implementation, Aftermath, ed. Omer Bartov (London: Routledge, 2000):
43-62.
Beth Griech-Pollele, “Image of a Churchman-Resister: Bishop von Galen, the Euthanasia Project
and the Sermons of Summer 1941,” Journal of Contemporary History 36,1 (2001).
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Presentation: Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final
Solution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).
Rhuairidh
5. October 30: Pioneers of the Genocide [the date will change]
Susanne Heim/Götz Aly, Architects of Annihilation: Auschwitz and the Logic of Destruction,
selection
Presentation: Götz Aly, Final solution: Nazi population policy and the murder of the European
Jews, transl. Allison Brown and Belinda Cooper (London: Arnold, 1999).
Stephen
6. November 6: no class, reading week
7. November 13: Operation Barbarossa, barbarization of warfare, and the emergence of
the Final Solution
Christian Gerlach, “The Wannsee Conference, the Fate of German Jews, and Hitler's Decision in
Principle to Exterminate All European Jews,” Journal of Modern History 70,4 (1998): 759-812.
Browning, Ordinary Men, selection
Presentation: Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann, War of extermination : the German Military in
World War II, 1941-1944 (New York: Berghahn, 2000).
Ying
8. November 20: The local populations and persecution of Jews [date will change]
Jan Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne Poland
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
Jan Grabowski, “Rural Society and the Jews in Hiding: Elders, Nights Watches, Firefighters,
Hostages and Manhunts,” Yad Vashem Studies 40 (2012).
Bergen, pp. 119-127.
Presentation: Barbara Lambauer, Otto Abetz et les Francais, ou l’envers de la Collaboration
(Paris: Fayard, 2001).
Amie
9. November 27: Jewish Councils
Isaiah Trunk, Judenrat: the Jewish councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi occupation (New
York: Stein and Day, 1977).
Essays from Dan Diner, Beyond the conceivable: Studies on Germany, Nazism, and the
Holocaust (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
Presentation: Beate Meyer, A Fatal Balancing Act. The Dilemma oft he Reich Association of
Jews in Germany, 1939-1945 (New York/Oxford, Berghahn: 2013).
Abbie
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10. December 4: Ghettos and everyday life
Eva Mändlova-Roubickova, We're Alive and Life Goes On: A Theresienstadt Diary, trans by
Zaia Alexander (New York: H. Holt, 1998), entries for 1941-1943 (scanned and circulated)
Anna Hájková, “Sexual Barter in Times of Genocide: Negotiating the Sexual Economy of the
Theresienstadt Ghetto,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 38, no. 3 (spring
2013): 503-533
last week of the autumn term
11. January 8: Sexual violence: Stories and Silences
Doris Bergen, “Sexual Violence in the Holocaust: Unique and Typical?” in Lessons and
Legacies VII: The Holocaust in International Perspective, ed. Dagmar Herzog (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 2006): 179-201.
Monika Flaschka, “Only Pretty Women Were Raped:” The Effect of Sexual Violence on Gender
Identities in the Concentration Camps in Sexual Violence Against Jewish Women During the
Holocaust, eds. Sonja M. Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel (Hanover: University Press of New
England, 2010): 77-93.
Presentation: essays by Robert Sommer and Regina Mühlhäuser in Dagmar Herzog, ed. Brutality
and Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe's Twentieth Century (New York : Palgrave Macmillan,
2009).
Elizabeth Heinemann, Sexuality and Nazism, JSH.
Harvey
12. January 15: Concentration camps
Nikolaus Wachsmann, “The dynamics of destruction: The development of the concentration
camps, 1933-1945,” in Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany: The New Histories, Jane Caplan
and Nikolaus Wachsmann, eds. (London & New York: Routledge, 2009): 17-43.
Film: Grey Zone
13. January 22: Prisoner society in the camps
Jane Caplan, “Gender and the Concentration Camps,” in Caplan/Wachsmann, pp. 82-107.
Liana Millu, Smoke over Birkenau (New York: Jewish Publication Society, 1991): 177-197.
Presentation:
Hermann Langbein, People in Auschwitz
or
Jorge Semprún, What a Beautiful Sunday! (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982).
Richard
14. January 29: Perpetrators and guards
Karin Orth, “The concentration camp personnel,” in Caplan/Wachsmann, pp. 44-57.
Chris Dillon??
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Elissa Mailänder-Koslov, “Going East:” Colonial experiences and practices of violence among
female and male Majdanek camp guards (1941-1944), Journal for Genocide Research, vol. 10,
nr. 4 (2008): 559-578.
Presentation: Sereny, Into that Darkness: An Examination of Conscience (New York: Vintage
Books, 1983).
Jon and Jordan
15. February 5: Resistance
Hermann Langbein, People in Auschwitz (Chapel Hill: University of North Caroline Press &
USHMM, 2003): ch. Resistance (240-272).
Lenore Weitzman, Women of Courage: The Kashariyot (Couriers) in the Jewish Resistance
During the Holocaust, in Lessons and Legacies VI, ed. Jeffry Diefendorf (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1996): 112-154.
Presentation: Gad Beck, An Underground life: Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin, trans.
Allison Brown (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999).
OR
Nechama Tec, Defiance: The Bielski Partisans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
Megan
16. February 12: no class, reading week
17. February 19: Mixed marriages and people with mixed background
Beate Meyer, “The Mixed Marriage: A Guarantee of Survival or a Reflection of German Society
during the Nazi Regime?” in Probing the depths of German antisemitism: German society and
the persecution of the Jews, 1933-1941 ed. David Bankier (New York: Berghahn, 2000): 54-77.
Selection from Klemperer diaries.
Ingeborg Hecht, Invisible Walls: A German Family Under the Nuremberg Walls, trans. J.
Maxwell Brownjohn (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), selection.
Presentation: Nathan Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse
Protest in Nazi Berlin (New York: Norton, 1996).
Huw
18. February 26: Persecution of homosexuals
Geoffrey J. Giles, “‘The Most Unkindest Cut of All’: Castration, Homosexuality, and Nazi
Justice.” Journal of Contemporary History 27, no. 1 (1992): 41-61.
Wolfgang Röll, “Homosexual Inmates in the Buchenwald Concentration Camp.” Journal of
Homosexuality 31, no. 4, (1996): 1-28.
Clips of video interviews from the University of Southern California Visual History Foundation.
Presentations:
Wanda Półtawska, And I am afraid of my dreams, trans. Mary Craig (London: Hodder &
Stoughton, 1987).
Insa Eschebach, ed., Homophobie und Devianz (Berlin: Metropol, 2012).
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Danny
19. March 5: Going into hiding
Kaplan, ch. 8.
Marie Jalowicz Simon, Gone to the Ground (London: Clerkenwell Press, 2015).
Presentation: Richard Lutjens, Jews in Hiding in Nazi Berlin, 1941-1945 (PhD Dissertation,
Northwestern University, 2012.)
Will
EXTRA SESSION: Transitional Justice & dissertation workshop
Devin Pendas, section from The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial
20. March 12: Artistic representation: Film
Sara Horowitz, “But is it Good for the Jews? Spielberg's Schindler and the Aesthetics of
Atrocity,” in Spielberg's Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler's List ed. Yosefa
Loshitsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997): 119-139.
Village Voice review of the film
Presentation: Lassner, Mintz
(last meeting of the spring term)
Josephine
21. April 23: Artistic representation: Literature
Art Spiegelmann, Maus, volume one
Marianne Hirsch, “The Generation of Postmemory,” Poetics Today 29:1 (Spring 2008)
22. May 7: Revision session
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