Postal Indiscretions

Postal Indiscretions PDF Author: Tadeusz Borowski
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810122030
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
In a brief life deeply and traumatically disrupted by two years in concentration camps as a political prisoner, Tadeusz Borowski (1922-1951) was tragically destined to become one of the most eloquent witnesses to the Holocaust in Poland. His recollections and stories, the most famous of which is This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, document in stark historical, literary, and personal terms the experience of the camps and its cost to humanity. The correspondence in this volume expands on the insights of Borowski's published work and extends to the less-documented aftermath of the Holocaust in postwar Poland and East Germany. The volume opens with Borowski's letter to his mother from Pawiak Prison the day after his arrest and closes with an unsigned telegram informing his parents of his suicide. This English edition also contains new material in the form of additional letters from the private collection of the family of Anatol Girs.Illustrated throughout with photographs and reproductions, the letters to and from family members, friends, and literary figures offer an indispensable picture of the world in the wake of the Nazis - and of the indelible stain that experience left upon the literature, politics, and life of Eastern Europe, in particular upon one gifted and doomed writer.

Postal Indiscretions

Postal Indiscretions PDF Author: Tadeusz Borowski
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810122030
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
In a brief life deeply and traumatically disrupted by two years in concentration camps as a political prisoner, Tadeusz Borowski (1922-1951) was tragically destined to become one of the most eloquent witnesses to the Holocaust in Poland. His recollections and stories, the most famous of which is This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, document in stark historical, literary, and personal terms the experience of the camps and its cost to humanity. The correspondence in this volume expands on the insights of Borowski's published work and extends to the less-documented aftermath of the Holocaust in postwar Poland and East Germany. The volume opens with Borowski's letter to his mother from Pawiak Prison the day after his arrest and closes with an unsigned telegram informing his parents of his suicide. This English edition also contains new material in the form of additional letters from the private collection of the family of Anatol Girs.Illustrated throughout with photographs and reproductions, the letters to and from family members, friends, and literary figures offer an indispensable picture of the world in the wake of the Nazis - and of the indelible stain that experience left upon the literature, politics, and life of Eastern Europe, in particular upon one gifted and doomed writer.

A Thousand Darknesses

A Thousand Darknesses PDF Author: Ruth Franklin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019971830X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
What is the difference between writing a novel about the Holocaust and fabricating a memoir? Do narratives about the Holocaust have a special obligation to be 'truthful'--that is, faithful to the facts of history? Or is it okay to lie in such works? In her provocative study A Thousand Darknesses, Ruth Franklin investigates these questions as they arise in the most significant works of Holocaust fiction, from Tadeusz Borowski's Auschwitz stories to Jonathan Safran Foer's postmodernist family history. Franklin argues that the memory-obsessed culture of the last few decades has led us to mistakenly focus on testimony as the only valid form of Holocaust writing. As even the most canonical texts have come under scrutiny for their fidelity to the facts, we have lost sight of the essential role that imagination plays in the creation of any literary work, including the memoir. Taking a fresh look at memoirs by Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi, and examining novels by writers such as Piotr Rawicz, Jerzy Kosinski, W.G. Sebald, and Wolfgang Koeppen, Franklin makes a persuasive case for literature as an equally vital vehicle for understanding the Holocaust (and for memoir as an equally ambiguous form). The result is a study of immense depth and range that offers a lucid view of an often cloudy field.

Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism

Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism PDF Author: Anna Holian
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472117807
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
In May of 1945, there were more than eight million “displaced persons” (or DPs) in Germany—recently liberated foreign workers, concentration camp prisoners, and prisoners of war from all of Nazi-occupied Europe, as well as eastern Europeans who had fled west before the advancing Red Army. Although most of them quickly returned home, it soon became clear that large numbers of eastern European DPs could or would not do so. Focusing on Bavaria, in the heart of the American occupation zone, Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism examines the cultural and political worlds that four groups of displaced persons—Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, and Jewish—created in Germany during the late 1940s and early 1950s. The volume investigates the development of refugee communities and how divergent interpretations of National Socialism and Soviet Communism defined these displaced groups. Combining German and eastern European history, Anna Holian draws on a rich array of sources in cultural and political history and engages the broader literature on displacement in the fields of anthropology, sociology, political theory, and cultural studies. Her book will interest students and scholars of German, eastern European, and Jewish history; migration and refugees; and human rights.

Kingdom of Barracks

Kingdom of Barracks PDF Author: Katarzyna Nowak
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0228018374
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
After World War II displaced more than sixty million people, Cold War politics opened global eyes and wallets to European displaced persons. The postwar experiences of more than three million forcibly displaced Polish people illuminate the painfully long process of reckoning with war and its fallout. Drawing on rich primary material unearthed in over a dozen archives, Kingdom of Barracks depicts the texture of everyday life in refugee camps in post–World War II Europe within a panorama of the social and cultural history of the twentieth century. Western Allies and Polish social elites construed the camps as spaces for rehabilitating and “re-civilizing” refugees to prepare them for the reconstruction of war-torn countries and a rebirth of the nation. On the ground, refugees lived in close proximity, sharing bug-infested barracks with people from other regions, social classes, and wartime experiences. Taking a bottom-up perspective and exploring the formation of cultural identity in exile through the lenses of class, gender, body, and nationality, Katarzyna Nowak argues that Polish DPs’ experiences of displacement stimulated a personal and a collective revival understood in religious and national terms. In an age of intensifying forced displacement, Kingdom of Barracks sheds new light on past experiences of war and migration that are still deeply relevant in the present.

The Art and Science of Trauma and the Autobiographical

The Art and Science of Trauma and the Autobiographical PDF Author: Meg Jensen
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 303006106X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
This book examines posttraumatic autobiographical projects, elucidating the complex relationship between the ‘science of trauma’ (and how that idea is understood across various scientific disciplines), and the rhetorical strategies of fragmentation, dissociation, reticence and repetitive troping widely used the representation of traumatic experience. From autobiographical fictions to prison poems, from witness testimony to autography, and from testimonio to war memorials, otherwise dissimilar projects speak of past suffering through a limited and even predictable discourse in search of healing. Drawing on approaches from literary, human rights and cultural studies that highlight relations between trauma, language, meaning and self-hood, and the latest research on the science of trauma from the fields of clinical, behavioral and evolutionary psychology and neuroscience, I read such autobiographical projects not as ‘symptoms’ but as complex interrogative negotiations of trauma and its aftermath: commemorative and performative narratives navigating aesthetic, biological, cultural, linguistic and emotional pressure and inspiration.

Handbook of Polish, Czech, and Slovak Holocaust Fiction

Handbook of Polish, Czech, and Slovak Holocaust Fiction PDF Author: Elisa-Maria Hiemer
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 311066741X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
The Handbook of Polish, Czech, and Slovak Holocaust Fiction aims to increase the visibility and show the versatility of works from East-Central European countries. It is the first encyclopedic work to bridge the gap between the literary production of countries that are considered to be main sites of the Holocaust and their recognition in international academic and public discourse. It contains over 100 entries offering not only facts about the content and motifs but also pointing out the characteristic fictional features of each work and its meaning for academic discourse and wider reception in the country of origin and abroad. The publication will appeal to the academic and broader public interested in the representation of the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, and World War II in literature and the arts. Besides prose, it also considers poetry and theatrical plays from 1943 through 2018. An introduction to the historical events and cultural developments in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Czech, and Slovak Republic, and their impact on the artistic output helps to contextualise the motif changes and fictional strategies that authors have been applying for decades. The publication is the result of long-term scholarly cooperation of specialists from four countries and several dozen academic centres.

Working Girls

Working Girls PDF Author: Katherine Mullin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198724845
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
Working Girls offers a cultural and literary history of telegraphists, typists, shop-girls, and barmaids. It argues that these occupations helped to shape a distinctively new identity for emancipated young women, and explores how authors used this to navigate a precarious literary landscape.

Re-examining the Holocaust through Literature

Re-examining the Holocaust through Literature PDF Author: Aukje Kluge
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443808318
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 395

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Book Description
In the late 1980s, Holocaust literature emerged as a provocative, but poorly defined, scholarly field. The essays in this volume reflect the increasingly international and pluridisciplinary nature of this scholarship and the widening of the definition of Holocaust literature to include comic books, fiction, film, and poetry, as well as the more traditional diaries, memoirs, and journals. Ten contributors from four countries engage issues of authenticity, evangelicalism, morality, representation, personal experience, and wish-fulfillment in Holocaust literature, which have been the subject of controversies in the US, Europe, and the Middle East. Of interest to students and instructors of antisemitism, national and comparative literatures, theater, film, history, literary criticism, religion, and Holocaust studies, this book also contains an extensive bibliography with references in over twenty languages which seeks to inspire further research in an international context.

Beyond the Archives

Beyond the Archives PDF Author: Gesa E Kirsch
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 080938695X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 189

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Book Description
This collection of highly readable essays reveals that research is not restricted to library archives. When researchers pursue information and perspectives from sources beyond the archives—from existing people and places— they are often rewarded with unexpected discoveries that enrich their research and their lives. Beyond the Archives: Research as a Lived Process presents narratives that demystify and illuminate the research process by showing how personal experiences, family history, and scholarly research intersect. Editors Gesa E. Kirsch and Liz Rohan emphasize how important it is for researchers to tap into their passions, pursuing research subjects that attract their attention with creativity and intuition without limiting themselves to traditional archival sources and research methods. Eighteen contributors from a number of disciplines detail inspiring research opportunities that led to recently published works, while offering insights on such topics as starting and finishing research projects, using a wide range of types of sources and methods, and taking advantage of unexpected leads, chance encounters and simple clues. In addition, the narratives trace the importance of place in archival research, the parallels between the lives of research subjects and researchers, and explore archives as sites that resurrect personal, cultural, and historical memory. Beyond the Archives sheds light on the creative, joyful, and serendipitous nature of research, addressing what attracts researchers to their subjects, as well as what inspires them to produce the most thorough, complete, and engaged scholarly work. This timely and essential volume supplements traditional-method textbooks and effectively models concrete practices of retrieving and synthesizing information by professional researchers.

Lessons and Legacies XIII

Lessons and Legacies XIII PDF Author: Alexandra Garbarini
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810137682
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 399

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Book Description
Lessons and Legacies XIII: New Approaches to an Integrated History of the Holocaust is an edited collection of thirteen original essays that reflect current research on the Holocaust in a range of disciplines.