Does suffering bring out the best in people, or the worst? Why/how?
Is it the responsibility of victims to tell their story, and if so, why?
Why is the Holocaust such a big deal to Americans? (Why so many movies, etc. etc.)
Is there a way to remember things that isn't "sentimental"? How?
Are some events impossible to tell/represent? If so, how do you represent them?
Reminder: post your group's response here if we didn't get a chance to talk about it yet
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I will notify you of your conference time as soon as everyone signs up. For those who are doing Monday/Tuesday conferences, your prospectus is due Sunday night at 9:00 p.m. and I will notify you of the time, probably tomorrow.
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Alexa, Annie, Lorena, Mark, Rosaline*
ReplyDeleteI'm not so sure if what we posted was supposed to be in detail; but here are the ideas we came up with while we were brainstorming.
-Does suffering bring out the best in people, or the worst?
[Best]
-selflessness; you are more sympathetic to others’ situations
-change perspectives; you dont take certain things for granted
-Ghandi; made himself suffer to achieve the goals he wanted
-children; you sacrifice for them
-help others through experiences
[Worst]
-Batman; superheroes in general = suffering but still try to help and villains seek revenge
-internalizing the pain
-makes them depressed, suicidal, everyone around them suffers
-selfish; want to soak in as much as they can because they realize they'll only be here for a litle while and want to do everything for themselves
Why is the Holocaust such a big deal to Americans? (Why so many movies, etc. etc.)
ReplyDelete1. Basically, as Americans, we like to be the humanitarian. The Holocaust was something terrible that we didn't cause, and that we tried to help. It's sort of like glorifying ourselves, by downgrading other places.
2. Many of the people who escaped came to America. Many wanted to tell their story. It's a means of appealing to those who were affected, because a great many were.
3. Because when something SO terrible happens, people are curious about it. What drives a person to commit such an act? It's inconceivable. Human nature makes us dwell on this horrific event because we just can't understand why someone would do such a thing. If it makes sense, it's kind of like when you see a car crash. It's terrible, but you can't help craning your neck as you drive by to check it out.
Is there a way to remember things that isn't "sentimental"? How?
ReplyDeleteWe talked about how Kluger began thinking about her father's death in the gas chambers as poetic, like drowning in an ocean, and then realized that it was not accurate. Her father did not grasp for air in an every ocean. He had poisonous gas surrounding him and he may have crawled on top of children and women to try to save himself. Later on, she finds out that he may have not even died in the gas chamber. We discussed that sometimes when people die, we sugar-coat the memories that we had with them because we want to honor the decesed. It is all too easy to remember the past with a rosy tint to it and memory is not a completely accurate recorder. Maybe in some cases, we may remember some situations without sentimentality, however, because our memory is so closely tied to our emotion, it is almost impossible to guarantee.
I'm trying to decode the Batman notes. Do you mean that Batman's suffering (the death of his parents) hasn't really made him "better," but instead just given him a kind of deep neurosis that he channels into his "violence for the sake of justice"? That was certainly the Joker's assertion in the last movie. (Recall also the Joker's many versions of stories about his own suffering and its formative effect.) In any case, I think Kluger might see it that way... she would see Batman as a ridiculous masculine idea... pretty much a Fascist. Notice how she criticizes Israeli militarism, criticizes the idea that the way for Jews to remember the Holocaust is to become "tougher."
ReplyDeleteAs to Americans and the Holocaust, I agree with #1... you're saying that the main image here is of Americans as liberators. It's what props up the whole idea of The Good War. I actually think that they knew very little about the concentration camps at the time, and that it wasn't one of their major strategic goals or motives. #2 is definitely true... you have to understand that most of the Jews in the world were living in Europe prior to the 1930s. Then 6 million, or about a third of them were murdered. About a third wound up in the U.S., most of the rest in the new nation of Israel... although a lot also went to Latin America. And as for Hollywood, you of course have many prominent directors and producers like Spielberg who are trying to deal with their own inheritance as Jews. #3 is true, but you're generalizing too much. You might ask whether Americans in particular are fascinated with that type of evil because they either wonder whether they are capable of it, or want to show what about them specially exempts them from it. The connection between the black civil rights movement and the Jewish community in the 1950s was no accident. I also want to submit that the Holocaust is a big deal because IT HAPPENED IN EUROPE. We seem to be less concerned with, say, Rwandans killing each other. The Holocaust is proof that barbarous cruelty can occur in a highly developed civilization. (Imagine what Gandhi thought of it. And imagine what the British and French said... they said it was because Germans were backward and primitive.) Again, I think this was Hart's idea in emphasizing Kluger's Vienna setting.
As to sentimentality... I had a revelation in reading the second half of the book today. Perhaps this is obvious and you noticed it too. But doesn't it seem that Kluger believes that literature, writing, is much less prone to sentimentality than the visual images we get in museums and movies? Perhaps it's because she sees visual images as a false attempt to convey immediacy and presence, whereas she sees writing, especially poetry, as a way of recording absence or displacement. I'll bring this up in class on Monday.
ReplyDelete