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Introduction

This chapter argues that the studying the Holocaust is an effective way to teach writing, but not for the reasons that most people imagine. It begins by exploring the concept of the "Americanization of the Holocaust" and traces its origins. After suggesting that writing teachers cannot entirely "Americanize" such a complex event, I describe how the Holocaust could be used in a writing course in which all the students were working on some aspect of a larger topic. I trace the precedents of this practice back to composition theory of the mid-1980s that emphasized the social aspects of writing, especially how academic writing depends on students understanding the conventions of a particular academic discourse community. I then trace Mary Louise Pratt’s notion of the "contact zone" through various articles in composition theory (especially Patricia Bizzell’s), and I argue that the contact zone is a useful metaphor for studying the Holocaust. I conclude the chapter by offering five reasons for why using the topic of Holocaust would be beneficial to the teaching of writing.

Chapter 1: Developing a Rationale for Using the Holocaust as a Topic

This chapter explores several broad issues in Holocaust scholarship and offers some middle-of-the-road positions on them. Writing teachers, it is argued, need to develop their own rationale for why the Holocaust can be used in a writing course. After a brief introductory section where I argue that the Holocaust can be used effectively in the teaching of writing, I discuss the differences between Holocaust and genocide, arguing that the Holocaust is a special case, probably the worst case, of genocide that we know about. I trace the history of the terms "genocide" and "holocaust," summarize scholarship that has tried to distinguish between them, and finally offer a definition of the Holocaust that I will use for the rest of the book.

Chapter 2: The Holocaust in American Culture

This chapter offers an historical look at how the Holocaust was regarded in American culture starting in World War II. Every since 1942, Americans were aware in some way that large numbers of Jews were being put to death, but it wasn’t until the discovery of the terrible concentration camps in 1945 that this act of genocide was widely publicized. I summarize the Nuremberg trails and then examine various events throughout the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s that contributed to American consciousness raising about the Holocaust. I concentrate on the effect of particular publications, such as Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews in 1961 and Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1963; certain movies and television events, such as the television series Holocaust in 1978 and Schindler’s List in 1993; and important political events, such as the Six-Day War in 1967, the establishment of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust in 1978 by President Carter, and President Reagan’s visit to the Kolmeshohe military cemetery at Bitburg in 1985. The purpose of such a survey is to give writing teachers a sense of how popular attitudes toward the Holocaust have developed, so that they might better understand the general conceptions about this event that their students will bring to class. They need to be equipped to deal with the unfortunate fact that "there’s no business like Shoah business": people who generally take little interest in the content of writing courses are likely to become interested once an instructor uses this particular topic. Understanding this history will also equip them to deal with the reaction of colleagues in other departments, other writing teachers, and the general public.

Chapter 3: Students’ Background Knowledge

This chapter describes an informal study I carried out on some University of Idaho freshmen to determine their general knowledge of the Holocaust. From this study and my own experience in teaching these students over several years, I describe the general gaps and misconceptions in their knowledge for which a writing teacher must prepare. Realizing that these students are not representative of all freshmen writing students, I argue that the very provinciality of Idaho students makes them useful for a work like this, for it is likely that students who come from a more varied urban background will be more familiar with Judaism.

This chapter suggests a sequence of material to introduce students to a more serious study of the Holocaust than they have ever undertaken. I offer summaries of the knowledge that students need to acquire before investigating specific works on this subject. This background knowledge falls in three areas: understanding of the history and practices of Judaism, the history of antisemitism from ancient times to the twentieth century, and knowledge of the major events of World War II. I also suggest techniques, films, and books that will help the instructor teach these topics.

Chapter 4: Representation of the Holocaust in a Writing Class

Many commentators have remarked on how the world of the death camp was in many ways an inversion of the "normal" world outside the camps. The actual operation of a death camp would be quite horrible to see if it all could somehow be reenacted for us. Yet it is common to see historical periods reenacted in films and historical novels. Conventional history also attempts to acquaint us with the atmosphere and feeling of past times. One of the best ways to understand an historical period is to watch a well-made movie of that period. To gloss over the details of the death camps can result in students not fully understanding what happened during the Holocaust. This chapter examines in some detail the general problem of representation of the Holocaust and places that discussion within the pedagogical context of the writing class. What other methods besides photographic realism are available to us in our attempt to understand this terrible period? What are the limitations of using graphic materials in a college-level writing class? What effect can some of these materials have on students? Are these effects positive or negative in the long term? This chapter attempts to offer a workable compromise to these difficult questions.

Chapter 5: Exploring the Experience of the Victims of the Holocaust

Understanding the experience of the victims of the Holocaust is crucial to learning about this event. At the same time, teaching this aspect of the Holocaust in isolation can result in some students coming to believe that the victims must have done something that made them deserve their treatment. The common image of all victims being packed into gas chambers dominates the popular imagination, without much understanding of the variety of methods that the Germans used or of how victims arrived at gas chambers in the first place.

The chapter examines three works in detail to demonstrate how some of these questions can be approached in a writing class. One of the most successful texts I have ever used is Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus. The work is very accessible, yet extraordinarily complex when read carefully. The experience of Vladek Spiegelman, the author’s father, is both universal in some ways and atypical in others. Maus has the power to shape students’ perceptions for later material, so the instructor needs to take care to contextualize Vladek Spiegelman’s experience in the Holocaust as a whole. This autobiographical account makes for useful connections with Elie Wiesel’s autobiographical novel Night. Both Maus and Night use minimalist approaches in interesting ways that help students contemplate questions of representation of the past. To give these works more immediacy, I also use excerpts from Claude Lanzmann’s nine-and-a-half-hour documentary Shoah (1985), which consists mostly of extended interviews with survivors. Used judiciously, certain excerpts of Shoah can elicit some careful and sensitive writing from students as they contemplate the depths of the predicament in which many survivors found themselves.

Focusing on survivor stories is necessary to thinking about the experience of the victims, but we need to be aware that most victims did not survive, so that all survivor stories are in many ways atypical. This emphasis is one of the best ways in which students can learn to grasp the full depth of the evil of the Holocaust.

Chapter 6: Examining the Behavior of the Perpetrators of the Holocaust

Holocaust scholarship has recently began to focus on the perpetrators, on trying to understand their motivations and other behavior. After learning about the Holocaust from the point of view of the victims, most students have convinced themselves that the perpetrators consisted primarily of sadistic monsters. Students also tend to accept completely the theory that orders were to be obeyed, and once Hitler (the main instigator of the Holocaust) gave the order, everything else was automatic. Holocaust scholarship has shown how this situation was considerably more complex than this.

In this chapter, I explore in detail Christopher Browning’s influential book, Ordinary Men, which examined the actions of one battalion of "Order Police," the mostly middle-aged soldier/policemen who provided most of the manpower for SS operations in Poland. Browning’s ideas were the main target of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s more sensational study, published last year, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, which attempts to discredit Browning’s main thesis—that the perpetrators were not unusually sadistic or even unusually antisemitic.

Because students usually find themselves wanting to put the evil of the Holocaust into the minds of a few sadistic monsters, they have considerable adjusting to do as they try to take into account Browning’s general thesis: Browning implies that any group of people, including the students themselves, could be trained to kill in a similar way, given the right set of circumstances.

This view can lead into a larger discussion of the human capacity for evil, and of a comparative look at mass killing. This chapter provides some details that attempt to set the Holocaust in the larger context of mass killing in World Wars I and II, with the purpose of showing that even in this context, the Holocaust provides us with what was almost a new type of crime in the twentieth century—the crime against humanity. I suggest various exercises that help students to distinguish between war crimes and crimes against humanity; at the same time, I suggest ideas and sources that can help teachers to problematize these categories for their students so that they might consider the issues raised with more complexity. In this atmosphere, I argue, students are likely to produce more complex writing because they are pushed to examine contradictions in their earlier thinking.

Chapter 7: Examining the Bystanders of the Holocaust

Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah offers many examples of bystanders. Some were literally standing by as they worked on their farms next to the death camps. The fact that so many people were able to watch what happened with apparent indifference or even approval is quite disturbing to many students; this study tends to build empathy for the victims and helps students to understand their plight more fully.

The purpose of this chapter is to explore techniques and materials that bring students to an awareness that the responsibility for the Holocaust extended much farther than the people who carried out the actual killing. After studying the topic in other writing assignments, students will by this point have become aware of the vast amount of organization that it required to murder such a large number of people. There are many examples in Shoah of people who engaged activities that contributed to the Final Solution without themselves having to visit death camps or even see the victims. So the students come to see how the web of responsibility for the Holocaust extends much farther than the SS themselves.

I would hope that students come to see that "desk murderers" were in some cases far more responsible for the murders because they were so successful at creating and maintaining a smoothly functioning bureaucracy. I regard this sort of understanding as crucial in a course whose main purpose is to teach students skills that can be used in other large bureaucracies. The example of the Nazis’ use of language to effect drastic, even murderous change, provides the instructor with an opportunity to explore how rhetorical skills can be misused and how students might identify such misuse. At the same time, I know from experience that young adults have difficulty understanding how an administrator far removed from the killing can contribute to that process, partially because they have a little experience with the inner workings of a bureaucracy. This chapter explores how teachers can use the work of Raul Hilberg, who has described so well the nature of the bureaucratic-administrative "destruction process" (and who also influenced much of Claude Lanzmann’s thinking in Shoah—Hilberg himself is interviewed at several points in that film).

Finally, the chapter summarizes recent scholarship over the role of the U.S. in the Holocaust. The work of Raoul Wallenberg, who probably did more than any one person to save Jews was partially funded by the U.S. War Refugee Board. But many questions remain as to whether the U.S. could have done more. Historian David S. Wyman is the most prominent of the historians who argue that the U.S. could have done much more to allow more immigration of Jews before the war and to save Jews toward the end of the war. Wyman also argues that the bombing of Auschwitz was quite feasible in the summer and fall of 1944. Many of Wyman’s arguments are accepted by other historians, but others are not, particularly the question of the bombing of Auschwitz. This chapter summarizes these controversies and suggests sources that make reasonable topics for students’ research topics.

As students explore how responsibility for the Holocaust widens, they often conclude that really no one can be held responsible. This chapter concludes with a discussion of how to help students realize the dangers of parceling out blame to such an extent that it is so diluted as to be meaningless. Understanding the complexity of a situation need not lead to abandoning of moral principles and judgments altogether.

Chapter 8: Holocaust Denial and the Writing Teacher

Holocaust denial has no intellectual credence in either the United States or Europe. It is even possible that that it receives far more attention than it deserves. Part of the reason for this attention is the concern that young people will be unduly influenced by it and that they will mistake the work of Holocaust deniers for genuine scholarship. There seems little doubt that young people, particularly college students, are the primary targets of deniers, who call themselves "revisionists" in order to mislead the partially educated student.

Students in writing courses are particularly vulnerable to the deniers’ claims because they are often working under tight deadlines without adequate background knowledge about the subject they are exploring. A particular problem is the tendency of some students to believe that the World Wide Web offers reliable information. Teaching the evaluation of sources is an important part of any writing course, and the lack of any filtering process makes the Web especially problematic.

This chapter argues that the problem of Holocaust denial stems from deeper sources: the evaluation of sources in general. There is false or misleading information about almost any topic a student explores, but we are seldom as alarmed over our students’ use of such sources as we are over Holocaust denial. In few cases, though, does misleading or even false information lead to as outrageous or offensive claims as do those of the Holocaust deniers. But these claims are not quite as outrageous as is popularly believed and therein lies their true danger. Our students are not likely to be seriously influenced by the work printed on cheap paper and put out by what are obviously hate groups. But the work of sophisticated Holocaust deniers doesn’t appear that way at all: they typically begin their articles with references to established scholars in the field, knowing that it is by this method that students can be convinced they are dealing with a reliable source. Only later in the article, does the false information appear. Often, it is only the overall thesis or slant of the article that is terribly misleading; most of the individual facts are true.

This chapter suggests several ways of dealing with this problem. The first concentrates on having the students practice evaluating written sources about the Holocaust that are somewhat misleading but are not the work of Holocaust deniers. The autobiography of Rudolf Hoess, the former commandant of Auschwitz, for example, presents a defense of his moral character that students do not find convincing. But the reasons that he would write such a document are nonetheless quite clear. Comparing what a source says to the reader’s own knowledge is the method that most of us rely on in evaluating sources, and this chapter suggests exercises that may help students to do this as well.

Discussing the problem of Holocaust denial in class is also a possibility. I summarize the work of Deborah Lipstadt, who has described in exhaustive detail the methods that Holocaust deniers have used. I recommend that teachers share some of these details with their students, but they should also be aware of the more common claims of the deniers, each of which has its own "scholarly" pedigree. At the same time, teachers need to be aware of how certain ‘facts" about the Holocaust have been shown to be untrue—the making of soap from human bodies, for example—and how repeating such information plays into the hands of the deniers. For introductory writing courses, I recommend that no more attention than this should be given to literature of deniers because the rhetorical problems that are involved can too easily overwhelm the beginning writer.

In advanced courses, however, I argue that it is revealing for students to investigate the rhetoric of the deniers’ works themselves. I examine the claims of the pamphlets published by the Institute for Historical Review, a clearinghouse for deniers’ material, with an eye toward showing how instructors could ask their students to make a similar investigation. The emphasis could be on evaluating how effective the rhetoric in these materials is. Of course the danger is that some students may succumb to the arguments, so powerful is some of their rhetoric. Students need a solid background in Holocaust Studies before proceeding very far with this approach.

Even if teachers do not choose to discuss the work of deniers in class, they need to be familiar with how effective some of these materials can be with students. All of the important pamphlets published by the Institute for Historical Review are available at their web site. The information can pop up in a research paper as a reliable source. I argue that they are many ways to keep this from happening, but I also discuss the limits of how much we can attempt to direct our own students’ research.

Finally, this chapter suggests ways in which writing teachers might initiate discussion or assignments that examine the limits or boundaries that are placed around most scholarly discussion. What is the purpose of these limits? Must they always be seen as repressive, as censorship, or are there acceptable reasons for why most academic conversations have such boundaries? Exploring questions like these can help students understand how scholarly discourse in any field is established and maintained.

Appendix A

Works Cited