The Holocaust in art and literature
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As one of the defining events of the 20th century, and one of the most stark examples of human brutality in modern history, the Holocaust has had a profound impact on art and literature over the past 60 years.
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[edit] Literature
Some of the more famous works are by Holocaust survivors or victims, such as Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, Imre Kertész, and Anne Frank, but there is a substantial body of literature and art in many languages. The Holocaust has been a common subject in American literature, with authors ranging from Sylvia Plath to Saul Bellow addressing it in their works.
In 1991, Art Spiegelman completed the second and final installment of his Pulitzer Prize winning graphic novel, Maus. Through text and illustration, the autobiography retraces his father's steps through the Holocaust along with the residual effects of those events a generation later.
White Wolf, Inc. put out Charnal Houses of Europe: The Shoah in 1997 under its adult Black Dog Game Factory label. It is a carefully researched, respectful, and horrifically detailed supplement on the ghosts of the victims of the Holocaust for the Wraith: The Oblivion game line.
Key works in other languages include Ukrainian Anatoly Kuznetsov's novel about the Babi Yar massacre and Polish Tadeusz Borowski's books "This way for Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen" and "We were in Auschwitz".
Some alternate history fiction set in scenarios where Nazi Germany wins World War II, includes the Holocaust happening in countries where it did not happen in reality.
[edit] Poetry
German philosopher Theodor Adorno famously commented that "writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric," but he later retracted this statement. There are some substantial works dealing with the Holocaust and its aftermath, including the work of survivor Paul Celan, which uses invented syntax and vocabulary in an attempt to express the inexpressible. Celan considered the German language tainted by the Nazis, although it is interesting to note his friendship with Nazi sympathizer and philosopher Martin Heidegger.
[edit] Visual Arts
Art inside the Nazi concentration camps and ghettos was punishable; if found, the person who created it could be killed. However, many people painted, sketched, and also made literary pieces of art. Many of the artist’s pieces were found by the Nazis before they could complete them. The ghettos were a very dreary place. Jews needed a way to bring life into the ghettos, and bring out their human need to create and be creative. The Nazis branded art that portrayed their regime poorly as “horror propaganda”.
German internment camps were much less strict with art. A black, Jewish artist named Joseph Nassy created over 200 drawings and paintings while he was at the Laufen and Tittmoning camps in Bavaria.
While inside the Łódź ghetto, Mendel Grossman took over 10,000 photos of the monstrosities inside. Grossman secretly took these photos from inside his raincoat using the statistics department for the materials needed to make the photographs. He was moved to a labor camp and died in 1945, but the negatives of his photos were discovered and were put into the book, With a Camera in the Ghetto. The photos illustrate the sad reality of how the Germans dealt with the Jews.
The art, and photographs, that have survived World War II best illustrates the suffering and horror of those inside the ghettos, camps, and prisons.
Other survivors presented their memories of the Holocaust in various forms of art. Esther Nisenthal Krinitz (1927 - 2001), a Polish survivor untrained in art told her story in a series of 36 fabric art pictures that are at once both beautiful and shocking. Memories of Survival (2005) displays her art along with a narrative by her daughter, Bernice Steinhardt.
[edit] Film
The Holocaust has also been the subject of many films, including Oscar winners Schindler's List, Voyage of the Damned, The Pianist and Life is Beautiful. A list of hundreds of Holocaust movies is available at the University of South Florida.
With the aging population of Holocaust survivors, there has also been increasing attention in recent years to preserving the memory of the Holocaust through documentaries. The most influential of these is Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, which attempts to tell the story in as literal a manner as possible, without dramatization of any kind.
The movie Blade: Trinity, centers around a 'Vampire Final Solution,' which mirrored the actual Final Solution. Vampires were planning to take over the world and either kill or turn the entire human race as well as keep some alive as a food source.
[edit] Music
The massacre of Jews at Babi Yar inspired a poem written by a Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko which was set to music by Dmitri Shostakovich in his Symphony No. 13.
In 1984, Canadian rock band Rush recorded the song Red Sector A on the album Grace Under Pressure. The song is particularly notable for its allusions to The Holocaust, inspired by Geddy Lee's memories of his mother's stories [1] about the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, where she was held prisoner.
In Pink Floyd's album The Wall , one of the record's tracks is titled "Waiting For The Worms". This song is set in the middle of the time the main character, Pink, has become a neo-nazi, and the head of a fascist group. The song seems to be set in a march down a main street in Brixton, England, with Pink singing/saying the lyrics through a megaphone. One of the lyrics from the song is, "Waiting! For the final solution to strengthen the strain!"
[edit] Theatre
Stuart Drapers short fictional play, "This Is My Story" is set in a concetration camp right at the end of the war and follows nine children (eight Jews and one Sinti, or Gipsy) with rumours of the gas-chamber showers weighing heavy on their minds.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
From Holocaust Survivors' Network --iSurvived.org:
- Art and the Holocaust from University of Pennsylvania
