Overview
This course is designed for graduate students in the MAIS program with an interest in genocide and Holocaust studies. This course situates the Holocaust in the colonial frame, traces the parallels between the genocide of the Herero and Nama tribes in German colonies and the Holocaust, and looks at the intersections of the Holocaust and the Nakba. The course contextualizes the euthanasia program, explores Nazi colonial visions of race and space in Eastern Europe, and examines links between ghettoization, Nazi resettlement policies, and genocide. The course offers insight into the factors, structure, and agency behind the genocide and a bottom-up perspective on the victims, perpetrators, and collaborators. It applies an intersectional lens to understand Jewish victims’ experience of the Nazi oppressive power structures while carefully unpacking mutually constitutive categories of race, gender, and sexuality. The course concludes by looking at how the settler colonial mindset infiltrates the Holocaust histories and pedagogies and examines the benefits of approaching the Holocaust memory as multidirectional rather than competing.
Outline
MAIS 752 comprises thirteen topics to be studied over thirteen weeks:
- Week 1: Definition of Genocide—Situating the Holocaust in the Colonial Context
- Week 2: From the “German Catechism” Debate to the Holocaust and Nakba
- Week 3: Victims of a Racial State—From Imperial Germany to the Third Reich
- Week 4: Antisemitism—Origins, Paradigms, and Problems of Definitions
- Week 5: Jewish Victims’ Agency within the Power Structure of the Nazi Regime—Intersectional Approach
- Week 6: Colonization, Resettlement, and Expulsion—Nazis as Demographers
- Week 7: Ghettoization and the Failure of Nazi Resettlement Policies
- Week 8: Nazi-Soviet War—Radicalization and the Final Solution
- Week 9: From Auschwitz to Lety—Dehumanization and Desexualization in L’Univers Concentrationnaire
- Week 10: Taboo and Agency—Sexuality, Sexual Violence, and Sexual Barter
- Week 11: Perpetrators—Ordinary Men or Willing Executioners?
- Week 12: Collaboration and Collaborationism in History and Memory
- Week 13: The Holocaust in the Twenty-First Century—Anxious Histories, Multidirectional Memory, and Settler Colonial Forgetting
Learning outcomes
By the end of the course, you will be able to:
- situate the Holocaust in a broader historical and global context;
- acquire critical understanding of human agency, causation and complexity, and change and continuity of the targeted historical era;
- investigate the ways in which knowledge about the Holocaust is created, deployed, enforced, and reinforced, as well as how it is resisted;
- employ and contextualize a wide variety of Holocaust-related historical sources to make sense of complex, richly textured, diverse, and sometimes disparate materials and to identify biases, ambiguities, and uncertainties in primary and secondary historical sources;
- conduct research on the Holocaust that is accurate, critically analytical, comprehensible, and thorough; and
- communicate research results cogently, clearly, and logically in written form that corresponds to professional standards of doing history.
Evaluation
To receive credit for MAIS 752, students must complete and submit all reflection assignments and essay assignments and participate in discussions. You must achieve a minimum grade of C− (60 percent) on both essay assignments and an overall grade of C- (60 percent) for the entire course.
All work must be submitted or completed by the end of your course contract date. You will be evaluated based on your understanding of the concepts presented in the course and on your ability to apply those concepts. Your final grade in the course will be based on the marks achieved for the following activities.
| Activity | Weight |
| Reflection A | 10% |
| Reflection B | 15% |
| Historiographical Essay 1 | 25% |
| Historiographical Essay 2 | 25% |
| Reflection C | 10% |
| Discussions | 15% |
| Total | 100% |
Materials
Physical course materials
The following course materials are included in a course package that will be shipped to your home prior to your course’s start date:
Browning, Christopher R. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. Harper Perennial, 1993.
Other materials
All other course materials, including a weekly Study Guide, additional selected readings, and a detailed course information, will be provided online through the course site.