Virtual Library

Under the guarantee of the League of Nations, Jews in most of Upper Silesia— an area encompassing nearly 1.5 million residents and around 10,000 Jews in 1933—were subject to special minority protections that barred Nazi discrimination on the basis of religion.  League-enforced limits on antisemitism in this eastern corner of the Reich amounted to an accident of history, born of a Polish-German treaty after World War I. While these protections remain largely unknown to German historians today, they were far from obscure in their time and place. Herbert Levy was one among hundreds of Jews who used international law to challenge Nazi antisemitic repression. Through appeals to the League, Jewish leaders in Upper Silesia secured from Nazi Germany a truly exceptional legal concession: from August 1934 until July 1937, all antisemitic laws were declared null and void in the region. Freedoms impossible to obtain elsewhere in Nazi Germany became commonplace in Upper Silesia. Jewish

bureaucrats and doctors held onto their jobs, Jewish Gemeinde continued to receive state subsidies, and perhaps most substantively, Jews and non-Jews married each other beyond the legal reach of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws.

This study was an elaboration of ideas he first proposed in 1933 in his address to the Fifth International Conference for the Unification of Penal Law (1933), which argued that attacks on racial, religious and ethnic groups should be considered international crimes. Important for the prosecution of the Nazis, it helped to establish the framework for all subsequent efforts to punish crimes against humanity.

Here, for the first time in one volume, is the full story of crimes committed by the Nazi leaders and of the trials in which they were brought to judgement. Conot reconstructs in a single absorbing narrative not only the events at Nuremburg but the offenses with which the accused were charged. He brilliantly characterizes each of the twenty-one defendants, vividly presenting each case and inspecting carefully the process of indictment, prosecution, defense and sentencing.

By taking migrants seriously as subjects of national and transnational memory, this essay picks up where Haacke’s project leaves off. It re-envisions the ‘population’ parallax as an active bearer of memory, rather than as merely a passive object of commemoration. Such a perspective uncovers the multidirectional and transcultural memory work of the population at large: it draws attention in particular to the formation of as-yet under-recognized archives of migrant engagement with the German national past, with a history and memory of which they are ostensibly not

a part and about which they are frequently said to be indifferent. In other words, DER BEVOLKERUNG, a performance of memory by a German artist who migrated out of Germany, constitutes only the tip of a rarely explored iceberg: the unavoidable conjunction in contemporary Europe of Holocaust remembrance and

migrant history. This conjunction offers an essential perspective on contemporary European society because the continent’s postwar unification – and especially Germany’s central role in that process – has taken place via the explicit rejection of the Nazi past and against the backdrop of demographic changes resulting from labour, postcolonial and post-Communist migrations. Collective memory of the Holocaust has functioned as a point of reference for a post-fascist Europe and the basis of a new human rights regime at the same time that migrations have

complicated the ‘unity’ of Europe’s population and posed challenges to Europe’s liberal model of rights.

Translated by Assenka Oksiloff.

Can collective memories of the past shape the future? If one of the fears about a globalized society is the homogenization of culture, can it nevertheless be true that the homogenization of memory might have a positive impact on political and cultural norms? Originally published in Germany, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age examines the nature of collective memory in a globalized world, and how the memory of one particular event--the Holocaust--helped give rise to an emerging global consensus on human rights. Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider show how memories of the Holocaust have been de-contextualized from the original event and offer a framework for interpreting contemporary acts of injustice such as ethnic cleansing and genocide. Representations of mass atrocities in Bosnia and Kosovo during the 1990s resonated with iconographies of the Holocaust and played a significant role in the political and military interventions in the Balkans. Subsequently, these representations have had a crucial impact on the consolidation of international human rights and related issues of transitional justice, reparations, and restitution.

This study revisits the place of the Holocaust and the French revolutionary tradition in the birth of international human rights law, with particular reference to the genesis of the Universal Declaration and European Convention. It argues against conceptualizing the drafting of the Universal Declaration as an exceptional moment of Holocaust remembrance in the immediate aftermath of the war, positing instead that the framers' silence on the Jewish identity of the victims of Nazi genocidal acts functioned as an instrument of consensus politics. The article also examines how figures on the French far right practiced their own form of consensus politics by recasting their counterrevolutionary corporatist agenda in the idiom of human rights. 

Trauma Cinema focuses on a new breed of documentary films and videos that adopt catastrophe as their subject matter and trauma as their aesthetic. Incorporating oral testimony, home-movie footage, and documentary reenactment, these documentaries express the havoc trauma wreaks on history and memory. Janet Walker uses incest and the Holocaust as a double thematic focus and fiction films as a point of comparison.

Portrayals of the Holocaust in literature, paintings, and architecture have aroused many ethical debates. How can we admire, much less enjoy, art that deals with such a horrific event? Does finding beauty in the Holocaust amount to a betrayal of its victims?

Brett Kaplan's Unwanted Beauty meets these difficult questions head on, analyzing a wide range of Holocaust representations in order to argue that a more careful understanding of aesthetics and its relation to history can best address the anxieties raised by beauty in Holocaust art.

Building on the work of Marianne Hirsch, Leo Spitzer, and other scholars, Kaplan approaches this art from multiple perspectives, including the works created within the concentration camps and by Holocaust survivors. She analyzes how art contributes to survival and how it functions within memory and history. Addressing the literary work of Paul Celan, Charlotte Delbo, Jorge Semprun, and Edmond Jabes; the visual art of Christian Boltanski and Anselm Kiefer; and the monuments and museums of Peter Eisenman, Jochen Gerz, Esther Shalev-Gerz, and James Ingo Freed, Unwanted Beauty finds that the aesthetic pleasures in these complex and multivalent texts can transform memory in enlivening ways and open these traumatic historical events to deeper understanding.