Tagged: holocaust
1960 article about the German “economic miracle” finds anti-Semitism
I’ve been reading U.S. newspaper coverage during the year 1960 of the so-called “German economic miracle”—recovery led by huge American investments & made possible by political “rehabiliation.” Most news articles are glowing. Everyone is happy. This one covers the 20% of Germans who are unhappy about the prosperity, or not...
I was asked to write about Auschwitz in 200 words
I was asked to write 200 words about Auschwitz for some sort of commemoration marking 75 years after liberation. I wrote what is below—actually 267 words. Survivor testimony presents its great challenges, but it is a subjectivity so intensely collective that it makes for a new kind of objectivity. One...
Symposium in memory of Terrence Des Pres — five video clips
The symposium in memoriam Terrence Des Pres at the Kelly Writers House honoredthe 40th anniversary of the publication of his influential study of survivorship and writing (bearing witness), The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps (1976), a major work on Holocaust testimony. Much contemporary scholarly and journalistic...
Representations of the holocaust
Today in “Representations of the Holocaust” we discussed Spiegelman’s Maus and were visited by the family of one of the students (including her survivor grandmother) and also by Diane & Jerry Rothenberg. It was an intense session and ended with Jerry’s preface to Khurbn in which he turns around Adorno’s...
Nabokov’s post-Holocaust story
Currently David Roberts and I are co-leading an online discussion group. We’re discussing two stories; one is Vladimir Nabokov’s “Symbols and Signs,” first published in the New York in May of 1948. I believe this is Nabokov’s post-Holocaust story. I asked the group (80 or so people from around the...
Al Filreis is Kelly Professor, Faculty Director of the Kelly Writers House, Director of the Center
for Programs in Contemporary Writing, Co-Director of PennSound, and Publisher of Jacket2—all at the University of Pennsylvania. Among his books are Secretaries of the Moon,
Wallace Stevens & the Actual World, Modernism from Left to Right, and Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945-60. He is currently writing a book on the art & avant-garde of 1960. He has taught a massive open online course, "
Founder/Faculty Director, 