History 137
THE HOLOCAUST
Winter 2007 Professor Mary Felstiner. mf@sfsu.edu.
Mondays, Wednesdays 1:15-2:30. History Corner 219
Discussion sections: TBA.
Office hrs: Mon: 3-5, Wed. 12-1. Office: Hist 125. Tel: 723-4960
What makes the Holocaust (Europe, 1933-45) possibly the most intentional and successful genocide in a planetary history of genocides? What conditions allowed mass murder to occur? What accounted for the excessive and exuberant cruelty of perpertrators? What ideas of race, gender, religion, and physicality made victims (such as Jews, disabled and ill people, Sinti/ Roma, certain nationalities, homosexuals, women, men, newborns), vulnerable to persecution? What processes of segregation, terror, co-optation, and deception turned persecution into mass murder? What forms of resistance and rescue developed? What political, moral, and psychological aftereffects of the Holocaust shape the world today?
To approach this challenging subject, to begin grasping what writer Elie Wiesel meant by a specific event with universal implications, we will dig into historical texts, primary sources, testimonies, visual documentation, fiction, artwork, poetry, comics.
By probing the experiences of victims, perpetrators, bystanders during the Nazi era, by following specific figures through the Holocaust and after, we're hoping to gain some enlightenment about its impact, then and now.
Though the subject can be disturbing, the experience of the course, I hope, will be creative and enlivening.
