Week 7

This week we met with Jenna Fisher a representative and teacher of the local organization Facing History and Ourselves. This is a group that dedicates its time teaching teachers how to teach about the Holocaust in their classrooms. During this session, before explaining what exactly it is she does, Fisher passed around many resources for the class to look at. They seemed to cover people from all different ethnic backgrounds from all over the world. These resources, she explained, were some of the ones she uses to teach others about difficult times in history so that they can teach these events to their students.

Then we looked over some documents in pairs and discussed what we found shocking, familiar, and something we wished to learn more about. I was particularity shocked by the political art that was being expressed around the time of the great depression. People would paint pictures and write music that was very vulgar and harsh at times but was also very telling of the kind of environment these artists were growing up in. Some of the paintings reminded me of Picasso who was also very politically and socially motivated in his time. I also wanted to learn more about the economics during the great depression and during the time of Hitler's rise to power. Were these people so desperate for some economic stability that they would overlook the horrors and abuse Hitler was already putting in place as Ambassador? 

Week 6

This week we met with a representative of the German Consulate in Boston, Rolf Schuette. He discussed the various ways in which Germany's identity has changed since the Holocaust. One aspect of this is how people who were killed in the Holocaust are now remembered in Germany. For example, Schuette said that engraved cobble stones are now placed in front of the home of the late Jews who used to live there that listed the name of the homeowner so people walking by will always be reminded of who once lived there. 

Before class we were asked to watch another of Schuette's lectures given in Germany. That lecture and the one that my class attended were very much the same although some statisticts had changed. One of the statistics was that of the amound of Neo-Nazi activity in West Germany. This statistic had risen ever so slightly and I asked the speaker if he could tell us anything more about this kind of activity and whether or not it should be a concern. Unfortunately he did not have much information because his primary focus was very much on the survivors and the Jewish community instead of the perpetrators. He did however suggest that much of the anti-semitism from these groups were geared toward Turkish Immigrants. I was very interested to learn that he was asked to give an opening speech at Gay Pride and that he was openly gay himself which made me soften to his abrupt and evasive nature a bit more.  

Week 5

This week we met with Dr. Julie Oxenberg, a Boston therapist that has worked extensively on the process of healing between Germans and Jews. Dr. Oxenberg showed us a video of seminars she had hosted where people from different conflicting racial backgrounds came together and expressed their feelings. The unique aspect of these meetings was that participants were asked to identify their feelings as separate of themselves. And each aspect of their specific emotional feelings took on different attributes. I found this technique to have interesting affects during the video. At one point the participants got very emotional and were asked to target their feelings and express their emotions as a separate entity. I was rather surprised by how tense things got between certain people and their feelings for those they had never even known.

In the readings about second generation perpetrators I was also surprised to find how little emotion some of these children had about their parents being involved in the Holocaust. I find it interesting how as people become more distantly related to the Holocaust their views change. They become more compassionate about those lost whether they are related to survivors or perpetrators. The nieces and nephews of perpetrators nowadays seem to be more compassionate and sympathetic to the Jews than second generation survivors decades ago. Perhaps there is a renewed curiosity among the modern age in regards to the horrible historical event.