Ethics, Art, and Representations of the Holocaust

Ethics, Art, and Representations of the Holocaust PDF Author: Simone Gigliotti
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739181947
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
The American-Jewish philosopher Berel Lang has left an indelible impression on an unusually broad range of fields that few scholars can rival. From his earliest innovations in philosophy and meta-philosophy, to his ground-breaking work on representation, historical writing, and art after Auschwitz, he has contributed original and penetrating insights to the philosophical, literary, and historical debates on ethics, art, and the representation of the Nazi Genocide. In honor of Berel Lang’s five decades of scholarly and philosophical contributions, the editors of Ethics, Art and Representations of the Holocaust invited seventeen eminent scholars from around the world to discuss Lang’s impact on their own research and to reflect on how the Nazi genocide continues to resonate in contemporary debates about antisemitism, commemoration and poetic representations. Resisting what Alvin Rosenfeld warned as “the end of the Holocaust”, the essays in this collection signal the Holocaust as an event without closure, of enduring resonance to new generations of scholars of genocide, Jewish studies, and philosophy. Readers will find original and provocative essays on topics as diverse as Nietzsche’s reputed Nazi leanings, Jewish anti-apartheid activists in South Africa, wartime rescue in Poland, philosophical responses to the Holocaust, hidden diaries in the Kovno Ghetto, and analyses of reactions to trauma in classic literary works by Bernhard Schlink, Sylvia Plath, and Derek Walcott.

Ethics, Art, and Representations of the Holocaust

Ethics, Art, and Representations of the Holocaust PDF Author: Simone Gigliotti
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739181947
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 329

Get Book Here

Book Description
The American-Jewish philosopher Berel Lang has left an indelible impression on an unusually broad range of fields that few scholars can rival. From his earliest innovations in philosophy and meta-philosophy, to his ground-breaking work on representation, historical writing, and art after Auschwitz, he has contributed original and penetrating insights to the philosophical, literary, and historical debates on ethics, art, and the representation of the Nazi Genocide. In honor of Berel Lang’s five decades of scholarly and philosophical contributions, the editors of Ethics, Art and Representations of the Holocaust invited seventeen eminent scholars from around the world to discuss Lang’s impact on their own research and to reflect on how the Nazi genocide continues to resonate in contemporary debates about antisemitism, commemoration and poetic representations. Resisting what Alvin Rosenfeld warned as “the end of the Holocaust”, the essays in this collection signal the Holocaust as an event without closure, of enduring resonance to new generations of scholars of genocide, Jewish studies, and philosophy. Readers will find original and provocative essays on topics as diverse as Nietzsche’s reputed Nazi leanings, Jewish anti-apartheid activists in South Africa, wartime rescue in Poland, philosophical responses to the Holocaust, hidden diaries in the Kovno Ghetto, and analyses of reactions to trauma in classic literary works by Bernhard Schlink, Sylvia Plath, and Derek Walcott.

Holocaust Representation

Holocaust Representation PDF Author: Berel Lang
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801864151
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
Since Theodor Adorno's attack on the writing of poetry "after Auschwitz," artists and theorists have faced the problem of reconciling the moral enormity of the Nazi genocide with the artist's search for creative freedom. In Holocaust Representation, Berel Lang addresses the relation between ethics and art in the context of contemporary discussions of the Holocaust. Are certain aesthetic means or genres "out of bounds" for the Holocaust? To what extent should artists be constrained by the "actuality" of history--and is the Holocaust unique in raising these problems of representation? The dynamics between artistic form and content generally hold even more intensely, Lang argues, when art's subject has the moral weight of an event like the Holocaust. As authors reach beyond the standard conventions for more adequate means of representation, Holocaust writings frequently display a blurring of genres. The same impulse manifests itself in repeated claims of historical as well as artistic authenticity. Informing Lang's discussion are the recent conflicts about the truth-status of Benjamin Wilkomirski's "memoir" Fragments and the comic fantasy of Roberto Benigni's film Life Is Beautiful. Lang views Holocaust representation as limited by a combination of ethical and historical constraints. As art that violates such constraints often lapses into sentimentality or melodrama, clich or kitsch, this becomes all the more objectionable when its subject is moral enormity. At an extreme, all Holocaust representation must face the test of whether its referent would not be more authentically expressed by silence--that is, by the absence of representation.

The Holocaust, Art, and Taboo

The Holocaust, Art, and Taboo PDF Author: Sophia Komor
Publisher: Universitatsverlag Winter
ISBN: 9783825357344
Category : Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945), and the arts
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Papers from a conference held in Hamburg, June 2008.

Ethics, Art, and Representations of the Holocaust

Ethics, Art, and Representations of the Holocaust PDF Author: Simone Gigliotti
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780739181959
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In honor of Berel Lang's five decades of scholarly and philosophical contributions, the editors of Ethics, Art and Representations of the Holocaust invited seventeen eminent scholars from around the world to discuss Lang's impact on their own research and to reflect on how the Nazi genocide continues to resonate in contemporary debates about antisemitism, commemoration and poetic representations. Resisting what Alvin Rosenfeld warned as "the end of the Holocaust", the essays in this collection signal the Holocaust as an event without closure, of enduring resonance to new generations of scholars of genocide, Jewish studies, and philosophy.

Holocaust Cinema in the Twenty-first Century

Holocaust Cinema in the Twenty-first Century PDF Author: Gerd Bayer
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780231174237
Category : Collective memory and motion pictures
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
Contemporary Holocaust cinema exists at the intersection of national cultural traditions, aesthetic conventions, and the inner logic of popular forms of entertainment. It also reacts to developments in both fiction and documentary films following the innovations of a postmodern aesthetic. With the number of witnesses to the atrocities of Nazi Germany dwindling, medialized representations of the Holocaust take on greater cultural significance. At the same time, visual responses to the task of keeping memories alive have to readjust their value systems and reconsider their artistic choices.

Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide

Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide PDF Author: Berel Lang
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 9780815629931
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
This work is an analysis of the ideology, causal patterns, and means employed in the Nazi genocide against the Jews. It argues that the events of the genocide compel reconsideration of such moral concepts as individual and group responsibility, the role of knowledge in ethical decisions, and the conditions governing the relation between guilt and forgiveness. It shows how the moral implications of genocide extend to linguistic and artistic presentations of the Nazi extermination of the Jews.

Comedy, Avant-garde, Scandal

Comedy, Avant-garde, Scandal PDF Author: Andrew S. Gross
Publisher: Universitatsverlag Winter
ISBN: 9783825357269
Category : Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Why did the Holocaust become such a prominent theme in American and European art, literature, and film in the 1990s? Why does so much of this art court controversy? These and related questions motivate this study, a joint effort by two scholars of American culture, one German and the other US-American. The authors link the growing centrality of the Holocaust in art, and the increasingly provocative strategies employed by writers, artists, and filmmakers, to the end of the Cold War. History, tainted by obsolete ideological debates, no longer seemed adequate to describing the past, so art mobilized the traditional strategies of the avant-garde - scandal, satire, and provocation - as a spur to memory. The Holocaust became the focus of this revolution in art - and crisis of historical representation - because it seemed to be beyond the limits of understanding. The authors argue that art turns to the Holocaust when commemoration, rather than novelty, is avant-garde.

A Tragic Fate

A Tragic Fate PDF Author: Nicholas M. O'Donnell
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781634257336
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The organized theft of fine art by Nazi Germany has captivated worldwide attention in the last twenty years. As much as any other topic arising out of World War Two, stolen art has proven to be an issue that simply will not go away. Newly found works of art pit survivors and their heirs against museums, foreign nations, and even their own family members. These stories are enduring because they speak to one of the core tragedies of the Nazi era: how a nation at the pinnacle of fine art and culture spawned a legalized culture of theft and plunder. A Tragic Fate is the first book to seriously address the legal and ethical rules that have dictated the results of restitution claims between competing claimants to the same works of art. It provides a history of Art and Culture in German-occupied Europe, an introduction to the most significant collections in Europe to be targeted by the Nazis, and a narrative of the efforts to reclaim looted artwork in the decades following the Holocaust through profiles of some of the art world's most famous and influential restitution cases.

The Sense of Semblance

The Sense of Semblance PDF Author: Henry W. Pickford
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 082324542X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
The Sense of Semblance is the first book to incorporate contemporary analytic philosophy in interpretations of art and architecture, literature, and film about the Holocaust. The book’s principal aim is to move beyond the familiar debates surrounding postmodernism by demonstrating the usefulness of alternative theories of meaning and understanding from the Anglophone analytic tradition. The book takes as its starting point the claim that Holocaust artworks must fulfill at least two specific yet potentially reciprocally countervailing desiderata: they must meet aesthetic criteria (lest they be, say, merely historical documents) and they must meet historical criteria (they must accurately represent the Holocaust, lest they be merely artworks). I locate this problematic within the tradition of philosophical aesthetics, as a version of the conflict between aesthetic autonomy and aesthetic heteronomy, and claim that Theodor W. Adorno’s “dialectic of aesthetic semblance” describes the normative demand that a successful artwork maintain a dynamic tension between these dual desiderata. While working within a framework inspired by Adorno, the book further claims that certain concepts and lines of reasoning from contemporary philosophy best explicate how individual artworks fulfill these dual desiderata, including the causal theory of names, the philosophy of tacit knowledge, analytic philosophy of quotation, Sartre’s theory of the imaginary, work in the epistemology of testimony, and Walter Benjamin’s theory of dialectical images. Individual chapters provide close readings of lyric poetry by Paul Celan (including a critique of Derridean deconstruction), Holocaust memorials in Berlin, texts by the Austrian quotational artist Heimrad Bäcker, Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah and Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus. The result is a set of interpretations of Holocaust artworks that, in their precision, specificity and clarity, inaugurate a dialogue between contemporary analytic philosophy and contemporary art.

The Train Journey

The Train Journey PDF Author: Simone Gigliotti
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 184545927X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
Deportations by train were critical in the Nazis’ genocidal vision of the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” Historians have estimated that between 1941 and 1944 up to three million Jews were transported to their deaths in concentration and extermination camps. In his writings on the “Final Solution,” Raul Hilberg pondered the role of trains: “How can railways be regarded as anything more than physical equipment that was used, when the time came, to transport the Jews from various cities to shooting grounds and gas chambers in Eastern Europe?” This book explores the question by analyzing the victims’ experiences at each stage of forced relocation: the round-ups and departures from the ghettos, the captivity in trains, and finally, the arrival at the camps. Utilizing a variety of published memoirs and unpublished testimonies, the book argues that victims experienced the train journeys as mobile chambers, comparable in importance to the more studied, fixed locations of persecution, such as ghettos and camps.