Timeline: Fall

• Part I: Human Rights and the Memory of Judgment: Famous Trials of the Holocaust on Film
  

  • Week 1: The Legacy of Nuremberg and the "Look" of Authenticity
    

  • Week 2: The Banality of Evil: The Eichmann Trial
    

  • Week 3: "Did Six Million Really Die?": Holocaust Deniers and the Law, Part 1
    

  • Week 4: "Did Six Million Really Die?": Holocaust Deniers and the Law, Part 2
    

• Part II: Ethical and Aesthetic Issues in Representing the Holocaust
  

  • Week 5: Visualizing the Unvisualizable: the Holocaust as Negative Sublime
    

  • Week 6: Psychoanalysis, Trauma and Survivor Testimonies
    

  • Week 7: Between Fact and Fiction: Shoah-business and Tales of Heroism
    

  • Week 8: Templates of Horror and Sexuality
    

  • Week 9: Humor and the Holocaust
    

• Part III: Narrative Templates of the Holocaust and Human Rights
  

  • Key Questions for Weeks 10-15
    

  • Week 10: The Hollywood and New German Versions of the Holocaust
    

  • Week 11: Black Humor, Melodrama, and Styles of Tension
    

  • Week 12: Use this time to work on refining your final papers
    

  • Week 13: Use this time to work on refining your final papers
    

  • Week 14: Dark Humor

  • Week 15: Propaganda, Resistance, Positionality and Representations of the Holocaust
    

  • Week 16: Final Paper Due
    

Part I:  Human Rights and the Memory of Judgment:  Famous Trials of the Holocaust on Film [top]

Week 1:  The Legacy of Nuremberg and the "Look" of Authenticity [top]

Key Questions:

1. How does the materiality of film (its emphasis on the visual, its "preference" for narrative "progression," its "documentary" nature) affect our willingness or unwillingness to believe what we see?  (Introduction to film form vocabulary as well.)
2. What legacies have the Nuremberg trials left us?
3. What are the relations between history, literature and film, in representing the Holocaust?

Films:  Nuremberg/Nazi Concentration Camps (documentary), Judgment at Nuremberg and Nuremberg

Required Reading:

Lawrence Douglas, The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust (New Haven and London:  Yale University Press, 2001), chapters 1-3.

Supplementary Readings:

Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders (HarperPerennial, 1993).

Geoffrey Robertson, Crimes Against Humanity: The Struggle for Global Justice (New York: The New Press, 2000), Chapter 1.

Week 2:  The Banality of Evil:  The Eichmann Trial [top]

Films:  The Specialist and The Wannsee Conference

Key Questions: 

1. What was unique about the Eichmann trial?
2. What have been some past and contemporary challenges to the promotion and protection of international human rights, and how has the individual body, in relation to the national and international bodies politic, been envisaged in relation to these challenges?
3. What roles do survivors, witnesses, third parties play in memorializing the Holocaust?

Required Readings:

Lawrence Douglas, The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust (New Haven and London:  Yale University Press, 2001), chapters 4-6.

Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (NY: Penguin, 1992).

Supplementary Reading:

Geoffrey Robertson, Crimes Against Humanity: The Struggle for Global Justice (New York: The New Press, 2000), Chapter 2.

Week 3:  "Did Six Million Really Die?": Holocaust Deniers and the Law, Part 1 [top]

REPORTS BEGIN; THREADED CONVERSATIONS BEGIN

Group #1: David Arroyo and Christopher Wood

Key Questions:

1. What was unique about the Barbie case?
2. What is the definition of torture under international law, and what are the implicit depictions of the "healthy"/ "free" human body?
3. How are women's rights and bodies configured in relation to the rights and bodies of their children, and their spouses?
4. How are women's and children's bodies configured in relation to property?
5. How is the allure of Fascism portrayed in film and literature?

Film:  Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie (1988)

Required Readings:

Lawrence Douglas, The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust (New Haven and London:  Yale University Press, 2001), chapters 7-8.

George Steiner, The Portage to San Cristobal of AH (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

Supplementary Reading:

Geoffrey Robertson, Crimes Against Humanity: The Struggle for Global Justice (New York: The New Press, 2000), Chapter 3

Week 4:  "Did Six Million Really Die?": Holocaust Deniers and the Law, Part 2 [top]

Group #2: Jennifer Perrine and Quentin James

Key Question:

1. How has international law responded to the challenge of Holocaust deniers?
2. How is the rise of Neo-Nazism and Holocaust denial portrayed in film and literature?

Film:  Mr. Death

Required Readings:

Lawrence Douglas, The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust (New Haven and London:  Yale University Press, 2001), chapters 9-10.

Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind (NY: Vintage, 1990).

Supplementary Reading:

Geoffrey Robertson, Crimes Against Humanity: The Struggle for Global Justice (New York: The New Press, 2000), Chapter 6.

Part II:  Ethical and Aesthetic Issues in Representing the Holocaust [top]

Week 5:  Visualizing the Unvisualizable: the Holocaust as Negative Sublime [top]

Group #3: LaDawna McDonald and Brett Ader

Key Questions:

What are the ethical issues involved in representing the Holocaust through a variety of media (film, literature, autobiographies and biographies, historical accounts, visual art)?

Films:  Night and Fog and Shoah  (part 1)

Required Readings: 

Michael Bernard-Donals and Richard Glejzer, Between Witness and Testimony:  The Holocaust and Limits of Representation (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001), Chapters 1 and 5.

Elie Wiesel, The Elie Wiesel Trilogy(especially "Night") (NY: Hill and Wang, 1985).

Week 6: Psychoanalysis, Trauma and Survivor Testimonies [top]

Reporter #1: Brett Ader

Key Questions: 

1.   How do we deal with the trauma of the Holocaust through film?

2.   What roles do survivor testimonies in film and literature play in memorializing the Holocaust?

Films:  Shoah (part 2) and Schindler's List (part 1)

Required Reading:  Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory After Auschwitz (Ithaca and London:  Cornell University Press, 1998), Chapter 4

Claude Lanzmann, Shoah: The Complete Text of the Acclaimed Holocaust Film (Da Capo Press/Perseus Books, 1995).

Supplementary Reading:

Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz (NY: Touchstone, 1996).

Primo Levi, The Reawakening (NY: Touchstone, 1993).

Week 7:  Between Fact and Fiction:  Shoah-business and Tales of Heroism [top]

Key Questions:

1. What role does popular culture play in envisaging the Holocaust?
2. What are the political, aesthetic and ethical effects of a film like Schindler's List?
3. How does it differ from the other films we have discussed so far, and how does it compare with Good Evening, Mr. Wallenberg?
4. What roles do literature, history, autobiographies, biographies and the visual arts play in relation to film and popular culture in depicting the Holocaust?

Films:  Schindler's List (part 2), Good Evening, Mr. Wallenberg and The Seventh Cross

Required Readings: 

Miriam Bratu Hansen, "Schindler's List is not Shoah:  The Second Commandment, Popular Modernism, and Public Memory," Critical Inquiry 22 (Winter 1996):  292-312.

Supplementary Texts:

Thomas Fensch, ed. Oskar Schindler and his List (Forest Dale, Vermont:  Paul S. Eriksson, 1995)

Week 8:  Templates of Horror and Sexuality [top]

Key Questions:

1. What genre conventions do popular cinematic appropriations of the story of the Holocaust fall back on?
2. How do genre and gender crossings intersect with the notion of the "monstrous"?
3. Compare and contrast real and "reel" life depictions of gender and sexuality based on cinematic, literary, historical, and critical texts.

Films: Apt Pupil and The Night Porter

Required Readings:

Caroline J.S. (Kay) Picart and Jason McKahan, "Sadomasochism, Sexual Torture, and the Holocaust Film:  From Misogyny to Homoeroticism and Homophobia in Apt Pupil," Jump Cut 45 (2002) (online at: http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc45.2002/picart/index.html

Stephen King, "Apt Pupil," in Different Seasons (Signet, 1995).

Carol Rittner and John K. Roth, eds., " Part I: Voices of Experience," Different Voices (MN: Paragon, 1994).

Supplementary Readings:

Heinz Heger, Kalus Miller, David Fernback, Men with the Pink Triangle: The True, Life-and-Death Story of Homosexuals in the Nazi Death Camps (Alyson Publications, 1994).

Richard Plant, The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals (Henry Holt, 1988).

Week 9: Humor and the Holocaust [top]

Reporter #2: Jennifer Perrine

Key Questions:

1.   Does humor have an appropriate role to play in relation to remembering the Holocaust through film, literature and the visual arts?

2.   What functions might humor have in relation to memorializing the Holocaust?

Films:  Life is Beautiful and Jacob the Liar

Required Readings:

Roberto Benigni, Vincenzo Cerami, S. Strinzi, Life is Beautiful (La Vita E Bella) (Hyperion-Miramax, 1998).

Jürek Becker, Leila Vennewitz (trans.), Jacob the Liar (Arcade, February 1996).

Supplementary Reading:

Robin T. Goodman and Kenneth J. Saltman, Strange Love, or How We Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Market (Lanham, MD and Boulder, CO:  Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), pp. 179-208.

Part III:  Narrative Templates of the Holocaust and Human Rights [top]

Key Questions for Weeks 10-15:

1.   What human rights are highlighted in these novels, literary texts, artistic pieces, historical accounts, biographies and autobiographies and films?  Are there significant convergences and departures in the depictions of human rights and the body in these different texts?

2.   What human rights are in conflict in the depictions of these gendered, raced, classed, aged and multi-classified human bodies in these different texts?

3.   Who act to defend and/or deny human rights in these different texts, in keeping with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?  How are these champions or oppressors raced, classed, gendered, aged and otherwise categorized?

4.   Is  the action to defend human rights effective or successful in these different texts?  Justify your answers carefully.

5.   Is the action to defend human rights in these different texts violent or non-violent?  Did it bring long range effects for the better or not?

6.   How are rights and responsibilities implicitly related in the depictions of raced, gendered, classed, aged bodies in these different texts?

7.   How are individual human bodies and rights configured in relation to those of the body politic in these different texts?

8.   Do any of these situations still have contemporary pertinence?

9.   What literary and cinematic devices are used in order to create a bodily rhetoric of human rights?

Week 10:  The Hollywood and New German Versions of the Holocaust [top]

Reporter #3: Quentin James

Additional Question:  What is distinctive about the Hollywood and the new German versions of the Holocaust?

Films: Holocaust, The Diary of Anne Frank, and The Tin Drum

Required Readings:

Annette Insdorf, Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust (New York:  Cambridge University Press, 1989), Chapters 1 and 11.

Anne Frank, BM Moovart (trans.), Eleanor Roosevelt (intro), Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl (Prentice Hall, 1993).

Gunter Grass, Ralph Manheim (trans.), The Tin Drum (Knopf, 1990).

Supplementary Reading:

Mary Lowenthal Felstiner, To Paint Her Life: Charlotte Salomon in the Nazi Era (University of California Press, 1997).

Week 11:  Black Humor, Melodrama, and Styles of Tension [top]

Reporter #4: David Arroyo and Reporter #5: Christopher Wood

Additional Questions:

1. How is humor created in these films and visual texts?
2. How effectively is humor maintained in these cinematic and comic book narratives?
3. How do genre conventions of the melodrama shape narrative depictions of race, gender, class, sexuality, and other factors in Holocaust films, as well as autobiographical, historical and critical-theoretical texts?

Films:  The Great Dictator, Seven Beauties, To Be or Not to Be, Passenger, The Pawnbroker and The Damned

Required Readings:

Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces (Knopf, 1996).

Annette Insdorf, Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust (New York:  Cambridge University Press, 1989), Chapters 3, 4, and 8.

Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor's Tale (NY: Random House, 1986).

Supplementary Readings:

Primo Levi, Moments of Reprieve: A Memoir of Auschwitz (NY: Penguin, 1986).

Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (Vintage, 1989).

Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (Touchstone, 1994).

Week 12:  Use this time to work on refining your final papers [top]

Week 13:  Use this time to work on refining your final papers [top]

Week 14:  Dark Humor [top]

Reporter #6: Steve Armstrong

Week 15: Propaganda, Resistance, Positionality and Representations of the Holocaust [top]

Reporter #7: LaDawna McDonald

Additional Questions:

1.   Do elements of propaganda creep into representations of the Holocaust?  How are they visualized?

2.   What implications follow from the recognition of these elements?

3.   How does resistance against the Nazis, or the process of becoming a Nazi, get depicted in film, literature, autobiography, biography, critical theory, and visual art?

Films:  Triumph of the Will (excerpt), Cartoons Go to War (excerpt), Ashes and Diamonds and The Sorrow and the Pity

*Websites pertaining to Richard Raskin's studies:

http://holocaust-trc.org/FischlPoem.htm

http://www.voorhees.k12.nj.us/middle/Holocaust/child_of_warsaw.htm

http://www.fpp.co.uk/online/01/11/Palestine_boy4.html

http://www.dottycommies.com/holocaust10.html

http://www.codoh.com/inter/intwgboy.html (in French)

http://www.abbc.com/aaargh/fran/archFaur/1974-1979/RF7912xx2.html (in French)

http://www.fpp.co.uk/Auschwitz/docs/fake/PhotosForeword.html (In German)

A good example of propaganda film is Education for Death , a  WWII propaganda animated short cartoon, released January 5, 1943, by Disney. It credits Gregor Athalwin Ziemer's work as the original. The entire 10 minute film may be viewed at  http://www.bcdb.com/bcdb/detailed.cgi?film=6318 . 

Required Reading: 

Annette Insdorf, Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust (New York:  Cambridge University Press, 1989), Chapters 9 and 13.

Katherine Taylor, Address Unknown (Washington Square Press, 2001).

Supplementary Reading:

Carol Rittner and John K. Roth, eds., Part II: "Voices of Interpretation," Different Voices (MN: Paragon, 1993).

Nelly Toll, When Memory Speaks: The Holocaust in Art (Westport: Praeger, 1998).

Gregor Athalwin Ziemer, Education for Death, the Making of the Nazi (Octagon, 1972). (please note this text is difficult to find as it is mostly out of print)

Access is not available from Tennessee to Woodward so it is best to come down from either Jefferson , Pensacola or Gaines St. to get to Woodward Ave. Once on Woodward Ave. go north and then make a left on Park Ave (construction zone at the end). The intersection is Wildwood Dr., go across it (which is the driveway to the International Center ), the IC is on your left, 3 story white building. Parking for FSU employees is available on the staff lots adjacent to and behind the building. Metered parking is available behind the building (close to the Leach Center ) for non-FSU employees.

Week 16 [top]