Interdisciplinary Elective Subject, topic 4: Terror and Trauma

The teaching material contains essays, literature and edited collections of oral and written testimonies concerning these four events.

Primary reading list: 

• Primo Levi: Se questo è un uomo (1958) / If this is a man (1969)
• Elie Wiesel, La nuit (1958) / Night (2006)
• H.G. Adler, Eine Reise (1962) /The Journey (2009)
• Etty Hillesum, Het Verstoorde leven (1981) / An Interrupted Life: The Diaries of Etty Hillesum 1941-43 (1984)
• Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
• W. G. Sebald: Luftkrieg und Literatur (1999) / On the Natural History of Destruction (2003)
• Svetlana Alexievich Chernobyl Prayer (1997/2016)
• Walter Kempowski, Das Echolot. Ein kollektives Tagebuch. Abgesang ´45 / Swansong 1945 (2005). 

Additional reading list

For comparison and contrast with these texts, we shall read more extensively,  students will be encouraged to choose two other texts from the list below and to read them in the languages within their competence: for seminars, the English translation will be the common text.

• John Hersey, Hiroshima (1946)
• Allan Resnais, Hiroshima mon amour (1959) (Film to be shown) and Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima mon amour (1960) / Hiroshima mon amour (1961)
• Peter Weiss, Die Ermittlung (1965) / The Investigation (1966)
• Martha Gellhorn: ‘Dachau: Experimental Murder’ (June 23, 1945)
• Ruth Klüger, weiter leben - eine Jugend (1992) translated (and adapted) as Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (2001).
• Jorge Semprun, Quel beau dimanche! (1980) / What a Beautiful Sunday (1980)

Inter alia