ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

What is the portrait of the human (and inhuman) that may be drawn from the Holocaust? How did the pseudo-science of Nazi eugenics redefine not only the human, but man’s other self? How did the Nazi perversion of Darwin and Spengler in order to create the Aryan ideal disturb the human sense of balance? Did the Nazis use Nietzsche’s superman or reinvent him? and for whom, the captor or the slave? How did Nazi euphemisms distort the language, the people to whom these euphemisms were applied, and the people who applied them, when dead people became no more than a “schmattes” (rags) and the prospective death of millions a “final solution”? Can the experience of the camp inmate in good conscience be spoken of in the same terms as the journey of the hero, as Primo Levi would have it, without doing permanent damage to the human spirit? Do we turn this crime “against humanity” into a crime “of humanity” when we attempt to study and understand those who perpetrated the Holocaust, as Claude Lanzmann states? How is it that such horror could produce such beauty as Celan’s “Todesfugue” and art of the caliber of Imre Kertesz Fateless without creating absolute revulsion of the artist and reader for their own carnivorous and cannibalistic appetites? Papers addressing these and other questions of what the Holocaust has done to and for the human being are presented.

Friday, March 24

Melanie Steiner, Cornell University
“The Reduction and the Ruin of the Human: Jean Amery, the Experience of Torture, and the Holocaust”
Phyllis Lassner, Northwestern University
“The Erotics of Auschwitz”
Lillian Corti, University of Alaska, Fairbanks
“The Witchcraze and the Holocaust in Maryse Conde’s ‘I Tituba, Black Witch of Salem’”
Jennifer Taylor, College of William and Mary
“Reading Holocaust Fiction at the End of the Twentieth Century: ‘Jakob the Liar’ and ‘Life is Beautiful’”

Saturday, March 25

Ferzina Banaji, University of Cambridge
“Ethical Images: A Levinasian Reading of Alain Resnais’ ‘Nuit et Brouillard’”
Steven Sage, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
“Ibsen, Hitler, and the Germ of the Final Solution”
Donna Coffey, Reinhardt College
“The Pastoral and Holocaust Poetry”
Seth Myers, University of Alaska, Fairbanks
“The Impossibility of Understanding: Metalepsis in Imre Kertsz’s ‘Fateless’”