Book Description
Poland suffered an exceedingly brutal Nazi occupation during the Second World War. Close to five million Polish citizens lost their lives as a result. More than half the casualties were Polish Jews. Thus, the second largest Jewish community in the world–only American Jewry numbered more than the three and a half million Polish Jews at the time–was wiped out. Over 90 percent of its members were killed in the Holocaust. And yet, despite this unprecedented calamity that affected both Jews and non-Jews, Jewish Holocaust survivors returning to their hometowns in Poland after the war experienced widespread hostility, including murder, at the hands of their neighbors. The bloodiest peacetime pogrom in twentieth-century Europe took place in the Polish town of Kielce one year after the war ended, on July 4, 1946.
Jan Gross’s Fear attempts to answer a perplexing question: How was anti-Semitism possible in Poland after the war? At the center of his investigation is a detailed reconstruction of the Kielce pogrom and the reactions it evoked in various milieus of Polish society. How did the Polish Catholic Church, Communist party workers, and intellectuals respond to the spectacle of Jews being murdered by their fellow citizens in a country that had just been liberated from a five-year Nazi occupation?
Gross argues that the anti-Semitism displayed in Poland in the war’s aftermath cannot be understood simply as a continuation of prewar attitudes. Rather, it developed in the context of the Holocaust and the Communist takeover: Anti-Semitism eventually became a common currency between the Communist regime and a society in which many had joined in the Nazi campaign of plunder and murder–and for whom the Jewish survivors were a standing reproach.
Jews did not bring communism to Poland as some believe; in fact, they were finally driven out of Poland under the Communist regime as a matter of political expediency. In the words of the Nobel Prize—winning poet Czeslaw Milosz, Poland’s Communist rulers fulfilled the dream of Polish nationalists by bringing into existence an ethnically pure state.
For more than half a century, what happened to the Jewish Holocaust survivors in Poland has been cloaked in guilt and shame. Writing with passion, brilliance, and fierce clarity, Jan T. Gross at last brings the truth to light.
Praise for Fear
“You read [Fear] breathlessly, all human reason telling you it can’t be so–and the book culminates in so keen a shock that even a student of the Jewish tragedy during World War II cannot fail to feel it.”–Elie Wiesel, The Washington Post Book World
“Bone-chilling . . . [Fear] is illuminating and searing, a moral indictment delivered with cool, lawyerly efficiency that pounds away at the conscience with the sledgehammer of a verdict. . . . Fear takes on an entire nation, forever depriving Poland of any false claims to the smug, easy virtue of an innocent bystander to Nazi atrocities. . . . Gross’ Fear should inspire a national reflection on why there are scarcely any Jews left in Poland. It’s never too late to mourn. The soul of the country depends on it.”–Thane Rosenbaum, Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Provocative . . . powerful and necessary . . . One can only hope that this important book will make a difference.”–Susan Rubin Suleiman, Boston Globe
“Imaginative, urgent, and unorthodox . . . The ‘fear’ of Mr. Gross’s title . . . is not just the fear suffered by Jews in a Poland that wished they had never come back alive. It is also the fear of the Poles themselves, who saw in those survivors a reminder of their own wartime crimes. Even beyond Mr. Gross’s exemplary historical research and analysis, it is this lesson that makes Fear such an important book.”–The New York Sun
“After all the millions dead, after the Nazi terror, a good many Poles still found it acceptable to hate the Jews among them. . . . The sorrows of history multiply: a necessary book.”
–Kirkus (starred review)
“Gross illustrates with eloquence and shocking detail that the bloodletting did not cease when the war ended. . . . This is a masterful work that sheds necessary light on a tragic and often-ignored aspect of postwar history.”–Booklist (starred review)
“[Fear] tells a wartime horror story that should forces Poles to confront an untold–and profoundly terrifying–aspect of their history.”–Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Customer Reviews:
Compare "Fear" With An Earlier Book By Gross.......2007-08-22
The invasion of Poland by Germany and Russia in September of 1939 was an unprovoked partition of the country. It is understood that the Poles were not pleased by the Russian occupation, but it may be thought that the Russian occupation was a minor annoyance compared to the occupation by the Germans. In an earlier book Revolution from Abroad written in his pre-postmodern days, when Gross was an associate professor at Emory, Gross carefully and with excellent documentation shows how wrong this notion was. He wrote (Revolution from Abroad, Princeton Univ. Press, 1st ed., p. 229):
"These very conservative estimates show that the Soviets killed or drove to their deaths three or four times as many people as the Nazis from a population half the size of that under German jurisdiction. This comparison holds for the first two years of the Second World War, the period before the Nazis began systematic mass annihilation of the Jewish population."
Gross shows that, for Polish Catholics, the Soviets were even worse, indeed much worse than the brutal Nazis. Essentially all the Polish professional and semiprofessional classes (doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers, managers, foremen, farmers with holding beyond a few acres, etc.) were rounded up by the Soviets and then either killed immediately or retained in prisons for shipments to slave labor camps in Siberia and Central Asia. Prison conditions were hellish, worse than those in the Nazi concentration camps. Gross writes (Revolution from Abroad, p. 161): "In Lwów, twenty-eight people living in a 11.5 sq. m cell relied on the geometrical skills of a gifted high school student who fitted them most ingeniously by size into an intricate pattern." Sanitary conditions were appalling, with inmates frequently forced to urinate and defecate on the floors of the cells.
What was the situation with the Jews in the lands occupied by the Soviets and what was their attitude to the occupiers? Gross writes (Revolution from Abroad, p. 32):
"What Poles and Ukrainians report, often with biting irony, the Jews do not deny: 'Jews greeted the Soviet army with joy. The youth was spending days and evenings with the soldiers. . . Jews received incoming Russians enthusiastically, they [the Russians] also trusted them [the Jews].'"
Again, Gross writes (Revolution from Abroad, p. 34, quoting Celina Koninska):
"It is hard to find words to describe the feeling -- this waiting and this happiness. We wondered how to express ourselves -- to throw flowers? To sing? To organize a demonstration? How to show our great joy? I think the Jews awaiting the Messiah will feel, when he finally comes, the way we felt. "
These warm receptions by Jews for the Soviets in eastern Poland were in September of 1939, when there were no Germans in sight. The Jews were rejoicing over the occupation of eastern Poland by the Russians. To Polish Catholics, this was simply treason, analogous to the occasional warm receptions in western Poland of the Germans by some Volksdeutsche.
Now, it is undeniable that in the German-occupied portion of Poland where the situation of the Jews was worse than that of the Catholics, many Polish families hid Jews from the Nazi occupiers. It is a matter of record that Poles are listed at Yad Vashem numerically first amongst the righteous Gentiles for risking their lives and those of their families for sheltering Jews from the Nazis. So, it is fair to ask the question, "When did Jews use their favored position in Soviet occupied eastern Poland to shelter Polish Catholics from the NKVD?" This reviewer regrets to say that he cannot find any instances of such assistance.
Up to the day (June 22, 1941) when Hitler broke his deal with Stalin and invaded Soviet-occupied Poland, Gross (Revolution from Abroad p. 194) estimates that 1.25 million people were transported into the Soviet Union from eastern Poland. The ghastly NKVD prisons in Poland were generally used as holding cells for Poles awaiting execution or prison train space for transportation to the gulags. When the Germans attacked the Soviets on June 22, 1941, the NKVD killed or moved to the east 150,000 prisoners from these holding cells. In the Brygidki prison in Lwów, on June 22, 1941, the NKVD killed almost all of the 13,000 inmates. (Revolution from Abroad, p. 179). This was recorded by Gross as a "massacre" rather than a pogrom.
After the Nazis occupied western Poland in 1939, they encouraged anti-Semitic acts by the Poles, including pogroms. The Germans had only the most minimal success. Polish Catholics were not inclined to participate in Nazi murders. Moreover, the Polish underground punished betrayal of Jews to the Nazis by death. In Fear, Gross eschews the careful data based arguments he gave in his earlier book Revolution from Abroad. What is substituted is the kind of postmodern sermonizing that appeals to Gross's anti-Polish, anti-Catholic choir.
FEAR:ANTI-SEMITISM IN "SWEDEN" AFTER AUSCHWITZ...YES.......2007-08-03
A little known fact is that Sweden, upon their four year invasion (1655-1658) and brutal occupation of Poland, had brought with them their cultural tendencies and indoctrinated them on the Poles. One doctrine that dominated the Swedish invasion, of Poland, was the SWEDES RAMPANT AND OBSSESIVE MISSION TO FOSTER/SPREAD "ANTI-SEMITISM." Going from the 17th century to the 20th, when boat loads of Jews, who were fortunate to escape the misery of war-ravaged europe,(unlike the Poles and countless Europeans who would continue to suffer horribly, "AFTER 'THEIR' HOLOCAUST,you know "THE OTHERS," under Stalin), headed to Sweden, the Swedish Government pushed these boats back, sending the Jewish holocaust survivors away. The Swedes did not want them either. The English did the same, and the rest is history. The Jews were basically thrown out of every country in Europe(WHY?!). Why did all the jews end up in Poland? Here's why: because, unlike "all" the other countries, Poland was not murdering robbing and deporting them. The Jewish word in Europe was: "Poland is welcoming the jews, we are not persecuted there 'Come to Poland!'" And the Jews came and lived in harmony for centuries. The sad truth is that, anti-semitism, for whatever reason is, sadly, in practically every country. The 64K question is: "WHY IS THERE SO MUCH ANTI-SEMITISM WHEREVER JEWS SETTLE???? Anyone who knows anything about WWII, knows that, if not for the Jewish holocaust, simultaneous with Polish-Catholic Holocaust, the Polish nation would be, as they should be, portrayed as the greatest sufferers/victims of world wars. Come on people, Poland is between Germay and Russia, Hitler and Stalin. What an unfair and vicious psychological flip Mr. gross does in his book to villify a 2 century tormented Poland,i.e., encouraging anti-Polish hate, instead of telling a true story, with some objectivity, where Poland could easily be seen as 'greatest victims, equal victims, vivtims!; fostering, overdue, Pro-Polish deserved sympathy). Mr. gross chose the path of HATE. It's easier. This gross book only stirs up the old cauldren of hate. This hate book by gross, gives every "bigot," just what their looking for: a fabricated reason to really hate; any reason will do.. One must read JAN KARSKI: A SECRET STATE. KARSKI wrote this during the war and is very objective, and tells the "real story." Gross tells, his version, of the story almost 60 years later. This book is filled with sensationalisms coated with bitterness and an awful hatred. Jan Karski "WAS THERE!" Stories closer to real history are fresh and remembered more acurately, as oppossed to hateful/hurtful embellished quasi-novels like Gross'. My Goodness, no nation suffered like Poland. Gross' book only reminds people to make sure to "continue to hate, hate and hate some more. This does no one any good, especially in our worlds present uncertain state. What really is sad is that the COMMUNIST AUTHORITIES WERE ABLE TO, AGAIN, BLAME POLAND FOR "THEIR DIRTY WORK." Those of you who have read this book, are suffering needlessly because of Mr gross' embellishments and "over-the-top" sensationalisms. Even the pogrom photos are said to be doctored photos from a pogrom by the Lituanian police beating jews in the street, of course, up in Lithuania. For peace between Jews and Non-jews(ALL SUFFERED UNDER GERMANS) and understanding, settle down and read Jan Karski: A Secret State. Mr. Karski, unlike mr. Gross, wrote to fill the world with better understanding, and to inform the world. Everyone, must get this undisputed fact through their heads!: NO MATTER WHAT "ALL THE OTHER NATIONS IN EUROPE DID(including the viscious/brutal Danish SS, the Norwegian S.S.; Vichy France(#2), and the #1 anti-semitic country: ROMANIA, with the Jewish butchering "IRON GUARD."(look into it, read michael Marrus Holocaust in history). THE "GERMANS, AND "ONLY" THE GERMANS DECIDED TO KILL EVERY JEW IN THIS WORLD, AND ACTUALLY HAD THE NATION PUT THEIR "HEART,AND SOUL" INTO TRYING TO ACHIEVE IT. The Germans, as we all know, murdered and burned 6,000,000 Jews., and 3,000,000 Polish-Catholics. May they "all" rest in peace. Write books and live to make the world better, not gross. Don't waste your time or money, on this book. I've discussed this book with Polish and Jewish friends. We all agreed that it served no purpose, but to upset all of us. Look for truth, and you'll feel happier: READ KARSKI.
Noble Effort; Should Be Read, and Understood, In Full.......2007-07-25
In reviewing Jan Tomasz Gross' book "Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz," one must consider two phenomena: the book itself, and exploitations of it.
The book "Fear" is excellent. The subject matter, anti-Semitism in Poland after the Holocaust, is of vital interest to any adult human with a conscience. The central portion of the book addresses the 1946 Kielce pogrom. Holocaust survivors were murdered, including being slowly stoned to death, on the basis of blood libel. This eruption boggles the mind; as part of understanding what one is as a human being, one wants to plumb this event. Thus, though aghast and sobbing, the reader can't help but continue to turn the pages until a conclusion is reached.
Gross' prose is elegant. His authorial presence is never intrusive, and yet the reader feels as if in the hands of a world-class expert with an encyclopedic command of even the most minuscule of pertinent historical facts. At times Gross' self-restraint weakens, and he makes a cutting comment, and those moments, rare as they are, merely enhance the reader's experience. You want to know that this powerful mind was driven to anguish by these facts, just as you are.
Gross struggles to be evenhanded. In fact, he is the author of previous books that depict Polish victimization under Nazi and Communist invasion ("Revolution from Abroad"; "Polish Society under German Occupation.") He opens "Fear" with a snapshot of the disaster that was WW II for Poland. In short, he wants us to know that human beings don't commit atrocities in a vacuum.
Though I greatly admired this book, there are some shortcomings.
Gross appears to state that he is the first to argue that Poles experience guilt over having taken over property vacated by Jewish Holocaust victims, and that this guilt exacerbated post-war Polish anti-Semitism. But Steinlauf said as much almost a decade previously, in 1997's "Bondage to the Dead," and Polish authors have said as much in less-read publications. Steinlauf also successfully harnessed Robert Jay Lifton's theories; Gross should have engaged this, and at least mentioned cultural reflections like the Czechoslovak film, "Shop on Main Street."
Gross should have at least mentioned Edna Bonacich's "Middleman Minority" theory. Thomas Sowell has recently written on the, to outsiders, inexplicable atrocities that have been inflicted on Middleman Minorities in places as distant from Poland as Southeast Asia.
The Kielce pogrom was sparked by blood libel. Blood libel is so absurd that readers may come to regard Poles as a lesser species. Gross himself, as utterly masterful as he is in his command of historical personages and events, is adrift when discussing folklore. He does not even cite, for example, Alan Dundes' basic work, though Gross' theory is similar to Dundes. Gross never uses the Freudian term "projective inversion," but, like Dundes, that is his understanding.
In fact, the Middleman Minority theory sheds some light on this item of ugly folklore, to a reader, unlike Gross, familiar with the study of folklore. Regard organ theft legends in the Third World today. Villagers insist that Americans are stealing children's organs for transplants. In 1994, June Weinstock, an Alaskan environmentalist, was beaten with sticks until thought dead by Maya Indians in Guatemala. A boy had wondered off; Guatemalans convinced themselves that the Gringo tourist had stolen his organs. This absurd legend is believed because it encapsulates the people's feeling of economic exploitation.
This understanding does not excuse anti-Semitism -- nothing does -- in fact, the very best Poles have always owned up to the anti-Semitism in their country, and given their lives to fight it. But unless a real attempt is made to understand why destructive folklore has currency, we can't help prevent atrocities.
The reception of "Fear" by the media, community leaders and readers here is disconnected from the book. Sadly, many readers have used this book, itself a courageous protest against hate, exactly as a carte blanche justifying their own hatred. While Gross struggles for fairness and conscience, too many exploiters of "Fear" struggle to make it say something it never says, i.e., "I have been telling you all along; those Polaks? They are animals."
Two misconceptions stand out. One is the insistence that a Polish national essence is responsible for the crime at Kielce. Gross himself attempts to fend off this kind of essentializing with his opening quote about the genocide in Rwanda. Events like these have happened before, far distant from Poland; they will happen again. We must develop a cross-cultural paradigm for understanding, one that is not hostage to the accumulation of chips in an ethnic grudge match.
The other misconception is the insistence that Gross alone has "forced" Poles from their "denial." Again, in this understanding, Poles are essentially incapable of conscience, and require a Jewish author to be pilloried for their crimes. This stereotype is all the more believable because many readers are unfamiliar with Poland, and don't speak Polish.
First, Warsaw-born Gross is as Polish as any Catholic. In any case, even if one rejects his identity on the racist grounds that a Jew can't also be a Pole, non-Jewish Poles, as well as Jewish ones, have been writing about Polish guilt for Polish crimes against Jews. Steinlauf's "Bondage to the Dead" offers a good summary of works by authors like Jan Blonski, Jerzy Ficowski, and Czeslaw Milosz. Many of these writings have not made a splash in the West in the way that Gross' have, but they have ignited self-examination in Poland. Gross quotes one of these works at length: Marcel Lozinski's 1988 film "Witnesses."
The publication of Jan Tomasz Gross' "Fear" is a victorious shedding of light on a very dark time. Its victory will be complete when readers can accept it for what it actually says, rather than what they want it to say, and exercise, for themselves, the very same courage, integrity and compassion that Gross therein exemplifies.
Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz.......2007-03-16
A good insight into the attitudes of indigenous populations in Europe in
regards to anti-semitism. It gives a good perspective as to why the Germans set up the death camps in the eastern part of Poland and why so few Jews who escaped the camps and ghettoes were able to last out the war.
Outstanding.......2007-03-12
people should understand that poland after thw war was very anti-semitic. The first revewer is completly ignoring the facts and the truth. The book is a wonderful analysis of the issue.
Book Description
This unique and profoundly moving memoir of life in the concentration camps and afterward was written by a French female resistance leader, a non-Jew who became an important literary figure in post-war France. Now available in English in its entirety for the first time, this book includes vignettes, poems, and prose poems that speak eloquently of horror, heroism, and conscience.
Customer Reviews:
If you read no other book on the Holocaust, read this one........2000-08-23
The other two reviews are so insightful and accurate, in my opinion, I should have little to add. Yet, after reading "Auschwitz and After", I felt I had to express something of how the book made me understand and grow. As a convert to Judaism (born in 1951, I was on the pathway my whole life, I realize now), I have read many, many books/memoirs/histories on the Holocaust. Many of them have been very moving, indeed, beginning with Anne Frank's Diary, on through to "Maus". Though I acknowledge that these words have been said before, I still believe that Charlotte Delbo's words put me into that Hell more than any other survivor's testimony to date. Delbo's words do more than say "this happened and that happened". They are poetry...yet how can poetry apply to any experience in a death camp? Surprisingly, scarily, the poetry transports the reader there more truly than any film, any historical analysis, even better than any well-written survivor account. At first I thought I would not like it; my sensibilities were offended that someone would write in poetic format about an experience at a death camp ("Maus" was different; it was a cartoon, yes, but drawn by the son of a survivor, not a survivor). After finishing Delbo's triology, I feel that her words (not all in poetic form) made me understand as much as anyone who did not experience a death camp, how it felt, how one survived, what one endured when one "came back" to the "real world".
Due to the passage of time, we are losing the remaining Holocaust survivors. Hence, Spielberg's and others' efforts to record the testimony before it is too late. There has been more attention lately paid to the children of the survivors' and how their parents' experiences affected their lives. Delbo's words transcend the words of one survivor - she really makes the reader understand what happned to those who "came back", how little they had to give, in some cases, to their spouses, to their children. American culture puts a lot of emphasis on "getting over, moving on". To some extent, I believe this is usually a healthy thing to try to do; but some experiences fall outside the realm of being able to "get over it". I would suggest that some experiences are so traumatic that one cannot "process" them and get over them. How is forgiveness possible when the entire world is affected as a result? Some experiences mark a person and maybe a culture permanently, and to deny or to try to repress this is unhealthy. At the end of their lives now, most published Holocaust testimonies report that the death camp experience "never leaves you" - something "survivors" probably didn't believe when they were first liberated. The fact that the Holocaust survivors are becoming fewer and fewer makes Delbo's book all the more important because it conveys the true horror, the true evil of human degradation and genocide - and explains why the Holocaust, as well as other genocides have and will reverberate from generation to generation. Her book made me realize that understanding and vigilance, not "processing" and forgiveness is the answer.
Delbo and the survivors.......2000-05-24
This book is a translation of the famous postwar trilogy of Charlotte Delbo, a French Resistance fighter who was caught and sent to Auschwitz, then transferred to Ravensbruck. She was, and is, quite well-known in France. Though she is now deceased, the translator, Rosette Lamont, knew Delbo personally and is the foremost expert on her work, having written a number of articles on Delbo. Another who has written sensitively about Delbo is Nathan Bracher. Like all translations, there is a little something lost in the English rendering. If you are able to read the French, the original titles are "Aucun de nous ne reviendra," "Une connaissance inutile," and "Mesure de nos jours." Other books by Delbo you might find interesting are "La Memoire et les Jours," and "Le convoi du 24 janvier." She also wrote a number of plays, and poetry that isn't in this trilogy.
Thanks to the work of the Video Archive for Holocaust Testimony at Yale University, the Survivors of the Shoah project by Steven Spielberg, and the efforts of the new National Holocaust Museum, there is no shortage of testimony from Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. But Jews were not the only victims of the Nazi regime, and there is surprisingly little testimony from non-Jewish survivors. Delbo is probably the only non-Jewish victim who became an important literary figure in the postwar era, and her position as victim along with her eloquent indictment of Christianity and Christian culture for their complicity in the extermination of the Jewish victims with whom she feels strong kinship and empathy make her work an absolutely unique contribution to post-Holocaust literature. Feel free to e-mail me at schnaibl@fas.harvard.edu for more bibliographical references.
Amazing account.......1999-08-19
I have never read a book on the topic of the Holocaust that grasped it quite as well as this one has. Other books make the Holocaust sound 'too good' compared to her stories and accounts that are portrayed in this book. If you want to get a real grasp or feel of the Holocaust experience in a poetic and creatively written path, then this is a book you should read. Also, for anybody interested in the Holocaust, this is a definite must. It is basically as true and real as an account on the Holocaust can possibly get. It is simply an amazing piece of work.
Customer Reviews:
Readable.......2002-01-18
Highly spiritual and respectful of the reader, the text is grave without being pompous. Philosophy without a doubt,nevertheless extremely readable. I recommend it for anybody in search of the meanders of soul and mind, never one without the other.
Average customer rating:
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Auschwitz and After: Race, Culture, and the Jewish Question in France
L. Kritzman
Manufacturer: Routledge
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Book Description
The memory of the Holocaust and the "Jewish question" have been key issues in French political, cultural and intellectual life for the past fifty years. Since Auschwitz, every word evoking its past either dissimulates guilt or simply denies the reality of the extermination that took place. Immediately following World War II, discussion of French participation in the "Final Solution" became taboo. Support for a massive inquiry into the many crimes of collaboration became an impossibilty because too many Frenchmen felt guilty because of their complicity during the war. Collaborators went back "into the closet" and the sins of the past were magically eradicated.
Beginning with Marcel Ophüs's documentary The Sorrow and the Pity (1970) there has been an attempt to question the idea of a totally unified, courageous and resistant wartime France. Even more startling have been the increasingly shocking revelations that the politics of collaboration were a mere extension of a deep-seated Frenchanti-Semitic tradition. In the shadow of these developments French writers and philosophers today are reflecting on the meaning of Jewish identity in the contemporary world.
Auschwitz and After analyzes for the first time how the memory of Auschwitz and the collaboration continue to haunt the French. These critical evaluations are accompanied by provocative essays on the "Jewish Question" and the politics of race as they have been studied by writers, historians, philosophers and film makers in postwar France.
Auschwitz and After offers an extraordinary compendium of critics of French culture treating subjects as diverse as: the representation of the Holocaust and the politics of revisionism; anti-Semitism in contemporary France; the literature of Jews writing in French; the literature of the French writing on Jews; the post-Auschwitz philosophy of Blanchot, Derrida, Levinas and Lyotard; images of the occupation in the films of Ophüls, Chabrol, Truffaut and Malle; war memories and autobiographical writing; and the construction of Jewish identity in Sartre, Aron, Lévi-Strauss and Finkielkraut.
Contributors:
Geoffrey Hartman, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Elaine Marks, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Judith Friedlander, Alain Finkielkraut,
Lawrence D. Kritzman, Jeanine Parisier Plottel, Allen Stoekl, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Emmanuel Levinas, Ora Avni, Jeffrey Mehlman, Warren Motte, Ronnie Scharfman, Richard Stamelman, Naomi Greene, Nelly Furman, Herman Rapaport.
Book Description
The collective memories of Nazism that developed in postwar Germany have helped define a new paradigm of memory politics. From Europe to South Africa and from Latin America to Iraq the German case has been studied to learn how to overcome internal division and regain international recognition. In Pursuit of German Memory: History, Television, and Politics after Auschwitz examines three arenas of German memory politics?professional historiography, national politics, and national public television?that have played a key role in the reinvention of the Nazi past in the past sixty years. Wulf Kansteiner shows that the interpretations of the past proposed by historians, politicians, and television makers reflect political and generational divisions and an extraordinary concern for Germany's perception abroad. At the same time, each of these theaters of memory has developed different dynamics and formats of historical reflection. Kansteiner's interrelated essays offer a comparative analysis of the German scene that reveals a complex and contradictory social geography of collective memory. In Pursuit of German Memory underscores the truth that, while all memory may be local, German memories of Nazism are highly mediated and part of a global exchange of images and story fragments. Wulf Kansteiner is an assistant professor of history and director of graduate studies at the State University of New York at Binghampton.
Customer Reviews:
difficult remembrances.......2007-06-11
Kansteiner gives an impressively comprehensive look at West Germany, and then Germany after 1990, and how it dealt with the awful history of World War 2. He shows how the television stations dealt well with facing this past. Financing and showing many documentaries. Where, for instance, some documentaries would interview Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, all over the world, in an attempt to bring home to German viewers the reality of what transpired. Also, the stations would finance plays and other dramas about the Holocaust. Though these were necessarily fewer in number, as it was always more expensive to finance than documentaries.
At the political level of the German (or West German) federal government, the book also takes us into the intergenerational stresses arising as new politicians came to power in Bonn and, later, Berlin. The first generation, in the 1950s, were adults during the war, and for them, the war years were not an objective, academic issue. We see how the left and the right in postwar West Germany pursed quite different policies around the war. Of these, the Social Democrats had the easier time of it. While the Christian Democrat right always had this awkward problem of summoning patriotism and traditional values without invoking the memories of the demons from the war. Or having these invoked by their opponents.
Book Description
In this pathbreaking study, Susan Gubar demonstrates that Theodor Adorno's famous injunction against writing poetry after Auschwitz paradoxically inspired an ongoing literary tradition. From the 1960s to the present, as the Shoah receded into a more remote European past, many contemporary writers grappled with personal and political, ethical and aesthetic consequences of the disaster. By speaking about or even as the dead, these poets tell what it means to cite, reconfigure, consume, or envy the traumatic memories of an earlier generation. This moving meditation by a major feminist critic finds in poetry a stimulant to empathy that can help us take to heart what we forget at our own peril.
Customer Reviews:
A good entry for your bibliography or home library........2000-05-30
If you are in academia, this is a book you will find as a useful addition to your bibliography. If you are simply interested in the theme, you will also enjoy this book.
Dominick LaCapra is one of the best-known critics of literature and art that is engaged with the Holocaust and of the Holocaust and post-Holocaust eras.
This book is not a book of history, though it is bound up with a historical event, nor is it a literary work. Instead, it is analysis of some major works of literature and art of the Holocaust and post-Holocaust eras. LaCapra provides concise and well thought-out analysis of The Fall, by French philosopher Albert Camus, Claude Lanzmann's unforgettable must-see documentary about the Holocaust (you will never forget it, and you MUST see it if you wish to understand something about the Holocaust, or Shoah, in Hebrew), and Art Spiegelman's Maus, a unique cartoon-art chronicle about his own father's life and experiences in the Auschwitz concentration camp.
A useful companion title is Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub. Felman also has an article on Camus' The Fall, and one on Lanzmann's Shoah. For another article on Maus, see Marianne Hirsch's article in Discourse 15:2, Winter 1992-1993 pp.3-29 entitled,"Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning and Post-Memory."
LaCapra's first two chapters in this book are especially useful, as is his introduction and excellent discussion of the Historikerstreit in Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma. This particular work is not a book to skip, even if you ultimately don't agree with all its conclusions.
For more on the Holocaust and literature on and of the Holocaust, see authors such as Sidra Ezrahi, Lawrence Kritzman, Berel Lang, Pierre Nora, and Geoffrey Hartman.
History and memory after Auscwitch.......2000-04-04
I found this book very complimentary to other books I have read about the Holocoust. The index was excellent and suggestions for further reading. In chapter one the dealing with the trauma of the survivors and the long term affects of having to watch their fellow victims die and the survivals guilt they had to deal with for as long as they lived and the memories also. Chapter two dealt with the ongoing debate amongst historians wich has been going on almost as soon as the World War Two ended, from Bullock to Goldhagen and all those in between (not to mentione those who have seen reason to take the road to fill the small group of apolagisers). Many controversial others quite tradisional but there has been many points of views and I did not think that this aspect was very well done in the book. Genocide was on the National socialists agenda, ie Nazis, under the direct rule of the Dictator Adolf Hitler.Mourning was mostly done by those Germans and who look the other way or actively helped in making the genocide possible even just as burocrats.Other nations under Nazi occupation were also far from blameless. France, Lithuania, Czekoslovakia, Polland (which was the location of Auswitch among other horrible exterminations camps), Hungary (wich to the credit of their leader tried to stand up to Hitler even if he did not succseed), all the Balkan states, Rumania and more. Some of them have shown remorse but many of them have not dealt with their past in any meaningfull way. Chapter three. That chapter did not make a lot of sense to me mostly because though there might be similarities to France experiance in World War Two and what the behaviour of the French in Algeria i had did not find the the author making a very good case and it was not backed by convincing arguments. In Chapter four there is an attempt to show the debate about the Holocaust wich the the Israelis call Shoah. In this there the author discusses Lanzmann's Shoah and Lanzmann's assertion that there was no reason. The "Here there is no why". The authors rendering of the work of Lanzmann is only adiquit but there is another book that did a far superior work on that subject wich is "Explaining the origins of Hitlers evil" Chapter five was downright incomprehensible, and the less that's said about that chapter the better. Chapter six was slightly better. The conclusions part were not that far off the mark. The psycoanalysis part a little worse, the memory part quite good and the ethical turn even better. The Index was very good and actually the best part of the book.
History and memory after Auscwitch.......2000-04-04
I found this book very complimentary to other books I have read about the Holocoust. The index was excellent and suggestions for further reading. In chapter one the dealing with the trauma of the survivors and the long term affects of having to watch their fellow victims die and the survivals guilt they had to deal with for as long as they lived and the memories also. Chapter two dealt with the ongoing debate amongst historians wich has been going on almost as soon as the World War Two ended, from Bullock to Goldhagen and all those in between (not to mentione those who have seen reason to take the road to fill the small group of apolagisers). Many controversial others quite tradisional but there has been many points of views and I did not think that this aspect was very well done in the book. Genocide was on the National socialists agenda, ie Nazis, under the direct rule of the Dictator Adolf Hitler.Mourning was mostly done by those Germans and who look the other way or actively helped in making the genocide possible even just as burocrats.Other nations under Nazi occupation were also far from blameless. France, Lithuania, Czekoslovakia, Polland (which was the location of Auswitch among other horrible exterminations camps), Hungary (wich to the credit of their leader tried to stand up to Hitler even if he did not succseed), all the Balkan states, Rumania and more. Some of them have shown remorse but many of them have not dealt with their past in any meaningfull way. Chapter three. That chapter did not make a lot of sense to me mostly because though there might be similarities to France experiance in World War Two and what the behaviour of the French in Algeria i had did not find the the author making a very good case and it was not backed by convincing arguments. In Chapter four there is an attempt to show the debate about the Holocaust wich the the Israelis call Shoah. In this there the author discusses Lanzmann's Shoah and Lanzmann's assertion that there was no reason. The "Here there is no why". The authors rendering of the work of Lanzmann is only adiquit but there is another book that did a far superior work on that subject wich is "Explaining the origins of Hitlers evil" Chapter five was downright incomprehensible, and the less that's said about that chapter the better. Chapter six was slightly better. The conclusions part were not that far off the mark. The psycoanalysis part a little worse, the memory part quite good and the ethical turn even better. The Index was very good and actually the best part of the book.
Average customer rating:
- Met my expectations
- Great sequel
- even better than the first!
- A Perfect Addition To Your Holocaust Collection
- My Brodges of Hope
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My Bridges of Hope : Searching for Life and Love After Auschwitz
Livia Bitton-Jackson
Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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I Have Lived A Thousand Years: Growing Up In The Holocaust
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Hello, America: A Refugee's Journey from Auschwitz to the New World
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Hello, America
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The Cage
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No Pretty Pictures: A Child of War
ASIN: 0689820267 |
Book Description
Elli Friedmann was fourteen years old in April 1945 when American soldiers liberated her from her Nazi captors and the harrowing year she spent at Auschwitz and other concentration camps where Jews were mass murdered.
At the opening of this book, Elli, her mother, and brother, recently reunited, return to their home in Czechoslovakia, expecting to pick up the lives they left behind. Instead, they confront the harsh realities of a house stripped bare, a town occupied by strangers, and the news that Daddy will never return. The anti-Semitism that still remains makes life there so oppressive that Elli and her family decide to immigrate to America -- a journey that will take six harrowing years of waiting in one temporary shelter after another.
Along the way Elli builds bridges of hope for other Holocaust survivors. She rescues Jewish orphans from rioting Slovak partisans, smuggles Jewish refugees to Palestine, and becomes a headmaster of a Jewish school, all the while struggling with her nightmarish past and questions about her future. Her teenage years, which culminate in a daring escape from behind the Iron Curtain, are a dizzying merry-go-round of danger, excitement, and love.
Thrilling, touching, and thought-provoking, this sequel to I Have Lived a Thousand Years offers a firsthand glimpse into post-war Europe. Elli's indomitable spirit shines through every page, making this an inspiring memoir.
Customer Reviews:
Met my expectations.......2007-01-18
Came close to what I expected. Not as powerful as her previous book (I HAVE LIVED A THOUSAND YEARS) but gives a good overview (specially the first 2/3) of what it was like coming back to a soon-to-be Communist (Stalinist) country behind the Iron Courtain, and what it took to flee it and keep on living in limbo for years - and all that in the teenage years.
Great sequel.......2005-01-06
This is one of the best sequels to a Shoah memoir I've read yet. Too many such sequels fall into the trap of simply recounting what happened next and aren't as compelling as the first book because there's no constant suspense and wondering what's going to happen next, which of these people being spoken about survived and who perished. In this sequel, though, there are a lot of interesting details about what happened next, such as Elli's involvement in the Bricha, the refugee house she liked to visit and hang out at, her work at a childrens' summer camp in the mountains, her training to become a teacher, and the long hard road she and her mother went through on their way from escaping from their home town to America before it was too late and the Iron Curtain closed permanently. It was also nice that each chapter was prefaced with the date or dates during which it transpired, so you had a real timeframe of things. The only minor complaint I have is about the languages used; in this book, the Friedmanns' town has returned to Czechoslovakian control and is in what is now the free nation of Slovakia, so they speak Slovakian, though in the first book, when they were in Hungarian hands, they seemed to be native speakers of Hungarian, and in the section of this book where Elli and her mother are being cross-examined when they're sneaking over the border with a transport of real Hungarians, Elli says they can make it, since they speak Hungarian as well as natives. I can't find any mention in the first book about the Friedmanns being Slovakians or speaking that language like their native tongue, but overall, apart from that minor unexplained detail, it's a really good sequel.
even better than the first!.......2004-07-14
I recommended the first book to two of the people I know, but what was dissapointing was that they never wanted to read the second book. I think that this was even better than the first, which was really good too! This was a really good addition to the first, very suspenseful and interesting. You only want the best for her.
A Perfect Addition To Your Holocaust Collection.......2004-01-13
My Bridges of Hope is a fascinating and well-written book that keeps you hooked from the first word to that last. Livia Bitton-Jackson gives you insight into what happened to those who were among the few to survive the Holocaust. The girl in the story is actually a younger Bitton-Jackson when she was growing up. This autobiography is more like a story than a recollection of one's past. The book is set in Czechoslovakia where before the war, Elli (Bitton-Jackson), her brother Bubi, and their parents lived. After the war, their beloved home feels abandoned and changed. Other settings of the book include Elli's apartment and various temporary homes that they live in on their way to finding hope in America.
They have survived the horrid concentration camps but return to find that their father and aunt both perished in the war. The book describes events that happened through June of 1945 to March 30 of 1951 to a young Jewish woman. Elli is 14 when the book starts out. While fighting her past, she helps out in a camp for orphans, helps refuges escape to Palestine, and continues her education. After her schooling, Elli becomes a teacher. Elli is strong-willed, confused, and hopefully. She is loving and smart. Elli's mother is a seamstress and wants to go to America because they can't stay in their homeland any longer. Her mother loves her children very much and is unfamiliar with the "newer" age. Bubi is Elli's older brother. He is a warm, caring, and affectionate. Elli looks up to him and often finds herself needing his comfort.
Although both her mother and brother want to go to America, Elli wants to join her friends in going to their "homeland" The dialog in the book was appropriate because she was the character. The words were probably even words she used herself. She keeps you interested because she adds in different languages and so it matches the period. Her style is wonderful and it flows and blends perfectly. She always made it so you understood what was happening. I think this book was written so she could move on and maybe start healing. I think she also wanted others to know what the Jews went through.
I think this is a wonderful book for young adults. It shows how a young girl changes into a confident woman while she is fighting her past and trying to live her future. It is a great book to add to anyone's Holocaust collection.
My Brodges of Hope.......2003-04-30
My Bridges of Hope is an excellent book about a girl named Elli returning from the dreadful Holocaust. Elli returns home expecting everything would be all right, but to her surprise everything has changed and she must too. The Friedmann family goes through many challenges when returning home and must also cope with the loss of family members. The family has to make many tough decisions and just as one problem is solved another comes along. They know they cannot stay in Czechoslovakia but where else would they go? They spend many years waiting and finally their chance comes to be sent to America to start a new life.
This is an excellent book and I recommend reading it. Even though the Holocaust was over Jews still had many challenges to overtake. Although we think the end of the war was the end of Jewish troubles it was not. This book gives one account of a person's life after the Holocaust.
Average customer rating:
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Architecture: Sites of Reversible Destiny : Architectural Experiments After Auschwitz-Hiroshima (Art & Design Monographs)
Madeline Gins , and
Arakawa
Manufacturer: John Wiley & Sons
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ASIN: 1854902792 |
Book Description
This is a comprehensive collection of readings from the work of Theodor Adorno, one of the most influential German thinkers of the twentieth century.
What took place in Auschwitz revokes what Adorno termed the “Western legacy of positivity,” the innermost substance of traditional philosophy. The prime task of philosophy then remains to reflect on its own failure, its own complicity in such events. Yet in linking the question of philosophy to historical occurrence, Adorno seems not to have abandoned his paradoxical, life-long hope that philosophy might not be entirely closed to the idea of redemption. He prepares for an altogether different praxis, one no longer conceived in traditionally Marxist terms but rather to be gleaned from “metaphysical experience.”
In this collection, Adorno's literary executor has assembled the definitive introduction to his thinking. Its five sections anatomize the range of Adorno's concerns: “Toward a New Categorical Imperative,” “Damaged Life,” “Administered World, Reified Thought,” “Art, Memory of Suffering,” and “A Philosophy That Keeps Itself Alive.”
A substantial number of Adorno’s writings included appear here in English for the first time. This collection comes with an eloquent introduction from Rolf Tiedemann, the literary executor of Adorno’s work.
Customer Reviews:
Okay compilation with a few major reservations.......2005-01-22
Another Amazon reviewer has suggested that this reader would be "... an excellent current selection for beginning Adorno students". This is fairly on the mark with a few comments.
There is not a lot of material included that is not available elsewhere, and only a scattering of new translations provided specifically for this volume. As such, experienced readers of Adorno may find it a bit superfluous - as I have.
Points of interest include an essay version of "Jargon of Authenticity" which is not available elsewhere (including in the "Gesammelte Schrifen") and an interesting aphorism from "Minima Moralia" that was not included in Jephcott's original Verso translation.
Against it's position as an introduction to Adorno's thought - there is very little provided from the "Dialectic of Enlightenment", and what is included is limited to "Elements of Anti-Semetism". It may be difficult to assimitate this essay without prior exposure to the two excurses of the "Dialectic".
In addition, many of the excerpts from "Notes on Literature" and "Prisms" may be difficult to read without an understanding of the "Dialectic's" critique of the culture industry in light of the critique of enlightenment more generally.
On a technical point, the cover and binding do not seem to be up to containing the 500 plus pages included in this paperback edition.
In all, a reasonable addition to English-language Adorno studies and a good starting point for newcommers determined to penetrate Adorno's frequently daunting writing. Not recommended for seasoned readers of Adorno.
More than the title implies.......2003-07-17
This is an excellent current selection for beginning Adorno students. The contents are much more generally useful than the title implies; this is not just a Holocaust-theory reader but a general Adorno selection of some worth. Since there's no other existing Adorno reader (that I know of) with such a broad, accessible, and interesting selection, this might be the one to pick for students not yet acquainted with his work. To me it looks like, for certain fields at least, this could end up being a counterpart to the well-respected "Marx-Engels Reader" as a broad introductory selection.
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- German Fighter Ace: Hans-Joachim Marseille : The Life Story of the "Star of Africa" (Schiffer Military History)
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- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
Books Index
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