HEGRTVF22U FÆL 4 EU+ course Jewish Identity and Memory in European Literature and Culture (Elective MA/BA)

This course part of a 4EU+ project on Jews in Europe. It includes the possibility for a field trip to Milano or Warszawa.

Course description

This course Jewish Identity and Memory in European Literature and Culture is concerned with the significant impact, which the Holocaust and displacement has had on literature from 1945 until today. In the first lections, we will study literature by eyewitnesses, investigate the question of actual witnessing and the impact, which the Holocaust has had on different author’s perception of Judaism. We will read excerpts of texts by Primo, Levi, Ruth Klüger and Charlotte Delbo.

In the second part of the course, we will turn our attention towards literature by Jewish authors from the second and third generation. Working with the concept of postmemory, we will investigate a transnational tendency in Jewish literature to express the former generation’s traumatic experiences alongside with negotiating their Jewish origin and the question which meaning Judaism possibly can have for them today. This part of the course includes an American Holocaust Comic by Art Spiegelmann, touches upon the displacement of Sephardic Jews to France in a short story by Barbara Honigmann, and Russian-Jewish migrant literature by Olga Grjasnowa and Katja Petrowskaja.

Mobility

The readings will form the starting point for a fieldwork that will be carried out in Milano, Denmark or Warszawa in which we will talk to representatives of the Jewish community or Jewish activists and ask questions like how it is to live as a Jew today, how they would define their Jewish Identity, and what they think about the need or danger of assimilation.