Responses to the Holocaust

Learning Outcomes

Transferable and Generic Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• Present a coherent critical argument in writing
• Participate in discussions of complex and contentious issues
• Analyse and critically evaluate primary historical source material

Subject Specific Intellectual and Research Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• Recognise the political implications of representing past events in particular ways and in particular contexts
• Critically approach and engage with primary sources
• Evaluate the ways in which past events are represented constructed in popular media as well as historiography

Knowledge and Understanding

Having successfully completed this module, you will be able to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of:

• The ways in which the Holocaust has been represented and understood in the postwar world, as well as the politics of Holocaust memory and commemoration
• The history of the Holocaust, particularly the experiences of its victims and the ways in which they responded to the events at the time
• How history is constructed through arts and popular media; how media such as films, books, and music help to shape the public's understanding of past events

More than 70 years after the liberation of Auschwitz and the end of the Holocaust—the systematic mass murder of six million European Jews, as well as homosexuals, communists, Roma, and other victims during the Second World War—the subject still generates extensive discussion and controversy, in intellectual circles as well as in the wider political world.

In this course we will explore contemporary responses to and post-war representations of the genocide, through media such as testimonies, literature, film, and music. Through these sources, we will tackle some of the questions that still challenge our understanding of the Holocaust today, such as: Was the Holocaust unique? Are there limits to how such catastrophic events can be represented? Why have some recent writers drawn attention to the 'Holocaust Industry' and the 'exploitation of suffering'? What are the politics of memory and commemoration?

We will take a chronological approach, beginning by looking at how victims understood and responded to the Holocaust at the time and afterwards. In considering their responses, we will explore both how they interpreted and recorded what they were experiencing, and what those records—diaries, songs, artworks, memoirs—tell us about the events they describe. In the second part of the course, we will shift our focus to consider how the Holocaust has featured in the post-war world, from comics and film to museums and memorials. Our focus is largely on public responses to the genocide—rather than theological, political, or scholarly responses—and one of the course's overarching themes is the question of how history is constructed through arts and popular media. How, in other words, do films, books, and music help to shape the public's understanding of past events? What do museums and memorials tell us about how we have chosen to remember those events?

Teaching methods include

• Lectures
• Seminars

Learning activities include

• Individual study and reading
• Preparing individual oral responses to weekly reading, on the basis of specific focusing questions
• Working with small groups of fellow students in seminars to analyse written texts, and providing oral feedback in class
• Writing an essay exploring the use and value of primary sources
• Accessing online resources

Summative

This is how we’ll formally assess what you have learned in this module.

Referral

This is how we’ll assess you if you don’t meet the criteria to pass this module.

Repeat

An internal repeat is where you take all of your modules again, including any you passed. An external repeat is where you only re-take the modules you failed.