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Literary themes in Holocaust poems and books
Literary themes in Holocaust poems and books
Literary themes in Holocaust poems and books
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In the novel The Reader, Michele explores the issue of German guilt for the Holocaust and how that guilt affects subsequent generations who ask who is responsible, who participate in the guilt even though they were not there, and who in effect inherit the guilt from their parents. This is true for the protagonist, who inherits this collective guilt even though his parents were not Nazis and did not participate themselves. Michael Berg is the young man who wrestles with issues of guilt and moral meaning, and he does so in a way that suggests that we can never answer these questions fully and that the interconnections among people and among elements in their lives make it difficult to give clear and certain answers. At some level, Michael simply has to accept that certain things just are, and this includes his own uncertainty. …show more content…
This gives him guilt in two ways. On the one hand, he feels guilty for loving someone who could commit such horrible crimes, and on the other, he feels he has failed her in some way and could have provided comfort or helped her cope with her own guilt and fear. This story is told as a memory, and so the older man is wrestling with all the guilt and meaning his experience has created in him: "Why does it make me so sad when I think back to that time?" (37). He remembers specific moments and agonizes over their meaning. His sense of having failed Hanna is bound with his memory of when he saw her watching him at the pool: "Sometimes I tried to tell myself that it wasn 't her I had seen . . . But I knew it was her. She stood and looked--and it was too late" (83). This emotional illiteracy could be for many reasons. For Michele, it may have been the lack of adulthood that was experienced in his life and for Hannah, it may have been because of the pain and suffering she
Irish Playwright, George Bernard Shaw, once said, “The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that's the essence of inhumanity.” Inhumanity is mankind’s worse attribute. Every so often, ordinary humans are driven to the point were they have no choice but to think of themselves. One of the most famous example used today is the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night demonstrates how fear is a debilitating force that causes people to lose sight of who they once were. After being forced into concentration camps, Elie was rudely awakened into reality. Traumatizing incidents such as Nazi persecution or even the mistreatment among fellow prisoners pushed Elie to realize the cruelty around him; Or even the wickedness Elie himself is capable of doing. This resulted in the loss of faith, innocence, and the close bonds with others.
In Harry Mulisch’s novel The Assault, the author not only informs society of the variance in perception of good and evil, but also provides evidence on how important it is for an innocent person experiencing guilt to come to terms with their personal past. First, Mulisch uses the characters Takes, Coster, and Ploeg to express the differences in perspective on the night of the assault. Then he uses Anton to express how one cannot hide from the past because of their guilt. Both of these lessons are important to Mulisch and worth sharing with his readers.
The events which have become to be known as The Holocaust have caused much debate and dispute among historians. Central to this varied dispute is the intentions and motives of the perpetrators, with a wide range of theories as to why such horrific events took place. The publication of Jonah Goldhagen’s controversial but bestselling book “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust” in many ways saw the reigniting of the debate and a flurry of scholarly and public interest. Central to Goldhagen’s disputed argument is the presentation of the perpetrators of the Holocaust as ordinary Germans who largely, willingly took part in the atrocities because of deeply held and violently strong anti-Semitic beliefs. This in many ways challenged earlier works like Christopher Browning’s “Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland” which arguably gives a more complex explanation for the motives of the perpetrators placing the emphasis on circumstance and pressure to conform. These differing opinions on why the perpetrators did what they did during the Holocaust have led to them being presented in very different ways by each historian. To contrast this I have chosen to focus on the portrayal of one event both books focus on in detail; the mass shooting of around 1,500 Jews that took place in Jozefow, Poland on July 13th 1942 (Browning:2001:225). This example clearly highlights the way each historian presents the perpetrators in different ways through; the use of language, imagery, stylistic devices and quotations, as a way of backing up their own argument. To do this I will focus on how various aspects of the massacre are portrayed and the way in which this affects the presentation of the per...
Botwinick writes in A History of the Holocaust, “The principle that resistance to evil was a moral duty did not exist for the vast majority of Germans. Not until the end of the war did men like Martin Niemoeller and Elie Wiesel arouse the world’s conscience to the realization that the bystander cannot escape guilt or shame” (pg. 45). In The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick writes of a world where Niemoeller and Wiesel’s voices never would have surfaced and in which Germany not only never would have repented for the Holocaust, but would have prided itself upon it. Dick writes of a world where this detached and guiltless attitude prevails globally, a world where America clung on to its isolationist policies, where the Axis powers obtained world domination and effectively wiped Jews from the surface, forcing all resistance and culture to the underground and allowing for those in the 1960’s Nazi world to live without questioning the hate they were born into.
“My body yearned for Hanna. But worse than my physical desire was my sense of guilt. Why hadn’t I jumped up immediately when she stood there and run to her! This one moment summed up all my halfheartedness of the past months, which had produced my denial of her, and my betrayal. Leaving was her punishment.” (Schlink 83)
As World War II occurred, the Jewish population suffered a tremendous loss and was treated with injustice and cruelty by the Nazi’s seen through examples in the book, Man’s Search for Meaning. Victor Frankl records his experiences and observations during his time as prisoner at Auschwitz during the war. Before imprisonment, he spent his leisure time as an Austrian psychiatrist and neurologist in Vienna, Austria and was able to implement his analytical thought processes to life in the concentration camp. As a psychological analyst, Frankl portrays through the everyday life of the imprisoned of how they discover their own sense of meaning in life and what they aspire to live for, while being mistreated, wrongly punished, and served with little to no food from day to day. He emphasizes three psychological phases that are characterized by shock, apathy, and the inability to retain to normal life after their release from camp. These themes recur throughout the entirety of the book, which the inmates experience when they are first imprisoned, as they adapt as prisoners, and when they are freed from imprisonment. He also emphasizes the need for hope, to provide for a purpose to keep fighting for their lives, even if they were stripped naked and treated lower than the human race. Moreover, the Capos and the SS guards, who were apart of the secret society of Hitler, tormented many of the unjustly convicted. Although many suffered through violent deaths from gas chambers, frostbites, starvation, etc., many more suffered internally from losing faith in oneself to keep on living.
The challenge Costello presents to her audience is to consider for a moment that what we enjoy at the dinner table is in reality an act of murder. Are the actions that human beings regard as ethically moral in reality violence that we inflict, at the expense of another beings life? In this milieu what results is not only a holocaust that is invisible but one that in many ways presents itself as the holocaust which saw over 6 million Jews murdered. In such a context, the production of thought, of human culture itself cannot be anything other than the continuous production of omission, deceit and epistemological unconsciousness.
The world’s worst genocide, the Holocaust, claimed the lives of nearly 6 million Jewish citizens across Western Europe. In Daniel’s Story, written by Carol Matas, Daniel, a boy thrown into the Holocaust at the age of 14, with nothing but his family, experiences hurt, death, and the cruelness of the Nazis firsthand. Daniel tells his story as he experiences the atrocities of the Holocaust. Daniel’s story is a prime example that no matter the consequence, fight for what is right.
The Holocaust left a lingering hurt with many of the survivors and perpetrators of the war. As a result, victims often suffered from post-war trauma. Traumatic responses, by first generation Holocaust survivors, were often projected onto their children. Authors Art Spiegelman and Hans-Ulrich Treichel illustrate the above in their memoirs Maus I and II and Lost. Whether it is the war, losing a sibling, or parent, the guilt of the loss is projected onto Art and Treichel. In both cases, the parents are physically or emotionally unavailable to the children, which affects their psychological well-being. Consequently, Art and Treichel suffer from intergenerational trauma which hinders their growth and leads to a feeling of isolation. Several forces
Levi contends that the “collective crime” of the German people as bystanders was “the most obvious demonstration of the cowardice to which Hitlerian terror had reduced them: a cowardice which became an integral part of mores and so profound as to prevent husbands from telling their wives, parents their children” (15). Self-preservation is a natural instinct, so when an individual faces a threat as pervasive as that of the Nazis during the early 1940s, it can’t be fair to assign responsibility of the perpetrators’ success to an individual who succumbed to this fear. This is why Levi is careful to discuss the choice to be a bystander as a collective crime as opposed to an individualized one. Of course, the population of German bystanders as an entity is still comprised of individuals who would each needed to have resisted fear and spoken out to have prevented the collective crime. Although Levi certainly provides a convincing argument for the assignment of some responsibility for the success of the Holocaust to bystanders, the situation is not without
The Silber Medal winning biography, “Surviving Hitler," written by Andrea Warren paints picture of life for teenagers during the Holocaust, mainly by telling the story of Jack Mandelbaum. Avoiding the use of historical analysis, Warren, along with Mandelbaum’s experiences, explains how Jack, along with a few other Jewish and non-Jewish people survived.
Andrew Green reveals the issue of representing Hitler in texts, and how the author’s moral obligations to Holocaust victims distorts the truth. Adolf Hitler, its amazing how one name can trigger a thousand thoughts and emotions. How can one name so easily send shivers down our spines and send our minds into a frenzy of thought in the same breath? The main reason behind this is that we are aware that Hitler was largely responsible for the Holocaust, by far the largest and most gruesome genocide in modern history. An estimated 50 million lives were lost during this era, the mourning for those lost will echo through the ages.
However, the narrator’s expected response and the reader’s actual response are two very different things: the narrator expects pity and an overall sense of understanding, but readers feel disgusted at the narrator’s blatant distastefulness. In an attempt to express the amount of pain she was suffering, the narrator instead caused readers to see her problems as trivial and superficial simply because she had the nerve to compare them to something as horrific as the Holocaust.
The books Maus I and Maus II, written by Art Spiegelman over a thirteen-year period from 1978-1991, are books that on the surface are written about the Holocaust. The books specifically relate to the author’s father’s experiences pre and post-war as well as his experiences in Auschwitz. The book also explores the author’s very complex relationship between himself and his father, and how the Holocaust further complicates this relationship. On a deeper level the book also dances around the idea of victims, perpetrators, and bystanders. The two books are presented in a very interesting way; they are shown in comic form, which provides the ability for Spiegelman to incorporate numerous ideas and complexities to his work.
Most narratives out of the Holocaust from the Nazis point of view are stories of soldiers or citizens who were forced to partake in the mass killings of the Jewish citizens. Theses people claim to have had no choice and potentially feared for their own lives if they did not follow orders. Neighbors, The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, by Jan T. Gross, shows a different account of people through their free will and motivations to kill their fellow Jewish Neighbors. Through Gross’s research, he discovers a complex account of a mass murder of roughly 1,600 Jews living in the town of Jedwabne Poland in 1941. What is captivating about this particular event was these Jews were murdered by friends, coworkers, and neighbors who lived in the same town of Jedwabne. Gross attempts to explain what motivated these neighbors to murder their fellow citizens of Jedwabne and how it was possible for them to move on with their lives like it had never happened.