The Holocaust

GEST 30214

FULFILLS UNIVERSITY / COLLEGE REQUIREMENTS

Liberal Arts 5 / 6: History (WKHI)

Arts & Letters college Requirement: History

Course Description

In the wake of the Holocaust, the German author Gunther Grass concluded that we now finally knew ourselves. The Holocaust changed everything. Nazi Germany murdered more than six million men, women, and children in a systematic effort to exterminate the Jews of Europe. Its shocking and spectacular barbarism shattered comfortable ideas about European civilization and called into question the essential goodness of humanity. It compelled scholars to search for new ideas about evil, new words like “genocide” simply to place and comprehend the scale of the slaughter and devastation. Politics, art, culture, and even religions would be fundamentally and irrevocably transformed by the Holocaust.

This course will investigate why Nazi Germany attempted to systematically exterminate the Jews of Europe, explore why so many Germans either participated in or accepted this act of mass violence, and consider why other Europeans so often assisted them. It will investigate the legacies of the Holocaust; how survivors and their families attempted to rebuild their lives in the wake of horror, how Germans variously struggled to come to terms with what they, their countrymen, or their ancestors had done, and how various understandings of the Holocaust have shaped political, cultural, and social discourses around the world.

Along the way, students will practice the skills of historical literacy. They will digest, analyze, and criticize scholarship (secondary literature). They will discern the relevance of particular interpretations for important debates. They will use sustained analysis of primary sources to develop, articulate, and defend their own historical interpretations and arguments.