The category of Holocaust art has been established by asking questions, the most vital of which is whether it should be a category of art at all. This question pursued Holocaust art long before it was categorized as such. Indeed, as a means of describing the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of European Jews by Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945, the word Holocaust itself only came into use belatedly in the 1960s. The category Holocaust art followed at an even further delay. The first major survey was published in 1993 by American art historian Ziva Amishai-Maisels. Her book opened by asking whether an artwork that took the Holocaust as its starting point could obtain any purchase as a form of aesthetic expression.
Although Amishai-Maisels did not provide an answer, her book attests to the manifold attempts by artists since the 1930s to grapple with this most fundamental question of Holocaust art. Other, related questions about the form, style, and temporality of Holocaust art have swirled around the category since its inception. In this new survey, those questions will provide the organizing framework. After the primary question of the viability of Holocaust art as a category is addressed, the subsequent five sections will move through a series of questions framed as either-or propositions: Life or theatre? Sacred or banal? Then or now? Figuration or abstraction? Painting or photography? Each section will pivot around a single instance of Holocaust art, chosen for the artwork’s ability to illuminate the problematics of the given proposition. While these propositions will not be resolved, as a set of questions they will offer a far more coherent narrative for the development of Holocaust art than one provided by chronology or region. But this is only fitting for a category that is as much involved with the art it has named as the questions it has provoked.
Article
Holocaust Art
Chloë Julius
Article
Nazism and Religion
Eric Kurlander
The National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) always had a complicated relationship with religion, emblematic of the diverse völkisch movement out of which the NSDAP emerged. This relationship became even more complicated during the later years of the Weimar Republic as the party grew larger and attracted millions of new supporters from Protestant as well as Catholic regions. The NSDAP’s attitude toward the Christian churches was nonetheless ambivalent, swinging from co-optation to outright hostility. This ambivalence was founded in part on a pragmatic recognition of Church power and the influence of Christianity across the German population, but it simultaneously reflected an ideological rejection of Judeo-Christian values that a number of Nazi leaders saw as antithetical to National Socialism. Many Nazis therefore sought religious alternatives, from Nordic paganism and a “religion of nature” to a German Christianity led by a blond, blue-eyed Aryan Jesus. This complex mélange of Christian and alternative faiths included an abiding interest in “Indo-Aryan” (Eastern) religion, tied to broader ideological assumptions regarding the origins of the Aryan race in South Asia. Ultimately, there was no such thing as an official “Nazi religion.” To the contrary, the regime explored, embraced, and exploited diverse elements of (Germanic) Christianity, Ario-Germanic paganism, and Indo-Aryan religions endemic to the völkisch movement and broader supernatural imaginary of the Wilhelmine and Weimar period.
Article
America’s Interactions with Islam and Judaism in North Africa
Lawrence A. Peskin
Encounters between Americans, Muslims, and Jews in North Africa played a foundational role in Americans’ early understanding of Islam and Judaism. At a time when the United States population had few Jews and virtually no free Muslims, North Africa was one of the places Americans were most likely to meet individuals from these groups.
Initially, American sailors and diplomats encountered North African Muslims and Jews as the result of frequent ship captures by Barbary corsairs beginning in the colonial period and culminating in the 1780s and 1790s. After 1815, the sailors and diplomats were joined by missionaries journeying to the Mediterranean region to convert Jews and Muslims as well as non-Protestant Christians.
These encounters prompted a good deal of literature published in the United States, including captivity narratives, novels, plays, histories, and missionary journals. These publications reinforced two dominant views of Islam. First, the early focus on Barbary corsairs capturing American “slaves” reinforced old notions of Islam as despotic and Muslims as “savages” similar to Native Americans. Missionary accounts prompted more thoughtful approaches to Muslim theology at the same time that they reinforced existing notions of Islam as a deceitful religion and revivified millenarian hopes that the declining Ottoman Empire foretold the Second Coming.
As a result of the captivity crises, Americans often had to deal with the area’s small but influential group of Jewish merchants in order to get terms and credit to free their countrymen. These fraught negotiations reinforced older European stereotypes of Jews as sharpers and Shylocks. As with Islam, the missionary period brought more thoughtful consideration of Jewish theology as Americans engaged in chiliastic hopes of bringing the Jews to Jerusalem.
After 1850 or so, Americans interested in Jews or Muslims looked less frequently to North Africa. Growing immigrant populations, first of Jews and then of Muslims, meant that Americans could encounter people of all three Abrahamic faiths at home. At the same time, missionary interests moved east, into the Holy Land, Syria, Turkey, and ultimately East Asia. Nevertheless, the early impact of North Africa on American thinking retained its influence, as is evident from President Barack Obama’s 2009 speech on American-Islamic relations delivered in Cairo.
