Going Visual: Holocaust Representation and Historical Method

doi:10.1086/AHR.115.1.115

Journal Article•DOI•

Going Visual: Holocaust Representation and Historical Method

01 Feb 2010-The American Historical Review (Oxford University Press)-Vol. 115, Iss: 1, pp 115-122

About: This article is published in The American Historical Review.The article was published on 2010-02-01. It has received 11 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Representation (systemics).

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Holocaust Memory and Visuality in the Age of Social Media

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Meghan Lundrigan

01 Jan 2019

TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that these individual digital images function as objects of postmemory, contributing to and cultivating an accessible visual and digital archive of the Holocaust, and demonstrate that though the number of Holocaust survivors become fewer in number, the act of remembering the genocide can be coded into the everyday behaviour of the amateur photographers featured in this work.

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Abstract: Everyday people make use of Instagram to visually share their experiences encountering Holocaust memory. Whether individuals are sharing their photos from Auschwitz, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, or of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, this dissertation uncovers the impetus to capture and share these images by the thousands. Using visuality as a framework for analyzing how the Holocaust has been seen, photographed, and communicated historically, this dissertation argues that these individual digital images function as objects of postmemory, contributing to and cultivating an accessible visual and digital archive. Sharing these images on Instagram results in a visual, grassroots archival space where networked Holocaust visuality and memory can flourish. The Holocaust looms large in public memory. Drawing from Holocaust studies, public history, photography theory, and new media studies, this dissertation argues that the amateur Instagram image is far from static. Existing spaces of Holocaust memory create preconditions for everyday publics to share their encounters with the Holocaust on their own terms. Thus, the final networked Instagram image is the product of a series of author interventions, carefully wrought from competing narratives and Holocaust representations. The choice to photograph, edit, post, and hashtag one's photo forges a public method for collaborating with hegemonic memory institutions. This work brings together seemingly disparate sources to find commonality between Instagram images, museum guestbook entries, online reviews, former concentration camps, and major Holocaust memorials and museums. This research, one of the first studies of Holocaust visual culture on Instagram, underscores the fluidity of Holocaust memory in the twenty-first century. While amateur photography at solemn sites has sparked concern, this dissertation demonstrates that though the number of Holocaust survivors become fewer in number, the act of remembering the genocide can be coded into the everyday behaviour of the amateur photographers featured in this work. This work not only shares authority with everyday publics in their efforts to remember and memorialize the Holocaust but reminds us that seemingly small and individual acts of remembrance can coalesce, contributing to a fluid and accessible archive of visual memory.

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19 citations

DOI•

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Multivalent Tower of Faces

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Grace Astrove

01 Jan 2013

TL;DR: The Tower of Faces as discussed by the authors is a collection of 6,000 photographs from Eishyshok, a small Jewish settlement in Eastern Europe, taken between 1890 and 1941, with the purpose of displaying them at the United States Holocaust Museum.

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Abstract: THE UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUS TOWER OF FACES Grace Champlain Astrove, Master of Arts A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University. Virginia Commonwealth University, 2013 Major Director: Dr. Margaret Lindauer, Associate Professor and Coordinator of Museum Studies, Art History Holocaust survivor Dr. Yaffa Eliach collected over 6,000 photographs depicting residents of Eishyshok, a small Jewish settlement in Eastern Europe, taken between 1890 and 1941. Eliach survived the Nazi-led massacre in 1941 that killed nearly the entire Jewish population of Eishyshok. As a way to commemorate the destroyed town of her youth she began to collect photographs from other survivors and residents who fled Europe prior to the Holocaust. She subsequently selected 1,032 photographs from the Yaffa Eliach Shtetl Collection for display in The Tower of Faces, a permanent exhibition in The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, located in Washington, DC. The Tower of Faces is a multivalent exhibition. What the photographs represent has changed as time has passed and the collection has served multiple purposes. For Eliach, who has a personal connection to the collection and to events the images have come to represent, the exhibition is a monument within a memorial museum that specifically visually depicts and commemorates Eishyshok and its residents. Once the photographs were

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10 citations

Journal Article•DOI•

The ‘Truth’ of the Past: Fiction as an Alternative to History in Contemporary Spanish Narratives of the Civil War and the Holocaust

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Samuel O'Donoghue¹•Institutions (1)

University College London¹

18 Aug 2016-Hispanic Research Journal-iberian and Latin American Studies

TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore the debates regarding the use of fiction to represent traumatic twentieth-century experiences through an analysis of Jorge Semprun's Quel beau dimanche (1980) and L’ecriture ou la vie (1994), Antonio Munoz Molina's Sefarad (2001) and Alberto Mendez's Los girasoles ciegos (2004).

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Abstract: This article explores the debates regarding the use of fiction to represent traumatic twentieth-century experiences. Through an analysis of Jorge Semprun’s Quel beau dimanche (1980) and L’ecriture ou la vie (1994), Antonio Munoz Molina’s Sefarad (2001) and Alberto Mendez’s Los girasoles ciegos (2004), it interrogates the value and morality of contemporary Spanish novelists’ use of fiction to explore the past. At the same time, this article seeks to build on a nascent field of critical investigation by drawing links between how novelists have written about two different historical experiences: the Spanish Civil War and the Holocaust.

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7 citations

Cites background from "Going Visual: Holocaust Representat..."

...Hollywood, driven by commercialism and ‘Shoah business’, is frequently Doi 10.1080/14682737.2016.1200856 singled out as the biggest culprit of trivializing the Holocaust (Farmer, 2010: 120)....
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Journal Article•DOI•

Ambivalent engagement: relational connection and depthful dwelling in a site of conscience

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Amy Fisher Smith¹, Charles R. Sullivan¹, Erin K. Freeman¹, Alyssa Alonso²•Institutions (2)

University of Dallas¹, Texas Woman's University²

25 Jul 2016-Holocaust Studies

TL;DR: In this article, a study of how individuals psychologically experience Holocaust-related exhibits or installations is presented. But such studies are relatively rare, in part because such investigations lie at the crossroads of Holocaust education and visitor or museum studies.

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Abstract: Studies of how individuals psychologically experience Holocaust-related exhibits or installations are relatively rare, in part because such investigations lie at the crossroads of Holocaust education and visitor or museum studies. The current study arose out of a unique opportunity during which the authors’ university hosted a traveling exhibit of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race. One hundred and ninety-four participants responded to a qualitative question regarding the impact of the exhibit. A descriptive form of thematic analysis was used to identify patterns in the data, resulting in three superordinate themes (closed, open, and ambivalent engagement). These themes describe how participants oriented themselves toward the exhibit, negotiating a complex interplay that included a passive to active continuum. Our critical analysis suggests that it may be helpful to view participants as ambivalent or even contradictory human agents, struggling wi...

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4 citations

Journal Article•DOI•

Challenging the "Hollywoodization" of the Holocaust: Reconsidering Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)

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Jennifer Frost

01 Oct 2013

TL;DR: One of the most prominent films made by producer-director Stanley Kramer, from an original screenplay by Abby Mann, Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) is a fictional film based on factual events, and depicts the trial of four judges for their crimes during the Nazi regime.

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Abstract: One of the most prominent films made by producer-director Stanley Kramer, from an original screenplay by Abby Mann, Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) is a fictional film based on factual events, and depicts the trial of four judges for their crimes during the Nazi regime. Set in 1948, the film nonetheless related closely to events in 1961, chiefly the trial of Adolf Eichmann and the building of the Berlin Wall—pivotal moments in Holocaust remembrance and the intensification of Cold War hostilities. As Jewish filmmakers, Kramer and Mann shared a commitment to remembrance that contradicts a longstanding—although recently challenged—historiographical contention that Jewish Americans paid little public attention to what came to be called the “Holocaust” until the Eichmann trial or after. Although Kramer was a Hollywood filmmaker who made films for commercial release and popular consumption, he and Mann also felt a responsibility to history. Utilizing the techniques of historical film analysis, this essay examines the filmmakers’ practice of historical filmmaking; their film’s representation and interpretation of the past to include surviving witnesses and Nazi perpetrators, and what has come to be called “particularism” and “universalism”; and the film’s reception by a range of contemporary audiences. Reconsidering Judgment at Nuremberg demonstrates it cannot be categorized as an example of the “Americanization” or “Hollywoodization” of the Holocaust.

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3 citations

Cites background from "Going Visual: Holocaust Representat..."

...Their film did not greatly appeal to mass audiences or make a big profit; in short, it did not successfully “Hollywoodize” the Holocaust....
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...19 Although Judgment at Nuremberg is not wholly or solely about the Nazi extermination of European Jewry—and scholars have urged more precision with the use and definition of “Holocaust film”—the film has been deemed as exemplifying some or all of the dimensions of the Americanization of the Holocaust.20 Other films appearing in the same years, such as The Diary of Anne Frank (George Stevens, 1959), established the optimistic Hollywood approach to the Holocaust, a finding Lawrence Baron recently confirmed.21 The same, however, cannot be said of Judgment at Nuremberg....
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...Although Kramer was a Hollywood filmmaker who made films for commercial release and popular consumption, he and Mann also felt a responsibility to history. utilizing the techniques of historical film analysis, this essay examines the filmmakers’ practice of historical filmmaking; their film’s representation and interpretation of the past to include surviving witnesses and Nazi perpetrators, and what has come to be called “particularism” and “universalism”; and the film’s reception by a range of contemporary audiences. reconsidering Judgment at Nuremberg demonstrates it cannot be categorized as an example of the “Americanization” or “Hollywoodization” of the Holocaust....
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...As a consequence Judgment at Nuremberg cannot be categorized as an unqualified example of “the Americanization of the Holocaust.”...
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...”(19) Although Judgment at Nuremberg is not wholly or solely about the Nazi extermination of European Jewry—and scholars have urged more precision with the use and definition of “Holocaust film”—the film has been deemed as exemplifying some or all of the dimensions of the Americanization of the Holocaust.(20) Other films appearing in the same years, such as The Diary of Anne Frank (George Stevens, 1959), established the optimistic Hollywood approach to the Holocaust, a finding Lawrence Baron recently confirmed....
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Going Visual: Holocaust Representation and Historical Method

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Cites background from "Going Visual: Holocaust Representat..."

Cites background from "Going Visual: Holocaust Representat..."

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