As one of the delegates pointed out, talking about Holocaust survivors as a resource was at the very least in bad taste, and probably morally dubious. She was right: carried away by the conversation on teaching Holocaust literature and film, the conference had slipped into pedagogy jargon (‘What resources can we use?’ ‘Visits by survivors are extremely moving’) before reflecting on what the wider connotations and meaning of the word. This sort of issue underlies many of the problems in teaching this subject, and adds an extra layer of complexity to an already difficult field. This conference, organised by Nicola King (University of West of England), Sue Vice (University of Sheffield) and myself, aimed to focus on exactly these involved and uncomfortable areas, which are often informally discussed but rarely reflected on more rigorously. The demand for this event was reflected in the rapid growth of the conference at the planning stage – from an intended one-day event to a two-day event with nearly 50 delegates.
As the Subject Centre’s 2003 survey of the English curriculum showed (1), supporting anecdotal evidence, there has been a rapid growth in courses on Holocaust Literature and Film in English departments, and of the use of these sorts of texts on other courses. Moreover, as the interdisciplinary research culture in Holocaust Studies bears out, there is a growth in this field right across the arts and humanities: in history, of course, but also in modern languages, cultural studies, media studies, geography and in what are (to us) remoter areas (nursing, the medical humanities, tourism). Our conference, while focussed on the teaching of literature and film, drew on this growth.
Many of the issues that arose repeatedly during the conference are common to all areas of English and film studies: how to fit all these texts, theories and ideas into a term-long course; how much and what sort of extra reading to recommend; the role of ‘theory’.The discussion returned several time to the issue of ‘how much history do we teach our students?’: the answer was either not enough or too much.(2) However, there was a strong feeling that the literary and film texts that came from or reflected on these events were doing something much more than teaching ‘history’ by another means and that these texts stood in their own right as important artistic events, rather than as illustrations to a historical narrative.
Some issues were more specific. There was also some concern that we, as teachers, were too squeamish. One odd phenomenon that I have noticed in myself while researching in this area – and I am secretly glad that others shared this – is that the more I study the Holocaust, the more squeamish and upset I get when I come across an account of some atrocity, rather than becoming (as I had originally thought I might) calloused and hardened to descriptions of mass death and suffering. This same feeling led people to self-censor when teaching, and there was some discussion over whether this was the right thing to do. It is clear that the ‘empathic unsettlement’ that scholars such as Dominick LaCapra have noted in reading or viewing Holocaust texts is also present in the experience of teaching and being taught the subject.
One of the many positive things about this field that emerged was that the level of student commitment was in general felt to be extremely high: students who opted for these courses invested a great deal of time and energy into them. Conversely, this commitment sometimes led to issues of identity and identity politics over a whole gamut of identifications (Jewish, British, Israeli, German, European, American) erupting with great and often disturbing force in the seminar room. Another part of the conversation concerned how teaching Holocaust texts ‘spun off ’ into courses and debates over memory and trauma, other literatures and issues of colonialism and slavery. There was also a discussion over the growth of a canon of Holocaust texts (see the appendix).
I noticed with some interest how many of the conversations and papers circled around (what used to be called) ‘binary oppositions’: do we?/should we?; silence/speech; history/fiction; literary/non-literary; testimony/fiction; perpetrators/victims; isolating Holocaust studies/locating it in the mainstream; affect/rigor ; appropriate/inappropriate; scholarship/respect for the dead or memory. Many of these reflect research or debates in the field (the last one mentioned, for example, has been the focus of a series of acrimonious debates between historians, curators and others). But, as one delegate pointed out, to see them as oppositions is a mistake: perhaps they are in a dialectical process, awaiting working through as research and reflection on Holocaust pedagogy develops and deepens. This event, in the UK at least, may have played an important part in this process.
Appendix: A Holocaust Literature and Film Canon?
The conference also put together a very rough indicative list of ‘canonical texts’ – those that were most often taught in these courses. In literature, extremely popular were Primo Levi, If this is a Man; Elie Wiesel, Night; Art Speigelman, Maus. Many also taught the following: Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved; Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After; Anne Frank, Diary; George Perec, W; Paul Celan;Tadeusz Borowski, This way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen; Anne Karpf, The War After;W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz; Robert Harris Fatherland; Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces. There were a few teaching these texts: Lisa Appignanesi, Losing the Dead; Anita Broonker, The Latecomers; Zofia Nalkowska, Medallions; Sara Nomberg- Przytyk, Auschwitz: True Tales; Cynthia Ozick, The Shawl; Stephan Maechler, The Wilkomirski Affair; ‘Benjamin Wilkomiriski’, Fragments; Eva Figes, Child of War; Jorge Semprum, Literature or Life? Ida Fink, Stories; Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated; Sylvia Plath; Geoffrey Hill; Kindertransport poets.
One thing that was a bit odd about this list was the omission of several well-known novels and accounts such as Martin Amis’ Time’s Arrow, and D. M.Thomas’s The White Hotel. Perhaps their time has passed.
For films, the four most central were (perhaps predictably); Schindler’s List; Shoah; Night and Fog and Life is Beautiful. Others that were taught were Sophie’s Choice; The Pawnbroker; Memorandum; Landscape After the Battle; Human Remains; The Believer and the BBC documentary, The Liberation of Belsen.
Museums and curating also play a part in pedagogy, and again there was a ‘canon’. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum and Beth Shalom were mentioned, as was the new Jewish Museum in Berlin. There was also much (justifiable) praise for the Imperial War Museum’s Holocaust exhibition, which seems to be an underused resource for Holocaust literature and film teaching.
Despite the discussion of history, relatively few historians were actually considered ‘canonical’ or taught on literature courses: Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews (certainly canonical among Holocaust Historians), Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men and Michael Marrus’s The Holocaust in History all got one or two mentions: but clearly, these are not widely taught. (This itself is interesting because among historians, there has been for many years a lively – and effectively literary-critical – debate over the language used to discuss the Holocaust).
Among critics, the leading figures were James Young, Dominick Lacapra, Sue Vice, Shoshona Felman, Cathy Caruth and Peter Novik, whose cultural history of the ‘history of the Holocaust’, The Holocaust and Collective Memory, caused a stir a few years ago. Again, noticeable absences from this list were Lawrence Langer and Des Pres’s The Survivor, possibly the first book in this field. Again, this shows, perhaps, how much interest there is in this area, and how the field is developing.
Among philosophers and theologians, selections were used from a range of the following: Hannah Arendt, Theodore Adorno, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Emil Fackenheim, Zygmunt Bauman, Maurice Blanchot, Paul Ricoeur and Jean-François Lyotard. There was praise for the new reader, The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings, edited by Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg for Edinburgh University Press.
References
1. Halcrow Group Limited, with Jane Gawthrope and Philip Martin, Survey of the English Curriculum and Teaching in UK Higher Education (English Subject Centre, 2003), available online at: http://www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/publications/reports.php
2. Cf. Philip Martin’s article, ‘With or Without? Is there any History in this Class?’, English Subject Centre Newsletter 7 (November 2004), 18-21
