Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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Item "Schweigen als Herausforderung": Silence as a Generational Challenge in the Post Holocaust Works of East German Jewish Authors Jurek Becker and Barbara Honigmann(2020) McDaniel, Jocelyn; Beicken, Peter; Germanic Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines how two postwar Jewish writers from the former German Democratic Republic, Jurek Becker, a child survivor of the Holocaust, and Barbara Honigmann, a descendent of returned Jewish communist emigres and a second-generation writer, depicted and challenged a culture of silence, “Schweigen,” concerning Holocaust memory and Jewish identity in postwar Germanophone societies. This study emphasizes the unique East German context that influenced both authors. “Schweigen” is defined as a societal phenomenon of binary emotional trauma. Facing the inevitable "Schuldfrage" (Jaspers, 1946), many postwar Germans found it arduous to come to terms with the inhumanity of the Third Reich, while many Jewish victims suffered from the shame of survival. In the GDR, “Schweigen” was compounded by the state’s propagation of antifascism and a prescriptive cultural heritage, Kulturerbe, encompassing the abdication of guilt from the fascist past, the minimization of Jewish victimhood, and misappropriation of Holocaust memory. Becker and Honigmann, whose parents were victimized by the Third Reich, grew up in the GDR, a communist state. Foremost, their family backgrounds, generational attitudes, and perceptions of East German socialism shaped their contrasting writings concerning the cultural silencing of Holocaust memory and complexity of Jewish identity. Literary trauma theory, memory studies, and gender studies bring these (dis)continuities into focus. Five chapters are devoted to the authors’ development in the GDR and their literary responses to “Schweigen” within the limitations of East German cultural heritage. Both oeuvres are therapeutic undertakings impacted by experienced and inherited Holocaust-trauma. The analyses of Becker's life and his novels, Jakob der Lügner, Der Boxer, and Bronsteins Kinder, reveal his adoption of the humanist tradition of socialism that stands against the dangers of fascism, while dissenting from the GDR’s official cultural doctrine. In life and writing, Honigmann forsakes East German Kulturerbe by recreating her own German Jewish identity and cultural heritage. Her autofictive works reject communism and the generational assimilation of her family in favor of Jewish spirituality, feminist assertions, and multiculturalism. The comparison of both authors and their Holocaust-relevant writings likewise endeavors to counter the dual waning of Holocaust memory and East German national memory.Item DARK MIRROR: HETEROTOPIA, UTOPIA, AND THE EXTERMINATION CAMPS OF OPERATION REINHARD(2019) Wanenchak, Sarah; Korzeniewicz, Roberto P; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In Michel Foucault's body of work, the notion of heterotopia stands out as both particularly intriguing and particularly underdeveloped. Introduced in the introduction of The Order of Things (first published 1966) and further described in the lecture “Of Other Spaces” (1967), heterotopia has been used by scholars in a variety of fields, from social theory to architecture. Of special interest is the way Foucault describes the relationship between heterotopia and utopia, one defined by its liminal nature and the other by its unreality. This work seeks to shed new light on that relationship, by focusing on heterotopias as threshold spaces between the real social world and the perfected but unreal world to come. I approach the concept of utopia with an eye toward its eliminationist implications, and use three extermination camps established as part of the Nazi regime’s Operation Reinhard as cases through which to explore significant features of a heterotopia, how those features manifest in these cases, and what connects these spaces to the world that can be glimpsed in the mirror they create. Although I primarily use historical cases as a way to expand existing theory, I aim to build upon that expansion by pointing the way toward the development of new theoretical tools for historical-comparative analysis of spaces of both extermination and detention. Finally, I suggest that work might be done focusing on embodied identities as themselves forms of heterotopia, which introduces possibilities for additional analysis of the roles of bodies and identity in cases of certain kinds of mass violence and death.Item Voices from the Holocaust, Remembered: Selected Works for Cello(2018) Jones, Molly; Kutz, Eric; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)During the Holocaust, many prominent Jewish composers’ lives and careers were cut short in their prime. Their music was banned and they had to abandon their homes and emigrate in order to survive. Tragically, many were shipped off to concentration camps where they were murdered. These composers were stripped of all possible advantages. As a result, their music often fell into obscurity. I chose to explore the lives and works of six of these composers: Hans Gál, Hans Krása, Gideon Klein, Erwin Schulhoff, James Simon, and Alexander Zemlinsky. Through my dissertation, I hope to promote their compelling music and bring some measure of justice to the tragedy of lives and careers cut short by the Holocaust.Item KNOWING THE ENEMY: NAZI FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE IN WAR, HOLOCAUST, AND POSTWAR(2016) Hutchinson, Robert; Herf, Jeffrey; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Knowing the Enemy: Nazi Foreign Intelligence in War, Holocaust and Postwar,” reveals the importance of ideologically-driven foreign intelligence reporting in the wartime radicalization of the Nazi dictatorship, and the continued prominence of Nazi discourses in postwar reports from German intelligence officers working with the U.S. Army and West German Federal Intelligence Service after 1945. For this project, I conducted extensive archival research in Germany and the United States, particularly in overlooked and files pertaining to the wartime activities of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, Abwehr, Fremde Heere Ost, Auswärtiges Amt, and German General Staff, and the recently declassified intelligence files pertaining to the postwar activities of the Gehlen Organization, Bundesnachrichtendienst, and Foreign Military Studies Program. Applying the technique of close textual analysis to the underutilized intelligence reports themselves, I discovered that wartime German intelligence officials in military, civil service, and Party institutions all lent the appearance of professional objectivity to the racist and conspiratorial foreign policy beliefs held in the highest echelons of the Nazi dictatorship. The German foreign intelligence services’ often erroneous reporting on Great Britain, the Soviet Union, the United States, and international Jewry simultaneously figured in the radicalization of the regime’s military and anti-Jewish policies and served to confirm the ideological preconceptions of Hitler and his most loyal followers. After 1945, many of these same figures found employment with the Cold War West, using their “expertise” in Soviet affairs to advise the West German Government, U.S. Military, and CIA on Russian military and political matters. I chart considerable continuities in personnel and ideas from the wartime intelligence organizations into postwar West German and American intelligence institutions, as later reporting on the Soviet Union continued to reproduce the flawed wartime tropes of innate Russian military and racial inferiority.Item "An Uncertain Life in Another World": German and Austrian Jewish Refugee Life in Shanghai, 1938-1950(2014) Hyman, Elizabeth Rebecca; Rozenblit, Marsha; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Between 1938 and 1941, 20,000 Eastern and Central European Jews fled to Shanghai. Through a close examination or memoirs and oral histories, I argue that the manner in which the refugees experiences the approximately twelve years (1938-1950) they spent in Shanghai was informed by their nationality, gender, and age. Further, I argue that the twelve years they spent in Shanghai eroded the refugee's behavioral, material, and emotional connections to their old lives in Germany and Austria until all they had left was language and memories.Item Virtual Legacies: Genealogy, the Internet, and Jewish Identity(2012) Jablon, Rachel Leah; Jelen, Sheila; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)As Jewish identities become more hybridized in what Manuel Castells calls a "network society," genealogical research intensifies the questioning of how Jews identify and who identifies as Jewish. Jewish identities based on relation, location, and devastation develop out of genealogical research, especially when networks such as the internet increase access to information and communities of other researchers. Mining the internet for genealogical information and searching for heritage only add to the possibilities of Jewish identity, revealing Jewish kin, connections to a particular place, or the tragedy of the Holocaust--evidence of the ways in which the World Wide Web changes Jewish identity formation. The internet is a virtual gathering place for the commemoration and study of Jewish life and culture, even as its use challenges conventional modes of Jewish community and identity formation. Through its treatment of the internet and Jewish identity, this dissertation explores new media and their cultural impact, arguing that new media enable penetrable and osmotic identities instead of reifying delimited parameters. Using Marianne Hirsch's "postmemory," Hayden White's "emplotment," Vivian M. Patraka's "goneness," and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett's "hereness" as critical lenses through which to view Jewish genealogical Web sites, I show how the narratives on Jewish genealogical research Web sites, cyber-shtetls, and personal genealogy Web sites and blogs reveal constructions of Jewish identity that have never before been articulated as viable options for forming Jewish communities. Jewish communities of relation, location, and devastation may resemble other Jewish communities, but they are unique in that they are virtual--their homes are online. The narratives found on each genre of Web site are functions of postmemory, in that they are the results of family lore, emplotted in order to tell coherent family histories. The "hereness" of postmemory confronts the "goneness" of much of the lives and times that compose Jewish culture, allowing for the creativity that emplotment requires. When Jewish genealogists search for their heritage online, they encounter communities of other genealogists who are just as eagerly emplotting their own genealogical narratives.