Kristina Busse

After Auschwitz: Responses to the Holocaust

Class Description

Discourse on the Holocaust is often characterized by its apparent uniqueness as it breaks down traditional models and explanatory tools. The destruction of the European Jews is surrounded by an aura of incomprehensibility, a refusal or even inability to represent the event, and often a rejection of theoretical tools otherwise easily employed when dealing with narrativized history. The Holocaust is thus often raised to an exemplar outside of space and time, an abject event that defies theorization and simply requires that it be witnessed.This mantra of incomprehensibility, disbelief, and inability to represent carries through much of the writings on the Holocaust, which complicates any post-holocaust treatment of the subject and its implications.

In philosophy, the contradictory premises of postmod ern relativism and Auschwitz's traumatic reality have created a post-war philosophy preoccupied with the Holocaust in any attempt to understand the incomprehensible. This class will explore the pivotal position Nazism holds in many current theoretical models and various theories of totalitarianism that these analyses develop.Looking at figures as diverse as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Jean-François Lyotard, Maurice Blanchot, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida, we will trace the connections many thinkers have found between Enlightenment thought and the atrocities of the Holocaust as well as the various post-Holocaust responses such insights have created. The first part of the course, Modernity and the Holocaust: Philosophical Responses to the Holocaust, looks at various philosophical responses, including the complicated reactions to Heidegger's ambiguous relationship to Nazism. The second part of the course, Memory and Trauma: Personal Responses to the Holocaust, addresses more personal reactions to the cataclysmic event that has shaped Western thought in general but most particularly that of the people who survived it. Focusing on survivor testimonies and studies thereof, we will address questions of moral culpability, psychological trauma, and personal insight in human behavior.

The third part, The Limits of Representation: Artistic Responses to the Holocaust , looks at representations of the Holocaust and the moral and ethical questions they raise.The moral imperatives placed upon representations range from the desire to move the Holocaust into an incomprehensible, unintelligible, and thus unrepresentable space that requires us to approach the events with a reverential silence to the obsessive attempts to recall, represent, and catalog the events in detail, thus hoping to comprehend and reach a larger truth. The main points of contention when dealing with Holocaust representation are whether to represent the Holocaust altogether, how to represent it, and who should undertake these representations. In other words, the ethical imperatives placed upon Holocaust representations include a complete call for silence or, in its lieu, an attempt to represent the events as truthfully as possible by restricting the depictions to realist account, preferably given by eyewitnesses.We will study select literary texts in order to decide for ourselves how appropriate and useful such a Bilderverbot ultimately is.