Matters of Testimony

Interpreting the Scrolls of Auschwitz
1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-78238-998-9
Verlag: Berghahn Books

Buch, Englisch, 264 Seiten, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 540 g

In 1944, members of the Sonderkommando—the “special squads,” composed almost exclusively of Jewish prisoners, who ensured the smooth operation of the gas chambers and had firsthand knowledge of the extermination process—buried on the grounds of Auschwitz-Birkenau a series of remarkable eyewitness accounts of Nazi genocide. This careful and penetrating study examines anew these “Scrolls of Auschwitz,” which were gradually recovered, in damaged and fragmentary form, in the years following the camp’s liberation. It painstakingly reconstructs their historical context and textual content, revealing complex literary works that resist narrow moral judgment and engage difficult questions about the limits of testimony.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Chare, Nicholas

Williams, Dominic

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Jüdische Studien Geschichte des Judentums Geschichte des Judentums: Moderne & Gegenwart
• Geisteswissenschaften Jüdische Studien Geschichte des Judentums Antisemitismus, Pogrome, Shoah
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Antisemitismus
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Deutsche Geschichte Deutsche Geschichte: Holocaust

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments

Preface

Introduction: Matters of Testimony

Chapter 1. Matters of History

Chapter 2. Zalman Gradowski: Literature in the Death Factory

Chapter 3. Scattered Selves: The Stories of Leyb Langfus

Chapter 4. Final Arrangements: Zalman Lewental’s Histories of Resistance

Chapter 5. Characters and Letters: Chaim Herman and Marcel Nadjary

Chapter 6. The Camera Eye: Four Photographs from Birkenau

Conclusion: Crossing the Circle of Flame

Appendix

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Williams, Dominic
Dominic Williams is a Montague Burton Fellow in Jewish Studies at the University of Leeds. He has published articles on modernism, the First World War, contemporary poetry and the Holocaust. In addition to co-editing Representing Auschwitz, he has co-edited, with Fabio A. Durão, Modernist Group Dynamics: The Politics and Poetics of Friendship.

Chare, Nicholas
Nicholas Chare is Associate Professor of Art History at the Université de Montréal. He is the author of Auschwitz and Afterimages: Abjection, Witnessing and Representation and After Francis Bacon: Synaesthesia and Sex in Paint, and the co-editor, with Dominic Williams, of Representing Auschwitz: At the Margins of Testimony.

Nicholas Chare is Associate Professor of Art History at the Université de Montréal. He is the author of Auschwitz and Afterimages: Abjection, Witnessing and Representation and After Francis Bacon: Synaesthesia and Sex in Paint, and the co-editor, with Dominic Williams, of Representing Auschwitz: At the Margins of Testimony.