Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness 2008 Conference Programme Session 7

9th Global Conference
Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness

Monday 10th March - Thursday 13th March 2008
Salzburg, Austria

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Conference Programme, Abstracts and Papers

Session 7: Holocaust
Chair: Erin Vallicelli

Vaseline on the Lens: Contemporary Representations of the Holocaust in Children’s Literature
Sue Page
University of South Australia, Australia

Naive protagonists, brave rescuers and survivors abound in the recent surge of Holocaust fiction for young people. While other realistic fiction for young people has become less constrained, more graphic and confronting over the years, most Holocaust literature has taken the opposite route. The depiction of that mid-twentieth century evil has been softened. All authors mediate reality through their writing, but is the soft-focus approach now giving young readers a misleading view of history, one where individual will and a good heart can protect the characters from the evil intent of those in power? The specific targeting of Jewish and Gypsy children for extermination is in sharp contrast with the level of protection now being offered to young readers. Even for adults, separated by more than 60 years from the Nazi era, it still appears impossible to comprehend the scale and motivation for the program of deliberate, mechanised killing of more than 11 million civilians during the Holocaust. The issue of how to inform a less experienced, less knowledgeable audience – children – about such inhumanity is fraught: how do we explain what we struggle to understand ourselves? Some examples from recent books are contrasted with a book first published in 1940, and the questions posed: What responsibilities do authors have to the past, to the future, and to their audience?

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Toying With Auschwitz
Lisa Herman
Institute of Imaginal Studies, Petaluma, CA, USA and Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, Palo Alto, CA, USA

What happens when we learn of an evil event through its images? In a 12-minute talk/music video the presenter explores the experience of engaging the disturbing images of Auschwitz. In the video, Herman speaks of the necessity for remaining engaged with disturbing material. She then enters a liminal musical space to explore the possibilities of finding new methodologies for encountering evil through a post-modern, non-linear inquiry. After a short talk on the affect of the images of others’ experience, she plays with a ‘Jewish’ puppet in a junkyard to a disco song about love. Following the video, in the accompanying paper, she offers the theoretical underpinnings of her research.
Both paper and video address the experience of non-participants in evil events and how, through awareness of affect, we might stay present for evil. We cannot learn about evil events only from linear accounts – on this day this and this happened. Without affect, we will not learn all there is to know and we will not stay interested.
We are affected through the images: the pictures, the movies, the stories themselves. As we become less sensitive to repeated images of horror, we need new forms, through the arts, to re-awaken us to our capacities for wickedness. To stay involved, we need to learn to play with the original images of evil, stay open and express our own experience of encounter. We are not the direct survivors, perpetrators or bystanders. We are our living selves, learning second and third hand, wanting to understand from afar. We are our selves living now, “trying to break through the hate”. Herman and her work struggle for this possibility.

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Profits of the Holocaust
Tanya Parnes
Nova Southeastern University (Fort Lauderdale, Florida), USA

Human atrocities and widespread annihilations are a global phenomenon. Detailed and horrific accounts of evil from genocide victims are widely publicized. Countless investigations, court cases, military trials, official government documents, biographies, journals, photographs and historical films are a few of the methods used to shed light on the evil that has been directed towards targeted populations around the world. The primary focus of this information has often been to give a voice to those who suffered needlessly and to bring to justice those who had committed these terrible crimes against humanity.
This study aims to illuminate a particular aspect of the evil act of genocide that is seldom discussed in purely economic terms. The profits derived from these mass killings often receive extremely inadequate coverage. There are numerous economic gains made during acts of genocide that are seldom explored in depth. This study examines the economic gains extracted from the Holocaust. I will analyze three areas in which the Nazis benefited directly from their victims. First, I will examine the Jewish property and possessions that were confiscated by Nazi authorities. Next, this study will address the gold transactions that took place during the war, specifically between Germany and Switzerland. Third, I will discuss the controversy over the Swiss Bank accounts that were terminated after the war had ended, even though these Jewish accounts had existed in good standing prior to the war. I will argue that the Holocaust, while mainly motivated by Hitler’s political ideology and worldview, may have been driven by the widespread economic and financial interests of those who were involved in its execution.