History and memory are depicted through human attitudes and behaviours. The way that History is shaped and represented impacts on our response to events of the past and memory is vital to this equation in order to fully understand history and appreciate the past. The representation of History and memory in Mark Baker's 'The Fiftieth Gate' (TFG) justifys Yossl, Genia and Baker's attitudes and behaviours. We are made aware of this through character, literary techniques and the structural frame in bakers journey through memory and David Olere's painting 'The Massacre Of The Innocents'
TFG is a non-fiction bildungsroman, constructed from historical research, interviews and memories. Baker retells the stories of his parents who survived the holocaust of WWII and the resettling of many European Jews throughout the world but specifically in Melbourne, Australia. Both Baker's parents suffered prosecution as a result of the holocaust but were able to survive. His father was held in the death camps and was in Auschwitz where 1.5 million people died. Bakers mother however was in Ukraine for the course of the war and her mother and sisters perished in Treblinka, a death camp near Warsaw in Poland, where 750 000 people died.
The representation of Genia and Yossl's history and memory in TFG allows us to justify Baker's response to their story. History is official documented evidence that takes an impersonal tone. Looking at facts alone Baker doesn't consider emotions and the painfulness of memory when he documents and unlocks his parents past of traumatic experience. "Dark, hiding in the cupboard...we hear the footsteps, the shots, the screams. [Genia] Not yet...first I need to hear how it began.[Baker]"this depicts Baker's dispassionat...
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...he lighter represents healing, while the darker (towers, etc.) represent power as well as seriousness overall. Furthermore the accent colours of yellow and orange of the smoke and fire is the same of the SS officers skeletal colour suggesting that the destruction belongs to him and he belongs to the SS.
Conclusively, these elements allow us to justify why Olere has depicted his history and memory in this way as a response to the past event of the holocaust.
Ultimately, these to texts represent similar ideas of the history and memory of the holocaust and how they allow us to obtain awareness of human attitudes and behaviours. Overall, history is incomplete, impersonal, documented and linear, memory is fragmented, personal, emotional, physiologically retained and non-linear and together they are the truth or the mystery, the memory of death or the death of memory.
Joshua Foer’s “The End of Remembering” and Kathryn Schulz’s “Evidence” are two essays that have more in common than one might think. Although on two totally different topics, they revolve around the central point of the complexities of the human mind. However, there are some key elements both writers have contemplated on in differing ways.
Through this short story we are taken through one of Vic Lang’s memories narrated by his wife struggling to figure out why a memory of Strawberry Alison is effecting their marriage and why she won’t give up on their relationship. Winton’s perspective of the theme memory is that even as you get older your past will follow you good, bad or ugly, you can’t always forget. E.g. “He didn’t just rattle these memories off.” (page 55) and ( I always assumed Vic’s infatuation with Strawberry Alison was all in the past, a mortifying memory.” (page 57). Memories are relevant to today’s society because it is our past, things or previous events that have happened to you in which we remembered them as good, bad, sad, angry etc. memories that you can’t forget. Winton has communicated this to his audience by sharing with us how a memory from your past if it is good or bad can still have an effect on you even as you get older. From the description of Vic’s memory being the major theme is that it just goes to show that that your past can haunt or follow you but it’s spur choice whether you chose to let it affect you in the
The Holocaust is considered the largest genocide of our entire world, killing more than 600,000,000 Jewish people during the years of 1933-1945. The memories and history that have filled our lives that occurred during the Holocaust are constantly remembered around the world. Many populations today “think” that constant reminders allow for us to become informed and help diminish the hatred for other races still today. These scholars believe that by remembering the Holocaust, you are able to become knowledgeable and learn how to help prevent this from happening again. Since the Holocaust in a sense impacted the entire human race and history of the world, there are traces of the Holocaust all across our culture today. As I continue to remember the victims of this tragic time period I think of all the ways that our world remembers the Holocaust in today’s society. Through spreading the word, works of media and memorials across the world, I am continually reminded of the tragedy that occurred.
The atomic bombings of Japanese cities and the genocides of the Holocaust are horrific events in human history. Although these events have their differences, they influence the world greatly today because they differ from each other to provide comparisons for history, have significance because of the survivors who tell their personal story, and achieve significance morally as well as immorally.
In Geoffrey Chaucer’s The House of Fame, the dreamer and the reader are led through a dream vision and are exposed to the technologies of memory as well as the link between textual recovery and the narrative of fame. The fragmentary nature of the dream allows the reader and the dreamer to explore the disconnected nature of philosophical concepts including fame and rumor. Furthermore, the use of the dream vision allows the narrator to present larger arguments about such concepts through the use of extraordinary visuals, conversations, and circumstances.
“The agony of the Jews under Hitler is too important and too outrageous to be forgotten; yet it can be remembered it seems, only in ways that distort its meaning and deny its importance… When Auschwitz became a social myth, a metaphor for modern life, people lost sight of the only lesson it could possibly offer: that it offers, in itself, no lessons (Rosenfled).
A person may have heard second hand accounts of those who have experienced the Holocaust, taking in the stories as facts without really thinking about them. But when one listens to one retelling his or her story of what occurred in the Holocaust, one can actually feel the other’s pain and suffering. Upon hearing Mrs. Gluck-Stewart’s personal narrative of the Holocaust, I underwent the feelings of horror, pain, and fear.
Despite of having learned about the horrors of the Holocaust in my History class, the events were analyzed, and interpreted in manner which did not evoke emotion within an individual. The most distinct part of the trip, which to this very day remains engrained within my memory, was walking through the ruins of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. As I walked under the sign reading, “Arbeit macht frei”, the German phrase for, “work makes free,” I felt a slight tremble in my body. Continuing the guided tour, I wa...
In my HIST 308 research essay I will be looking at how and why society and historians from the early 1960s till 1990s to stress the importance that people need to know about the Holocaust. Thus making the event to be seen as ‘common memory”, according to the literature and German historian, James Young.
One of the most tragic human events in the history of the world is the Holocaust. The articles that are written about the Holocaust, objective or subjective, can have a big impact on the reader. The texts about the Holocaust that focuses on an objective way informs the reader of facts. However, texts about the Holocaust that focuses on a subjective way may impact the reader emotionally. Objective and subjective writing can impact the way a reader understands these historical events in the world! The article, At the Holocaust Museum, presents information about the Holocaust in a objective way.
I was privileged to know some of my maternal great-grandparents, my gentile great-grandparents, although one of them died shortly before my birth. I never had the chance to know any of my paternal great-grandparents, my Jewish great-grandparents. They were taken from me. I am not alone in my grief. Every Jew has lost family and friends in the Holocaust, which we call the Shoah, the calamity. Despite this deep-rooted ancestral pain, the Holocaust is not an exclusively Jewish trauma, although Jews were its most numerous victims. Yet Amis chooses to write almost exclusively about Jewish suffering in the Holocaust, which is something that a gentile cannot remotely understand or relate to. The passage recounting the story of the bomb baby was especially horrifying to read from the perspective of an irreverent goy. Reading about Jews being “picked up” (Amis 141) from a mass grave, being brought to life with carbon monoxide, and eventually crammed together in their hiding place, behind a removable panel in a cloth factory, while the secondary consciousness of a Nazi doctor looks on with concern, was frankly disturbing. Time’s Arrow is not a new and enthralling retelling of the Holocaust. It is the desecration of the murder of my
The essence of memory is subjective (Lavenne, et al. 2005: 2). In Never Let Me Go memories are formed in the mind of ‘Kathy H’ which emanate her subjective views. These relate to her own emotions and prejudices as an outsider, a clone, experienced through the innocence of childhood, and the deception of adulthood from the institutions of ‘Hailsham’ and ‘the cottages.’ Which allude to Kazuo Ishiguro’s ow...
...predominate and alter the reading of this story of the Holocaust. The drastic emotional effect on both the reader and the author himself shapes a story would not be satisfied by the simple categorization of a historical novel. It is a contemporary look at the past in a way that seeks not to condemn or justify, but tries to make sense of the pain and suffering and how it factors into the future. I’m a sensitive librarian, I want to do justice to the personal trials of Art as he struggles with his own identity. Therefore, these novels belong in the autobiographical or biographical sections of the library, where readers will not only learn of the horror of the Holocaust, but of its damaging ripples. These damaging ripples that are still causing pain to this day, still causing suffering. Much like the insidious, lingering, devastatingly silent radiation of an atom bomb.
For a majority of people, their earliest childhood memory is nothing more than a fragment of something that happened when they were three to four years old. This fragment in some way, shape, or form must have been important in some way if it was the one memory remembered out of the countless number hidden away in the deep trenches of the mind. My mind seems to have chosen the fragment of a memory from when I was about three or four, yet, I cannot absolutely guarantee if this is correct. I may have been a year or two older or perhaps even a year younger. In fact, I have a number of memories from my adolescence that according to my parents and those who were close to me at the time I remembered incorrectly. These memories felt so authentic and substantial it was difficult for me to recognize that they were not necessarily true. Despite this, I have come to realize that I do have one memory that I know is true, that is backed up by film, eyewitness accounts, and record keeping. This memory, as fragmented as it might be is a story fit for the ages. It portrays images of hard work, of glory, of cunning adaptability and of victory.
The ‘fictionality’ of history is grounded in the simple assumption that life is shaped like a story. For Saleem, who is “buffeted by too much history”, it is his memory which creates his own history. “Memory, as well as fruit, is being saved from the corruption of the clocks”. This reflects back to concepts of time and place. Yet, for Rushdie, it is not based on the universal empty time that has been conceptualised by the colonisers. Notions of time and space are integrated into his own history.