Humanities Seminars Course: The Holocaust in History and Memory

Tuesday, September 29, 2015 - 10:00am to Tuesday, December 15, 2015 - 12:00pm
Rubel Room, Poetry Center 1508 E. Helen Street Tucson, AZ 85721
TUESDAYS 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. September 29 - December 15, 2015. No class on November 10 and November 24, 2015. Register here.

Tuition: $150

This course addresses the twentieth-century genocide that was the Holocaust, the attempted annihilation of European Jews and other designated racial and political opponents led by the Third Reich in Germany. We will review the horrific events of the Holocaust and explore the current scholarly understanding of this history: What does it mean to remember the Holocaust today?

The Holocaust continues to be relevant, and not only for surviving victims and perpetrators. We will consider how and why the Holocaust has been remembered in the United States and abroad, whether in museums and schools or popular culture and the Internet. We will also discuss in particular how visual evidence of atrocities has been circulated to provide testimony and promote popular awareness of the crime of genocide.

Required Reading: 

Friedlander, Saul. Nazi Germany and the Jews: Volume 1: The Years of Persecution 1933-1939. Harper Perennial, 1998. ISBN-10: 0060928786.

---. Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945: The Years of Extermination.Harper Perennial, 2008. ISBN-10: 0060930489.

Spiegelman, Art. The Complete Maus. 25th Anniversary Edition. Pantheon, 1996. ISBN-10: 0679406417.

SUSAN A. CRANE is Associate Professor of Modern European History at the University of Arizona. She is the author of Collecting and Historical Consciousness in Early 19th-Century Germany and editor of Museums and Memory, and has published many articles on historical consciousness and the use of historical photographs. Her current work is "...and then Nothing Happened: A Short History of Nothing."