Seminar questions:

What is the Holocaust?

Can the Holocaust be represented historically? How can we apply Hayden White to this end?

Is the Holocaust narratable?

What can one learn from Holocaust testimony; and what are the limitations of testimony?

Core readings:

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.

Extended readings:

Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).

Eliyana Adler, „Hrubieszów at the Crossroads: Polish Jews Navigate the German and Soviet Occupations.“

Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 1994).

Federica Clementi, Holocaust Mothers & Daughters, Family, History, and Trauma (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2014).

Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in spite of all: Four Photographs from Auschwitz (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003).

Dorota Glowacka, Disappearing Traces: Holocaust Testimonials, Ethics, and Aesthetics (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012).

Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of European Jews, 3 vols (New York: Holmes & Meier, 2003).

Lawrence Langer, Admitting the Holocaust: Collected Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).