The Holocaust across Borders: Trauma, Atrocity, and Representation in Literature and Culture. Hilene S Flanzbaum

Extract

The Holocaust across Borders brings a global lens to often-vexed questions around issues of Holocaust representation. Essays in this volume examine the Holocaust’s aftereffects in France, Italy, Poland, Germany, Austria, Argentina, England, Canada, Australia, Israel, and the United States. In the space of this short review, I will offer a preview of the anthology’s diversity by focusing primarily on essays by Flanzbaum, Omer-Sherman, and Grinberg.¹

Flanzbaum opens the volume with a readable and personal story: as an American Holocaust expert invited to speak in Germany, she discovered that the rules and mores of how Holocaust fiction is understood in Germany differed sharply from how it is absorbed and taught in the United States. The case at hand centered on Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader (1995), which galvanized opinions and generated global debate regarding the degree to which Schlink, a German writer, had humanized a Nazi. Flanzbaum finds the novel invaluable in the classroom to convey moral complexity to students raised on superheroes and expecting clean divisions between good and evil. “I create a transformative teaching moment,” Flanzbaum recalls, when students think about their own moral trespasses and come to understand that perhaps they could have done the same thing as the woman at the center of The Reader (p. 4). Flanzbaum’s moment of reckoning in Germany, the understanding that deep national differences delineate divergent responses to the same texts, in addition to her own family’s riveting story of survival, catalyzed her desire to curate a volume bringing together reports on how the Holocaust is taught, understood, and represented around the world as we rapidly approach the one-hundred-year mark since its occurrence. The result makes for an excellent text that covers an impressive range of novels, television shows, films, graphic narratives, memorials, and other media used to represent the Holocaust.