Students will become familiar with the historical context and 
main events leading up to the Holocaust as well as the time 
line of the Holocaust itself.  They will learn about the 
international character of the Holocaust literature and film 
which exist in almost all European languages and in Yiddish and 
Hebrew.  They will become acquainted with a variety of genres: 
novels, short stories, journals, testimonies, plays, poetry, 
essays, documentary films and film adaptations of literary 
works. Last but not least the students will master new concepts 
that arose from the field of Holocaust studies, such as post-
memory (Marianne Hirsch's notion).

The course will focus on the prose, poetry, as well as film and 
music from the time of the Holocaust and /or produced in its 
aftermath.  The topical foci of the course are as follows: 
trauma, memory, guilt, testimony, the difficulty of adequate 
representation, silence, post-memory.  Sample authors will 
include Janusz Korczak (Ghetto Diary), Ota Pavel (How I Came to 
Know Fish), Danilo Kiš (Hourglass), Henryk Grynberg (Jewish 
War, The Victory, Children of Zion, Drohobycz, Drohobycz as 
well as the documentary film about Grynberg’s return to Poland, 
Birthplace, directed by Pawel Lozinski), Norman Manea (The 
Hooligan’s Return), Primo Levi (Survival in Auschwitz), Alvin 
Rosenfeld (A Double Dying. Reflections on Holocaust Literature) 
as well as films (e.g., Polanski's The Pianist and Benigni's La 
vita e bella).  The songs written by Aleksander Kulisiewicz in 
the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen and put to music by 
Paul Schoenfeld will also be taught.