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Increasingly, German Studies programs include courses on the Holocaust, but suitable course materials are often difficult to find. Teachers in higher education will therefore very much welcome this volume that examines and reflects both the practical and theoretical aspects of teaching about the Holocaust. Though designed primarily by and for North American Germanists and German Studies specialists, this book will prove no less useful for teachers in other countries and associated disciplines. It presents and describes successful Holocaust-related courses that have been developed and taught at U.S. and Canadian colleges and universities, demonstrating the depth, breadth, and variety of such offerings, while remaining mindful of the instructor's special moral responsibilities. Reflecting as it does, the innovative Holocaust pedagogy in North American German and German Studies, this collection serves the needs of educators who wish to revise or update their existing Holocaust courses and of those who are seeking guidance, ideas, and resources to enable them to develop their first Holocaust course or unit.
Born in Belgium in 1939 to Jewish parents who had been forced to flee their home in Berlin six months earlier, Sylvia Ruth Gutmann chronicles an odyssey that spans sixty years, three countries, and thousands of miles. With an intimate voice, this heartbreaking and inspiring memoir tells a story of of loss, love, resilience, belonging, and identity.
Ruth Herskovits Gutmann’s powerful memoir recounts her life not only as a concentration camp inmate and survivor, but also as a sister and daughter. Born in 1928, Gutmann and her twin sister, Eva, escaped the growing Nazi threat in Germany on a Kindertransport to Holland in 1939. The false expectation of being allowed to immigrate to Cuba as a family led her father, Samuel Herskovits, to bring the twins back to Hannover in 1941. Rather than receive travel visas, however, they, their father, and their stepmother, Mania, were arrested and deported first to Thereisenstadt and then Auschwitz-Birkenau. After their parents were killed, the girls spent the remainder of the war in numerous other c...
Introduction: The well-known, poorly understood ghetto -- 1. "The overorganized ghetto:" administering Terezin -- 2. A society based on inequality -- 3. The age of pearl barley: food and hunger -- 4. Medicine and illness -- 5. Cultural life: leisure time activities -- 6. Transports to the East.
Female, Jewish, and Educated presents a collective biography of Jewish women who attended universities in Germany or Austria before the Nazi era. To what extent could middle-class Jewish women in the early decades of the 20th century combine family and careers? What impact did anti-Semitism and gender discrimination have in shaping their personal and professional choices? Harriet Freidenreich analyzes the lives of 460 Central European Jewish university women, focusing on their family backgrounds, university experiences, professional careers, and decisions about marriage and children. She evaluates the role of discrimination and anti-Semitism in shaping the careers of academics, physicians, and lawyers in the four decades preceding World War II and assesses the effects of Nazism, the Holocaust, and emigration on the lives of a younger cohort of women. The life stories of the women profiled reveal the courage, character, and resourcefulness with which they confronted challenges still faced by women today.
During the Second World War, an unprecedented number of families were torn apart. As the Nazi empire crumbled, millions roamed the continent in search of their loved ones. The Lost Children tells the story of these families, and of the struggle to determine their fate. We see how the reconstruction of families quickly became synonymous with the survival of European civilization itself. Even as Allied officials and humanitarian organizations proclaimed a new era of individualist and internationalist values, Tara Zahra demonstrates that they defined the “best interests” of children in nationalist terms. Sovereign nations and families were seen as the key to the psychological rehabilitation...
When we are confronted with images of and memoirs from the Holocaust and subsequent cases of vast cruelty and suffering, is our impulse to empathize put at risk by the possibility of becoming numb to horror? Carolyn J. Dean's provocative new book addresses the ways we evade our failures of empathy in the face of massive suffering: Has exposure (or overexposure) to representations of pain damaged our ability to feel? Do the frequent claims that artistic representations of extreme cruelty are pornographic allow us to dodge the real issues that we must confront in attempting to come to terms with suffering? Does an excess of terror place constraints on compassion?Dean examines the very different representations of suffering found in visual media, history writing, cultural criticism, and journalism that grapple with the assumption that Americans and Western Europeans have been rendered numb and their appropriate human responses blunted by the events of the past century. The Fragility of Empathy after the Holocaust will be of interest to all readers concerned with contemporary "victim culture," Holocaust representation, and humanism.
New essays by prominent scholars in German and Holocaust Studies exploring the boundaries and confluences between the fields and examining new transnational approaches to the Holocaust.
A sequel to the groundbreaking Children of the Holocaust, Where She Came From is a daughter’s memoir of her mother’s family. Drawing on her journalistic training, Helen Epstein demonstrates how documentary research can unearth family history and bridge the historical chasm of the Shoah. This book is at once a memoir, a family history and a social history of Central European Jews of the 19th and 20th centuries. The three generations of women she portrays are dressmakers; the fashion salon, a refuge and a rare institution where women could speak. “What we so coldly call ‘acculturation’ is a major theme of Helen Epstein’s rich and absorbing new book, Where She Came From. In the guis...
This updated edition of Witness, which includes a new Afterword with an address by Steven Spielberg, commemorates the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II and the liberation of Europe from the Nazis. For over 25 years, the March of the Living has organized visits for adults and students from all over the world to Poland, where millions of Jews were enslaved and murdered by Nazi Germany. The organization's goal is not only to remember and bear witness to the terrible events of the past, but also to look forward. Witness is a compilation of firsthand accounts from the survivors who have participated in March of the Living programs, together with responses from the people, young students...