470:388 The Holocaust and Transgenerational Trauma(3 credits)

Professor Gabriele Schwab

Crosslisted with Comparative Literature (01:195:398:02) and Jewish Studies (01:563:395:01)

In this course we explore how the legacy of the Holocaust is passed on across the generations. The focus lies on narratives of victims, particularly the descendants of Holocaust survivors, discussed alongside narratives of “children of perpetrators” in the postwar generation in Germany. We ask what happens to psychic, cultural and political life in the wake of unfathomable violence and explore the role of writing, including memoirs and “life writing” in the aftermath of traumatic and haunting histories. We will also include a range of theoretical texts that provide a basic knowledge about trauma, traumatic writing and the Holocaust.

Literature: Ruth Kluger, Still Alive (Weiterleben); Art Spiegelmann, Maus; Philippe Grimbert, Secret; Marguerite Duras, The War; Ingeborg Bachmann, Selected Poems from Darkness Spoken (bilingual ed.) and Last Living Words (English translation); W.G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction (Luftkrieg und Literatur); Sabine Reichel, What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?; Selected Poems fromUrsula Duba, Tales of the Child of the Enemy

Films: Night and Fog; Hiroshima , Mon Amour.

Theory: Freud, Mourning and Melancholia (in: On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia, Penguin Edition); Selections from Abraham/Torok, The Shell and the Kernel; Selections from Dan Bar-On, Legacies of Silence; Selected articles by Shoshana Felman, Dominick LaCapra, Eric Santner and Michael Rothberg.