University of Illinois, November 5-6, 2009


Schedule with Abstracts

Thursday, November 5

9:30-10:00: Coffee and pastry

10:00 am: Welcome by Matti Bunzl, Peter Fritzsche, Harriet Murav, & Michael Rothberg

10:15-11:45 am: Keynote Lecture

Dagmar Herzog (CUNY Graduate Center), “Sexual Violence in the Holocaust in Comparative Perspective”

This presentation will place the diverse and horrific forms of sexual violence that were intrinsic components of the Holocaust -- in both the killing fields and the ghettos and concentration and death camps -- into multiple wider contexts: Nazi sexual and reproductive politics and antisemitism; sexual violence in World War II more generally; and sexual violence in other genocides, wars, and "ethnic cleansings" of Europe's twentieth century, from the Armenian genocide to France's war in Algeria to the wars in the former Yugoslavia.

11:45 am -1:15 pm: Lunch

1:15-3:00 pm: Visual Culture, Aesthetics, and the Holocaust

Olga Gershenson (University of Massachusetts at Amherst), “The Unconquered (1945)—The First Holocaust Film”

In 1943 Pravda published Boris Gorbatov’s novel The Unconquered, about the fate of a Ukrainian family during the war. The novel was a big hit, and in 1944, a great Soviet director Mark Donskoy turned the novel into a film. A Jewish doctor, who was a side character in the novel, became one of the central figures in the film (played by Veniamin Zuskin). Mass execution of Jews, which was only mentioned in passing, turned into a key scene on screen, filmed on location, in Babi Yar. At the official meeting at the studio, The Unconquered was lambasted for its emphasis on the particular Jewish suffering. The film was salvaged only by the brave advocacy of Mikhail Romm (future director of The Ordinary Fascism) and Sergey Eisenstein. Following its wide release, The Unconquered was lauded in the Soviet press: incredibly, many reviewers openly admired its treatment of the Jewish tragedy. It is not until 1948 that the mention of the Jewish content of the film disappears from the official Soviet discourse. In this talk, I will trace out the history of The Unconquered’s production and reception, and analyze the representation of the Holocaust in the film, which was the first treatment of the topic in the Soviet—and international—cinema.

Paul B. Jaskot (DePaul University), “The Nazi Party’s Use of Heinrich Wölfflin: The Intersection of Art History and the Political History of Antisemitism”

Individuals within the Nazi Party, the policies they pursued and the extremes of oppression that they perpetrated established conditions that directly or indirectly formed a set of conditions that influenced artistic work from the end of the Weimar Republic when the Party first rose to prominence to today. With its tentacles extending back into the roots of fascism after World War I and forward into the neo-Nazi groups and antisemitic pronouncements of recent years, understanding the relationship of art and politics in 20th-century Germany means having a firm grip on the significance and specifics of the history of National Socialism. Focusing on culture not as an ideological cipher but rather as intellectual work of instrumental use, I argue that art history functioned to buttress specific propaganda positions and Party tactics at a crucial time in the NSDAP’s development at the end of the Weimar Republic. Heinrich Wölfflin, perhaps the most well-known art historian ever, and his work were especially useful to specific Nazi leaders in surprising ways. My presentation will explore the gap between art historical concepts of race and National Socialist ones. From the perspective of political history, what becomes interesting is how this gap is bridged by specific Party officials at particular times. This analysis clarifies the use of the discipline of art history for the electoral strategies of the fascist party and its specific internal dynamics, setting the foundation for genocidal practices to come.

3:00-3:15 pm: Coffee break

3:15-5:45 pm: Rethinking Genocide in Comparative Perspective

Karl Jacoby (Brown University), "'Exterminate all the Brutes': Intersections and Fault Lines Between American Indian History and Genocide Studies"

This paper will explore the congruences and conflicts between the burgeoning fields of American Indian History and Genocide Studies through a close reading of Native American experiences during the nineteenth century.

Dirk Moses (University of Sydney), "The Holocaust and World History"



Here I consider question of the Holocaust as a genocide, a generic concept that necessarily casts it as an event (or conjunction of many events) that shares essential properties with other genocides since the beginning of human society. Many temporal claims are made on behalf the Holocaust: as unprecedented, a caesura in time, an "event," and so forth. Such claims are usually indentured to certain philosophical commitments. This paper considers the Holocaust in relation to the discipline of world history, and asks what claims can be made about the Holocaust in this disciplinary context.

Scott Straus (University of Wisconsin, Madison), "Rethinking Comparative Research on Genocide"



In the past decade, a lively field of inquiry on the causes and consequences of genocide in comparative perspective has developed. Once a fairly marginal subject, comparative genocide studies is now an increasingly accepted and mainstream topic of scholarly research. The change is apparent in the huge growth of courses on comparative genocide and in publications on genocide in top academic journals and presses. The research registers many accomplishments, including new theories, more sophisticated methods, incorporation of contemporary examples of genocide, and moving past stale debates about the uniqueness (and hence incomparability) of the Holocaust. However, the burgeoning area of comparative genocide studies has produced its own set of methodological and theoretical blindspots. This paper examines those problems and proposes some new directions for comparative research on genocide.

Friday, November 6

9:30-10:00 am: Coffee and pastries

10:00-11:30: Keynote Lecture

Carolyn Dean (Brown University), “’Styles of Dying,’ or Minimalism in Victim Narratives”

“Styles of Dying” demonstrates how, within the context of the conviction that there is now a “surfeit” of Holocaust memory, one preeminent and forceful if not wholly dominant antidote is the insistence by a wide variety of mainstream critics that Holocaust testimony and indeed debates be conducted in the form of a particularly reductive minimalism that is almost inseparable from the purely documentary. They argue that it militates against the sacralization of suffering, the over-identification of victims' heirs with their ancestors’ traumas, and with the narcissistic appropriation of others' pain. The talk seeks to show how these critics construct credible victims as those who have already mastered the symptoms of suffering and denounce those who proclaim their wounds. I begin with a general discussion and then analyze the work of four prominent writers on Holocaust representation to demonstrate the conundrums created by this preference for minimalism in their critical and historical interpretations: Lawrence Langer, Berel Lang, Saul Friedlander, and Jan T. Gross.

11:30 am -1:00 pm: Lunch

1:00-2:45 pm: Economies of Justice and Memory

Krista Hegburg (Columbia University), “The Obligation to Receive: Reparations and Misrecognition in the Czech Republic”

Reparations are often theorized in the vein of accountability: victims of past wrongs call states to account for their suffering; states, in a gesture that marks a new, post-Cold War responsiveness to their citizenry, recognize and repair these wrongs via financial compensation. In this interpretation, the willingness to give responds to a demand to receive. But as reparations projects intersect with a consolidation of liberalism that, in the post-socialist Czech Republic, increasingly hinges on a politics of recognition, the obverse obtains: the will to give produces an obligation to receive. In the Czech city of Ostrava in 2004, aid workers arrived, unanticipated and unannounced, on the doorsteps of Roma who had survived the Holocaust to deliver reparations in the form of foodstuffs and household products. In an ethnographic account of this process, this paper examines how the obligation to receive interpellates minority subjects as victims in economies of repair. Viewed from the perspective of their recipients, reparations appear less as the rectification of historical wrongs and more as a window onto the persistent forms of misrecognition that animate contemporary Czech politics.


R. Clifton Spargo (Marquette University), "The Economy of Memory: The Cultural Status of the Holocaust in the United States"

Among the trenchant criticisms of Holocaust memory in the United States over the last decade has been the charge that the invocation of the Holocaust prevents rather than facilitates consideration of other injustices in the public sphere. The corollary to this charge — as advocated by defenders of the Holocaust as a moral paradigm as well as by critics of the cultural ascendancy of the Holocaust in American culture — is that ideas or memories in the public realm, as emanations of the constituencies in and through which they circulate, abide by principles of competition, struggle, and displacement. As Spargo links a prevalent critique of Holocaust memory to a set of larger ideological premises about memory, he argues for the preeminence of an “economy of memory” in the American public sphere. Investigating the moorings of such an economy in certain political-theoretical premises of the liberal nation-state, he explores the extent to which the “economy of memory” emerged as a reigning cultural logic of post-war American society. By the rules of this cultural economy, any attempt to place the Holocaust in comparison to other injustices would necessarily entail a contentious and competitive result, as though it were part of the inherent function of a “memory of injustice” to vie with other memories of injustice within constricted cultural space. Even as Spargo offers a description of the relative dominance of this model, he argues for a paradoxical result whereby it helped generate a literature that could proceed only circumspectly, though often compellingly, toward the articulation of memories of injustice. With reference to texts from writers such as Saul Bellow, Flannery O’Connor, Kurt Vonnegut, and Toni Morrison, Spargo suggests that memory of the Holocaust has functioned across several generations under an economic imperative that predetermines — and, indeed, limits — our understanding of the ethical imperative purportedly inscribed by such memory.

2:45-3:00 pm: Coffee break

3:00-4:45: Victims and Perpetrators: From Testimony to Fiction

Alexandra Garbarini (Williams College), “’Words to Outlive Us’: Testimonies and Telling the Truth about Mass Atrocities”

This paper is my first attempt to write about a new project, which seeks to examine cultural, political, and legal responses to mass atrocity in interwar Europe with an eye to how they may have influenced later responses to the Holocaust. Why did Jews throughout Europe respond to their persecution and extermination during the years 1939-1945 by producing and collecting testimony? With the long-term plan of shedding light on this later phenomenon, I am investigating testimonial responses to the Ukrainian pogroms of 1919-1921 and their reception for what they reveal about then-current conceptualizations of justice, truth, history, and public opinion.

Erin McGlothlin (Washington University), “Constructing the Mind of the Perpetrator in Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones”

While the body of autobiographical literature by Holocaust perpetrators is close to non-existent (indeed, one can count such texts on one hand), fictional first-person representations of perpetrators and bystanders, although not nearly as prevalent as fiction that considers the event from the perspective of the survivors and victims, have increased in the past several decades. The most notable recent example of such texts is Jonathan Littell’s 2006 novel Les Bienveillantes (published in German in 2008 under the title Die Wohlgesinnten and in English in 2009 as The Kindly Ones), which tells the story of World War II and the Holocaust from the perspective of Max von der Aue, an SS officer involved in both mass shootings and the bureaucratic administration of death camps. My presentation will continue my recent narratological research into literary texts that foreground the narrative voice of the Holocaust perpetrator by examining the ways in which Littell’s novel, with its painstaking exposé of Max’s character (which runs to nearly 1,000 pages in length), meticulously constructs the direct perspective of the genocidal criminal. In my consideration of the ways in which Littell posits the perpetrator’s mind, I will examine how his novel utilizes particular narratological concepts, such as voice and focalization, to illuminate Max’s consciousness. However, as I will demonstrate, even as the novel endeavors to provide the most direct view into the mind of the perpetrator to date with its mimetic and extremely detailed first-person account, it also deploys a variety of narrative strategies, such as filtering mechanisms and narrative unreliabilty, that ultimately defer any unmediated representation of the perpetrator’s mind. I will then conclude my paper with one of the questions that guides my project: Is it possible to create an almost transparent view into the mind of the Holocaust perpetrator, or are the filtering strategies I identify in this text ineluctable elements in narratives of perpetration?

4:45-5:30 pm: Closing Roundtable

Participants: Matti Bunzl, Peter Fritzsche, Harriet Murav, Michael Rothberg, and others.