Trajectories of Memory: Intergenerational Representations of the Holocaust in History and the Arts

This volume, which grew out of a conference of the same name held at Bowling Green State University in March 2006, represents new scholarly perspectives on the way in which the Holocaust is remembered in history, literary studies and theatre. It is a response to changing representations of the Holocaust across generations, disciplines, and in various cultural and national contexts. The contributions address the following questions: How do historians, artists, scholars, and teachers negotiate the language of the Holocaust as survivors die, leaving future generations to respond to the dictum: Never again? How do children and grandchildren of survivors, perpetrators, bystanders transmit the difficult legacy of the Holocaust in American, Israeli, French, German, Swiss and Austrian contexts while navigating feelings of transgenerational guilt or victimhood? How can we do justice to survivor testimony when the survivors can no longer speak directly or mediate the testimony to us? How does transferred and multiply mediated knowledge translate into meaningful artifacts for the next generations? The collection features an interview about interdisciplinarity within Holocaust studies conducted at the conference with keynote speakers Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer. The articles in the first section explore the complex relationship between memory, oral history and historiography in cross-cultural contexts. The second section includes articles on texts by Cynthia Ozick, Thane Rosenbaum, Daniel Handler, W.G Sebald, Monika Maron, Stephan Wackwitz, Jonathan Foer, Art Spiegelman, Georges-Arthur Goldstein, Binjamin Wilkomirski, Elfriede Jelinek, Thomas Bernhard, Tim Blake Nelson, and Diane Samuel.
About the Author: Christina Guenther is Associate Professor of German at Bowling Green State University. Her teaching and research focus on German and Austrian culture, Jewish identity, and the Holocaust. She has published essays in Comparative Literature Studies, Unterrichtspraxis and Modern Austrian Literature, and her work has also appeared in anthologies, including Visions and Visionaries in Contemporary Austrian Literature and Film. Currently a fellow at the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society at Bowling Green State University, she is at work on a book-length project exploring the life and work of Jewish Austrian writers Doron Rabinovici, Ruth Beckermann, Robert Schindel, and Anna Mitgutsch. E-mail: cguenth@bgsu.edu Beth A. Griech-Polelle is Associate Professor of Modern European History at Bowling Green State University. Her teaching and research focus on the Nazi era, including a specific focus on the Catholic Church in Nazi Germany. Her first book is Bishop von Galen: German Catholicism and National Socialism (Yale University Press, 2002). Her essays have appeared in works such as In God's Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century, edited by Omer Bartov and Phyllis Mack; Antisemitism, Christian Ambivalence, and the Holocaust, edited by Kevin P. Spicer; and Glaube-Freiheit-Diktatur in Europa und den U.S.A., edited by Katarzyna Stoklosa and Andrea Str?bind. She is currently working on another book project exploring the impact of the Spanish Civil War (1936- 1939) on Roman Catholic clergy in Nazi Germany. E-mail: bgriech@bgnet.bgsu.edu