This book investigates creative responses to the Nazi period in the work of three artists, Felix Nussbaum, Charlotte Salomon and Arnold Daghani, focusing on their use of pictorial narrative. It analyses their contrasting aesthetic strategies and their innovative forms of artistic production. In contrast with the autonomous, modernist art object, their works were explicitly linked with the historical conditions under which they were produced – the pressures of persecution and exile. Conditions in the slave labour camps and ghettos in the Ukraine, which shaped the paintings and drawings of Daghani, are contrasted with the experiences of exile in Belgium and France, which inspired Nussbaum and Salomon. In defiance of conventional artistic practice, they produced word-image combinations that can be read as narrative sequences, incorporating specific references to political events. While there has been a wealth of literary, philosophical and historical studies relating to the Holocaust, aesthetic debate has developed less extensively. This is the first comparative study of three artists who are only belatedly achieving recognition and the recent reception of their work is evaluated. By identifying the aesthetic principles and narrative strategies underlying their work, the book reassesses their achievement in creating new forms of modernism with an unmistakable political momentum. This book was published as a special issue of Word & Image.

Featuring contributions from prominent art historians, literary and cultural critics, and historians, Reading Charlotte Salomon celebrates the genius and courage of a remarkable figure in twentieth-century art.

This book explores the memory of the Romanian Holocaust in Romanian, German, Israeli, and French cultural representations. The essays in this volume discuss first-hand testimonial accounts, letters, journals, drawings, literary texts and films by Elie Wiesel, Paul Celan, Aharon Appelfeld Norman Manea, Radu Mihaileanu, among others.

In recent years an increasing number of scholars have incorporated a focus on emotions in their theories of material culture, transnationalism and globalization, and this book aims to contribute to this field of inquiry. It examines how ‘emotions’ can be theorized, and serves as a useful analytical tool for understanding the interrelated mobility of humans, objects and images. Ethnographically rich, and theoretically grounded case studies offer new perspectives on the relations between migration, material culture and emotions. While some chapters address the many different ways in which migrants and migrant artists express their emotions through objects and images in transnational contexts, other chapters focus on how particular works of art, everyday objects and artefacts can evoke feelings specific to particular migrant groups and communities. Case studies also analyse how artists, academics and policy makers can stimulate positive interaction between migrants and non-migrant communities.

A book that looks at both the traditional and the unconventional ways in which the holocaust has been visually represented. The purpose of this volume is to enhance our understanding of the visual representation of the Holocaust - in films, television, photographs, art and museum installations and cultural artifacts - and to examine the ways in which these have shaped our consciousness. The areas covered include the Eichman Trial as covered on American television, the impact of Schindler's List, the Jewish Museum in Berlin, the Isreali Heritage Museums, Women and Holocaust Photography, Internet Holocaust sites and tattoos and shrunken heads, the bodies of the dead and of the survivors.>

Investigating the complex history of visual art?s engagement with literature, this collection demonstrates that the art of the book is a fully interdisciplinary and distinctly modern form. The essays in the collection develop new critical approaches to the analysis of twentieth-century bookworks and explore ways in which European writers and painters challenged the boundary between visual and linguistic expression in the content, production, and physical form of books. The Art Book Tradition in Twentieth-Century Europe offers a detailed examination of word-image relations in forms ranging from the livre d?artiste to personal diaries and almanacs. It analyzes innovative attempts to challenge familiar hierarchies between texts and images, to fuse different expressive media, and to reconceptualize traditional notions of ekphrasis. Giving consideration to the material qualities of books, the works discussed in this collection also test and celebrate the act of reading, while locating it in the context of other sensory experiences. Essays examine works by Dufy, Matisse, Beckett, Kandinsky, Braque, and Ponge, among other European artists and writers active during the twentieth century.

This volume presents the intellectual autobiographies of fourteen leading scholars in the fields of history, literature, film and cultural studies who have dedicated a considerable part of their career to researching the history and memories of France during the Second World War. Basedin five different countries, Margaret Atack, Marc Dambre, Laurent Douzou, Hilary Footitt, Robert Gildea, Richard J. Golsan, Bertram M. Gordon, Christopher Lloyd, Colin Nettelbeck, Denis Peschanski, Renée Poznanski, Henry Rousso, Peter Tame, and Susan Rubin Suleiman have playeda crucial role in shaping and reshaping what has become a thought-provoking field of research. This volume, which also includes an interview with historian Robert O. Paxton, clarifies the rationales and driving forces behind their work and thus behind our current understanding of one of the darkest and most vividly remembered pages of history in contemporary France.

In Modern Jewish Art: Definitions, Problems, and Opportunities, Ori Z. Soltes considers both the emerging and evolving discussion on, and the expanding array of practitioners of ‘Jewish art’ in the past two hundred years. He notes the developing problem of how to define ‘Judaism’ in the 19th century—as a religion, a culture, a race, a nation, a people—and thus the complications for placing ‘Jewish art’ under the extended umbrella of ‘religion and the arts.’ The fluidity with which one must engage the subject is reflected in the broadening conceptual and visual vocabulary, the extended range of subject foci and media, and the increasingly rich analytical approaches to the subject that have surfaced particularly in the past fifty years. Well-known and little-known artists are included in a far-ranging discussion of painting, sculpture, photography, video, installations, ceremonial objects, and works that blur the boundaries between categories.

The Routledge Handbook to Contemporary Jewish Cultures explores the diversity of Jewish cultures and ways of investigating them, presenting the different methodologies, arguments and challenges within the discipline. Divided into themed sections, this book considers in turn: How the individual terms "Jewish" and "culture" are defined, looking at perspectives from Anthropology, Music, Literary Studies, Sociology, Religious Studies, History, Art History, and Film, Television, and New Media Studies. How Jewish cultures are theorized, looking at key themes regarding power, textuality, religion/secularity, memory, bodies, space and place, and networks. Case studies in contemporary Jewish cultures. With essays by leading scholars in Jewish culture, this book offers a clear overview of the field and offers exciting new directions for the future.

Published in Association with the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C. Based on careful, intensive research in primary sources, many of these essays break new ground in our understanding of a crucial and tumultuous period. The contributors, drawn from both sides of the Atlantic, offer an in-depth analysis of how the collective memory of Nazism and the Holocaust influenced, and was influenced by, politics and culture in West Germany in the 1960s. The contributions address a wide variety of issues, including prosecution for war crimes, restitution, immigration policy, health policy, reform of the police, German relations with Israel and the United States, nuclear non-proliferation, and, of course, student politics and the New Left protest movement.