Holocaust Awareness Week

timturner — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 01:43:16 +0000

Many of you may have seen the story in the New York Times yesterday about a comic that has been introduced in Germany to teach students about the Holocaust. (A brief portion from an English translation appears below.) This week, 25 Feb. through 2 Mar., is actually Holocaust Awareness Week, so some attention is being paid to issues surrounding the teaching of the Holocaust in this and other countries. More examples, after the jump.

The article notes that

With the Second World War passing from living memory, the Holocaust remains a subject taught as a singular event and obligation [in Germany], and Germans still seem to grapple almost eagerly with their own historic guilt and shame. That said, few German schoolchildren today can go home to ask their grandparents, much less their parents, what they did while Hitler was around. The end of the war is now as distant from them in time as the end of the First World War was from the Reagan presidency. Paradoxically, this seems to have freed young Germans — adolescent ones, anyway — to talk more openly and in new ways about Nazis and the Holocaust. Passing is the shock therapy, with its films of piled corpses, that earlier generations of schoolchildren had to endure.

This discussion sets up an interesting contrast between the "shock therapy" of the past and the comic book, called "The Search," "The visual style of [which] is clear, simple, pastel-colored, in a classic Belgian-Franco comic tradition. 'Less is more,' Mr. Heuvel, the artist, said in a recent telephone conversation..." Mr. Heuvel points to the creator of Tintin as one of his influences.

This less is more philosophy is also at work in this poster, created for Hillel Colorado:

According to one blogger, Angela Natividad at AdRants, "This is one of those well-tempered print ads that forces you to really look before you know what's going on. Most people will probably miss the point while rushing by on the subway, but those that catch it might go, 'Hrm' and bring it up in random bar conversation." The kicker of this stark, spare, but effective image is the Fiction label attached to the book's spine.

Natividad contrasts the effective simplicity of this image with the more forceful, less subtles visual style of the following two spots, created for Think MTV (Until yesterday I had never heard of it, but according to its homepage "Think is your community where you, your friends, and your favorite celebrities can get informed, get heard and take action on the issues that matter to you most."):

In their different ways, each seems like an effective approach, although the contrast between the visual styles of the comic book and the video spots is somewhat stark. (However, the Times article also quotes one source who says that using black and white imagery to depict the Holocaust has become a cliche; each of the spots ends with an actual black and white image of Holocaust victims.)

In the Times article, one of the teachers using the German comic is quoted as saying that the comic "teaches the subject...so it's not just about victims and perpetrators," and that "the result [of teaching the comic] is that interest in the subject is actually increasing. These students don't have the same discomfort we did talking about it" (emphasis added). I want to call attention to two assumptions made here: one is the emphasis on the Holocaust as a "subject," and the other is his point that students don't have as much "discomfort" when they talk about the Holocaust. I don't mean to suggest that modern, teenage Germans especially should feel discomfort about the Holocaust--but, in fact, shouldn't everyone, regardless of nationality, feel some discomfort when talking about this "subject"?

viz. - Holocaust

Holocaust Awareness Week