Introduction

The Holocaust is probably the most disturbing sequence of events in modern history.  Many historians regard it as unique:  the worst example of how a government could plan to annihilate an entire ethnic group not for what they had done, but for who they were.  It is an extremely shocking and morbid story that evokes pity, anger, disgust, and revulsion.  At the same time, the history of the Holocaust contains examples of extreme heroism and self-sacrifice.   The Holocaust has been intensively studied, and it has had a profound influence on popular culture.  Dramatizations of past events, documentaries, and other materials are easy to find.  The topic engages and sustains students’ attention; it gives students a chance to become seriously involved in complex moral and historical issues.  Studying this topic demonstrates to students how serious, sustained inquiry can reveal facts, attitudes, and opinions that will shape their personal intellectual landscape.  It is the thesis of this book that studying the Holocaust is a powerful means for teaching academic writing.

Using the topic of the Holocaust enables writing teachers to develop writing assignments that require students to practice the conventions of academic discourse at the same time that they analyze serious moral and ethical dilemmas.  By considering these dilemmas from a rhetorical perspective, teachers can avoid transforming their course into history courses masquerading as writing courses.  The Holocaust is more than an “historical event”: its horror is so awful and its moral consequences so far reaching that historical analysis is just one of many possible responses, albeit one of the most important.

It is not hard to argue that the Holocaust is worth studying in its own right.  Its unspeakable horror demands that we examine it, not simply to keep history from repeating itself, but to understand our past, the full nature of our human condition.  To feel personally disgusted with aspects of this topic is an insufficient reason to avoid it.  Yet many people do ignore the significance of the fact that places like Auschwitz or Treblinka existed and operated in the way that they did.  And the exact significance of these places and events is still a matter of considerable debate among historians and moralists.[1]  Significant questions in Holocaust Studies include the issues of whether the Holocaust is unique, when or even if the Nazi leadership deliberately planned from the beginning whether to carry out the Final Solution, and what the motivations of the perpetrators could be.  Apart from these issues, though, the question naturally arises whether the study of the Holocaust is appropriate for a college writing course.

The answer is bound up in what we expect to happen in such a course.  Naturally, we hope that our students will learn to use the conventions of academic writing.  But most writing instructors have more ambitious goals.  We sometimes organize our courses around the study of cultural criticism and ask our students to examine how various powerful forces, undergirded by the prevailing ideology, come to shape successful rhetoric.  Or a writing course may explore the history of rhetoric in an attempt to get students to capture what are sometimes assumed to be eternal principles.  In contrast, students may be asked to consider how rhetoric is changing and what techniques and principles are the most effective with the audiences they are likely to encounter.  We almost always emphasize the practice of sound research, and most assignments are designed to give students practice in carrying out research on a complex topic and learning to balance the conflicting viewpoints.  And we usually expect that students will develop a more sophisticated attitude and more skillful methods in examining and elucidating issues that have significant intellectual content.  We often hope that students will show an ability to handle issues in writing of ethical and moral complexity.  In first-year writing courses, a very common and important goal is to teach students to represent fairly and completely points of view with which they do not personally agree.

All of these aims can be achieved by methods other than studying the Holocaust.  Obviously, people learn to write in a wide variety of ways.  But the topic of the Holocaust offers abundant examples that demand a high degree of ethical and moral complexity.  At the same time, because the events took place over 50 years ago on a different continent, the topic affords most students a certain distance that can be very helpful in developing enough detachment to be able to learn how to write about the topic critically.  The Holocaust has also been very well studied and holds a significant place in popular culture.  A great deal of material about the Holocaust is readily accessible in libraries and video stores.  Although the event appears at first to be comprised of black and white issues, a closer study of the topic reveals many shades of gray.  By studying these gray areas, students are placed in a situation that requires some of the more difficult writing tasks.  The serious study of the Holocaust is filled with legitimate questions of interpretation, worthy of exploration in their own right, but the entire question of what makes an issue legitimate in the first place is also open for students, through an examination of what is wrong with the arguments offered by Holocaust deniers.  Finally, the Holocaust offers one of the most chilling examples of how language can be corrupted and debased in order to serve murderous ends; students can learn the difference between rhetoric that is honest and rhetoric used to deceive not just its audience but its creators.

I have used the Holocaust as a topic in five different courses over the past ten years.  Three of these have been writing courses: a first-year course, an intermediate-level course, and an advanced course.  The fourth course was an Honors seminar entitled “Cultural, Ethical, and Historical Legacies of the Holocaust”; and the fifth was a graduate course for high school teachers, “The Holocaust as a Topic in the Teaching of Writing and Literature.”  All these courses were taught at the University of Idaho, in a region of the country that has a very low Jewish population.  Many of my students have never had a Jewish friend or acquaintance; only one of my students was Jewish.  Consequently, learning about the Holocaust for them also involves an introduction to Judaism as a religion and a culture.  None of them has ever professed to being a Holocaust denier.

Anyone who uses this topic in a writing course, which has as its main purpose something other than teaching a particular segment of our past, needs to have a well-formed rationale for doing so.  In the next section of this chapter, I offer such a rationale as I explore in more detail why the Holocaust is especially well suited for the teaching of writing.

When I first started using the Holocaust in my writing courses, friends and colleagues would often remark that they thought it was “very important” that students study this topic.  Their reasons for believing this turn out to be rather different from how I have come to feel now.  One of the more common reasons is that “so that the Holocaust will never happen again.” As the examples of Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bosnia have shown, this hope has not come to pass.[2] 

Another reason is so that students can learn the “lessons” of the Holocaust.  While I certainly hope that students can learn something from the experience, I am repelled at the idea that the Holocaust has “lessons.”[3]  Too often people find a redemptive quality to the suffering that the victims underwent, or they cast the story as evidence that some good always comes out of evil, as the admiration we might have for the heroism of the victims or even grateful appreciation for the founding of the Israel.  As Michael Berenbaum explains in the “Afterword” to the book that accompanies the exhibits of the Holocaust museum, “the central theme of the story of the Holocaust is not regeneration and rebirth, goodness or resistance, liberation or justice, but death and destruction, dehumanization and devastation, and, above all, loss” (220).  There are many good reasons for studying the Holocaust in a writing course, but they are not the reasons that many people at first suppose.

Many writing teachers would question whether it is even desirable for the instructor to select a single large topic; it is common for students in writing courses to explore a number of different topics in a semester.  In many classes, students may each write about different topics—usually selected by the students themselves.  One common method, which I myself have used, is to ask the students to explore some issue that is related to their academic major.  Most of us do not simply lecture our students about various general principles of writing research papers and then sit back and wait to see what sorts of papers the students turn in.  Generally, we monitor the students’ selection of topics quite carefully, often holding several individual conferences with each student well in advance of the due date of the paper.  The primary purpose of such a conference is to listen to the student describe the topic and general approaches to it, as well as guide the student in this process.  As the students carry out their research, we expect them to turn in evidence of this process.  For example, students may be required to write a prospectus of their paper, summaries of some of their most important sources, or an annotated bibliography.  My role as teacher has often been to urge them to complicate the topic, to sharpen the rhetorical edge so that the overall purpose of the paper goes beyond reporting a set of facts to advancing a thesis or providing a more complex rhetorical purpose.[4]  This method of teaching writing can be successful and probably comes closer to the norm than what I am about to propose.

One problem with the approach described above is that after a certain point in the course, all the students are working on a different topic.  In an effort to encourage students to become better readers of developing prose and also to lessen the burden of reading so much writing, I often require my students to read each other’s writing in conference groups, especially as the papers are in rough draft form.  Students often have difficulty assessing each other’s papers, especially when they are exploring more complex issues, because they are not familiar with the general topic that the others are pursuing.  One argument in favor of this practice is that it is the writer’s responsibility to be able to explain his or her topic to his or her readers.  But even so, I find that this can reduce the intellectual depth that students attempt in their writing.

An alternative approach is to have students all work on the same general topic and to write papers that use the same general sources.  Students then exercise their individual preferences in the particular topics and approaches of their own papers.  As a class, we begin by all reading the same texts.  When students write their longer research topics, though, they pursue sub-topics and readings that are based on these common texts.  The result is a class that functions more as a community of writers, each of whom is trying to explain something specific to an audience that is already somewhat knowledgeable and interested in the general topic.  This situation more closely approximates the ideal rhetorical setting in an academic environment.[5]  It is this sort of teaching environment I have in mind when I say that the Holocaust is a powerful means for teaching academic writing.

Precedents in Composition Practice and Theory

This community-of-writers approach to writing was put forward in the mid-1980s by James A. Reither as he called for a broader definition of the writing process as it was then understood.  Reither was criticizing the process model then in vogue:

. . . we proceed as if students come to us already widely-experienced widely-read, well-informed beings who need only learn how to do the kinds of thinking that will enable them to probe their [own] experience and knowledge. . . .   We teach them to look heuristically into their own hearts, experiences, long-term memories, information-and-idea banks to discover what they have to say on the assigned or chosen subject.  (622)

Such assumptions falsely lead us to believe that “composing can be learned and done outside of full participation in the knowledge/discourse communities that motivate writing,” which is not the way experienced writers approach their tasks.  To put students in more realistic writing situations, Reither advocated that students be immersed in real academic inquiry.  The students would “write not merely for their teacher, but for themselves and for each other” (625).

Reither was influenced in part by Kenneth A. Bruffee’s call for collaborative learning, made most famously in his 1984 article, “Collaborative Learning and the ‘Conversation of Mankind,’” in which he argued that collaborative learning was particularly important in the teaching of writing because it encouraged students to see their writing as an extended conversation, part of a larger conversation.[6]  Bruffee’s model of collaborative learning was challenged by Greg Myers on the basis that Bruffee failed to take into account the large role that social and economic factors play in the formation of consensus; some “bodies of knowledge cannot be resolved into a consensus without one side losing something” (166-67).  Neverthless, Bruffee’s call for collaboration was extremely influential in composition studies, even as other scholars recognized that consensus building may result in overwhelming minority voices in the classroom.[7]  Bruffee, Reither, and Myers were all part of a larger movement in the teaching of writing that sought to emphasize the social over the individual.

At the same time this view was given even wider implications in David Bartholomae’s classic essay, “Inventing the University” (1985), in which he identified the problem that students face as they write in academic settings:

Every time a student sits down to write for us, he has to invent the university for the occasion—invent the university, that is, or a branch of it, like history or anthropology or economics or English.  The student has to learn to speak our language, to speak as we do, to try on the peculiar ways of knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding, and arguing that define the discourse of our community. . . . The student has to appropriate (or be appropriated by) a specialized discourse, and he has to do this as though he were easily and comfortably one with his audience, as though he were a member of the academy or an historian or an anthropologist or an economist; he has to invent the university by assembling and mimicking its language while finding somecompromise between idiosyncrasy, a personal history, on the one hand, and the requirements of convention, the history of a discipline, on the other hand.  He must learn to speak our language.  Or he must dare to speak it or to carry off the bluff, since speaking and writing will most certainly be required long before the skill is “learned.”  (589-90)

Of course students have some difficulty doing this.  And writing teachers won’t be helping them, Bartholomae implies, if they conceive of their task as the correcting of a student’s grammar and punctuation.  Instead, writing instruction should offer “a place to begin”—a place where students can begin the difficult process of learning to speak, think, and write using the conventions of a new community.  The central task of writing teachers should be to initiate students into the conventions of academic discourse; students already realize that there are discourse communities out there that they need to join.  Their problem is “the problem of establishing authority, of defining rhetorically or stylistically a position from which one may speak” (611).

Throughout his essay, Bartholomae acknowledged his indebtedness to Patricia Bizzell, who in a series of articles had already argued for an increased emphasis on the teaching of the conventions of literary discourse.[8]  More recently, Bizzell has also been concerned with the topics that students write about: 

The selection of materials now for the typical composition course might almost be called defiantly random.  It has tended to begin from the teacher’s choice of a topic she thinks her students will want to write about, such as “childhood,” and then the collection of readings on this topic selected because they are moving; because they present varied ethnic, social-class, and gender perspectives; because they are the teacher’s personal favorites; and so on” (“The Teacher’s Authority” 199)

Bizzell goes on in this article to advocate that course materials center on contentious periods in American history.  She argues elsewhere that these sorts of assignments make it possible for the teacher to teach using the “rhetoric of authority,” which involves telling students at the outset what one’s ideological perspective is and then seeking to persuade students by developing an “authority that is derived from ideologies that already have some currency in the community” (“Beyond Anti-Foundationalism” 273).[9] 

In a short, but influential opinion piece, Bizzell enlarges on the issue of topic selection and argues that the boundaries in all areas of literary studies could be redrawn so that the different world literatures written in English “come into productive dialogue with one another.”  To do this, Bizzell uses Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of the “contact zone”:  Pratt says that she used the “term to refer to social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today” (34).  As her main example, Pratt offers a partial analysis of a 1200-page letter written in a mixture of Spanish and Quechua (the official language of the Incas) by an educated Andean in 1613.  The letter parodies both Spanish history and the genre of writing that the Spanish used to describe their American conquests; it offers a Christian view of the world from the perspective of the Andeans and a critique of the sort of government that the Spanish imposed upon the Andeans.  Pratt uses this example to illustrate the kind of writing that might characterize the contact zone, as well as its “perils”: “miscomprehension, incomprehension, dead letters, unread masterpieces, absolute heterogeneity of meaning” (37).  Bizzell argues that “the United States is another such contact zone, or more precisely, a congeries of overlapping contact zones, considered from the first massive immigration of Europeans in the seventeenth century up to the present day” (166); in her textbook Negotiating Difference (1996), she focuses on six periods from the time of English colonization up to the Vietnam War (including a unit on the internment of the Japanese-Americans during World War II).

Bizzell sees the value of the “contact zone” concept as supplying a unifying principle on how to organize the curriculum of both writing and literature classes. Pratt is interested in the nature of texts produced by historical periods that could be considered contact zones because she sees all these sorts of texts being produced and reproduced “in the transnationalized metropolis of the United States” today (37).  The different cultural histories that make up America today form the curriculum of a course taught at her home institution, Stanford, entitled Cultures, Ideas, Values.  Pratt reports that this course itself is “not like a homogeneous community or a horizontal alliance but like a contact zone” (39).  It was impossible for anyone involved in this course—instructors and students—to see the activity of the course as consensus building:

The very nature of the course put ideas and identities on the line.  All the students in the class had the experience, for example, of hearing their culture discussed and objectified in ways that horrified them; all the students saw their roots traced back to legacies of both glory and shame; all the students experienced face-to-face the ignorance and incomprehension, and occasionally the hostility, of others.  In the absence of community values and the hope of synthesis, it was easy to forget the positives; the fact, for instance, that kinds of marginalization once taken for granted were gone.  Virtually every student was having the experience of seeing the world described with him or her in it.  Along with rage, incomprehension, and pain, there were exhilarating moments of wonder and revelation, mutual understanding, and new wisdom—the joys of the contact zone.  The sufferings and revelations were, at different moments to be sure, experienced by every student.  No one was excluded, and no one was safe.  (39)

Although this sounds like a hearty endorsement for the approach, Pratt acknowledges its weaknesses.  It is important for students and teachers to have “safe houses,” a term she uses “to refer to social and intellectual spaces where groups can constitute themselves as horizontal, homogeneous, sovereign communities with high degrees of trust, shared understandings, temporary protection from legacies of oppression.”  Furthermore, she argues, multicultural courses should not be expected to replace ethnic or women’s studies courses.  She writes that “groups need places for healing and mutual recognition, safe houses in which to construct shared understandings, knowledges, claims on the world that they can then bring into the contact zone” (40).

In arguing for using the Holocaust as a topic in writing courses, I suggest yet another application of the concept of the contact zone.  Certainly, the Holocaust can be seen as a contact zone itself: it took place in a context “of highly asymmetrical relations of power,” and we are still trying to deal with its aftermath.  In one respect, it was quite different from the contact zones that both Pratt and Bizzell consider, because it lasted only 12 years.  But the “contact zone” itself—the period in which Jews were in conflict with the surrounding culture—was much longer, extending back as far as the dawn of Christianity.  European antisemitism took a number of forms, culminating in one society with the Final Solution.  In addition to the coming to power of the Nazis with their radical ideology of race, the causes of the Holocaust included an intensification of antisemitism, brought about in part by the threat posed by the assimilation and success of a relatively small number of Jews.  Another problem with using the term “contact zone” to describe the Holocaust is that it seems such an understatement for describing the complete annihilation of a people.  Yet, at Pratt notes, in the early 17th century, the Spanish “were decimating the population of the Andes at a genocidal rate” (35).

Should the classroom itself become a contact zone?  Several other writers besides Pratt and Bizzell seem to think so.[10]  But is it the most appropriate way for students to learn how to write?  It makes more sense to argue that, initially at least and then periodically throughout the course, students need “safe houses”:  just like the women and minority students whom Pratt describes, all students need “high degrees of trust,” “mutual recognition,” and “shared understandings” when they are taking a writing course.  As I will argue below, the Holocaust as a topic can help serve both these functions.  Because there is, broadly speaking, almost universal agreement on the moral status of the victims and perpetrators, students can begin their study of this topic in an atmosphere of support from the instructor.  But the same subject will also open up the possibility of objectifying the students’ culture in ways that will horrify them, making them aware of “legacies of both glory and shame.”

Reasons for Studying the Holocaust in a Writing Course

Most students come to a writing class, even their first college-level writing class, believing that they already know quite a bit about the Holocaust.  Compared to their knowledge about, say, the general outlines of World War II, I have found that they are usually knowledgeable. But few of them have much understanding of the details of the event.  And there is not time in a writing course to offer a full-fledged history of the Holocaust, nor are most writing teachers prepared for this kind of teaching.  But it is possible to offer students an overview of the Holocaust and then to plunge into a specific text relating to it.  Student understanding can be supplemented by films (or portions thereof) and mini-lectures as they examine one work in more detail.  The goal here is not for students to attain the comprehensive knowledge about the Holocaust that they might get from a specialized history course.  It makes more sense to provide students with the experience of writing knowledgeably and sensitively about a specific aspect of this vast phenomenon.  They are thus placed in a rhetorical situation that both motivates and challenges them.  In the process, they will learn a great deal about the Holocaust itself.  Here are several reasons why this choice of topic is beneficial for a writing course:

Emotional Force: The emotional force of the topic, occasioned by the brutality and cruelty of the perpetrators, but also occasionally by the heroism of the victims, encourages the students to conduct their inquiries with seriousness and care.  The heightened emotion also serves to motivate students to produce their strongest work. 

 Emotional Distance:  At the same time, this emotion is usually not so personal as to inhibit writing.[11]  Exploring controversial issues that seem to challenge a student’s sense of identity can sometimes have this effect. It is almost always the case on my campus that the writing teachers come from a far more liberal tradition than do most of the students, which creates a tension between instructor and students from the first day of class. One long-term goal of the teacher may be to make the students somewhat more tolerant of other cultures, races, and even sexual orientations.  To have tolerance as the central purpose of a writing course is somewhat problematic, considering the place such courses generally hold in the curriculum,[12] but I consider it to be a laudable secondary goal.  The question is what the best method for achieving the goal of tolerance is. We will be successful with such a goal if we subordinate it to others and lower our expectations for what we are going to do in a single course.  Instead of attempting to eradicate prejudice and bigotry by a direct assault on students’ opinions, I suggest that exploring historical examples of intolerance, racism, and religious bigotry is more pedagogically sound: it is more likely to have a long-lasting impact on students.

As an example of a head-on assault on students’ prejudices, let me offer the technique that some of my colleagues have used to combat homophobia. To build empathy for gay men in the midst of the AIDS crisis, the instructor shows in class the moving film Longtime Companion (1990), which includes some brief scenes of men kissing one another.  Students are then asked to analyze the film and the situation that the characters find themselves in.  While it is certainly the case that this kind of approach can be successful in increasing empathy for gays suffering from AIDS or for their friends and families, the instructor must be extraordinarily skillful to bring it off.  And I wonder whether students quickly recognize that a good way to succeed in such a course is to suppress their true feelings.[13] 

In contrast, the Holocaust as a topic gives students the impression, at the beginning of the course, that they are dealing with less ambiguous issues.  To some extent this is true:  the teacher and students can almost always begin their investigation agreeing on the large-scale issues.  For this reason, students who are deeply conservative or fundamentalist Christians often approach the Holocaust with a sense of relief:  here finally is something on which they agree with their liberal teacher.  But as the class deepens its exploration into the topic, it becomes clear that many of the same morally ambivalent questions—the ones that encourage students to do their best writing when they approach them with enough rigor—are also lurking in the Holocaust.  Students can be asked somewhat later in the course to confront their own prejudices.  By that point, however, the instructor has had a chance to build a sense of trust among the students because the class has shared a common experience of making an initial exploration of a dramatic and even shocking subject.

 Accessibility:  The Holocaust is a story with a beginning, middle, and end.  True, the beginning is considerably longer than most people realize, since one must start with the long history of antisemitism, which dates back to the early years of Christianity.  And in a sense, the story continues up to the present when we consider the effects of the Holocaust on the children of survivors.[14]  But the main events took place from 1933 to 1945—just 12 years—and it ended completely with the defeat of the Nazis.  During that time at least 5,100,000 Jews were killed, according to Raul Hilberg, one of the most conservative of the reputable historians.  In 1943 alone, over half the victims perished.  The self-contained quality of the Holocaust, combined with the fact that many of the survivors ended up in the U.S., is one of the factors that make it an event so well known in popular culture and so well documented in scholarly books and articles.  Teaching materials on the subject abound; indeed, the very wealth of material is one of the reasons that a guide like this book is necessary.  In addition, there are many organizations and foundations that encourage the study of the Holocaust.[15]  From a practical perspective, another extremely important point for teachers is that these materials are very accessible.

Moral Complexity: The moral complexity of many of the issues, particularly the ones associated with the moral choices that ordinary people had to make, provide excellent material for eliciting powerful writing from the students.  Theories of ethical and moral development describe in general how young adults tend to see the world in less ambiguous terms than do older adults.  Many writing theorists have ascribed an ability to deal with complex moral or ethical questions as an important prerequisite to being able to write well.[16]  The stakes students have in discussing these issues are raised by the extreme nature of these choices (often life versus death or choosing what might be best for one’s family versus what might be best for one personally) and the fact that they are not hypothetical.  For example, it is not difficult to sympathize with a victim like Anne Frank (although why Anne Frank is so appealing and how that appeal has been nurtured by certain aspects of her story is a topic worth exploring in writing classes).  But the role played by the Jewish Councils is much more difficult to sort out.  On the one hand, they can be seen as collaborating to some extent with the Nazis, but such a view fails to account for the difficult and complex moral situation that they were placed in. 

Historical Complexity:  Some of these issues raise questions about human nature to which there really are no definitive answers. What, for example, motivated the perpetrators?  The debate between historians Daniel Jonah Goldhagen and Christopher Browning raises the question of whether the perpetrators were people with their own terrible history, people who are not much like most of us, or whether they were “ordinary”—that is pretty much like the general population from anywhere in the world.[17]  Students can be told the general outlines of this debate, but to grasp fully its implications, they must come to their own conclusions.  Exploring a general issue in writing results in a far deeper understanding of the question.  Of course, a history or sociology course can also require students to write; I would hope that they would.  But it is invaluable in a composition class to have the experience of writing one’s way to a position on a difficult issue, to undergo the intellectual and emotional investment that is fostered by this kind of writing.

Any historical event can be analyzed with different interpretations.  But the Holocaust is unusual in that it has a strong central narrative that is undisputed (except by the deniers):  Hitler and his party came to power in 1933, ruthlessly eliminated their opposition, built progressively a campaign of persecution and intolerance toward the Jews, started World War II, and then systematically began murdering all the Jews of Europe, not even stopping when it became obvious that they would lose the war.  Within that framework, though, there are many differing interpretations.  When did the Nazi government decide on mass murder as the “final solution” to the “Jewish question”?  Was it something that Hitler had planned all along (the “intentionalist” argument), or was it something that evolved as the war progressed (the “functionalist” argument)?  How might we best characterize the resistance by the Jews?  Was it virtually nonexistent, as Raul Hilberg describes? Was it widespread but subverted at every point by lack of opportunity and support from fellow resistance fighters and the Allies, as described by historians such as Nora Levin? Should we include within it the concept of “spiritual resistance”?  What reasons might historians such as Hilberg and Levin have for their differing accounts?  Should the U.S. have done more to aid the Holocaust victims during the war?  In particular, should the Army Air Force have bombed Auschwitz in the summer and fall of 1944, as many survivors, Elie Wiesel among them, strongly argue?  Or should we believe the arguments of James H. Kitchens, who argues that it was impossible to do effectively?[18]  All of these are legitimate questions in Holocaust Studies.  Since even professional historians disagree on these questions, student cannot resolve them fully, but they can examine them and argue their own conclusions.

 Boundaries of Acceptable Discussion:  The Holocaust is unusual in that there are a number of historical questions that are generally considered to be illegitimate—the views of the Holocaust deniers.  As Deborah Lipstadt has described, the methods of the deniers have gone far beyond the days when their ideas were published in cheap pamphlets.  They now sponsor their own journal, The Journal of Historical Review, which to an unsuspecting student will appear as a typical scholarly journal.  Their presence on the World Wide Web appears professional and convincing, and many students are unprepared to filter good information from the bad on the Web.  Students who already have some understanding of Holocaust issues could examine the rhetoric of the deniers’ publications.  They might then explore the more general question of what makes certain issues unacceptable to mainstream researchers.   What is wrong with the deniers’ argument that the Holocaust story has “another side”?

The Role of Language in a Bureaucracy:  Many writing teachers like to think that they are “empowering” students to function in a world in which critical literacy is the primary means to asserting one’s own identity and interests.  In practice, the vast majority of our students will not completely assimilate these complex lessons.  Instead, they will use their skill in scribal conventions to attain more modest positions in large bureaucracies—corporate, educational, or governmental. In only a few years, they will be the ones who draft memoranda, write instructions, enforce regulations—in short all the mundane tasks that make bureaucracies work.  Studying the Holocaust in a writing course can provide these students with an insight into the enormous evil one large bureaucracy committed more than 50 years ago.  The murder of millions of people was not carried out only by gas chambers, rifles, bullets or even railroads.  Authorized by a powerful government, it was organized by thousands of bureaucrats wielding pens, typewriters, stamps, and paper.[19]  Writing leads to actions, which can have terrible consequences; more accurately put, writing is action.  Through the corruption of language—the very term “Final Solution” being a euphemism for mass murder—the Nazi bureaucracy demonstrated how it is possible to conceal what one is really doing, even from oneself.  When students come to grasp the nature of the bureaucratic-administrative “destruction process,” as described by Raul Hilberg, and the role that language played in this process, they will have learned a valuable lesson about how large organizations can function.  It is of course no more accurate to claim that bureaucracies caused the Holocaust than it is to put the blame on railroads, but the potential use of such large organizations and technologies is always there.  In addition to empowering our students, we should also teach them how their skills may be misused.

In the chapters that follow, I offer a guide to using the Holocaust as a sustained topic for writing courses.  The field of Holocaust Studies is vast, and it has primarily been the domain of historians.  Courses in Holocaust Studies often include disciplines such as history, sociology, religious studies, and literature.  The method by which one might organize a course on the history of the Holocaust or even the literature of the Holocaust is different from how one would organize a writing course around this issue.  Furthermore, the stakes involved in the selection of this topic are higher.  Many people, sometimes in the most unexpected quarters, are intensely interested in the topic.  Using this topic in a writing course can invite a kind of scrutiny not usually accorded the subjects that students write on in composition classes.[20]  We need to be prepared to defend our choice of topic and approach in the face of assertions that students should derive certain lessons from the Holocaust, as well as accusations that we are not qualified to teach this subject.  Many of the issues in Holocaust scholarship have already been discussed and written about in thoughtful ways.  In this book, I propose to survey some of these issues and suggest ways that we might approach them in writing courses.

Ultimately, though, we as individual teachers must decide how to deal with our individual students as their situations require.  Speaking of the difficulty that instructors face in dealing with unexpected responses to assignments, Richard E. Miller writes, “In the uncharted realms of teaching and studying in the contact zone, the teacher’s traditional claim to authority is . . . constantly undermined and reconfigured which, in turn, enables the real work of learning how to negotiate and to place oneself in dialogue with different ways of knowing to commence” (407).  I do not intend my advice or summaries of background information to support “the teacher’s traditional claim to authority.”  At the same time, though, plunging into such a complex and potentially emotional subject as the Holocaust should require some preparation on the instructor’s part.  Thinking of oneself as simply another co-investigator with the students can, I believe, result in, at best, missed opportunities or, at worse, sentimental or inauthentic writing that deserves the scorn of those critics who may look on our work from afar.[21]

In the first chapter, I examine some questions that any teacher using the Holocaust should consider:  What do we mean by “the Holocaust”?  How does it fit in with the concept of genocide?  How has the Holocaust come to be regarded in the United States?  Chapter 2 offers a detailed answer to this last question; it provides a more extended exploration of how the Holocaust has been regarded in American culture, starting from World War II. I emphasize popular culture because as writing teachers, we must always be aware of the conceptions and misconceptions with which our students approach our classes.  These issues are important for writing teachers to consider in order to develop a rationale for using the topic in a writing course.  The Holocaust is not like an ordinary historical topic.  At the very least, the graphic subject matter can so shock some students that the teacher’s purpose in introducing the topic can be swept away.  The topic also invokes strong emotions in people, some of whom believe that it is ultimately unknowable and that any attempt to try is doomed to failure.

Chapter 3 addresses the question of how much background knowledge we can count on our students having concerning the history and beliefs of Judaism, the history of antisemitism, and general understanding of the major events of World War II.  I argue that students will learn the Holocaust history that they need in the course of reading and writing about specific texts and films that are the subjects of later chapters.  It is impossible to generalize about all students taking writing courses, but I offer the results of an informal study among freshmen students at the University of Idaho, who belong to a population that has had little exposure to Jewish culture.  I then suggest what I consider the most important points for students to either know or learn early in the course about these topics; these summaries are meant to provide instructors with a framework with which to refresh their own knowledge of these topics and extend their own reading.  I envision spending only three or four class days on these topics, mostly toward the beginning of the course, depending on what the students already seem to know.

Chapter 4 concentrates on the special problems in representation that the Holocaust presents.  How can we study or write about something that is so horrible that most survivors will say that they cannot describe it? 

Chapters 5, 6, and 7 examine the Holocaust from the perspective of the different participants: in Chapter 5, I review literature, techniques, and assignments that have worked well for having students write about the experience of the victims.  Chapter 6 takes a similar approach, but concentrates this time on the experience of the perpetrators.  In Chapter 7, I suggest writing assignments and materials that can be used to examine the experience of the bystanders.  In the organization of these three chapters, I mean to suggest too a possible way of organizing the experience for students in a writing course.  It is important to start with the experience of the victims in order to give students a sense of the enormity of what occurred.  Students naturally identify with the victims’ experience and thus are placed in the position of regarding the perpetrators as inhuman monsters.  After considering some of the more recent research on the perpetrators, it is difficult for students to regard them as inhuman, and they are faced with the difficult rhetorical task of trying to write about the perpetrators in an effort to understand them, but not (one hopes) to sympathize with or excuse them.   A logical step to take from there is to consider the role that bystanders played, people who could have been very much like the students themselves.  Another interpretation of “bystander” is the governments of other countries.  The role of the U.S. during the Holocaust itself is a hotly contested issue among historians today.

Chapter 8 deals with the special problem of Holocaust denial.  I argue that when students have become familiar with broad details of Holocaust history and when they have been exposed to a variety of evidence from victims, as well as perpetrators and bystanders, they are ready to analyze the claims made by the Holocaust deniers.  Literature from the deniers is all too easy to come by, so easy in fact that I argue that it is important that students learn to interpret the rhetoric of these publications, so that they can more easily resist being seduced by them.  Furthermore, the techniques that the Holocaust deniers use are not unique to the deniers.  We can find the same rhetorical tactics in use in almost any kind of writing.

The Holocaust can elicit several different kinds of writing: personal responses; summaries, comparisons, analyses from historical, literary, and ethical perspectives; and critical reflection.  Personal responses should form the basis for all the other writing students do in the course.  The easiest way for this to occur is to ask students to keep a journal throughout the course.  Personal writing can also be one means for developing the historical background that will be necessary for the other writing tasks.  It can also be the means by which students explore and record their initial responses to the details of the material that they face.  Summarizing an article and developing a comparison between two others can also serve to acquire this background knowledge.  Students can then be asked to develop historical, literary, and ethical analyses.  I outline some of these issues and suggest particular materials, such as excerpts of films and books, that are accessible and yet profound.  Toward the end of the course, students can be asked to reconsider their journal writing or other more traditional papers in the light of what they have learned later in the course.  They can then reflect critically on earlier views and come to some conclusions about what they have learned and how they have responded.  In this way, we can broaden the methods and subject matter that we ask students to consider in writing courses, and they can learn about a topic and wrestle with issues that are significant for every educated person.  More important, they will have gained experience in dealing with complex and difficult rhetorical situations, abilities that can serve them well in many other areas of academic and personal endeavor.