In the first half of the course, we will examine the "History" of the Holocaust, and establish a firm grounding in the historical context of the Third Reich and the genocide of the European Jewry. We will pay particular attention to Germany's development of a "Racial State" which defined who was and was not part of the Volk, and the legal, social, and economic steps the state took to exclude and persecute a range of the people they deemed "racially inferior"--Jews, but also the Roma and Scintii, people with developmental and physical disabilities, homosexuals, Slavs, and others. In the second half of the course, we will focus on ways the Holocaust has been remembered. After we've gained an overview of the Holocaust, its victims, its perpetrators, and its bystanders, we will explore the ways that the Holocaust has been memorialized, historicized, and fictionalized. Then, as a class, we will develop our own interpretative memorialization of this horrific moment in history.
Counts Toward Major: History
To find books for this class, please visit the St. Olaf Bookstore.