Holocaust
The sheer scale of the Holocaust can make it difficult to understand, because while human history is rife with examples of oppression and genocide, never before had it been carried out in such an efficient, industrialized fashion. The methodical murder of some six million Jews, along with millions of other individuals who did not fit the parameter's of the Nazis' racial utopia, left a scar on the global consciousness and forced a dramatic reconception of social theories, which now had to account for how the Holocaust could come to happen. The old dualisms of social theory proved insufficient on their own, because the motivations, logistics, and execution of the Nazis' "Final Solution" defy easy categorization and explanation. Instead, one must examine the explanations provided by each of these theoretical schema and then attempt to formulate a broader, more eclectic explanation of the Holocaust than is provided by any individual theory.…...
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References
Anheier, H.K. 1998, "The Logic of Evil: The Social Origins of the Nazi Party, 1925-1933,"
Social Forces, vol. 77, no. 1, pp. 394-396.
Berger, R. (2002), Fathoming the Holocaust: A Social Problems Approach, Walter de Gruyter
Holocaust is a catastrophe orchestrated by Nazi Germany under the leadership of Adolf Hitler. It was an organized and systematic murder with the outcome being the brutal killing of approximately six million innocent Jews during the Word War II (Longerich 2007 p. 29). State involvement in the murder complicates the whole affair as it was contrary to expectations. This was in deep contrast by all standards given the reality among different states that it is the only institution that come to the rescue of the Jews living within the Germany territory. Apart from sponsoring the murder, the state through the leader Adolf Hitler, initiated certain bureaucratic systems that ensure they accomplish the main agenda (murder).
Holocaust means sacrifice by fire and symbolizes the physical and psychological trauma that most families of Jews origin faced. In their quest to execute the common agenda of brutal murder of non-Germans, the Nazi Germany dream…...
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Bibliography
Bialas, W. (2012). Remembering the holocaust: A debate. German Studies Review, 35(1), 209-
Bruhn, J.G. (2011). The Sociology of Community Connections. Dordrecht: Springer
Science+Business Media B.V. p. 113
Gitlin, M. (2011). The Holocaust. Edina, Minn: ABDO Pub. Co. p. 6
Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. is a place that is both dark and light, from the perspective of a visitor and the emotions that one feels on being in a place like this. The darkness results from the facts and photographs that are on display. It is very difficult to believe that these events took place just over seventy years ago in Europe, and that Adolf Hitler's Nazi party conducted mass killings without interference until the Soviets, the Americans and British and allies finally fought their way through France and into Germany to put a stop to the genocide. The light comes from knowing that the truth is a very final thing and it brings closure to such a horrifying event. Seeing the photos, viewing the videos, and watching the other visitors to the museum respond and react to the exhibits, I did see a lighter picture of the Holocaust…...
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United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. (2012). Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (2012). Fighting the Fires of Hate: America and the Nazi Book Burnings.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. (2012). Time Line
Holocaust and Genres
The Holocaust is one of the most profound, disturbing, and defining events in modern history. As such, stories of the Holocaust have been told by a wide variety of storytellers, and in a wide variety of ways. The treatment of a specific theme such as the Holocaust can be profoundly different both between different and within different genres. As such, this paper describes the treatment of the Holocaust in Elie iesel's Night, Art Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor's Tale, Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful, Alain Resnais' Night and Fog. Each of these different works provides a unique and important look at the Holocaust, illustrating that different genres and approaches can be effective in conveying an event as important and profound as the Holocaust.
Elie iesel's book, Night, tells the semi-autobiographical tale of fourteen-year-old Eliezer iesel who is sent to Holocaust concentration camps. Throughout the novel, the author struggles to find…...
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Works Cited
Life is Beautiful. 2002. Director: Roberto Benigni. Starring: Roberto Benigni, Nicoletta Braschi, Giorgio Cantarini, Giustino Durano, Sergio Bustric, Horst Buchholz. Miramax Home Entertainment.
Night and Fog. 1955. Director Alain Resnais. Starring: Michel Bouquet (narrator).
Spiegelman, Art. 1986. Maus: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History/Here My Troubles Began/Boxed. New York; Pantheon Books.
For example, the essentially female nature of the author's suffering is embodied in her tale of Karola, a woman who cleverly hides the age of her daughter, so she will allow the child to be admitted through the gates of Auschwitz by her side. Sara Nomberg-Przytyk implies that a woman will have a special reason, as a mother, to be clever and devious in avoiding the horrors of the Nazis and ensuring the survival of the next generation of Jews.
When Karola fears Dr. Mengle will target her other child, a son, the woman hides him from the doctor's eyes and experimentation. To do so, however, she must draw upon the collective force of all of the women of the camp, who respond to Karola not just as a Jew, but also as a woman and a mother. The other women's collective spirit highlights the author's communism and belief in…...
Holocaust
The name "Holocaust" has its root in a Greek word that means burnt whole or totally consumed by fire. Between 1939 and 1945, approximately six million Jews and five million non-Jews died in the Holocaust as Adolph Hitler sought to create a "perfect nation." All of these deaths were premeditated mass executions.
In September 1939, Hitler started World War II with a rapid air and land attack on an unprepared Poland. He did so without a declaration of war and the world superpowers were aware of this.
Prior to World War II, Hitler attempted to get rid of the Jewish population in Germany by making the German rules so harsh for the Jews that they would leave voluntarily. When this did not work, he decided to expel them from the country. Most historians agree that, at the beginning of WWII, Hitler and his Nazi party had yet to create a plan for…...
Holocaust Memorial
How Is it That We Should emember?
Sometimes the only thing that we can do to help remedy a terrible wrong is to serve as witnesses. And if we cannot be actual witnesses, then we struggle to find some way to serve the same function in a different way, very often by visiting a memorial to what has happened. If we cannot have been there ourselves, then we can travel there -- wherever that there is -- in spirit and in our hearts we can help ensure that the world does not forget. One of those events that many people seek to ensure such a remembrance of by visiting memorials is the Holocaust. There are memorials to the millions who were slaughtered by Nazi Germany -- mostly Jews, but also others like Gypsies and the disabled -- all over the world, even in places that are far away from where…...
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References
Baron, R.A. & Richardson, D.A. (2004). "Catharsis: does "getting it out of one's system" really help?" Human Aggression.
For one, the cover art used for each of these media formats is remarkably -- and perhaps not coincidentally -- similar. Spiegelman's graphic novel cover depicts a large white circle front and center. On this white circle is a Nazi swastika with a cat face at its center. The title "Maus" is written in a bloody red font, and below the white circle are characters -- perhaps Vladek and Anja. The cover art on Film Unfinished also has a circle -- a wheel occupying the background. This wheel is not white, but it is a film reel to represent the Nazi propaganda film in question. Just as the white circle on the cover of Maus sports a Nazi swastika, so to does the film reel. Below the film reel are crowds of people.
Both Maus and Film Unfinished use frame narratives to anchor present and past, and to impart the…...
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Works Cited
Hersonski, Yael. A Film Unfinished. [Feature Film]. Oscilliscope, 2010.
This may also account for Eliezer's interpretation of Moshe's account of the slaughter at the hands of the Gestapo: he feels that the man must be lying -- he also believes that the rest of his town rejects his story as well. However, it is quite likely that many of the older citizens fearfully believe Moshe, but do not want to publicly acknowledge it. Nonetheless, from Eliezer's young point-of-view, such events remain unimaginable; but it is apparent that Kaplan would have been ready to believe such tales even early in the war.
Although Kaplan's diary was written during the conflict and Night was written afterwards, the strongest contrast between the two seems to be between the perspectives of those providing their accounts. Eliezer's tale is fundamentally spiritual and Kaplan is fundamentally empirical in his writing. However, though approaching the topic from opposite angles, both seem to evoke analogous themes. Kaplan's…...
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Works Cited
Katsh, Abraham I. (1965). The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan. New York: Collier Books.
Wiesel, Elie. (1960). Night. New York: Bantam Books.
hen it comes to Film Unfinished, this is certainly the case. The media of the film the Nazis used is the message that Hersonski is delivering the audience. It is the way propaganda film is created that is part of the story.
Graphic novels use art to depict the "real" world. Just as a viewer does not mistake a Hollywood movie for reality, the viewer usually does not mistake a graphic novel as depicting real life. However, Maus is meant to be taken as a substitute for photos, films, and other primary source material. The audience is expected to read Maus for what it is, an autobiographical report of what it is like to be the son of a survivor. As a graphic novel, Maus fuses different modes of communication to allow the audience to connect with the reality of trauma.
Both Maus and Film Unfinished use frame narratives as a…...
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Works Cited
Hersonski, Yael. A Film Unfinished. [Feature Film]. Oscilliscope, 2010.
Holocaust
Many historians and scholars contend that the Holocaust -- the mass slaughter of an estimated 6 million Jews, gypsies and others carried out by the Nazis in II -- was the worst example of genocide in human history. Others suggest the killing of Native Americans by European settlers (and the U.S. government) was genocide as well. On the subject of genocide, there is strong evidence that genocide is being carried out in Darfur, at this moment. Those issues will be presented in this paper.
Genocide in II and Genocide in 2012
The horrific pictures of starving prisoners in the Nazi death camps -- and photos of piles of bodies in ditches along with images of the ovens used to kill people -- tell the gruesome, inhumane story of Hitler's "final solution." Every American high school student has studied this mass slaughter and has been subjected to those hideous images. But there are…...
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Works Cited
Lewy, Guenter. (2007). Were American Indians the Victims of Genocide? History News
It is again easy to see how citizens might be overwhelmed with daily reports of violence and despair, and unable to truly grasp the ramifications of what was happening to the Jews.
yman presents a persuasive case that even if the American citizenry might be forgiven for their disbelief, the political leadership has no viable excuse. Jewish organizations consistently reported first-hand accounts of the atrocities and American Congressional leaders were privy to high-level intelligence that confirmed those versions of events. yman argues that outright anti-Semitism was likely a factor in the overwhelmingly Protestant legislature, but also points to the deadly force of indifference at all levels of the federal bureaucracy. He reserves his harshest criticism for Roosevelt, a President who is remembered for his heroism: "In the end, the era's most prominent symbol of humanitarianism turned away from one of history's most compelling moral challenges," (yman, 1984: 313).
Holocaust
The Cut for Survival as Made on the Second Hand
Survival in the Holocaust concentration camps meant something different for every human being who lived as a prisoner. And it meant the same. Survival meant enduring dread, fear, pain, starvation, exhaustion, and debasement. Survival required ever increasing degrees of physical, mental, and emotional adaptation and tolerance. Survival meant ever-increasing extremes of degradation in every realm -- degradation of faith, hope, strength, standards. And survival meant being lucky at every turn, in every moment, with each breath. In And The Sun Still Dared to Shine, Peter Scheponik wrote about surviving and survival. To those who are free, the words are the relatively same. To those featured in the poems "Afterlife," Love Photos," and "Punishment," the cut made between surviving and survival happened on the second hand.
The hands of the Nazis doled out cruelty and held chance loosely, as in a game. To…...
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Works Cited
"Afterlife." Scheponik 37.
"Love Photos." Scheponik 28.
"Punishment." Scheponik 85.
Scheponik, Peter. And the Sun Still Dared to Shine. La Vergne, TN: Mazo Publishers, 2011. Print.
The physicality of pain, the hunger, the feces and spit, all the brutalities that served to dehumanize them became precisely what brought the survivors out of the camps alive. Many if not most survivors were purely lucky. All learned how to live with dehumanization: to live while being dehumanized. All were able to resist succumbing to the belief that they were truly inhuman creatures, and all rose above and re-humanized themselves when they re-entered the world. Survivors use the process and act of remembering as the key to rehumanizing themselves. To rejoin the human race, they must remember the compassion and empathy they felt for their fellow prisoners: the images so deftly recalled in Holocaust literature and poetry. Only the stories of survivors exist to recreate the holocaust experience. As Andrei states in "The Last Camp," "our ideas would survive but the Nazi evil wouldn't."
hen Gotfryd states, "I couldn't believe…...
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Works Cited
Borowski, Tadeusz., Vedder, Barbara, Kott, Jan, & Kandel, Michael. This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. Penguin, 1976
The Girl from Auschwitz." From the Black Book. Ehrenburg, Ilya and Grossman, Vasily. Eds. New York: Holocaust Library.
Gotfryd, Bernard. "The Execution," "Hans Burger: #15252." And "The Last Camp." In Anton the Dove Fancier and other Tales of the Holocaust. Washington Square: 1990.
Hamburger, Michael. "Treblinka." In Schiff, Hilda. (Ed) Holocaust Poetry. New York: St. Martins Griffin, 1995.
Whereas documentary evidence presents photographic testimonies, the artistic renditions allow for the impressions of how the reality of Nazism impacted the primary stakeholders. Using this line of thinking, it is important to understand the different modes of witnessing: the "heterogeneous points-of-view" that comprise the Nazi social organization (Felman 207). There were victims (Jews and survivors), perpetrators (Nazis), and perhaps most importantly, the bystanders (Poles, in the case of Auschwitz and documentaries related to the Warsaw ghetto; Germans in the case of the Nazi endeavors in German-speaking lands). The Nazi social organization must be understood on all these dimensions. There are bystanders that watched while their neighbors were being forcibly removed and displaced; these bystanders are crucial for understanding the narrative of Nazism. The Nazi social organization depends on cohesion and collective identity under the rubric of German nationalism.
Genocide is a strange response to the sense of threat that derives…...
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Hansen, in fact, points out the peculiar continuities between Schindler's List and D.W. Griffith's "racist blockbuster of 1915, Birth of a Nation. Both films bear witness to the "vicissitudes of public history," (127). Although Hansen acknowledges that the comparison is not much more than a "disanalogy," there do still remain some points of continuity that bear mentioning (128). After all, the displacement of Africans from their homeland to a position of servitude and political oppression can be compared with the Holocaust in terms of both issues having a collective as well as personal dimension; and each reflecting racism and its link to political and social power.
Creative or non-documentary representations of the Holocaust, as with Eli Wiesel's Maus and Stephen Spielberg's Schindler's List allow for a thorough recreation of the Nazi ethos. Whereas documentary evidence presents photographic testimonies, the artistic renditions allow for the impressions of how the reality of Nazism impacted the primary stakeholders. Using this line of thinking, it is important to understand the different modes of witnessing: the "heterogeneous points-of-view" that comprise the Nazi social organization (Felman 207). There were victims (Jews and survivors), perpetrators (Nazis), and perhaps most importantly, the bystanders (Poles, in the case of Auschwitz and documentaries related to the Warsaw ghetto; Germans in the case of the Nazi endeavors in German-speaking lands). The Nazi social organization must be understood on all these dimensions. There are bystanders that watched while their neighbors were being forcibly removed and displaced; these bystanders are crucial for understanding the narrative of Nazism. The Nazi social organization depends on cohesion and collective identity under the rubric of German nationalism.
Genocide is a strange response to the sense of threat that derives from encounters with the Other. The Self vs. The Other is, however, the essence of representative documentation of the Holocaust. Discourses on the Holocaust, such as those presented in artistic renditions like Maus and Schindler's List allow for a reencountering and a multifaceted perspective. There is also the element of incidentalism. As Weissman shows, many critics of Schindler's List claim that Spielberg uses the Holocaust as a "backdrop" for telling the story of his protagonist, thereby reducing Nazism as an incidental setting (148). Friedlander also elucidates the framework that suggests Nazism "or fascism generally thus appears as a particularly barbaric outgrowth of the Western capitalist system," and a disturbing reflection on the effects of modernity (13). The structure of Nazi consciousness and German identity cannot be reduced to such puerile conjectures, though. Elements of colonialism, imperialism, and displacement do come into play but in a complex and multifaceted manner.
Certainly! Here are a few potential essay topics related to the Holocaust:
1. The role of bystanders during the Holocaust: How did individuals and countries around the world respond to the atrocities being committed, and what responsibilities did they have to intervene?
2. The impact of propaganda on the Holocaust: How did the Nazi regime use propaganda to dehumanize and demonize Jewish people and other targeted groups, and how did this contribute to the genocide?
3. Resilience and resistance in the face of persecution: Explore the stories of individuals who resisted Nazi oppression during the Holocaust, and examine the ways in which they....
Title: The Holocaust: A Profound Legacy of Intolerance and Resilience
Introduction: The Holocaust stands as an indelible scar on the conscience of humanity, a systematic campaign of extermination that extinguished millions of lives. Exploring this dark chapter in history offers a profound opportunity to learn, reflect, and work towards a future free from intolerance. This essay presents a comprehensive analysis of various aspects related to the Holocaust, delving into its historical context, the mechanisms of persecution, the experiences of victims, and the enduring legacy of remembrance and resilience.
Body Paragraph 1: Roots of Intolerance: Examining the Historical Context The Holocaust did not arise in a....
1. The Enigma of Adolf Hitler: Unraveling the Mind of a Dictator
This title piques curiosity by presenting Hitler as an enigma, inviting the reader to delve into the complexities of his psyche.
2. The Ascent of Evil: Hitler's Path to Power
This title emphasizes the gradual rise of Hitler, highlighting the series of events and decisions that led to his dictatorship.
3. The Shadow of Totalitarianism: Hitler's Impact on Germany and Europe
This title explores the consequences of Hitler's rule, examining its devastating impact on Germany and the broader European landscape.
4. The Holocaust: Hitler's....
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