The use of Holocaust literature within education starts with Anne Frank and ends with Elie Wiesel's Night; however, the need for a more comprehensive understanding of the Holocaust starts with utilizing the literature to discuss the horrific events. The theories of trauma and affect are relatively new to Holocaust literature studies, which brings a lack of sources to the overall subject. Although there is a lack of sources, understanding trauma, denial, and affect relies on analyzing the written language. This thesis's significance is to detail the importance of Holocaust literature within education and to comprehend the effects denial has on significant genocidal events portrayed in literature. My thesis, Vergissmeinnicht, will provide critical comparative analysis of reading of the novels, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (1946) by Tadeusz Borowski and Lilac Girls (2016) by Martha Hall Kelly with memoirs, Surviving the Angel of Death (2009) by Eva Kor and Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account (1960) by Dr. Miklos Nyiszli. This paper aims to explore the use of denial, trauma, and affect within each genre. The literature analyzed will focus on medical experimentation discourse and the silenced voices of their victims. Through Holocaust literature, both fiction and non-fiction, comprehending the concepts of denial, trauma, and affect will allow for a deeper connection to the Holocaust and maintain that education will never allow it to repeat.

This  thesis  offers  a  comparative  study  of  the  My  Lai  massacre  perpetrated  by  American soldiers during the Vietnam in War and the  massacre in Bialystok  carried out by a police unit operating  under the Nazi regime. Using theories from social  psychology in combination witha  careful  scrutiny  of  sources  from  criminal  investigations,  it  seeks  to  elucidate  the  social mechanisms  of  perpetration  in  the  two  cases  and  explores  how  their  divergent  macro-level contexts facilitated  distinctions in the perpetrator’s behavioural patterns and motivations. The study  demonstrates  that  despite  commonalities  at  the  micro  level,  the  massacres  were organized  in  distinctive  ways,  featured  divergent  perpetrator  behavioural  patterns  andencompassed  disparities  in  the  number  of  abstainers  due  to  different  macro-level  contexts. The  thesis provides  explanations  for these case variations, and it  argues  that new insight into the phenomenon of perpetration can be gained by adopting a comparative perspective.

This thesis analyzes the US response to the 1994 Rwandan genocide. It argues that in 1994, the US was retooling its stance on humanitarian intervention because of the disastrous US-led Operation Gothic Serpent in Somalia in 1993. Therefore, the American response to the genocide in Rwanda became a casualty of Washington’s reassessment of its humanitarian intervention policy in the 1990s. The reason behind the US adoption of a more muscular humanitarian intervention policy was due in part to the end of the Cold War in 1991. Thus, the US was able to focus on other issues in international affairs, such as human security, which became a focal point of George H.W Bush’s New World Order. This policy plan outlined areas in which the US could assist the world with human rights issues through cooperation with the United Nations. In 1993, the Clinton Administration expanded the principles of Bush’s New World Order to create a muscular American foreign policy platform that imposed US domestic ideas of human rights on international affairs. Subsequent polarizing events would force the US to retreat from humanitarian intervention. This resulted in a new, lukewarm approach to humanitarian intervention by the Clinton Administration. The new cautious approach to humanitarian intervention affected the US response to the genocide in Rwanda. This thesis aims to reassess how the US reacted to this particular genocide.

This article explores how the Americanization of the Holocaust is in part responsible for the paradigm that the mention of the Holocaust is vital for a Jewish writer of postwar fiction to be taken seriously. In keeping with the need for people to find meaning in catastrophe, to derive humanity from inhumanity and order out of chaos, Jewish literature's apparent 'success' or international reach often depends on reflecting on the Holocaust as an empowering movement that pushed survivors and other Jews to feel a sense of unity and inclusiveness. By using the Holocaust to generate interest in audiences as opposed to educating the masses, the general perception of Jews as well as of the Jewish religion is reduced to nothing more than an acknowledgment of the traumatic historic event they endured. I argue that this perception of Jewish identity is disillusioned as well as destructive, and that survivor literature paints a more realistic image of what the Holocaust was like while still maintaining the Jewishness within the story. The aim of this article is to examine the trauma in Holocaust literature through the lens of Judaic studies, analyzing the way that it is written as well as providing an analysis of the trends in this postwar genre of writing from survivors and non-survivors. Being analyzed are the writings of Tadeusz Borowski and Cynthia Ozick; "This Way for Gas, Ladies & Gentlemen" and "Silence" by Borowski, and "Rosa" as well as "The Shawl" by Ozick. While Borowski's stories were developed based on his own personal experiences as a victim of the Holocaust, Ozick is an American-born Jewish woman whose stories correlate particularly well with Borowski's despite not having been through the traumatic experience herself. The goal in analyzing this type of literature is to bring to light the realities of the Holocaust and exactly how gruesome, inhumane and disturbing these events were and to contrast these images with more heavily edited and/or fictionalized literature, particularly the Americanized version of "The Diary of Anne Frank". When structured for entertainment purposes, fictional literature set in the time period of the Holocaust tends to develop unrealistic portrayals of the event itself and the Jewish population affected by it. The intention of this article to draw attention to the lack of Jewish identity and religion in postwar Holocaust literature, to challenge the accuracy in Holocaust retellings and to outline the destructiveness of both characteristics in this genre of literature to the general perception of Jewish people.

Historiography of the National Socialist Volksgemeinschaft, or people’s community, has traditionally been divided between historians surmising its construction under the Third Reich as a genuine undertaking meant to uplift German society, and those who view the project as a propaganda effort which assisted the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in retaining legitimacy. Utilizing the plethora of works written on the topic, and a handful of primary sources from pre-Nazified Germany, NSDAP officials, and average citizens alike, this work will demonstrate that, as early as 1807, German philosophers, statesmen, and eventually a large majority of the population yearned for the national unity of Volksgemeinschaft; that the National Socialists adapted the concept for their own ideology. Furthermore, this study finds that, although Adolf Hitler indeed exploited the Volksgemeinschaft for his retention of power, the Third Reich’s efforts in its development were certainly authentic, thus combining both schools of thought in the historiographical debate.

Previous studies of post-genocide Rwanda illutrates how nation-building and the government’s urgency to break with the past results in aims to rearrange society in order to prevent further violence and hostility. Developmental aims are also embedded in the broader project of post-genocide nation-building, adapted to promote a new and improved way of life after the genocide. This thesis examines the local experiences of parents in post-genocide Rwanda, with the specific geographical focus on the capital city of Kigali. Based on an ethnographic data collection from spring 2022, this thesis deals with the local experience of top-down rearrangements among parents in “informal” settlements in Kigali. Governmental perceptions of informality highlight the issue of risk in the urban context of post-genocide Kigali. Characterized by lack of order and formality the neighborhoods are deemed as excluded from the new societal modes and norms in the post-genocide aims of social engineering. This thesis uses the theory social engineering by James Scott (1998) to highlight the top-down measures intended to rearrange the lives of parents in “informal” settlements in Kigali. Additionally, the theoretical perspective of parenting culture is applied in order to explore the targeted regulations of parenting, as a result of government’s special interest in children as “future members of the nation” in a post-genocide context. This thesis shows that parenting culture is especially targeted by top-down regulations as a risk preventing strategy to shape the future of the nation. Working with a bottom-up perspective on top- down measures of social engineering the thesis includes the theoretical perspective of governmentality described by Mitchell Dean (2010) and Tania Murray Li (2007). Through mechanisms of self-regulation and accountability the thesis shows how regulations of parents in “informal” settlements are contested by their lack of ability and willingness to integrate top-down social engineering as meaningful rearrangements in everyday life.

Scholars of American Jewish history have long debated the complicity of the American Jewish community in the loss of six million Jewish lives in Europe during the Holocaust. After Hitler took power in 1933, American Jewish leaders took to the streets to protest the Nazi Party’s abuse of German Jews. Two central figures in this history are Reform Rabbi Stephen Wise and Revisionist Zionist Ben Hecht because of their wide-reaching protest movements that operated in competition with each other. Although the historiography presents Wise and Hecht's inability to unite as the product of difference, my examination of their protest performances presents a novel picture of similarity. Despite their ideological antagonism, Wise and Hecht's shared cultural identities, as both Americans and Jews, produced pageants with decidedly similar elements. The three productions studied here – The Case of Civilization Against Hitler (1934), Stop Hitler Now (1943), and We Will Never Die (1943) – were reflective of these identities. Appealing to their Americanness, they performed rituals of democratic justice. Appealing to their Jewishness, they presented Jewish prayer, iconography, and ritual related to divine justice. In highlighting the parallels in the performances, I read their actions as successful insofar as they appealed to a diverse American Jewish audience.

Rather than being located in a field of art that addresses genocide through assumptions connected with identity issues or activism, this thesis of an artist’s exploration of artistic response to genocide in post World War II art practice, is informed by the emerging field of genocide scholarship. Seeing a parallelism between the concerns of genocide scholars and artists who respond to genocide, this thesis is an interdisciplinary study of art positioned alongside the field of genocide scholarship, as theorised by scholars such as Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses. In addressing genocide through broader historical trends, periods and structures, it assumes that artists who respond to genocide share with genocide scholars a concern about genocide at a secondary level and share the potential to create illumination in the field. This thesis explores art practices that address genocide conceptually through structure and material. The central claim of this thesis is that recent and contemporary art practices, here discussed, show a concern to respond to genocide as an ethical response, and that they do so by engaging with the complexity of abstract issues such as complicity and agency. The initial analysis of Adorno’s discourse on ethics, as it relates to response in art, sets up a level of complexity for two further investigations that interrogate the discourses of victim representation and lens-based documents of genocide through ethics and agency. Together these provide an analytical framework for the project. Close readings informed by genocide scholarship, of art practices including those of Jimmie Durham and Francis Alÿs, take forward notions in the existing critical field. These readings yield not only the evidence that demonstrates a commitment to creating ethically based art through conceptually informed practice, in artists responding to genocide, but also the value of a cultural critique that is informed by genocide scholarship.

A study of ten Louisiana newspapers during May 15-31,1948 revealed a period in which articles varied in their coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict and wider international relations. Discourse about Arabs and Israelis which became evident in newspapers in later years had emerged but was not fully developed. This coverage revealed a silence about the Holocaust and a subtext about the United Nations.

Embedding itself in the larger discussion on protests against measures taken by governments all over the world to mitigate the effects of the covid-19 pandemic, this work concerns itself with the role of the Holocaust in narratives found in prominent Telegram channels and chat groups of German covid-protests. Building on the existing body of research, it uses the theoretical framework of New Social Movement (NSM) theory to categorise the protests in Germany. Choosing a mixed-methods design, the phenomenon is described using narrative analysis, computer-assisted coding, and elements of network analysis. The narrative analysis and results of computer-assisted coding, find that the Holocaust is narrated as a valid comparison to pandemic politics, while some Telegram channels engage in historical revisionism. The network analysis reveals a large network of Telegram channels, strengthening the importance of the analysed channels for the protests in Germany