Abstract
Even after the guns of Nazi mobile killing squads had fallen silent, after the gas chambers at Auschwitz
had been destroyed, and after the Nazi concentration camps had been liberated, the history of the
Holocaust continued. Survivors had to rebuild their lives, to find new homes, and to share their stories.
Liberators processed what they had witnessed as they returned to their home countries. Postwar courts
convened to try far too few Nazi figures, and some European societies ostracized alleged collaborators.
Eventually memorials and museums were built around the world, and teachers struggled with how to
glean pedagogical meaning from the Holocaust. People everywhere had to make sense of what Nazi
persecution and genocide meant in the aftermath of Auschwitz. We still have to grapple with what the
Holocaust means to us and our society today.
This upper-division course will explore the legacies of the Holocaust after May 1945. Officially, ENG 102;
CH 201 or CH 202 are prerequisites for this course, and because we will be reading and writing about
sources and their contexts. That said, even if you know very little about the Holocaust, HIST 436B could
serve as your only class on this history in college, but it builds on the history explored in other UNR
courses on the Holocaust and genocide. To bring everyone up to speed, the first three weeks will present
a streamlined version of the history of the Holocaust through Christopher Browning’s excellent book
Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp. After that we’ll hit the ground running by
exploring topics including the experiences of refugees, postwar justice, the psychology of the Holocaust
(particularly related to aging survivors and their children), literature and cinema, Holocaust museums and
memorials, global Holocaust memory, and pedagogy related to the Holocaust. This course is roughly
divided in thirds to consider the legacies of the Holocaust across Europe, in the United States, and in
Israel. Our course will culminate in your presentations related to the Holocaust and its legacies.