I was reading today about the supposed silence in art concerning the Holocaust in its immediate aftermath. I realised I hadn't ever read any fiction of any description. I've read a fair bit of history, but nothing fiction.
In a way it seems a bit frivolous, but nothing could be further from the truth, i realised.
Any recommendations?
'Sophie's Choice' (William Styron) - 'Schindler's Ark' (Thomas Keneally) - both works of fiction set in concentration camps.
H
If This Is a Man by Primo Levi is one of the earliest I believe, about Levi's own experiences in Auschwitz.
Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus, which largely addresses the theme of what it means to depict something like the holocaust in art and then to profit from that depiction.
"If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia."
- Margaret Atwood
Beat me to "Maus": it is wonderful.Originally Posted by OrphanPip
I would also add to the list "Boy in the Striped Pajamas"
I wrote a poem on a leaf and it blew away...
Boy In the Striped Pajamas was one of the most haunting movies I ever saw--I imagine the book is even worse.
There's a very popular young-adult novel called Night that deals with the holocaust. I've never read it, but I've heard nothing but praise.
Gerald Green novelized the television miniseries The Holocaust. It's fiction and very good. (The TV series is excellent also.)
Jane Yolen wrote an updated version of the old fairy tale Briar Rose set in Poland during the Holocaust.
You must be the change you wish to see in the world. -- Mahatma Gandhi
It was great. The author gave me one of my favorite quotes ever: "the opposite of love is not hate - it is indifference."
Not a fictional story, though.
__________________
"Personal note: When I was a little kid my mother told me not to stare into the sun. So once when I was six, I did. At first the brightness was overwhelming, but I had seen that before. I kept looking, forcing myself not to blink, and then the brightness began to dissolve. My pupils shrunk to pinholes and everything came into focus and for a moment I understood. The doctors didn't know if my eyes would ever heal."
-Pi
And I wouldn't call "Night" a young-adult novel, although it is being introduced in high schools. I think that, along with "Man's Search For Meaning" are two essential reads when it comes to Holocaust memoirs.
I wrote a poem on a leaf and it blew away...
Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus, which largely addresses the theme of what it means to depict something like the holocaust in art and then to profit from that depiction.
An interesting theme you draw attention to here, Pip. Recently I've been reading a book entitled The German Genius which explores the impact of various Germanic "geniuses" upon the world as we know it. The opening chapter, "Blinded by the Light: Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Past that will not Pass Away" explores the continued impact of the WWII and Holocaust upon Germany, England, the US, and Israel. It is noted that 97% of Germans have a rough understanding of basic English with 25% fluent compared to 22% of English with a rough grasp of basic German and less than 1% fluent. The author explores the fact that most of what is taught about Germany in British public schools centers upon Hitler leading to a grossly unbalanced view of German culture. Watson suggests that as "every country need to go through an identity-building process" it was WWII that has taken this role for the English. "In 1940, Britain was confronted with an overpowering enemy and through the sheer mustering of British virtues, Britain finally managed to turn it around... Like the conquering of the West is part of the American myth, so it is the same with Britain and the defeat of Nazism... "The defeat of Germany still seems to be essential to the English sense of who they are... That obsession shows no sign of diminishing. In July 2005, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of Bavaria became Pope. The following day, the London Sun, a tabloid newspaper, splashed its front page with the headline, "From Hitler Youth to Papa Ratzi."
The author goes on to explore the impact of WWII and the Holocaust upon America. In spite of the fact that WWII resulted in the US as the last man standing... the sole military and economic superpower in the world... there was no great impact upon the American psyche as the war ended and the majority of Americans turned their focus to setting about making money and building the ideal world of tomorrow.
For nearly two decades following the war, the Holocaust was something rarely spoken of. Jewish cultural groups repeatedly rejected any idea of establishing a Holocaust Memorial, not wishing to be remembered as "victims". This began to change in the late 1980s and 1990's with the advent of political correctness and the notion that "victim status" lent one the moral high ground. By 1995 97% of American knew what the Holocaust was... quite a bit more than could identify Pearl Harbor and nearly twice as many as those who knew that the United States has dropped two atom bombs on Japan.
The result, as several Jewish writers have noted, has been that the Holocaust has been sanctified... or made sacrosanct. This has carried over any art work made about the Holocaust and ultimately to the state of Israel. While Israel carries out actions against the Palestinians that mirror those carried out a half a century earlier by the Nazis against the Jews, to question Israeli politics is almost immediately tied to antisemitism. Many of the US' problems over the last half-century with the Middle-East relate to this notion of Israel and the Jews as being sacrosanct or above criticism. Just as many are fearful of criticizing Israel, so many critics are afraid of criticizing any work of art or literature or music inspired by or dealing with the Holocaust. Yet are we to assume that a profound theme will inherently always result in an art of equal profundity?
One author, Norman G. Finkelstein, in his book, The Holocaust Industry, acerbically suggested that there are more than a few among the American Jewish population who are guilty of exploiting the Holocaust... "Holocaust Hucksters", he calls them... who repeatedly use the Holocaust for personal gain... or for the benefit of Israel.
I share a studio with an older Jewish artist who, in my less diplomatic moments, I might accuse of Holocaust Hucksterism. After years of painting abstractly and a decade-long side trip working as a baseball artist, he suddenly began to explore the theme of the Holocaust. On more than one occasion he has let slip the fact that as he has never been afforded the one-man museum exhibition he so believes he is worthy of, he has taken on the theme of the Holocaust as a means of shaming dealers and galleries into showing his work. Any criticism of his work is dismissed as criticism of those who died and suffered during the Holocaust... and thus is clearly antisemitic. He went so far, at one point, as to send envelopes filled with ashes to various galleries which had turned down his work with a note stating simply, "May the ashes of the dead be upon you."
Personally, I think the Holocaust and WWII and Hitler are all historical events that are no more nor less valid as themes for the artist/author. Like any other historical narrative, be it the old America West, the American Civil War, the Revolutionary War, the French Revolution, the Cultural Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the 30-Years War, the Napoleonic wars, etc... I feel WWII, the Holocaust, and Hitler should be open to various artistic explorations, whether reverent, revisionist, or even comic.
I believe that it was Theodor Adorno who suggested that one could not write poetry after Auschwitz. The great Romanian poet, Paul Celan, responded by composing one of the most powerful post-war poems... ABOUT Auschwitz:
Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown
we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night
we drink and we drink it
we dig a grave in the breezes there one lies unconfined
A man lives in the house he plays with the serpents he writes
he writes when dusk falls to Germany your golden hair Margarete
he writes it and steps out of doors and the stars are flashing he whistles his pack out
he whistles his Jews out in earth has them dig for a grave
he commands us strike up for the dance
Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink in the morning at noon we drink you at sundown
we drink and we drink you
A man lives in the house he plays with the serpents he writes
he writes when dusk falls to Germany your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith we dig a grave in the breezes there one lies unconfined.
He calls out jab deeper into the earth you lot you others sing now and play
he grabs at the iron in his belt he waves it his eyes are blue
jab deeper you lot with your spades you others play on for the dance
Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at noon in the morning we drink you at sundown
we drink you and we drink you
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith he plays with the serpents
He calls out more sweetly play death death is a master from Germany
he calls out more darkly now stroke your strings then as smoke you will rise into air
then a grave you will have in the clouds there one lies unconfined
Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at noon death is a master from Germany
we drink you at sundown and in the morning we drink and we drink you
death is a master from Germany his eyes are blue
he strikes you with leaden bullets his aim is true
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
he sets his pack on to us he grants us a grave in the air
he plays with the serpents and daydreams death is a master from Germany
your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith
Trans. Michael Hamburger
Last edited by stlukesguild; 01-22-2012 at 01:11 PM.
Beware of the man with just one book. -Ovid
The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.- Mark Twain
My Blog: Of Delicious Recoil
http://stlukesguild.tumblr.com/
I don't think you'll see that any time soon, not with the Holocaust anyway (we already have some fun stuff with Hitler, lots of it in fact - Inglorious Bastards, my sixth favorite modern episode of Doctor Who in which they accidently save Hitler's life, the South Park song in which Hitler is sad because he can't find a Christmas tree in hell, &c). It's still too soon for many people, especially people who aren't Jewish, to feel comfortable seeking money by creating Holocaust art/literature. *shrug* Not that I'm against it, I just don't think it will happen and not because the Holocaust is disturbing, but because many of the survivors are still alive. No one cares if you bolster your bank account using the French Revolution, the people you're profiting off of are long dead so it isn't as tasteless (and it's the financial success and fame which Spiegelman had hang-ups over, not the artistic expression itself). Give it another fifty years and I think you'll see your "various artistic explorations."
...Seriously though, Holocaust comedy? How would that even be done?
Last edited by JuniperWoolf; 01-22-2012 at 02:00 PM.
__________________
"Personal note: When I was a little kid my mother told me not to stare into the sun. So once when I was six, I did. At first the brightness was overwhelming, but I had seen that before. I kept looking, forcing myself not to blink, and then the brightness began to dissolve. My pupils shrunk to pinholes and everything came into focus and for a moment I understood. The doctors didn't know if my eyes would ever heal."
-Pi
I am amazed at the rotund ignorance of these late posts, mainly because these partial and crazy perspectives were not revealed directly up to this point.
Okay, I'll bite.
Cafolini, what the hell are you talking about now?
__________________
"Personal note: When I was a little kid my mother told me not to stare into the sun. So once when I was six, I did. At first the brightness was overwhelming, but I had seen that before. I kept looking, forcing myself not to blink, and then the brightness began to dissolve. My pupils shrunk to pinholes and everything came into focus and for a moment I understood. The doctors didn't know if my eyes would ever heal."
-Pi
Don't bite, please. You've done enough of that. Kiss for a while.
"Life is Beautiful" - Roberto Benigni.
While it is in itself not a comedy, it explores the idea of "the comic side of the Holocaust."
Case and point: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Y9aKqawdUQ
I wrote a poem on a leaf and it blew away...
Quite easily, I don't know about you but my friends and I often joke about it in conversation, along with a variety of such topics. I think most guys in their late teens, early 20's could spout off half a dozen halocoust jokes on the spot, rather easily.
The more sublime something is the greater it's potential for the ridicoulous, in my experiance.
Last edited by Alexander III; 01-22-2012 at 02:59 PM.
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
