Abstract
As survivors of the Nazis’ death and concentration camps or of the genocidal war of annihilation on the
Eastern Front were liberated and returned to old homes or sought out new homelands, many of their
experiences were too raw to capture in words. Philosophers, authors, and artists all asked whether there
could be art, literature, or poetry after Auschwitz. Decades later, a German historian mulled over whether
historians could try to tackle this period that came embody evil: “Indeed one cannot do scholarship at the
open grave of the slain. But no grave is so large and remains so fresh that after the passage of years or
decades it cannot become—or must not become—the theme of scholarly inquiry.”
This course will examine murderous Nazi persecution and the Holocaust, the attempted complete
genocidal eradication of Europe’s Jews. Like Holocaust and genocide classes across the world, we will
ask how the Holocaust happened, who survived and who perished, and what ethical questions confronted
ordinary Germans, those who resisted, those who collaborated, and those who rose up against their Nazi
oppressors. We will also consider postwar memory and how the Holocaust is used as an ethical argument
in public discourse today. However, this course also puts the Holocaust in the longer context of Jewish
life in Europe before the Second World War. Of course, this historical context is partially one of
antisemitism, exclusion, and ideas of scientific racism that grow within the context of European
imperialism, but it also includes the too-often-overlooked history of Jewish emancipation, Jewish
theological innovation, and a mingling of cultures and traditions across the continent. We will study this
multicultural context to understand the vibrant Central European Jewish world that was lost and the
contest legacies of the Holocaust in our present.