Holocaust
Studies at the University of Naples
I might
have called it as I have just called it:
"Holocaust Studies." The Frederick II University
of Naples, however, has a more expansive name for
it. It has announced a new graduate degree program
in ''The communication of memory of the Shoah
and of the culture of tolerance”. The goal
is (cited from the ANSAmed press release)
... to provide an occasion to study the
Holocaust and all forms of racism and Holocaust denial
fighting the creation of a shared memory. Issues
examined include ''European philosophy and the Shoah
[Holocaust]"; "Art and religion in the Mediterranean'';
''Shoah in the Mediterranean: the case of Italy (and
Campania);" and "The social construction of Memory".
The
announcement was timed to coincide with the
International Day of Commemoration in Memory of
the Victims of the Holocaust on January 27. Such a program is not unique in
Italy; the University of Siena has run Holocaust Studies
courses for a number of years. In the world at large, such
programs are not even unusual. There are many private
institutions and private and public universities around the
world that now offer certificates or degrees in this
discipline. Also, UNESCO sponsors a project called Why Teach
About the Holocaust? There is a general consensus that such
programs are useful. The main controversy seems to be an
in-house debate about whether or not to make the subject
more inclusive; that is, should it be Holocaust Studies or
something more general, something to join the Holocaust's
uniquely Jewish character not just to other genocides, but
to the wider societal issues of multiculturalism and human
rights. The tendency seems to favor the latter, especially
with the passage. By its own self-description ("...to study the Holocaust and all
forms of racism...") the Naples program will be of the "more
general" type.
Some
worry about the possibility of
trivialization. In 1989 Elie Wiesel (in "Art and
the Holocaust: Trivializing Memory") wrote this:
Auschwitz is something else, always
something else. It is a universe outside the
universe, a creation that exists parallel to
creation. Auschwitz lies on the other side of
life and on the other side of death. There, one
lives differently, one walks differently, one
dreams differently. Auschwitz represents the
negation and failure of human progress; it
negates the human design and casts doubts on its
validity. ...just as no one could imagine
Auschwitz before Auschwitz, no one can now
retell Auschwitz after Auschwitz. The truth of
Auschwitz remains hidden in its ashes... Such,
then, is the victory of the executioner: by
raising his crimes to a level beyond the
imagining and understanding of men, he planned
to deprive his victims of any hope of sharing
their monstrous meaning with others.
The
term "victory of the executioner" is staggering.
Wiesel was talking about simplistic melodramatic
films about the Holocaust, true, and not
university courses, but we should take the concern
seriously. When I see courses such as “Shoah
in the Mediterranean: the case of Italy (and
Campania)" and "The social construction
of memory,” a few alarms go off in my head.
I, too, am worried about the social construction
of memory, but also about, if not self-aggrandizement, then
“passing the buck-ism”, and burying the minutiae of horror
“beyond the imagining and understanding of men” in even
well-intentioned courses on human rights and
multi-culturalism. In fairness, I withhold judgment because
the courses haven't started yet.
As
noted, a look at the courses leads me to think
that the general tenor of the program is
“all-inclusive”, aimed at promoting a culture of
tolerance, and I am not making a case that this is
a mistake. After all, do we not want our youth to
know about unspeakable atrocities committed in
Rwanda? Of course we do. And how far back do we go
before we “draw a line under” (forget) historic
horrors? —that is, before we let ourselves off the hook
for genocide and slavery? I don't know. How soon will it
be before we draw a line under the Holocaust? I don't
know that, either. Yad Vashem, Israel's official
memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, established in
1953, has on its website the line, "The Holocaust,
which established the standard for absolute evil, is
the universal heritage of all civilized people." I
believe that is true. A phrase by Hannah Arendt has
occurred to me: "The Banality of Evil" —the subtitle of
her report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, published in
1963. That phrase can be (and has been) interpreted in
widely divergent ways, just two of which are that
(1) we all have an Eichmann within us, and (2) if such
evil is a result of blind and slavish stupidity
(Eichmann) then it can be defeated. I hope the program
in Naples will talk about such things.
You
might say that only Holocaust survivors such as
Wiesel (author of Night, one of the definitive
books about the Holocaust, pub. in French in
1958) or Primo Levi (author of If This is a
Man, pub. 1947), plus many essays on the
subject have any right to say anything at all.
What can the rest of us express without fear of
trivializing? I have no experience in any of this
except, decades ago, a trip to the memorial at
Dachau, near Munich. The display has since been
changed, but at the time, you entered and saw a
wall plastered with pictures of Hitler and
prominent Nazis. There was a caption: Die
Verantwortlichen—Those Responsible. Someone
had defaced the caption with a pen by scrawling Das
Volk —the people. In a register reserved for
visitor comments, someone had written in English,
"The next thing you know, you'll be telling us
Hitler was just taking orders from someone
else." So I am wary of distortion though
willful omission or by a tendency to want to "draw
a line under it" in order to get on with the
important task of promoting understanding and
tolerance.
I
asked a number of friends, some of whom are, if
not personally, then one generation removed from
those touched physically by the Holocaust. My
question was direct and childish. Do you think
courses like this do any good? Does this one look
any good? Should I give it the benefit of the
doubt? I reminded them that it was a graduate
program with participants likely to be in their
early to mid-20s, possibly already involved in
education from the teaching end. There would be no
one whose only idea of WWII was that it probably
came after WWI. "But," said one, "they might still
have seen Schindler's List and think they
had just seen a documentary about the Holocaust,
which would be a mistake. It's like asking, How
bad was the Holocaust on a scale of 1-10? The
question makes no sense." That would be the Elie
Wiesel end of the spectrum of responses. At the
other end was the inclusive, "Silence documents
nothing....the Holocaust and similar disasters need all of
the notice they can get...it is contradictory to
recommend nothing but written accounts of the Holocaust
while claiming that the events cannot be reduced to
words...dramatic presentations could be valuable." There
was also a comment in the form of a question: "What is
the difference, if any, between healing and
forgetting?" I'll leave that one to you.
So, we shall see.
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Jan 2023
Holocaust Remembrance
Forensic
Musicologists often help sort out copyright infringement
cases, a field so fraught with tedium that I think I'll fall
asleep before I finish this sente...................
BUT they also do this: Forensic
musicologists race to rescue works lost after the
Holocaust. That's the title of one of many articles
about this subject, The gentleman on the right, Francesco
Latoro, has spent much of his life trying to find and
restore music lost in the Holocaust. The music was written
by countless murdered composers you've never heard of.
Thousands of lost compositions. We can't undo the evil done
to them, give them back their lives, but we can try to
resurrect their legacy, their music. That is the least we
should do and maybe the only thing we can do.
Latoro lives in Barletta, a town on the Adriatic at about
the same latitude as Naples. His work consists of giving
presentations on saving the lost music of the Holocaust. He
was born in 1964 and is still quite active.
What he and others like him do —
there is nothing nobler.
Related entries:
- Campagna, the Righteous Town,
where you will find a subsection entitled "Whatever happened to
the 'Italian Schindler? " and a report on the
soon-to-be-built Holocaust Museum in Rome;
to portal for WWII
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