**CANCELLED**
The atrocities committed by Nazi Germany during the Second World War continue to trouble historians in their attempts to understand and represent them in
all their magnitude and horror. Beyond historians, the complicity of segments of
European societies in perpetrating those atrocities continues to raise thorny
questions for postwar European nations about what their responsibilities are toward that past.
This tutorial will focus on a series of questions relating to the historicization and
memorialization of the extermination of European Jews. They include: Is the
Holocaust unique? Is it a Jewish story or universal story? Does the Holocaust
raise different issues for the historian than other historical events? How should
the Holocaust be represented and what are the implications of different means of
representing it? What role, if any, did European Jews play in their own destruction? Has Germany faced up to its past? Were Germans also victims of World
War II? Who were the "bystanders" as compared to the "perpetrators"? Were the
postwar trials of perpetrators a travesty of justice? How appropriate are the different uses that Israel and the United States have made of the Holocaust? By the
end of the course, students will have grappled with the ongoing controversies
that have arisen among scholars, governments, and lay people about the meaning (and meaninglessness) of the Holocaust for the postwar world. In a world in
which extraordinary acts of violence continue to be perpetrated and more and
more nations' pasts are marked by episodes of extreme criminality and/or trauma, exploring the manner by which one such episode has been remembered,
avenged, and adjudicated should prove relevant for future consideration of other
societies' efforts to confront their own traumatic pasts.
Format: tutorial. Requirements: weekly one-hour sessions with the instructor
and a fellow student. Every other week the student will write and present orally a
5- to 7-page paper on the assigned readings of that week. On alternate weeks, the
student will write a 2-page critique of the fellow student's paper. A final written
exercise, a thought piece on the issues raised in the tutorial, will cap off the semester's work. Enrollment limit: 10 (expected: 10). Preference to History majors.
Group B
Tutorial meetings to be arranged. GARBARINI