CHI TIẾT NGHIÊN CỨU …
Tiêu đề
Histories: Betrayed and unfulfilled
Tác giả
Bennett T.A.; Millen R.L.
Năm xuất bản
2007
Source title
Testimony, Tensions, and Tikkun: Teaching the Holocaust in Colleges and Universities
Số trích dẫn
0
DOI
Liên kết
Tóm tắt
Peter Sloterdijk's statement suggests the peril of discussing traditions in the post-Shoah era, for in the twentieth century, as he reminds his German audience, traditions may no longer embody the noble aspirations and humane ideals of a people. Instead, in a nightmarish inversion, traditions may perhaps imprison a people as a bombed-out city holds its denizens captive. More recently, George Steiner has described our century as a "time out of hell": The collapse of humaneness in the twentieth century has specific enigmas. It arises not from riders on the distant steppe or barbarians at the gates National Socialism, Fascism, Stalinism (though, in this latter instance, more opaquely) spring from within the context, the locale, the administrative social instruments of the high places of civilization, of education, of scientific progress and humanizing deployment, be it Christian or Enlightened.1 For us-one a student of Judaism and Jewish thought, the other a student of German literature and culture-these statements capture tensions that we have worked to mold into the very fabric of a course titled "Germans and Jews: Culture, Identity, and Diaerence." In our course, we endeavor to confront the troublesome and schizophrenic question of tradition, both as a hallmark of the "high places of civilization" and as a scene of catastrophic devastation. In fact, rather than arguing that tensions arise in the context of our course on the Holocaust, we contend that an honest encounter with these tensions-the tensions between the emancipatory and destructive forces embedded in Western traditions- is necessary to help students begin to cope with the overwhelming tragedy that characterizes the Shoah. Indeed, in its very focus, "Germans and Jews" points to the integration of tensions into the learning process. The class is and is not a Holocaust course. It is true that students enroll because the title clearly suggests the Shoah-indeed, any reference to Germans and Jews in the postmodern era immediately invokes images of death camps and Nazi atrocities-and yet, though our approach may seem paradoxical, we do not introduce the Holocaust and its events before the latter portion of the course. Instead, we require students to begin their studies with a survey of German history since the Reformation. Too often, we fear, students leave a course on the Holocaust having learned to see Germans and Jews as perpetrators and victims and thus persist in thinking in stereotypes. We wondered whether it was possible to construct a course that would introduce students to the horror of the Holocaust without leading them to believe that atrocity is inevitable, and morality ineaective. Similarly, we asked ourselves if it was possible to structure a course that would help students avoid a facile moralizing about the Holocaust that failed to wrestle with the complexity of its history. These questions arose for us as we worked together with colleagues at Wittenberg University to plan an international conference titled "Teaching the Holocaust: Issues and Dilemmas." In the course of our planning, we found ourselves confronting a dilemma: Aside from one course on the literature of the Holocaust, Wittenberg-a small liberal arts college of about 2,100 students aliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America-had no course devoted to the Holocaust. Furthermore, the Evangelical Lutheran Church had extended a declaration of regret concerning the influence of Martin Luther's antisemitism on the church's teachings and actions (and inaction).2 Therefore, we discerned the possibility of constructing a course that would reside in the interstices of several tensions: drawing on the fields of religion and German studies, it would be interdisciplinary; it would model interfaith dialogue as well as interdisciplinary dialogue; and it would ask students to conduct a critical interrogation of their own beliefs about history and diaerence as they considered what became the essential question of the course: Was the Holocaust inevitable?3 Bringing these issues to the classroom proved both exciting and risky. In The Courage to Teach, Parker J. Palmer lists some core paradoxes about teaching: "My inward and invisible sense of identity becomes known, even to me, only as it manifests itself in encounters with external and visible 'otherness.' . . . Teaching always take place at the crossroad of the personal and the public, and if I want to teach well, I must learn to stand where these opposites intersect. Intellect works in concert with feeling, so if I hope to open my students' minds, I must open their emotions as well."4 Thus, although our course had originated in the context of our developing an interdisciplinary class on the Holocaust, we soon discovered that professional and personal identities intersect and inform one another. Rochelle Millen is the daughter of Polish Jews who escaped to the United States in 1936, and for her the study of the Holocaust can never be purely academic; the Shoah is a palpable presence in her sense of family, in her personal history, and for her co-religionists. Timothy Bennett, a Lutheran, has played an active role in exploring the significance ofWittenberg's relationship to the church and the nature of the liberal arts in a church-related setting. We found that eaective teaching meant foregrounding our professional (public) and personal identities. By doing so, we hoped to help our students learn to integrate what they were learning about the past, as historical knowledge, with how they acted in the present to make ethical determinations. Clearly, intellectual pursuit and what psychologists call the aaective domain-spiritual and emotional insight-need to work in productive tension for students and teachers alike. Palmer's teaching-related paradoxes translated into our learning goals for the course: Students can learn to examine critically their sense of identity by engaging "otherness" and entering into a process of dialogue both with others and with otherness. Students can learn to study history so as to make more informed ethical decisions in their lives. Students can learn to regard history as a scene of tension-between conflicting interests, motives, and forces-that requires ethical response by individuals. To achieve these goals, we structured a course that examines the history of the Jewish experience in Germany, without presupposing the inevitability of the Holocaust. In taking this approach, we followed Jacob Katz's admonition to consider each historical period as a scene of open possibilities rather than historical inevitabilities: A historian who wants to describe a specific historical period also possesses knowledge of later periods that are the results of countless subsequent decisions. If, however, he wants to discover the choices open to and the diculties encountered by people acting in the earlier period, then he must exclude his own knowledge [of subsequent developments]. It requires, as the great Dutch historian Johan Huizinga put it, that "one imagine the past as though it were just now present."5 Katz's insight is fundamental to the course: we structure the syllabus and presentations so that students begin to appreciate that at any given moment other histories were possible, but that the aggregate force of decisions made by reasoning, civilized human beings- either acting in accord with the inherited wisdom of their traditions or claiming the authority of those traditions (sometimes falsely)-had resulted instead in the institution of death camps. This fateful tension-between, on the one hand, the hope and promise of emancipation and mutual respect that characterized some Enlightenment thinkers and, on the other, the eventual rise of genocidal fascism-determined the outline of the class, the selection of texts, and the shape of the dialogue between instructors and students. © 2007 University of Washington Press. All rights reserved.
Từ khóa
Tài liệu tham khảo
Steiner G., Grammars of Creation, (2001); The Declaration of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America to the Jewish Community, (1994); Katz J., Was the holocaust predictable?, Commentary, pp. 41-48, (1975); Palmer P.J., The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of A Teacher's Life, (1998); Katz J., War der holocaust vorhersehbar, Zwischen Messianismus und Zionismus: Zur Jüdischen Sozialgeschichte, (1993); Rubenstein R., After Auschwitz: History, Theology, and Contemporary Judaism, pp. 84-87, (1992); Benjamin W., ÜBer den begriff der geschichte, Illuminationen: Ausgewählte Schriften, pp. 251-261, (1980); Rubenstein, After Auschwitz; Steiner G., A season in hell, Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes towards the Redefinition of Culture, (1971); Steiner G., Real Presences, pp. 231-232, (1989); Cargas H.J., Shadows of Auschwitz, (1990)
Nơi xuất bản
University of Washington Press
Hình thức xuất bản
Book chapter
Open Access
Nguồn
Scopus