1.3.1 Expectations of reality

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En provenance du cours de University of California, Santa Cruz

The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry

126 notes

University of California, Santa Cruz

The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry

126 notes

The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry is an adaptation of an on-campus course that has been co-taught by Murray Baumgarten, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature (Literature Department), and Peter Kenez, Professor Emeritus (History Department), for over 20 years at UC Santa Cruz. In this course, you will explore the Holocaust from the overlapping perspectives of literature and history—through memoirs, historical documents, poetry, documentary footage, filmic representations, and novels. You will expand your knowledge of the literature of the Holocaust, Eastern and Western European Jewish communities, the origins and development of antisemitism, the establishment of labor and extermination camps, resistance movements, and the Holocaust as a problem for world history. There is more than one way to take this course: You can complete all of the activities (and earn a Verified Certificate) or only the activities that are most interesting to you. Whatever you choose to do, we encourage you to find a havruta (a study partner) in your community or in the Coursera community so that you can experience the course in a more interactive and meaningful way.

À partir de la leçon

Who were the Jews?

This module is an introduction to the study of the Holocaust and a prehistory of the Holocaust. Profs. Baumgarten and Kenez discuss the roots of modern antisemitism, the culture of European Jews in the 19th century, Nehama Tec’s Dry Tears, and the various genres of Holocaust literature. The module also contains general information about the course.

1.3.1 Expectations of reality13:15

1.3.2 Hier ist kein warum11:04

1.3.3 Yiddish culture13:00

1.3.4 On Account of a Hat18:04

Rencontrer les enseignants

Murray Baumgarten
Distinguished Professor of English & Comparative Literature
Literature
Peter Kenez
Professor Emeritus
History

What is it that we read when we read about Holocaust material?

One of my arguments that's overarching

Is that the experience of the Holocaust has changed modern literature and

that all literature since then deals with

a subject matter that changes the literary form that

we deal with in modern literature.

And one of the bits of evidence I have of that is

the kind of material that has been written about,

the Holocaust, and the different forms,

the different genres Now, part of my job here

is to transform all of you into students of literature.

Something you all need to know about even if you are going to be

bioinformatics engineers That is,

literary forms are something that we all engage in

all the time When we go back and tell our

roommate about what kind of a day we had.

In other words.

We're always making narratives.

We're always telling stories.

And you should know the kinds of stories I got for why you need to be in this class.

Narratives.

I'm interested in narratives.

And there are all kinds of Holocaust narratives.

[INAUDIBLE] And the literary genres all have expectations.

The expectations are what we expect when my roommate comes back,

and I say, what was your afternoon like?

And the roommate says, well,

I spent it upside down at the gym doing head-stands.

But they're all kinds of narratives and

we anticipate usually what is known as a realistic narrative.

With the literary genre of realism but

all of you know that there are many other kinds of expectations.

You read science fiction and you have that funny moment

of expectation Realistic experience, but

the person telling you has green eyes and

horns and

a tail or a luminous face.

In other words, the question of literary genre involves

reader expectations, or, like film, viewer expectations.

When your roommate tells you what kind of a day he had doing

headstands you don't expect that he'll suddenly transform.

Or maybe she will.

I don't know. But Holocaust

writing appeared in all the genres, the different kinds of writing.

It appeared in diary, Anne Frank.

It appeared in memoirs, Elie Wiesel's.

It appeared in ethnography, Nechama Tec, Dry Tears.

It appeared in historical writing.

I wanna come back to The difference between historical writing

and other literary genres.

And historical writing is also a literary form, and

we're very lucky to have Peter with us to prove that

historians not only go to the archives and make.

General narratives from the individual

narratives they read about in the archives.

But he's also written an autobiography, a personal narrative.

So we have a question of realistic narratives about

Well you can say there are strange experiences that the Holocaust involved.

There are extraordinary experiences.

There are surrealistic experiences.

But, you know, those are ways of Telling us that

something different is going on in what is being told about.

Something out of the ordinary.

And this is one of the problems of [FOREIGN].

They have these problems because they, themselves do not believe what

is happening, and they haven't read the story yet, right?

So they don't know what the end will be.

By the way, think about it this way.

What if you knew the ending?

If you had read the ending first.

But these people do not, of course however, when historians

write about these issues when they constructed historical narrative.

There's suspense about what's going to happen.

But the historians know what the ending is.

Or where the conclusion will be.

And they don't mind usually.

To let you know and that you know.

And they write therefore, and this is grammar.

I hate this grammar, but grammar is much different and bigger than you think.

They write in a tense,

a verbal tense like the past tense.

This happened and that happened and this caused it and so on.

So we can talk about the historical past.

As the tense.

But that's not why you read diaries.

Diaries aren't written in the past exactly.

They're all about, it just happened.

And memoirs, it just happened.

And fiction is all about giving you the present-ness of experience and

having the presence of those unfolding experiences before

you without knowing, without the teleology of an ending.

Big word teleology, I'll explain it later if you

want me to But you can all Google.

So that literary genres differ in terms of reader expectation,

in terms of what you know and what you experience.

So the writer has this question of how to communicate ongoing

present experience if the writer is a novelist.

But not if he's a historian.

The historian wants to tell you this happened and that happened.

Right?

The historical past,

even if it's written in the past tense in fiction,

there is a way in which the writer does something to make it present.

And, one of the ways, is that,

literary fiction often has a first person narrator,

whereas there are few histories that are written with a first person narrator.

But rather a general objective in quotes because it isn't.

Narrator telling you about many experiences that are general.

Whereas the first person narrator, dry tears.

it's her ethnography, it's her memoir, she tells you her own personal experience,

and so if you started to read it, there's a moment, maybe

I can find it, but let me just tell you what it is, there's a moment at which

The family factory has been locked up.

Jews are not allowed to own factories any more according to the Nazi regime.

And she goes to the factory and it's locked up.

And she realizes there is someone inside.

That is not Nehama but her mother.

And her mother goes and

wants to open the lock because she thinks someone has been locked in there.

And the Nazi guard comes up to her, and

Nehama has to describe the fact that the guard responds

Is to start hitting her mother.

And so, like good Californians.

Like well fed,

strong Americans.

Our response would be, she must hit him back.

But Nehama then says, my mother knew she could not

do anything but accept the blows, and she covers her head.

Which is where the guard is, the Nazi is busy Whacking her.

Finally, he gets tired and the mother's

response is, this is a terrible thing to think about, she's completely passive.

None of us want to be passive When attacked.

Right?

But here is mother, knowing that she's,

in one sense powerless, and in another sense able to refuse.

To participate.

Exactly. By being passive.

There is a whole sequence of issues that her narrative raises.

And Nehama is Discovering

this in her own persona as the book progresses.

She is learning something about what it means to be powerless.

And she is learning something about resisting even though you are powerless.

I think this is a key moment in the book and

in our questioning about what the holocaust was about.

And this of course will be something Peter and I will have a chance to talk about.

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