Gunter Grass's Blechtrommel

The Holocaust is considered one of the world’s most explicit examples of inhumanity. The German Nazi regime and their collaborators organized and executed the systematic extermination of millions of Jews, homosexuals, and gypsies. The few that survived set forth on a quest to reconstruct their lives, but were often hindered by the trauma they sustained. Simon Wiesenthal, a Holocaust survivor, struggled with his emotions from the war and sought solace by writing about his experiences as well as founding an organization responsible for catching Nazi war criminals. One of his most famous works, The Sunflower, recounts his interaction with a Nazi soldier lying on his deathbed. This soldier confronts Wiesenthal with the existential question of forgiveness; he asks for a Jew’s forgiveness after killing hundreds of innocent people. At the end of the memoir, Wiesenthal’s moral dilemma becomes open to other interpretations when he poses the question: “What would you have done?” Though many people have grappled with this question, one respondent, Jose Hobday, supports forgiving the Schutzstaffel (SS) officer and expresses her ideas with passion. She supports her claim by stating that forgiveness is essential for maintaining a productive society.

Marked by the dehumanizing and horrific genocide of the Jewish people, the Holocaust was a significant conflict that fueled the militant period of the twentieth century. As the spearhead of the Nazi Party of Germany from 1934 to 1945, Adolf Hitler sponsored the brutal persecution and genocide of around six million Jewish individuals, along with many other casualties. Subjugated to the tyranny of the concentration and labor camps where they were stripped of their identity and liberty, the individuals that survived the Holocaust will carry the burden of their traumatic memories through their lifetime. In his memoir, Night, Elie Wiesel explores his harrowing experiences imprisoned in multiple concentration camps as a teenager during the Holocaust.

Elie Wiesel, in his remembrance speech, “The Perils of Indifference” (1999) illustrates the dangers of the indifference that admitted the horrors of the Holocaust. Wiesel tells his illustration with an emotional tone and supports his thesis by drawing on memories of his own Holocaust experience. Wiesel’s purpose is to bring attention to the people that were treated with indifference in the 20th century, in order to advise the US and people everywhere to do better in the new century. Wiesel is specifically addressing the White House at the Seventh Millennium Evening lecture, but his emotional message is intended for all people, as he tells the consequences of apathy toward others.

On April 12th 1999, Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor and Nobel Laureate, delivered a speech that would change the minds of citizens in America for generations to come. As part of the Millennium Lecture Series, Wiesel discussed his horrific experiences in the concentration camp of Auschwitz and turned them into numerous knowledgeable life lessons. The message of the speech, titled Perils of Indifference, portrays citizens around the world should discourage indifference being tolerated, and it is achieved by creating credibility (ethos in beginning ), by using strict logic and reason (logos used in middle), and by discussing the morality on being indifferent to victims of injustice and cruelty (pathos used in end).

The term Holocaust is now used to describe the mass genocide by the German Nazi regime during World War II. Millions of Jews and members of other persecuted groups deemed unacceptable by Hitler were tortured and murdered in the most gruesome of ways. Elie Wiesel was among the few survivors to have gone through Auschwitz, the primary death camp used by Nazi soldiers. His personal account of the Holocaust encompasses the death of his family, his loss of innocence, and his first-hand experience viewing the evil of man. Through the use of strategic diction and syntax, figurative language and imagery, Elie Wiesel makes the unimaginable horrors incredibly vivid and clear to his readers.

“Homeland is something one becomes aware of only through its loss, Gunter Grass.” In Peter Gay’s memoir, My German Question, he articulates what it was like living in Germany with the presence of the Nazis or in his own experience the lack there of. Peter lived in a family that didn’t directly practice Judaism and most German families didn’t perceive them as Jews until the Nazis defined what a Jew was to the public. The persecution of other Jewish families in Germany where far worse than what Peter experienced growing up. There was a major contrast between how Gay’s family was treated and how other Jews who actively practiced the religion in Germany were treated which played a contributing factor for why the family stayed so long before they left.

The Holocaust was a cruel and terrifying time, especially for the groups targeted. Before it began, the Wiesels had been a deeply religious Jewish family. Elie Wiesel was only a teenager when he and his family were torn from their home and sent to concentration camps. There, he faced many horrors including the deaths of his family and the distortion of the person he once was. Wiesel has recounted these horrific events in his memoir, Night. Although many realize the significance of this novel, it has been criticized for its depressing subject matter. Night is important because it tells the painfully true details of the Holocaust in a way that cannot be forgotten.

“Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fürher” (Bendersky 99). This quote that has been traced back to the time when Nazism ruled over Germany, left an incredible mark on the minds of most Germans whom of which lived during this time. Throughout history, the world has seen many atrocities, but there is one that happened less than a century ago, and still haunts the world to this day: The Holocaust. While we have all learned about concentration camps, D-Day, and Nazi Germanys invasions of its neighboring countries in school, one thing that always seems to be glanced over is how Nazism rose up to power in Germany in the first place. This process didn’t happen overnight by Adolf Hitler declaring himself as the Fürher of Germany, but it was a long process that stretched out for over more than a decade. Joseph W. Bendersky’s book A Concise History of Nazi Germany includes meticulous details from history that describe the rise, rule, and fall of Nazism in Germany, which causes for it to be a reliable source for the study of Nazism in Germany and will further aid my final research paper in the rise of Hitler’s Nazi Party.

Wiesel publishes this book in his early twenties when he is possibly feeling anguished. He writes down his experience and thoughts in Auschwitz before his father died. He wants everyone in the world know this history, know the anguish that Jews had experienced. There are two sentences in his speech for the Nobel Peace Prize that shocked me, “ That I have tried to keep the memory alive, that I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget who the guilty are, we are

During the Holocaust in 1933 survivor Elie Wiesel says" When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is an jeopardy national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant" (Wiesel18). Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party were responsible for the Holocaust and millions of deaths of the Eastern Europe and Germany. The Nazis believed that the Jews were responsible for economic struggle known as The Depression. I think the Holocaust was a horrible thing that happened and it was wrong for innocent people to have suffered for no reason just because Hitler wanted them vanished.

As troubling pasts linger on throughout the world, countries that once committed violence as perpetuators struggle to shape its legacy. Germany, a nation that committed one of the most violent atrocities of the 20th century, has been tasked with remembering its past in hopes of shaping its national identity. In the process, leaders and politicians have struggled to properly memorialize the nation’s many victims. Many have debated what proper memorialization is, sparking controversies over almost all of Berlin’s Holocaust memorial (Hansen-Glucklich). With its wrongdoings so recent in human history, the ubiquitous ideals of nationalism have complicated Germany’s legacy. Meanwhile, the United States fails to commemorate its victims of slavery

This essay will attempt to explore the role of the individual in the larger historical event of the Holocaust carried out by the 1933 Nazi Germany. Explicitly, this paper will make an effort to further examine Primo Levi’s classic memoir of the Holocaust, The Reawakening. The contention here will be to look into the role of the individual, both as victim and as persecutor, in which is paramount in historical events of major magnitude. Additionally, several correlations and important references will be made to Primo Levi’s first “ouvrage,” Survival in Auschwitz, the companion volume to “The Reawakening.” Equally, “The Reawakening / The Truce, “is a deep echoing reminder of the humanity we must share with others despite atrocity.

“We must do something, we can’t let them kill us like that, like cattle in the slaughterhouse, we must revolt”. These are the words from many men surrounding Elie Wiesel as he entered Auschwitz, calling out for rebellious toward the Germans harsh conditions. Of course they had no idea what they were getting themselves into, many thought that there was nothing wrong until boarding the cattle train that would send them off to their final resting place. Life during the holocaust was torturous to say the least, so much so that some 6,000,000 lives were taken during this time in Jewish descent alone. People of the Jewish descent did not have it easy; they either were forced out of their homes into concentration camps, or they would hide out only to be found and killed of they remained in their settlements.

The Holocaust, started in the 1930s, was a detrimental moment in history that claimed the souls of over six million jews. Little did anyone know that this genocide could have been Shi prevented until it had accurately been presented to the world in William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. It suggests that the Nazi regime simply was a repercussion of the citizens of Germany when they were in a delusional state, all infected with the common belief: Hitler’s promise of the return of their former glory. It almost seems as if the people welcomingly invited the Reich in. Throughout this book, Shirer presents his account of the Third Reich starting from Adolf Hitler’s beginnings to the end of his days along with the destruction of the Nazis. If the citizens had been more aware of their surroundings, perhaps the Holocaust or even Hitler’s rise of power would have never happened.

Tim Snyder’s “Bloodlands” gives a detailed history of Europe during the reigns of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. In “Bloodlands” Snyder’s main point is to describe that although Hitler and Stalin had conflicting goals and viewpoints, their actions directly affected one another and resulted in one of the most horrific time periods in European history. Timothy Snyder is an American author and historian who specializes in the Holocaust and Central and Western Europe. After graduating high school, Snyder received his Bachelor’s degree from Brown University and his Doctorate from Oxford University; Snyder also has held fellowships Paris, Vienna, and Warsaw (Timothy Snyder, 2018). Due to his vast experience and education in Europe, specifically in Warsaw and in Vienna, Snyder probably had a large amount of exposure to the events he writes about in “Bloodlands.” There may have been more opportunity to hear from primary sources about the events that occurred and as a result, these experiences sparked his interests. Snyder also clearly conveys in “Bloodlands” that there is a misconception that Germany was the primary “doer of evil” in the periods during and leading up to the Second World War. Snyder aims not to compare Hitler and Stalin, but to show that there was not just one side to the disasters and that the Holocaust was not just a Western event. Snyder’s writing seems to be directed towards those who may think they know a great deal about the subject, but in fact do not;