131-450 Remembering the Holocaust

Admission to the postgraduate diploma or fourth year honours in history.

This subject will examine the variety of ways in which the Holocaust has come to be remembered in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It will take a comparative approach to the substantive and theoretical questions which remembering the Holocaust raises, considering developments in Israel and the wider Diaspora. It will address these questions from different theoretical perspectives, including feminism, post-structuralism and psychoanalysis. Questions and topics to be addressed include: how the Holocaust came to function as a, if not the, definitive experience for modern Jewry; the different forms of memorialisation that have developed - museums, monuments, education courses, family tree projects, etc. - and the issues and controversies surrounding these; 'death camp tourism' and the revisits by Holocaust survivors and/or their descendants to places from which they were exiled; international and local movements to record survivor-witness testimonies, and the questions historians have raised about the historical value of such testimonies; the prolific growth of memoirs, autobiographies and other forms of writing by both survivors and their children; unconscious forms of remembrance as evidenced in inter-generational transmission of trauma; the relationship that remembering the Holocaust has to Jewish identity and to Jewish political existence.

Written work totalling 5000 words for 4th year, 5000 words and a class paper for masters students.

A subject reader will be available.