Evil and Disaster in Art
Index
Introduction.................................................................................................................................................................... 2
Van Alphen, E. (1997) Caught by History. Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art. Introduction................................2
Real and Imaginary Images of Evil...................................................................................................................................2
[no article]................................................................................................................................................................... 2
The Voice of The Victims.................................................................................................................................................2
Lacapra, D. (2001) Writing History, Writing Trauma. Chapter 3: Holocaust Testimonies; Attending to the Victim’s
Voice............................................................................................................................................................................ 2
Smith & Watson (2010) Reading Autobiography. A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Chapter 1 + 2.................3
The Voice of The Perpetrators.........................................................................................................................................5
Video Heinrich Himmler’s Speech at Poznan (Posen)..................................................................................................5
Video (1935) Triumph of the Will.................................................................................................................................5
Video Ein Traum von Afrika – Leni Riefenstahl beim Volk der Nuba im Sudan............................................................5
Video Leni Riefenstahl defending herself in a 1964 interview......................................................................................5
Lacapra, D. (2001) Writing History, Writing Trauma. Chapter 4: Perpetrators and Victims. The Goldhagen Debate
and Beyond..................................................................................................................................................................5
Grossman, V. (1946) The Years of War: The Treblinka Hell..........................................................................................5
Holocaust and Holocaust related Art...............................................................................................................................7
Van Alphen, E. (1997) Caught by History. Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art. Chapter 4: Deadly Historians:
Christian Boltanski’s Intervention in Holocaust Historiography..................................................................................7
Van Alphen, E. (1997) Caught by History. Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art. Chapter 6.....................................8
Art Inspired by Evil?.........................................................................................................................................................8
Metz, C. (2008) ‘Show Me the Shoah!’: Generic Experience and Spectatorship in Popular Representations of the
Holocaust. 16-35.........................................................................................................................................................8
Examples of art inspired by evil...................................................................................................................................9
Islamic State, Artaud and the Theatre of Cruelty............................................................................................................9
Driessen & de Ruiter (2016) Islamic State and the Artaudian Theatre of Cruelty........................................................9
Disaster, Art and Activism.............................................................................................................................................10
Charlesworth (2019) How art deals with disaster, from Guernica to the climate crisis. CNN....................................10
Bloom (2021) The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture and Climate Change. Chapter: At
Memory’s Edge: Climate Trauma in the Arctic through Film.....................................................................................11
Apocalyptic Art..............................................................................................................................................................11
O’Hear (2015) The Apocalypse in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. A Survey of Different Approaches to
Revelation in the Arts and Popular Culture...............................................................................................................11
Disaster and Art as Commemorative Practice...............................................................................................................12
Marsoobian (2020) Breaking the Silence: Memorialization and Cultural Repair in the Aftermath of the Armenian
Genocide.................................................................................................................................................................... 12
, Introduction
Van Alphen, E. (1997) Caught by History. Holocaust Effects in Contemporary
Art. Introduction
The writer was bored with stories about war and death because he felt that he was not allowed to have his own
response to them. His response was already culturally prescribed or narratively programmed (e.g. war is bad and
should never happen again). Another reason for him to hate these frameworks in which the war was shown was the
‘heroism’, e.g. they had ‘won’ the war and put an end to the worst possible inhumanity. The writer did not want to
get involved with the cultural construction of a national, masculine identity. Another reason, the Holocaust remained
isolated fragments in the whole war and did not make sense in the whole.
What makes Holocaust art and literature not modeled on documentary realist genres like testimony/memoir
good, or seen as representable?
For imaginative poetry based on the Holocaust it seems that it usually represents metaphysical despair
or personal sentiment. The representation of these issues is somehow not in conflict with the privileging
of historical discourse with regard to the Holocaust.
Holocaust effect = the viewer is confronted with a representation of the Holocaust and the viewer experiences
directly a certain aspect of the Holocaust or of Nazism which led to the Holocaust. In these moments the Holocaust is
not re-presented, but rather presented or reenacted through a reference to it.
Real and Imaginary Images of Evil
[no article]
The Voice of The Victims
Lacapra, D. (2001) Writing History, Writing Trauma. Chapter 3: Holocaust
Testimonies; Attending to the Victim’s Voice
The interviewer in survivor testimonies is in a position comparable to that of the oral historian. One important role
for testimonies:
To serve as a supplement to more standard documentary sources in history. However, they may be of
limited value when used narrowly to derive facts about events in the past. Historians who see
testimonies as sources of facts or information about the past are justifiably concerned about their
reliability. Testimonies are significant in the attempt to understand experience and its aftermath,
including the role of memory and coming to terms with/denying/repressing the past.
One issue that is raised in accentuated form by the study of survivor videos is how to represent and come to terms
with affect in those who have been victimized and traumatized by their experiences; a problem that involves the
tense relation between procedures of objective reconstruction of the past and emphatic response, especially in the
case of victims and survivors.
Testifying means to some extent, reliving an experience. What is being relived of the past as if it were happening
now in the present, may to a certain extent be (or not be) an accurate reconstruction/representation of what
actually occurred in the past. It may involve distortion, disguise or other permutations relation to processes of
imaginative transformation and narrative shaping.
Traumatic memory may not be subject to controller or conscious recall. It can return in nightmares, flashbacks,
anxiety attacks and other forms of intrusively repetitive behavior. The past can be uncontrollably relived, as if there
were no difference between it and the present.
Angstbereitschaft (Freud) = the readiness to feel anxiety.
In memory as an aspect of working through the past, one is both back there and here at the same time and one is
able to distinguish between the two. This duality of being is essential for memory as a component of working over
and through problems.
2
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