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HEBRG030 Graduate Seminar: Introduction to Holocaust Studies

Course Code:	HEBRG030
Tutor:	Professor Michael Berkowitz Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies,  UCL 326 Foster Court  Phone: 0207-679-2814; internal: 3-2814  E-mail: m.berkowitz@ucl.ac.uk Office hours: Mondays, 0830-1030 and by appointment
Mode of assessment:	One 10,000 word essay
Taught:	In terms 1 and 2
Classes:	Mondays, 1100-1300 in Roberts, 103

The last decades have witnessed a proliferation of scholarship on the Holocaust, and historical work incorporating international perspectives and disciplines outside of history per se is being published at an increasing rate. As opposed to David Engel's contention in Historians of the Jews and the Holocaust (2010) that "Jewish" and "Holocaust" history are alarmingly and artificially bifurcated, studies featuring an integrative approach, rather than an either/or focus on perpetrators or victims, is epitomized by the evolving scholarship of Christopher Browning, Omer Bartov, Dan Michman, Martin Dean, Timothy Synder, Alan Steinweis, and Peter Fritzsche. In general, it seems that the historical understanding of the Holocaust is becoming more sophisticated and nuanced.

In this course we shall begin to look at the immense literature on the Holocaust. We mainly seek to gain a sense of leading scholarship in the field, as opposed to a survey of events and interpretations. We will examine selected historical syntheses and anthologies of both primary and secondary sources and consider, as well, some literary work relevant to intellectual perspectives on the Holocaust. Students will be expected to read at least one entire book each week, and will prepare at least four class presentations on selected books.

For class presentations students are expected to locate and read scholarly reviews. Please obtain information concerning access to the 'Web of Science' search engine from the reference desk at the main library of UCL. Although there are many ways to locate reviews (and review essays), this system is fairly comprehensive and is free of charge.

Mode of assessment

The major (written) assessment for the course is one essay of 10,000 words, following the criteria of the departmental 'Departmental Style Sheet'. (This is separate from the MA dissertation.) The essay, which does not necessarily entail original research, is due 5 April 2013. There is one important addition regarding citations: in your footnotes or endnotes, please include the publisher as well as the place of publication. Class participation, which will be judged on the basis of 'exceptional', 'high pass', and 'acceptable' will be taken into account in the event of a 'borderline' mark.

In addition to the UCL and Senate House libraries, books also are available at the Wiener Library, Russell Square, the British Library, St. Pancras, and libraries of the Institute of German Studies and the Institute of Historical Research. If you are unable to locate books locally, it is strongly suggested that you use internet bookstores. The majority of books for the course are available in paperback. Used copies are often available.

Along with weekly classes, which meet Mondays, there will be several evening lectures during the academic year by visiting scholars to complement the seminar.

Students in the class, for most of the last dozen years, have participated in intensive study-tours to significant sites of Jewish history and the Holocaust (after the exam period). In 2012 we explored Trieste, while previously the focus was on Lithuania. Additional sessions, in preparation for the tour, would be organized in due course.

Class meetings

Below is a tentative schedule for class meetings and a list of readings. Books marked *** are to be read by everyone, in addition to the specified assignment. Readings are subject to change according to the interests of members of the seminar:

Term 1

Monday, 15 October 2012: Introductions and assignments.

The state(s) of the Jews up to 1939:

• ***Bernard Wasserstein, On the Eve: The Jews of Europe before the Second World War (London: Profile, 2012) (also US edition).
• ***Yehoshue Perle, Ordinary Jews, trans. And intro. Shirley Kumove (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011).

Monday, 22 October 2012: comprehensive treatments:

• ***Peter Fritzsche, Life and Death in Nazi Germany (Boston, MA: Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 2008).
• Doris Bergen, War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).
• Dan Mikhman and David Bankier, eds., Holocaust Historiography in Context: Emergence, Challenges, Polemics and Achievements (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem; New York: Berghahn, 2008).
• Mark Mazower, Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe (London: Penguin, 2008).
• ***Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic, 2010).

EVENING LECTURE (also Monday, 22 October), INSTITUTE OF JEWISH STUDIES (IJS), 6:45, Gustave Tuck Theatre, UCL South Cloister: Professor Rachel Brenner, University of Wisconsin on Polish Jewish memoirs

Reading in preparation:

• Marian Turski, ed., Polish Witnesses to the Holocaust (London: Valentine Mitchell, 2010).
• Gunnar Paulsson, Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw, 1940-1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).

Monday, 29 October 2012: rethinking anti-Semitism and Nazi ideology:

• Götz Aly, Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State, trans. Jefferson Chase (New York: Metropolitan, 2007).
• Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006)
• Martin Dean, Robbing the Jews: The Confiscation of Jewish Property in the Holocaust (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

Thursday, 1 November 2012: EVENING LECTURE, INSTITUTE OF JEWISH STUDIES (IJS), 6:45, Gustave Tuck Theatre, UCL South Cloister: Professor Jack Jacobs, City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center, on the Frankfurt School

Reading in preparation: 

• Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Historical Research 1923-1950 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

Monday, 5 November 2012: ghettos and killing grounds:

• Hilary Earl, The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial, 1945-1958: Atrocity, Law, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
• ***Kazimierz Sakowicz, Ponary Diary: A Bystander's Account of a Mass Murder, ed. Yitzhak Arad (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).
• ***Christopher Browning, Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-labor Camp (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010).

Monday, 12 November 2012: 'rational' causes?:

• ***Ulrich Herbert, ed., National Socialist Extermination Policies (Oxford: Berghahn, 2000).
• Lars Fischer, The Socialist Response to Antisemitism in Imperial Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
• Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).
• David Bankier, Germans and the Final Solution (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986).

Monday, 19 November 2012: German society:

• Robert Ericksen, Complicity in the Holocaust: Churches and Universities in Nazi Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
• Nathan Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany (New York: Norton, 2001).
• Marion Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
• ***Saul Friedlander, Nazi Germany and the Jews: Volume I: The Years of Persecution (New York: Harper Collins, 1997).

Monday, 26 November 2012: Business and other motives

• Peter Hayes, From Cooperation to Complicity: Degussa in the Third Reich (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
• Gordon Horwitz, Ghettostadt: Łódz and the making of a Nazi City (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008).
• Gerald D. Feldman, Allianz and the German Insurance Business, 1933-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

EVENING LECTURE, INSTITUTE OF JEWISH STUDIES (IJS), (also Monday, 26 November), 6:45, Gustave Tuck Theatre, UCL South Cloister: Dr Lisa Peschel, York University, on theatre in the Theresienstadt Ghetto

Reading in preparation:

• Shirli Gilbert, Music in the Holocaust: Confronting Life in the Nazi Ghettos and Camps (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005).

Monday, 3 December 2012: cultural support:

• Alan Steinweis, Studying the Jew: Scholarly Antisemitism in Nazi Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
• Robert Proctor, The Nazi War on Cancer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
• Jonathan Petropoulos, The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany (London: Penguin, 2001).
• Shelley Baranowski, Strength Through Joy: Consumerism and Mass Tourism in the Third Reich (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Monday, 10 December 2012: memoirs, life-stories:

• Jürgen Matthäus, ed., Approaching an Auschwitz Survivor: Holocaust Testimony and its Transformations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
• Avraham Tory, Surviving the Holocaust: The Kovno Ghetto Diary, edited with an introduction by Martin Gilbert, historical notes by Dina Porat, trans. Jerzy Michalowicz (London: Pimlico, 1991).
• ***Samuel Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007).

Term 2

Monday, 7 January 2013: Aftermaths (I):

• Zeev Mankowitz, Life between Memory and Hope: The Survivors of the Holocaust in Postwar Germany (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
• Avinoam Patt, Finding Home and Homeland: Jewish Youth and Zionism in the Aftermath of the Holocaust (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009).
• Idith Zertal, From Catastrophe to Power: Holocaust Survivors and the Emergence of Israel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
• Atina Grossmann, Germans, Jews and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

Monday, 14 January 2013: according to plan?

• Leo Goldberger, ed., The Rescue of the Danish Jews: Moral Courage Under Stress (New York: New York University Press, 1987).
• Anton Weiss-Wendt, Murder Without Hatred: Estonians and the Holocaust (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2009).
• Jonathan Steinberg, All or Nothing: The Axis and the Holocaust (London: Routledge, 1991).
• Susan Zuccotti, The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1999).

Monday, 21 January 2013: fitting the pieces together?

• Patricia Heberer and Jürgen Matthäus, eds., Atrocities on Trial: Historical Perspectives on the Politics of Prosecuting War Crimes (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008).
• Omer Bartov, Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
• ***Michael Berenbaum and Abraham J. Peck, eds., The Holocaust and History: The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the Reexamined (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998).

Monday, 28 January 2013: Aftermaths (II):

• Rebecca Kobrin, Jewish Bialystok and its Diaspora (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010).
• Jay Howard Geller, Jews in Post-Holocaust Germany, 1945-1953 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 20005).
• Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (London: Heinemann, 2005).

Monday, 4 February 2013: thought, knowledge and actions:

• Christopher Probst, Demonizing the Jews: Luther and the Protestant Church in Nazi Germany (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012).
• Richard Breitman, Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned. What the British and Americans Knew (London: Penguin, 2000).
• Robert Blobaum, ed., Antisemitism and its Opponents in Modern Poland (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005).

Monday, 18 February 2013: history and autobiography:

• Alexandra Garbarini, Numbered Days: Diaries and the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).
• Shimon Redlich, Together and Apart in Brzezany: Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians, 1919-1945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002).
• Omer Bartov, Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-day Ukraine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).
• Raul Hilberg, The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996).
• Dan Jacobson, Heschel's Kingdom (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999).

Monday, 25 February 2013: Central and Eastern Europe with and without Jews; seeing, interpreting and reimagining the Holocaust:

• Michael Steinlauf, Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1997).
• James Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).
• Lawrence Baron, Projecting the Holocaust into the Present: The Changing Focus of Contemporary Holocaust Cinema (Lanham: Roman and Littlefield, 2005).
• Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999).
• Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991).

Monday, 4 March 2013: modernity, sweeping forces:

• Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (London: Penguin, 2008).
• ***Saul Friedländer, Reflections on Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993).
• Richard Overy, The Dictators: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia (New York: Norton, 2006).
• Robert Gellately and Nathan Stoltzfus, eds., Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

Monday, 11 March 2013: Revisiting classics, evaluating trends:

• ***Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (preferably the most recent edition--London: Penguin, 2001).
• Victor Klemperer, I Shall Bear Witness: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer, trans. Martin Chalmers (London: Phoenix, 1999).
• William Sheridan Allen, The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town, 1922-1945, rev. ed. (New York: F. Watts, 1984).
• David Engel, Historians of the Jews and the Holocaust (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010).

Monday, 18 March 2013: A place for fiction?

• Jacques Presser, The Night of the Girondists, foreword by Primo Levi, trans. Barrows Mussey (Hammersmith: Harvill, 1992).
• Jonathan Littell, The Kindly Ones, trans. Charlotte Mandell (London: Vintage, 2010).
• Giorgio Bassani, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1977).

Additional recommended texts:

• George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology (New York: Grossat & Dunlap, 1964).
• Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).
• Donald Niewyk and Francis Nicosia, The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).
• Barbara Epstein, The Minsk Ghetto, 1941-1943 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).
• Michael Thad Allen, The Business of Genocide: The SS, Slave Labor, and the Concentration Camps (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
• Michael Kater, Different Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany (London: Replica, 2001).