Search for Articles:
Title / Keyword
Author / Affiliation / Email
Journal
Article Type
 
 
Advanced Search
 
Section
Special Issue
Volume
Issue
Number
Page
 
0.6
0.3
Journals
Humanities
Special Issues
The Holocaust in Literature and Film
share announcement

The Holocaust in Literature and Film

A special issue of Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (15 November 2017) | Viewed by 25697

Special Issue Editor

Prof. Dr. Andrea Reiter

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Modern Languages, University of Southampton, Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK
Interests: Holocaust and Exile literature; Post-War Austrian literature, in particular Thomas Bernhard and Ilse Aichinger; and anti-modernist movements in Austria; Post-War Jewish literature; Monika Maron; narrative theory; music and literature

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

In 1998 Irene Heidelberger-Leonard, an expert on the Holocaust memoirs of Jean Améry, Imre Kertész and Peter Weiss, suggested that Ruth Klüger’s memoir weiter leben (1993, published in the author’s own translation as Still alive in 2001) set a new benchmark in Jewish literature about Auschwitz. Heidelberger-Leonard made her statement a quarter century after the American literature scholar Lawrence Langer, with his book on The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination, became one of the founders of the study of Holocaust literature. While both scholars and others after them concentrated on survivor memoirs, more recently responses to the Holocaust from the perspectives of children and even grandchildren of former victims have prompted new concepts, exemplified by Marianne Hirsch’s term ‘post-memory’, with which to think about such texts. Holocaust fiction, poetry and the representation of the Holocaust in film have called for the application of yet further categories.

While Klüger’s weiter leben remains one of the seminal texts against which this literature is measured, it is time to revisit this canon, not least to explore its diversity.

This Special Issue of Humanities on “The Holocaust in Literature and Film” invites contributions that deal with the full range of representations. These include memoirs, fiction, poetry and drama, as well as documentary, feature or television films. We welcome both revaluations of well-known texts and films and investigations of those that deserve to be better known.

Prof. Dr. Andrea Reiter
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All papers will be peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Humanities is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • Holocaust memoirs
  • fiction, poetry
  • drama, film
  • TV documentary

Benefits of Publishing in a Special Issue

  • Ease of navigation: Grouping papers by topic helps scholars navigate broad scope journals more efficiently.
  • Greater discoverability: Special Issues support the reach and impact of scientific research. Articles in Special Issues are more discoverable and cited more frequently.
  • Expansion of research network: Special Issues facilitate connections among authors, fostering scientific collaborations.
  • External promotion: Articles in Special Issues are often promoted through the journal's social media, increasing their visibility.
  • e-Book format: Special Issues with more than 10 articles can be published as dedicated e-books, ensuring wide and rapid dissemination.

Further information on MDPI's Special Issue polices can be found here.

Published Papers (5 papers)

Download All Papers
Order results
Result details
Show export options expand_more Show export options expand_less
Select all
Export citation of selected articles as:

Research

13 pages, 264 KiB  
Article
Heterolingualism and the Holocaust: Translating the Ineffable in Hélène Berr’s Journal
by Stephanie Faye Munyard
Humanities 2018, 7(3), 74; https://doi.org/10.3390/h7030074 - 20 Jul 2018
Viewed by 4811
Abstract
By drawing attention to Hélène Berr’s use of foreign languages and literature as acts of translation, arguably one of the most prominent features of her Journal, this paper hopes to lay the foundation for a more sustained discussion of what translation means [...] Read more.
By drawing attention to Hélène Berr’s use of foreign languages and literature as acts of translation, arguably one of the most prominent features of her Journal, this paper hopes to lay the foundation for a more sustained discussion of what translation means for victims of Nazi persecution, as well as of what translation does to their voices and for the continued transmission of their memories. The first section of this paper considers how Hélène Berr uses translation as a communicative aid to expression and argues that foreign languages, literary forms of expression, and also literature itself form part of a broader network of substitute vocabularies that function to help Berr to narrate, or even to translate, the ineffable. After considering the important role that heterolingualism and these substitute vocabularies play in Berr’s narrative, the paper raises some of the distinct challenges that linguistic plurality poses to translators of narratives of Nazi persecution. By drawing on, and comparing, examples from a textual analysis of the (2008) English version of Berr’s Journal, translated by David Bellos, and from the (2009) German edition, translated by Elisabeth Edl, and crucially through assessments of citations from the translators themselves, this paper highlights the significant role that translators, and the practice of translation, play in shaping memories of Nazi persecution. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Holocaust in Literature and Film)
18 pages, 311 KiB  
Article
Staging Encounters with Estranged Pasts: Radu Jude’s The Dead Nation (2017) and the Cinematic Face of Public Memory of the Holocaust in Present-Day Romania
by Diana I. Popescu
Humanities 2018, 7(2), 40; https://doi.org/10.3390/h7020040 - 23 Apr 2018
Viewed by 5090
Abstract
This article provides a close analysis of Radu Jude’s The Dead Nation (2017), a documentary essay that brings together authentic archival sources documenting the persecution and murder of Jews in World War II. The sources include a little-known diary of Emil Dorian, a [...] Read more.
This article provides a close analysis of Radu Jude’s The Dead Nation (2017), a documentary essay that brings together authentic archival sources documenting the persecution and murder of Jews in World War II. The sources include a little-known diary of Emil Dorian, a Jewish medical doctor and writer from Bucharest, a collection of photographs depicting scenes from Romanian daily life in the 1930s and 1940s, and recordings of political speeches and propaganda songs of a Fascist nature. Through a careful framing of this film in relation to Romanian public memory of World War II, and in connection to the popular new wave cinema, I will contend that Jude’s work acts, perhaps unwittingly, to intervene in public memory and invites the Romanian public to face up to and acknowledge the nation’s perpetrator past. This filmic intervention further offers an important platform for public debate on Romania’s Holocaust memory and is of significance for European public memory, as it proposes the film happening as a distinct and innovative practice of public engagement with history. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Holocaust in Literature and Film)
18 pages, 226 KiB  
Article
‘You think your writing belongs to you?’: Intertextuality in Contemporary Jewish Post-Holocaust Literature
by Kirstin Gwyer
Humanities 2018, 7(1), 20; https://doi.org/10.3390/h7010020 - 1 Mar 2018
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 5124
Abstract
This article examines a sub-category of recent Jewish post-Holocaust fiction that engages with the absent memory of the persecution its authors did not personally witness through the medium of intertextuality, but with intertextual recourse not to testimonial writing but to literature only unwittingly [...] Read more.
This article examines a sub-category of recent Jewish post-Holocaust fiction that engages with the absent memory of the persecution its authors did not personally witness through the medium of intertextuality, but with intertextual recourse not to testimonial writing but to literature only unwittingly or retrospectively shadowed by the Holocaust. It will be proposed that this practice of intertextuality constitutes a response to the post-Holocaust Jewish author’s ‘anxiety of influence’ that, in the wake of the first generation’s experience of atrocity, their own life story and literature will always appear derivative. With reference to works by four such post-Holocaust authors, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes (2010), Maxim Biller’s Im Kopf von Bruno Schulz (2013), Helen Maryles Shankman’s In the Land of Armadillos (2016), and Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love (2005) and Forest Dark (2017), all of which engage intertextually with Franz Kafka and Bruno Schulz, it will be suggested that these authors are looking to return to a Kristevan practice of intertextuality after the predominantly citational recourse to antecedent material that has often characterized post-Holocaust literature. In the process, they also succeed in troubling recently popular conceptualizations of ‘postmemory’ literature as the ‘belated’ and ‘evacuated’ recipient of encrypted traumatic content inherited from the first generation that it must now seek either to preserve or to work through vicariously. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Holocaust in Literature and Film)
226 KiB  
Article
The Black Star: Lived Paradoxes in the Poetry of Paul Celan
by Dorit Lemberger
Humanities 2017, 6(4), 100; https://doi.org/10.3390/h6040100 - 15 Dec 2017
Viewed by 5311
Abstract
Celan’s poetry is deemed universal and experimental, and its main characteristic is to “explore possibilities of sense-making.” His poetry is also acknowledged to be the apex of Jewish post-Holocaust poetry, contending with existentialist questions such as the existence God in the Holocaust and [...] Read more.
Celan’s poetry is deemed universal and experimental, and its main characteristic is to “explore possibilities of sense-making.” His poetry is also acknowledged to be the apex of Jewish post-Holocaust poetry, contending with existentialist questions such as the existence God in the Holocaust and the possibility of restoring Jewish identity. In this paper I will examine how Celan uses paradoxes in his poetry to create atheistic and skeptical expressions. The technique of paradox expresses the concurrent existence of two contradictory possibilities; the article will present three types of paradox typical of Celan’s poetry: (1) the affirmation and denial of the existence of God; (2) the mention of rituals from Jewish tradition, while voiding them of their conventional meaning; (3) the use of German, specifically, for the reconstitution of Jewish identity. My main argument is that paradox in Celan’s work creates a unique voice of atheism and skepticism, since it preserves the ideas that it rejects as a source for fashioning meaning. In order to explore how Celan constructs paradox, I will use Wittgenstein’s resolutions of the paradoxes that emerge from the use of language, and I will show how they illuminate Celan’s use of this technique. The article will examine three Wittgensteinian methods of resolving the paradoxes that Celan employs in his oeuvre: highlighting, containing, and dissolving. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Holocaust in Literature and Film)
212 KiB  
Article
Negotiating Proximity and Distance to Holocaust Memory through Narrativity and Photography in Monika Maron’s Pawels Briefe (Pavel’s Letters) (1999)
by Lauren Hansen
Humanities 2017, 6(4), 96; https://doi.org/10.3390/h6040096 - 6 Dec 2017
Viewed by 4286
Abstract
Germany’s unification in 1989 triggered a public and literary confrontation with WWII, the Holocaust and the East-West German past. The years following the “Wende” of 1989/90 witnessed an increase in autobiographical family novels that explore how historical events of the twentieth century impacted [...] Read more.
Germany’s unification in 1989 triggered a public and literary confrontation with WWII, the Holocaust and the East-West German past. The years following the “Wende” of 1989/90 witnessed an increase in autobiographical family novels that explore how historical events of the twentieth century impacted upon individual and family pasts and continue to do so. Monika Maron, in claiming Pawels Briefe (Pavel’s Letters) (1999) as a family story/history, rather than novel, raises questions about the ethics of intertwinement between autobiographical memory and family memory, specifically postmemory. By analyzing narrative and photographic engagement, I argue that Maron resists over-identification by engendering critical distance between family memory and autobiographical memory that are both situated in a particular moment of German national memory. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Holocaust in Literature and Film)
Show export options expand_more Show export options expand_less
Select all
Export citation of selected articles as:
 
Displaying articles 1-5
Back to TopTop