This research documentation explores representations of the Holocaust in the visual arts in relation to the post-Holocaust ??ripple effect????the impact of the Holocaust on the world today, in both the wider arena of global political conflicts and in the lives of individuals. In the following chapters, I address the complex ethical and political aspects of representations of the Holocaust in the context of the evolution of Holocaust awareness and memorialisation. I also investigate recent developments in art and theory that challenge prevailing conventions governing Holocaust representation, especially how the relationship between the perceived political exploitation of the Holocaust and the intergenerational effects of Holocaust trauma is addressed. Given these are sensitive and contentious issues I discuss my studio work in terms of how trauma affects the political rather than as an overt polemically/politically motivated art. I examine my attempts to bypass controversy (maintaining respect for victims and survivors), yet maintain engagement with these issues in my art. In doing this I aim to liberate both my art and the viewer from habits of perception in regard to the subject. From this principle I propose a ??strategic?? form of self-censorship that paradoxically gives me the freedom to do this. This strategy enables me to create an art of ambiguity, which exists in an amoral zone. The art evokes reflective thought, uncertainty and ambivalence, where references to the Holocaust or political content are often not explicit, leaving room for lateral and open readings. My work, which incorporates interdisciplinary methods, is often based on photographs from a variety of sources. I also create three dimensional constructions. The sourced images and the constructions are disguised, decontextualised, cropped, erased or digitally altered, and also experiment with optical illusion. Through transformative processes these images are changed into drawings, paintings, photographs. This research documentation acknowledges the gap between the gravitas of the subject with its ethical and geo-political complexities and my idiosyncratic, subjective, introverted approach to making art. I conclude that there is potential in the exploration of an ??anxiety of representation?? in relation to the Holocaust in the contemporary context.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2004. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 201-210).

When we speak of historical events, we do so with a certain amount of perceived knowledge; that is, we come to believe we know specific, individual 'truths' about the event. Since historical works are never unembellished lists of documented facts, the knowledge of how we conceive of factual events, how we document events we did not witness, is important in understanding the resulting storytelling process, not just in fictional literary constructs such as novels, short stories, poetry or film, but in the formulation of history itself. For written history must be seen, at least in part, as a constructed or representational reality and this construction generally takes place organically, that is, there are no architects of such histories. Instead, they come together as a result of public acceptance of the individual elements of the narrative. Over time, historical data and anecdotal narrative solidify into a cohesive whole made up of both hard fact and individual response to those facts, a blended whole that can be termed the master narrative of the historical event and which serves as the basis on which we construct the fictional narratives of literature and film.

Teilw. zugl.: Hamburg, Universiẗat, Diss.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

The subject of this thesis is the development of Holocaust commemoration in the city of Vancouver, British Columbia in the period between 1943-1975. In much of the current literature, the two decades following the Second World War are considered to have been a time when the Holocaust was virtually absent from the public discourse of North American Jewry. Commemoration, according to this view, is said to have been a private affair limited to survivors, a situation which changed only after the appearance of neo-Nazism in the early 1960s, the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, and particularly in the wake of the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973. Based on my own study of the oral and documentary materials pertaining to Warsaw Ghetto memorials in Vancouver, I argue that these assessments, which are largely based on the official announcements and priorities of the national Jewish leadership, are of limited value in a community context, where there is evidence of a considerable variety of responses to the murder of European Jewry long before the awareness-raising events said to have initiated "Holocaust consciousness".

The subject of this thesis is the development of Holocaust commemoration in the city of Vancouver, British Columbia in the period between 1943-1975. In much of the current literature, the two decades following the Second World War are considered to have been a time when the Holocaust was virtually absent from the public discourse of North American Jewry. Commemoration, according to this view, is said to have been a private affair limited to survivors, a situation which changed only after the appearance of neo-Nazism in the early 1960s, the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, and particularly in the wake of the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973. Based on my own study of the oral and documentary materials pertaining to Warsaw Ghetto memorials in Vancouver, I argue that these assessments, which are largely based on the official announcements and priorities of the national Jewish leadership, are of limited value in a community context, where there is evidence of a considerable variety of responses to the murder of European Jewry long before the awareness-raising events said to have initiated "Holocaust consciousness". / Arts, Faculty of / Classical, Near Eastern and Religious Studies, Department of / Graduate

Processing the Holocaust and its disruption to society has emerged as a significant preoccupation, both privately and publicly, since the war ended almost seventy years ago. By taking up the topic, contemporary artists, often called the "third generation," die Enkel or die Dritten in German, argue that grappling with the past is a process that cannot yet be laid to rest. The cultural production of some of these artists is the focus of this study. Some, like German literary scholar Ernestine Schlant, have argued that past efforts to process history have been lacking. Her review of West German, post-war literature, The Language of Silence, is surveyed for the purpose of understanding how previous generations tackled the topic and how success in confronting the issues could be measured. Four artists represent their views on the burden of history in works produced in the first decade of the new century. In Schweigen die Täter, reden die Enkel, Claudia Brunner describes her efforts to recognize and deal with the feelings of Phantomschmerzen as a result of being a descendent of a Nazi perpetrator. Himmelskörper, by Tanja Dückers, portrays a new mother trying to discover the secrets her grandmother harbors; Uwe von Seltmann wrestles with the legacy of unpunished crimes in Karlebachs Vermächtnis; and, denial takes center stage as Jens Schanze documents his family's attempts to end the silence about a Nazi grandfather in the film Winterkinder. Lest it be thought contemporary artists saw no importance in the legacy of the Holocaust or were not inclined to tackle political issues, this study contends that modern artists are not only capable of confronting the past, but that they find the confrontation still necessary. Given their temporal distance to the era, they have an advantage over previous generations to approach the issues with more objectivity and composure. They do this work in service to others who seek to understand the pain and guilt they feel; to those who sense secrets in their family's history that remain buried and harmful; to those who were wronged; to those who suffer from long-suppressed conflict; and, to those who care deeply, also from afar, that German society successfully digest, but not forget, the history.

This project sets out to frame and examine the theoretical and practical challenges involved in the process and effect of translating Holocaust testimony, which has been largely overlooked in Holocaust discourses. Research pertaining to the fields of Holocaust memorialisation, historiography, literary theory, and translation studies is drawn together, with a view to shedding light on what it means to write Holocaust testimony, what it means to read it, and how these often conflicting processes affect and are affected by translation. Using a canonical testimonial text by Elie Wiesel as a case study allows the exploration of these questions to be grounded in detailed and wide-ranging textual analysis, demonstrating the extent to which translation impacts Holocaust testimony. The Holocaust is an unparalleled event in the twentieth century and testimony to it is born of a unique desire to relate one’s experiences, coupled with a certainty that these experiences cannot be expressed. This dual set of challenges requires a distinctive approach to reading testimony, which is shaped through a range of textual and paratextual features. Furthermore, the reader’s perception of the author figure is argued here to have a discernible bearing on this reading process. Translation has the potential to unsettle this reading, by undermining the readers’ belief in the author figure and in the referential status of the text. The analysis of Wiesel’s La Nuit in translation demonstrates that translation not only has a marked effect on the content and nature of this piece of testimony, but that the way in which this effect is presented to the readership is a reflection of the text’s shifting target locale and strongly impacts the reading of testimonial texts.

1. Sweetness and Light. A novel. Judi lives in a nice, clean house with her seventeen year old stepson, who won’t talk to her in anything but monosyllables. His father, Nelson, and she are struggling to relate to each other, since they fell out over Judi’s continued desire to have a baby, despite many miscarriages. She’s forty-one. Her relationship has lost its spark, she doesn’t know how to talk to the man that she lives with anymore. To make matters worse, he is her boss too. Judi needs answers, what she discovers instead is The Secret, Rhonda Byrne’s internationally bestselling guide to shaping the world around you with the power of your mind. Judi soon discovers she’s pretty good at it. Uncanny things start to happen. A wine-do with literary pretentions leads to an unexpectedly spiritual interlude, during which Judi is led, by a cosmic vision, to discover the sinister happenings at her work place. Hope, a schizophrenic woman in their care, has been raped, and is pregnant. Worse, Judi has strong reason to suspect that her abuser is the man she has shared her life with. With The Secret as her moral compass, Judi decides to kidnap Hope and raise the baby as her own. The relationship on the brink, becomes a game of brinkmanship. As Judi struggles to build a dream-life from the wreckage of the old, the burden of past makes its weight felt. A novel of secrets, and The Secret. An exploration of cosmic ordering, and its consequences. 2. Making Light Of The Holocaust: Modelling Calvino’s concept of lightness as an appropriate literary response to the Shoah in Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces. In Six Memos For The New Millenium, Italo Calvio proposes that lightness is a literary value which can act against cultural and creative paralysis. Given the ongoing cultural obligation to bear witness to the events of The Holocaust, might lightness be a necessary approach to post-holocaust literature? Calvino’s concept of lightness is deconstructed and examined in relation to the Memorial to The Murdered Jews Of Europe. The understandable critical hesitancy surrounding a light approach to the atrocities is examined, with special reference to Benigni’s La vita è bella Finally, taking Anne Michaels’ novel Fugitive Pieces as an exemplar of the lightness Calvino advocated at work in the field of holocaust literature, the case is made for the appropriateness, and potential necessity, of this approach in works that address The Holocaust, in the specific context of Michaels’ work and more generally.