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course, you will explore the Holocaust from the overlapping perspectives of literature and history—through memoirs, historical documents, poetry, documentary footage, filmic representations, and novels.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.
2.4.2 The Bildungsroman, part 2
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The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry
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Prelude to the Holocaust
In this module Profs. Baumgarten and Kenez discuss the changing demographics and political landscape of early 20th century Eastern Europe, Jewish identity, the Bildungsroman, Silvano Arieti’s The Parnas, Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, Aharon Appelfeld’s Badenheim 1939, and Elie Wiesel’s Night.
Rencontrer les enseignants
Murray BaumgartenDistinguished Professor of English & Comparative Literature
Literature
Peter KenezProfessor Emeritus
History
Arieti, Silvano Arieti, another Italian scholar and
very important in all kinds of ways.
He changed psychotherapy here in this country,
and that change also rose out of what he's writing about.
And he writes about not just a personal story, or
a story of seeing from
an anthropological ethnographic perspective as Primo Levi's is.
But he writes about his community.
And the Parnas is about the Jewish community of Pisa,
which he keeps telling us is very small.
But it's also about the whole community of Pisa which honors the Jews.
And in his account, you'll remember the devoted townspeople and
the way in which they interact with the Jews.
And there's that little moment when the well
in the Parnassus garden is talked about.
That when there's a drought, everybody comes from the town and
takes water from the well, it always seems to have water,
and this is freely given.
And the way in which the Christian servant who is told to go away and
save herself will not go away.
So I've used a word that has a different kind of resonance, the convivencia.
The tradition of how in Spain,
before 1492, with ups and downs, Jews and Muslims and
Christians, as those of you who know Spanish, experienced the convivencia.
They lived together with each other.
And I thought it was appropriate that you might learn a little German, and
you might know a little Spanish or learn a little Spanish,
because the issue of language is huge here.
And Primo Levi tells us
that one of the things that the Nazis were doing was
creating a gigantic biological and social experiment.
And in that biological and social experiment,
there was a babble of languages.
And had the camps lasted another year,
he thought we would've had a full blown camp language.
The language of the logger, another word in German,
that Primo Levi uses, and that's a very helpful word.
I find it much easier to use that than concentration camp.
So, the narrator's situation and
the story he is telling is central to all of these.
And just
as Wiesel the character in night
tells us his problem of making sense of what seems out of bounds.
It's not just over the top, or whatever you would call it, it's incredible.
And over and over again, people talk about incredulity, and
the incredibility issue extended
to the soldiers who liberated the camps.
And there's the famous story about the liberation of Buchenwald,
where Elie Wiesel ends up.
You'll remember, that's at the end of night.
And General Eisenhower, General Walker, and
General Patton all claimed that they were the ones who said that the people.
The Germans who lived near Buchenwald in the town of Weimar
in Ohrdruf, had to come and look at
the piles of corpses and the whole experience in the camp.
Because they wanted them to know what they had done,
and there was already the sense that people were saying, we didn't know.
And this is, of course, part of what this literature is about, what the history and
the literature, we didn't know, and this is there to make you know.
And General Walker insisted that the mayor of Weimar, no,
of the little town nearby, and his wife come and see what was happening.
And what they had done in Buchenwald, and when the mayor and
his wife went home after having done this, they committed suicide.
So, they too couldn't believe it, and
they couldn't keep on facing it, they committed suicide.
So how does the reader, seeing this through Wiesel's eyes,
through Arieti's eyes, through Primo Levi's eyes.
How does the reader make sense of this situation?
And I have to ask you about what it means to make sense of a situation.
How does that happen?
What is it that makes sense?
What's the context?
What's the frame within which you say, this make sense?
And here are things that are way out of just being senseless,
although the narrators, the protagonists, all say at one point.
This is senseless, why are they doing this?
And that's, of course, Primo Levi's question.
Why can't I take the icicle nobody else is going to have?
And so he says [FOREIGN].
Now, Wiesel's is personal, but
Arieti is talking about his town.
And he talks in the very first paragraph,
that he didn't quite live through it, he escaped.
But this is his hometown, and what does it mean for
this hometown to have experienced this
murder, and murderous situation?
And this hometown is Pisa.
My apologies, also, for not capitalizing Pisa.
It was 5 o'clock in the morning, but that's no excuse.
Wiesel is telling us a story of,
well, I have to ask you what you make of the end of the story, right?
You remember the last lines, somebody got a copy of it?
The last line, he looks in the mirror.
>> And he sees a corpse.
>> And he sees a corpse in the mirror, but he's alive.
Well, there are many things that have been killed in the course of this experience.
And one of the things that has been killed is the liberal,
European, humanist tradition that Germany was so
famous for, especially in Weimar.
The word Weimar, of course, should echo the Weimar Republic,
which came into being after World War I.
And it should also remind us that Weimar was the place
where one of the greatest of those German humanists,
a writer named Goethe, G-O-E-T-H-E.
Goethe lived, and wrote, especially poems and plays,
along with his friend Friedrich Schiller.
And they are the two great humanists of this early 19th century tradition.
And if you think about Western culture and music, for example.
Germany, big stuff.
Besides Beethoven, you all know Bach, and
you already have a poem by Paul Celan which includes Bach's Fugue in it.
It's in your syllabus at the end with those other poems.
I hope to talk about those in my next lecture.
But, Wiesel is talking about the end of liberal European culture.
Hitler succeeded.
Arieti is talking about his town, Pisa.
And Pisa, as he says, is not just any place.
You all know, I'm sure you know the Leaning Tower of Pisa, right?
But then Arieti tells us that it's important because of how
Galileo discovered gravity.
By throwing a feather and stone out of the Leaning Tower of Pisa and
understanding because it leaned that, the angle from which they descended.
But the feather and the stone accelerate at the same rate, gravity is constant.
Pisa is not only the place of the tower, but
it's also a place of great learning where Fibonacci,
Brought the zero into Western culture.
Without zero, you don't have
modern anything in math, right?
And some of you are scientists among us, so you know how important zero is.
So, Pisa is a real place.
And a place that's full of historical experience and
it is a place that is locatable, it has an address.
And it's therefor, for Arieti, and for all of us now in what?
If you studied math or physics,
it's a place that a French scholar,
Pierre Nora has called [FOREIGN] a place of remembering, of memory.
That, if you go to Pisa, you'll see the tower, but
even if you don't go and you've seen a picture or now you've read about it.
It's a place that reverberates with these experiences.
One of the things, and we all have those experiences, our hometown
Against that, the craziness, the senselessness,
the incredibility that the Nazis wanted to make the Jews extinct,
and to destroy their communities.
Their locations and after they killed them or
while they killed them, they burned their bodies, everything went up
in smoke says Don Pagis and many others, right?
And that's in Primo Levi where he gets initiated into the camp.
And they say, smoke, the chimney.
That's where you're going to go.
And then you no longer have a place for memory or
a place of memory, and therefore, no ability to have memorialization.
All the great cultures memorialize, have locations, have memorials, have monuments.
Even, I told you about the post office, have I not, out across the street
from the post office here in Santa Cruz is a monument to our soldiers.
It was put up after World War I.
And a few names were added to it there.
And we have all of those experiences now,
including the tomb of the unknown soldier, right?
So for Arieti,
the destruction not only of liberal European culture, but
the community of learning and the location that helped develop this learning.
People say to me, you teach at Santa Cruz, a hippie school.
And so I tell them yes, we completed the human genome, right?
And a few other things like that.
We're a real place.
To think about Santa Cruz is to remember all of those things.
And some of you, I understand, are the children of hippies who came to
Santa Cruz, and who are here now to get a further education, like your parents.
So, I mentioned Fibonacci and Galileo.
And Primo Levi has an even larger view.
A view of an ethnographer, an anthropologist.
And he says, even from this horror, he says,
quoting a Roman and Greek inspired scholar, nothing human is alien to me.
I can learn from this horror.
So, he makes us become ethnographers and anthropologists.
And he makes us rethink in this incredible world,
that if you don't steal, you won't have enough to live on, to eat.
And that the standard views, don't steal,
don't lie, all of that are changed in the world
where there is this gray zone, right?
And he even has a chapter about that, a whole series of things.
So, I mentioned these, in a sense,
because I want to get us to think about all of these writers,
including Dry Tears, where most of these issues are already raised.
And I want to look at the Parnas in a little bit of detail,
and the Parnas begins by asking questions about not
only the hometown, but the Parnas gives us a map.
You'll remember that right away, in the beginning, there's a map of Pisa.
Now, I think this is pretty interesting because it says that what
we're talking about is not only history but what we would call geography.
But geography isn't the right word either, right?
The map is there to give us a sense of well,
let's call it time-space.
And we get to see how intertwined
the Parnas' home is with the synagogue.
And how much that's part of Pisa's
geosocial historic experience, right?
So, we get to think about space.
And this map is a kind of commemoration of Arietie's home town.
But Arieti reminds us right away,
that the Parnas that he's writing about is
somebody who's very interesting to him.
Because of the Parnas' illness.
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