2007- 2008 ESSAY 1: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), and particularly the very public debate this fifteen-year old national landmark has engendered, forms the subject of Miss Harriet Notley’s First Class essay for the final year History module, The Holocaust. Political considerations for the specific housing of the museum in Washington D.C., the curatorial decisions on prominent displays and galleries, as well the dragooning of audience interaction, are all eloquently raised here. Throughout, discussion is underpinned by Notley’s acknowledgement of the significance of Holocaust remembrance in American – and latterly, ‘Western’ – postwar society, and she therefore shows a sensitivity to both the criticism of, and support for, the USHMM. Especially worthy of note here is the historical methodology used to consider a contemporary subject, one that itself represents the Holocaust in a number of specific and controversial ways. Like Hemming’s previous 2,000 word essay, Notley concisely links the pivotal context of the wartime Holocaust to its ensuing cultural representation – and in this case, memorialisation – or perhaps, by the impossibility of adequately representing such a vast series of literally unimaginable horrors. But either way, as Notley pointedly concludes, inviting the widest public possible to reflect on these complex issues rightly remains an important contribution by the USHMM. ESSAY 2: Mr Phil Hemming’s Third Year essay on one manner of representing the horrors of the Holocaust, Art Speigelman’s graphic novel Maus II, offers a rare interdisciplinary approach to studying the genocide of European Jews during World War II. By way of linking historical events to their artistic impressions, Hemming employs a literary methodology – notable in terms of the historiography and consequent referencing used – in offering a close reading of Maus II, paying particular reference to the medium, allegorical nature, and de-anthromorphised characters in this 1987 rendering of one man’s coming to terms with an unimaginable past. Yet Maus II is itself contextualised against the very real past of the Second World War, with Hemming clearly establishing the narrative analogies to Nazi anti-Semitism and its twisted culmination at extermination centres like Auschwitz. It may well be, as Hemming concludes, that Speigleman’s innovation reaches a wider audience than a non-fictional (and often imageless) text on the Holocaust. But especially if this is the case, exploring the historical context of graphic novels and related media clearly remains an important role for historical writing, as this First Class effort clearly demonstrates. 2006 - 2007 ESSAY 1:
The following First Class (or A) essay by Miss Stacey Kerslake was originally written for The Holocaust and Its Histories, and analyses the centrality of Auschwitz-Birkenau to postwar views of Nazi genocide. Driven by the sheer scale and variety of functions in the camp system, the industrial method of genocide, and mass murder of targeted groups additional to European Jewry (such as Roma and Sinti Travellers), Kerslake finds much in the history of Auschwitz rightly, when viewed after 1945, as microcosmic of the Holocaust as a whole. Yet this popular, and sometimes academic, understanding is challenged here by the various and brutal idiosyncracies found in this largest of extermination camps. These understandings are also contrasted with other features of the Final Solution far less germane to Auschwitz – such as mass shooting and Jewish ghettoisation in occupied Russia – but still part and parcel of Nazi rule, and which similarly demand study and incorporation as prominent aspects of the Holocaust as a whole. By reflecting upon both the wartime events and postwar memorialisation surrounding Auschwitz-Birkenau, Kerslake is able to make a strong case in cautioning any symbolic generalizations for so complex and far-reaching an extermination process. Note also the excellent use of bibliography and filmography, concise footnoting, and sophisticated argumentation found in this essay.
ESSAY 2:
Miss Hayley Cassidy’s essay on the nature of resistance to the Holocaust, which earned a First Class (or A) mark in The Holocaust and Its Histories, focuses on variety of forms anti-Nazi activities could take. Rejecting historiography finding that only armed uprisings (such as that in the Warsaw Ghetto) constituted legitimate forms of resistance – consequently leading some to assert that wartime Jewish resistance to the Holocaust was largely “mythic” – Cassidy locates several alternatives to violence which nonetheless made resistance to the Final Solution much more of a widespread “reality”. By separating ‘active’ (or ‘overt’) from ‘passive’ resistance, a wide range of strategies by persecuted Jewry is considered here, from smuggling and underground activities to the far more contentious role of Jewish Councils and the concept of amidah, or ‘sanctification of life’. Through these, and indeed through a clear and effective writing style consistently in evidence, Cassidy is able to directly engage with relevant academic studies on the subject of resistance to the Holocaust, while simultaneously concluding that the very act of survival ultimately contributed to the thwarting of genocidal Nazi intentions; namely, the extermination of every Jewish human being in Europe.
ESSAY 3:
Unlike the other essays presented here, Miss Paula Bowles’ Third Year dissertation on Criminology and the Holocaust was not initially assessed by the Dept. of History; instead, it was initially submitted to Mr. Doug Rae in the Dept. of Criminology (also in Northampton’s School of Social Sciences), where it received the highest grade of any dissertation in 2007 (Alpha First, or A+). Reasons for this mark include the unusual, interdisciplinary connection of crime and Nazi genocide – simultaneously appearing everywhere and nowhere in various accounts of criminality suffusing (the nevertheless sovereign state of) Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945 – detailed and judiciously-chosen case studies; exhaustive reading; and also, not least, the flair with which these are incorporated into existing views of the Holocaust. To be sure, the confluence of Criminology and the Holocaust is not unproblematic, and clearing the way for such a reading comprises much of Bowles’ thesis, a detour necessary given the dearth of Anglophone scholarship directly considering such a relation. Also worthy of mention are features different to the “house-style” for essays typically submitted to the Dept. of History; for example, an alternative referencing format is employed here (specifically, the Harvard rather than Cambridge system); a more individualistic writing-style is visible, as with the novel inclusion of personal reflections on a trip made to Holocaust sites in Poland forming Appendix 1. That said, this extended piece of work remains deeply historical in its methodology, source-base, and evaluation, meaning that aspects of compositional “difference” are interspersed with more “familiar” historical approaches to Nazi genocides, such as the reproduced excerpts from both perpetrators and victims comprising Appendix 2, which together contribute to the original flavour of this finalist dissertation. -Matthew Feldman
matthew.feldman@northampton.ac.uk |