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The Altering Landscapes: Mediation of Holocaust Memories through Art

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An event as horrific in its impact and magnitude as the Holocaust, called for proper documentation in the years that followed it. The most valued documentation developed in the form of literary responses that majorly comprised of the first-hand accounts and narratives of the Holocaust survivors. These were published in the weekly newspapers that circulated in the displaced persons’ camps. These not only served as a means to vent out their emotions but also as a way of re-connecting to their kin if they had survived. During the initial years after the catastrophe, the Holocaust historians, as well as survivors, have remained divided in their opinion with regard to the literary response to the Holocaust and consequently the genre of Holocaust literature. Moreover, there also existed the ethical dilemma of whether or not an event such as the Holocaust should be represented in any form or genre.

In the Encyclopedia of Holocaust Literature published in 2002, the editors David Patterson, Alan L. Berger, and Sarita Cargas explore the literature that developed in response to the Holocaust. The fact that the seemingly contradicted term ‘Holocaust literature’ exists is because the “soul is there” (xiii). They state that the Holocaust literature holds a unique and distinguished place as it transcends the event of the death into a return to life, and in the process, the readers become a witness. They conclude,

The literary response to the Holocaust is a human being’s endeavor to restore to life a relationship to humanity that harbors the affirmation of life. It entails a movement of memory—for memory is its defining feature— by which a soul undertakes a movement of return (xiv).

In a more recent work, Literature of The Holocaust (2004) edited by Harold Bloom, the Holocaust historian, Alvin Rosenfeld, in his chapter, ‘The Problematics of Holocaust Literature’, acknowledging the significance of Holocaust literature discusses the ethical problematics of the unresolved query about the tension between ‘claims of silence’ and ‘claims of word’ (41). He approaches this question through the writings of Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi and expresses that although the writers mentioned the brutalities and horrors of the concentration camps, there existed a latent struggle to express the emotions clearly. He thus states that the Holocaust literature transcends beyond the scope of being classified as ‘topical literature’ (21), as it demands a certain amount of sensibility and responsibility on the reader’s part. Rosenfeld further opines that the Holocaust literature is a ‘chronicle of the human spirit’s most turbulent strivings with an immense historical and metaphysical weight’ (22). He also highlights the role of the reader, as it is only through the reader’s imagination and understanding of the text that inexplicable and unwritten horrors are rendered intelligible. The fact that Holocaust literature apart from the Jewish languages (Yiddish and Hebrew) is written in every European language, classifies it as an ‘international literature’ (25). In the words of David Patterson, Alan L. Berger, and Sarita Cargas,

Holocaust literature is a testimony to the absolute dearness of every human being. It teems with a sense of urgency which disturbs our comfort and complacency to put to us the question put to the first human being: Where are you? Thus it transforms death into life by transforming its reader into a witness (Encyclopedia of Holocaust Literature, xiv).

Artistic Representations of the Holocaust

A creative domain through which Holocaust memories can be mediated is visual art. The artists depicting the Holocaust in their paintings explore the maxim of pictures speaking a thousand words. One of the earliest artworks is by Morris Kestelman entitled Lama Sabachthani (Oh God, why have you forsaken me?) which depicts a group of Jewish people mourning over a pile of unburied corpses. The artist Edgar Ainsworth visited the Bergen Belsen concentration camp after liberation and recorded the scene in his drawing, Belsen: April 1945 in which he sketched various aspects of the camp. The best-known Holocaust artwork is Charlotte Salomon’s play Life? Or Theater? composed of seven hundred sixty-nine paintings. The artworks form a major part of exhibitions in the Holocaust museums particularly the Yad Vashem, Jerusalem. The Holocaust is also depicted in the artworks produced by artists born after 1945. The most well known example is of post Holocaust artwork is by Anselm Kiefer. His painting Margarethe (1981) is inspired by Paul Celan’s “Todesfuge” and Goethe’s Faust and depicts the golden hair of Margarete in the form yellow straws. Another painting Sternenfall (Falling Stars) created in 1998 depicts a sky with celestial bodies that are numbered, alluding to the tattooed numbers, both of which are alphanumeric. The Auschwitz Album published in 1981 and Auschwitz: A History in Photographs published in 1993 remain the best-known photographic record books of the largest death camp of Auschwitz.

More recent works include artworks by Morris Kagan, a second-generation survivor who shares his father’s artwork on social media. His father, Henry Kagan was a woodcarver, a skill that helped him survive the concentration camps as he used to carve sculptors on the order of camp commanders. Caroline Slifkin, an artist as well as a Holocaust educator specialises in teaching about the Holocaust through Holocaust art. She has created a Holocaust Arts Project called “Fragments of Family” in 2016. The project is included in the curriculum of various schools in order to develop critical thinking and visual literacy. In her sessions, Caroline invites the students to discuss historical artwork and to create their own works in response. Students view the art as a form of documentation, witness, spiritual resistance, and as evidence from the victim’s perspective. Through the use of visual images, students are able to develop visual literacy to add to their skills of critical thinking in order to understand, recognize and evaluate arts as a means of expression. The students are thus able to investigate human behaviour, and come to appreciate that silence and indifference to suffering of others however unintentional can lead to events that allow for legalized discrimination, prejudice, hatred, and ultimately mass murder. Caroline believes that learning about the Holocaust can evoke powerful emotions and using the creative arts can help students to express their thoughts, ideas, and responses in an appropriate and creative way.

Image Courtesy: Caroline Slifkin

 

Image Courtesy: Caroline Slifkin

Daniela Mansur, the creative art director at Tributart and the author of Art Therapy Journal: Holocaust Without Words through a chronological artwork narrates a wordless story of the Holocaust.

Image Courtesy: Daniela Mansur
Image Courtesy: Daniela Mansur

Daniela offers a blended approach as she commemorates she not only pays tribute to the Holocaust victims and survivors through her art but also believes in telling the story of the Holocaust through her art in order to teach the future generations.

Conclusion

The artistic works of the Holocaust portray the intricate human reactions to exploitation, and to the annihilation of one’s life and culture. The artistic works created by survivors or victims as well as third-party witnesses depict a kaleidoscope of themes that are self-reflective and thus deepen our understanding of the Holocaust. The two forms that have dominated the literary corpus of the Holocaust literature are the memoirs and diaries written by survivors that are believed to be the most authentic accounts of the Holocaust experience. Apart from these, over the years other forms such as poetry, theatre, music, dance and storytelling have emerged. The memoirs and diaries together provided first hand accounts of the horrors of the catastrophe, thereby informing the readers what living during the Holocaust was. There is also a proliferation of Holocaust fiction, which propels the readers to imaginatively enter the realms of experiences of the narrator. The artistic works not only serve as a means of commemorating the Holocaust but are also a powerful medium for educators to teach about the Holocaust.

At the Crossroads between Psychiatry and the Holocaust

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The Hall of Names in the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Site in Jerusalem, Israel, remembering some of the 6 million Jews murdered during World War II. Source: iStockPhoto.

In the decades following the First World War, discontent, inflation, and political infighting characterised Germany. Adolf Hitler, who would become one of the most infamous dictators in history, rode on the subsequent wave of popular discontent, eventually becoming Germany’s Chancellor in 1933 and unleashing a radical transformation of the German state. Linking Jewish people to the country’s defeat in 1918, the National Socialist Workers’ Party (NSDAP) gave new impetus to this age-old racial thinking. To historian Tim Grady, for example, the NSDAP became the embodiment of German defeat in the Great War.

Among many of the ideals of the Nazi party, the Volksgemeinschaft (or the people’s community) figured centrally within the NSDAP. With the ambition to create a kind of social solidarity, Nazism attempted to put forward a cohesive and unifying movement for all Germans, at least those acceptable under its ideals. This pursuit led to the promotion of the concept of the Volk (the nation’s people) and its associated notions of blood and soil (Blut und Boden), where they would dwell. The Artamanen-Gesellschaft (Artaman League) started in 1923 as a German agrarian and völkisch (folk)-oriented movement devoted to a blood-and-soil–inspired ruralism, intent on carrying out the reformation of society (Lebensreform. The League turned out to be firmly connected to, and was ultimately absorbed by, the Nazi Party and the aforementioned concepts of the German Volk and their associated place of belonging in the world, central to Nazi propaganda.

Among the Germans belonging to the Volksgemeinschaft, the superior race and racial hygiene were the Aryans featured most prominently, as the epitome of superiority reflected by their racial hygiene. As a race that was believed to have given birth to all European civilisations, including the German, typical Aryan features included fair skin, a strong physique, blue eyes, and blond hair. This idea of Aryanism became the foundation of the Nazi race theory. By contrast, the Jews became identified as unwanted elements within this future society. As a people collectively to blame for the German defeat in the First World War, they became the victims of a German revanchist movement. Excluded from the Volksgemeinschaft, the Jewish people became suitable and convenient scapegoats to explain any misery of the German people, particularly the loss of the German state’s property (territorial and financial) caused by stipulations of the Treaty of Versailles.

One of the Nazi propaganda posters depicting Jews as demons as compared to the superior and ideal Aryan race. Source: The Forward

Emerging in this climate, the eugenics movement, pioneered by Francis Galton - a psychologist working on the hereditary nature of intelligence - in 1883, , held that only people with superior characteristic traits should be allowed by society to procreate further. Years later in 1905, Alfred Ploetz, a German biologist, published his work The Fitness of Our Race and the Protection of the Weak which debilitated clinical attention to the frail and undesirables. Ploetz termed this as the theory of racial hygiene (Rassenhygiene). As a particular special notion of eugenics, this philosophy led to the formation of the International Society for Racial Hygiene (Gesellschaft fur Rassenhygiene) by Alfred’s brother-in -law, Ernst Rüdin in 1907. Rüdin, a psychiatrist and an advocate of racial hygiene, through his research into genealogy, reasoned that frail mindedness and its related issues were heritable, and could be forestalled through eugenics.

The 1917 photoplay, “The Black Stork”, edited and re-released in 1927 as “Are You Fit to Marry” further established the benefits of proper racial hygiene. Influenced by the notions of racial cleanliness and anti-Semitism, Hitler acknowledged that eugenic practices were important to eliminate degenerate components from the country’s blood stream. Besides Jews as the Unerwünschte (unwanted elements), the other, non-Jewish groups included Roma Sinti groups, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the disabled, and homosexuals.

An anti-Semitic sign that translates, as “Jews are unwanted here”. Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

The eugenic ideals were used to justify mass sterilisation on those persons the German state deemed unwanted. Moreover, in 1933, the sterilisation law was passed. Marriage laws followed, prohibiting union with the “ill suited”. A further measure that ensured the racial cleansing of the German nation was the enactment and adoption of The Nuremberg Laws on 15 September 1935. The Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, both passed in Nuremburg at the time ensured the exclusion of Jews from the Reich citizenship and further the Blood Protection Law forbade the marriage between Jewish and non-Jewish Germans. In this way, a eugenic thinking process and the idea of blood unity began to seep in and spread through the institutions across Germany.

The eugenic ideal was actualised in October 1939, when the Nazi Regime implemented Aktion T4 or the T4 Euthanasia Program. The name was taken after Tiergartenstrasse 4, the street address of the program’s coordinating office in Berlin. The program included practically the whole German mental network. Headed by physicists, Dr. Karl Brandt and Phillip Bouhler, an administration was set up with an order to execute anybody considered a useless eater. On one hand, where the Nazi regime treated the Jewish people as parasites and vermin, the psychiatric vocation treated them as genetic aberrations. Killed from the outset by starvation and deadly injection, then later suffocation by poison gas. Doctors supervised gassings in chambers in the guise of showers, utilising deadly carbon monoxide gas obtained from physicists. So successful was this endeavour that the program directors set up gas chambers at six existing psychiatric extermination centers in Germany and Austria.

To curb the proliferation of what the Nazis perceived as abnormal, defective, and flawed individuals, the psychiatrists, who were fervent eugenicists, killed their patients who otherwise appeared to be quite normal without any deformities, much to the violation of the ethics of the Hippocratic oath. A majority of the doctors who became skilled in the techniques of this kind of extermination later also operated the concentration camps. However, as they realised that the carbon monoxide gas would not be successful for a large-scale mass extermination, they replaced it with Zyklon B. Used for fumigant purposes in the camp, it soon proved out to be an effective means for mass murder.

Conclusion

Commenting on psychiatric activities in Nazi regime, the German biologist, Benno Muller-Hill argues: “Almost no one stopped to think that something could be wrong with psychiatry […] The international scientific establishment reassured their German colleagues that it had indeed been the unpardonable misconduct of a few individuals, but it lay outside the scope of science.” As much as physical selection took place in the extermination camps the moment victims descended from the cattle trains, psychiatric selection played an important role within the hospital framework that preceded the Holocaust as it targeted those inmates of institutions who were thought fit for sterilisation and thus it was the psychiatrists who decided the reproductive potential of the individuals.

It remains thus important to infer that the intrinsic, fundamental standards of psychiatry were not just mirrored by Nazi extremism and racist bigotry, but they also envisioned, supported, and acted as an entering wedge into the Holocaust. Psychiatry, further helped establish the concept of the Volk as individuals within the body politic, advocating the expulsion of purportedly parasitic people from the country’s society. This subject of treating society to the detriment of the individual was vital to the corruption of medication and the defense of the annihilations. An underlying principle that was shared between both Holocaust and psychiatry was the concept of selection.

Mehak Burza is a doctoral research scholar of Holocaust Studies in the Department of English, Jamia University (New Delhi, India). Her thesis title is Literary Representations of The Holocaust; An Assessment. Her primary interests include Holocaust/Genocide Studies, Gender Studies, Holocaust Trauma and PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). She has presented papers in international conferences in Texas and Gettysburg. Her creative works have been published in Trouvaille Review, Visual Verse and Galaxy International Multidisciplinary Research Journal. She also translates from Hindi/Urdu into English and her translations are published in Purple Ink Magazine, the online magazine of Brown University, Los Angeles. She is also associated with LLIDS Journal as a peer reviewer, CLRI journal as an editor for research papers and as a copy editor (part time) in Journal of International Women’s Studies. Apart from academics she is trained classical dancer, with Kathak being her forte.