Planet Auschwitz


Book Description

Planet Auschwitz explores how the Holocaust has influenced science fiction and horror film and television. These genres explore important Holocaust themes - trauma, guilt, grief, ideological fervor and perversion, industrialized killing, and the dangerous afterlife of Nazism after World War II.




The Happiest Man on Earth


Book Description

Holocaust survivor Eddie Jaku made a vow to smile every day and believed he was the 'happiest man on earth'. In his inspirational memoir, he paid tribute to those who were lost by telling his story and sharing his wisdom. 'Eddie looked evil in the eye and met it with joy and kindness . . . [his] philosophy is life-affirming' - Daily Express Life can be beautiful if you make it beautiful. It is up to you. Eddie Jaku always considered himself a German first, a Jew second. He was proud of his country. But all of that changed in November 1938, when he was beaten, arrested and taken to a concentration camp. Over the next seven years, Eddie faced unimaginable horrors every day, first in Buchenwald, then in Auschwitz, then on a Nazi death march. He lost family, friends, his country. The Happiest Man on Earth is a powerful, heartbreaking and ultimately hopeful memoir of how happiness can be found even in the darkest of times. 'Australia's answer to Captain Tom . . . a memoir that extols the power of hope, love and mutual support' - The Times




Black Earth


Book Description

A brilliant, haunting, and profoundly original portrait of the defining tragedy of our time. In this epic history of extermination and survival, Timothy Snyder presents a new explanation of the great atrocity of the twentieth century, and reveals the risks that we face in the twenty-first. Based on new sources from eastern Europe and forgotten testimonies from Jewish survivors, Black Earth recounts the mass murder of the Jews as an event that is still close to us, more comprehensible than we would like to think, and thus all the more terrifying. The Holocaust began in a dark but accessible place, in Hitler's mind, with the thought that the elimination of Jews would restore balance to the planet and allow Germans to win the resources they desperately needed. Such a worldview could be realized only if Germany destroyed other states, so Hitler's aim was a colonial war in Europe itself. In the zones of statelessness, almost all Jews died. A few people, the righteous few, aided them, without support from institutions. Much of the new research in this book is devoted to understanding these extraordinary individuals. The almost insurmountable difficulties they faced only confirm the dangers of state destruction and ecological panic. These men and women should be emulated, but in similar circumstances few of us would do so. By overlooking the lessons of the Holocaust, Snyder concludes, we have misunderstood modernity and endangered the future. The early twenty-first century is coming to resemble the early twentieth, as growing preoccupations with food and water accompany ideological challenges to global order. Our world is closer to Hitler's than we like to admit, and saving it requires us to see the Holocaust as it was --and ourselves as we are. Groundbreaking, authoritative, and utterly absorbing, Black Earth reveals a Holocaust that is not only history but warning.




The World Reacts to the Holocaust


Book Description

Among the issues examined are the extent of the human destruction, the degree of collaboration, Jewish reactions, and efforts to save the Jews.




Planet Dora


Book Description

Shocking linkages between Nazi concentration camp Dora, Nazi rocket scientists, and the American space program? Did the grandest technological achievement of the 20th century have origins in the Holocaust? Half a century ago, did a group of brilliant scientists make a Faustian bargain that still stains the foundation of our reach for the stars? Once you read PLANET DORA, you will never watch the launching of the Space Shuttle in quite the same way again. Index. Maps. Photos.




Imagining the Unimaginable


Book Description

Imagining the Unimaginable examines popular fiction's treatment of the Holocaust in the dystopian and alternate history genres of speculative fiction, analyzing the effectiveness of the genre's major works as a lens through which to view the most prominent historical trauma of the 20th century. It surveys a range of British and American authors, from science fiction pulp to Pulitzer Prize winners, building on scholarship across disciplines, including Holocaust studies, trauma studies, and science fiction studies. The conventional discourse around the Holocaust is one of the unapproachable, unknowable, and the unimaginable. The Holocaust has been compared to an earthquake, another planet, another universe, a void. It has been said to be beyond language, or else have its own incomprehensible language, beyond art, and beyond thought. The 'othering' of the event has spurred the phenomenon of non-realist Holocaust literature, engaging with speculative fiction and its history of the uncanny, the grotesque, and the inhuman. This book examines the most common forms of nonmimetic Holocaust fiction, the dystopia and the alternate history, while firmly positioning these forms within a broader pattern of non-realist engagements with the Holocaust.




Between Auschwitz and Tradition


Book Description

The reference of the postmodern task of thinking is Auschwitz, the abyss and discontinuity separating us from the world of our ancestors. As inhabitants of Planet Auschwitz our point of reference lacks all transcendental warrants; it is not a non-referable reference which constitutes the abyss we must enter, endure, and in which our intellectual and cultural tradition must be transformed. The private/public transformations which constitute the texts of this book attempt to depart from the dystopic individuality and public life resulting from business-as-usual after Auschwitz. The three parts of the book are progressive reworkings of traditional metaphysics as adapted and modified by a modernism that refuses to grapple with its complicity. It is precisely that complicity which postmodern thinking takes up in its attempt to signify otherwise than the easy modernist translations and images of tradition. Thus it is a series of uneasy images imaging otherwise but never apart from modernity that take us away from complicity toward a transformed tradition. The uneasy images of this book are photogrammic combinations of photographs and texts, mutual supplements, pulling tradition through the Event against the persistent and murderous forces of contemporary idolatry and repression.




The Holocaust Novel


Book Description

The first comprehensive study of Holocaust literature as a major postwar literary genre, The Holocaust Novel provides an ideal student guide to the powerful and moving works written in response to this historical tragedy. This student-friendly volume answers a dire need for readers to understand a genre in which boundaries and often blurred between history, fiction, autobiography, and memoir. Other essential features for students here include an annotated bibliography, chronology, and further reading list. Major texts discussed include such widely taught works as Night, Maus, The Shawl, Schindler's List, Sophie's Choice, White Noise, and Time's Arrow.




To Mend the World


Book Description

"This subtle and nuanced study is clearly Fackenheim's most important book." —Paul Mendes-Flohr " . . . magnificent in sweep and in execution of detail." —Franklin H. Littell In To Mend the World Emil L. Fackenheim points the way to Judaism's renewal in a world and an age in which all of our notions—about God, humanity, and revelation—have been severely challenged. He tests the resources within Judaism for healing the breach between secularism and revelation after the Holocaust. Spinoza, Rosenzweig, Hegel, Heidegger, and Buber figure prominently in his account.




Holocaust Historiography in Context


Book Description

The modes in which historical research is being shaped have become themselves topics of research. Holocaust historiography - the documentation, depiction and analysis of one of the most horrific events in human history - is today a wide ranging academic field in which Jewish and non-Jewish scholars throughout the world are active. But how did this historiography, especially its Jewish aspect, emerge and by what factors was it shaped? This volume examines the very beginnings of the effort to apply scholarly standards to the understanding of the Holocaust - when World War II was still raging and immediately after it had ended.




Recent Books