Synopses & Reviews
In this series of interlinked essays, Geoffrey Hartman draws upon his pioneering interests in the collection of Holocaust survivor video testimony and his personal experience as a child of the Kindertransport to explore life and culture, meaning, and memory in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Taking up the anguished question of many survivors, “has the world learned anything?”, Hartman discusses issues of representation and ethics, the relations between first- and second-generation witnesses to the events, and how artists, scholars, and teachers have represented and transmitted these extreme experiences. How, he asks, do we convert our knowledge about the Holocaust into a thoughtful and potent understanding? Writing with his characteristic intelligence and grace, Hartman takes us from Bitburg to “Schindler’s List”, from Vichy to battles over public memory. He also evokes his experience as a refugee in England in vivid detail and explains how as a writer on literature and culture he came gradually to focus on the Holocaust.
About the Author
Geoffrey Hartman is one of America’s most renowned literary critics. He is the Sterling Professor of English and Comparative Literature (Emeritus) and Co-Founder and Project Director of the Holocaust video testimony project at Yale University.
Table of Contents
Introduction * The Longest Shadow * The Weight of What Happened * Darkness Visible * Bitburg * The Voice of Vichy * The Cinema Animal: On Spielberg’s
Schindler’s List * Public Memory and Its Discontents * The Book of the Destruction * Learning from Survivors * Holocaust Testimony, Art, and Trauma
Introduction * The Longest Shadow * The Weight of What Happened * Darkness Visible * Bitburg * The Voice of Vichy * The Cinema Animal: On Spielberg’s Schindler’s List * Public Memory and Its Discontents * The Book of the Destruction * Learning from Survivors * Holocaust Testimony, Art, and Trauma