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This article explores the connection between genocide, language and language consciousness by tracing the strange biography of one Yiddish neologism: shabreven. During the Holocaust, the word came to mean both ›looting‹ and ›taking ownerless property‹. It stoked moral and etymological debate among Yiddish speakers in the Warsaw ghetto, while also occupying a prominent position in postwar Polish and Zionist discourses. The term shifted between different semantic, ethical and cultural fields, navigating a delicate balance between various meanings and norms. The discussions around this term help to shed light on key questions: What were the motivations for the study of Holocaust Yiddish neologisms? How did this early postwar Yiddish philological discourse differ from its parallel in German? Shabreven became both a symbol of the genocidal collapse of language and a tool for regaining victim agency in speech.
Picture agencies are mediators between photographers and editorial staffs; they play a crucial role in producing mass media visibility. However, their part in the system of the visual propaganda of the Nazi state is largely unexplored. This article features a controversial case, the American Associated Press and its German subsidiary. By submitting to the Schriftleitergesetz (Editorial Control Law) in 1935, the German AP GmbH (LLC) followed its German counterparts in the process of Gleichschaltung (forcible coordination). Until the United States entered the war in December 1941, AP supplied the Nazi press with American pictures. This service proved to be of particular relevance for propaganda. AP was also allowed to continue its photographic reporting in the Reich. AP pictures taken under the aegis of the Propaganda Ministry, the Wehrmacht and the SS were ubiquitous in the Nazi press. Moreover, the New York headquarters supplied the North American press with these same pictures, where they were published either as news photos or as propaganda images.
“Silent Dust”, released in February 1949, was one of a group of films that explored the problems of the returning Second World War veteran. Although the maladjusted veteran is a feature of all major wars, it assumes an added significance in this instance because the Second World War, in Britain and America at least, is conventionally understood “almost universally as honourable and noble, fought with right and justice exclusively on the Allied side”. Angus Calder has argued that the dominant narrative constructed about the Second World War in Britain was what he terms the “myth of the Blitz”, a heroic myth of courage, endurance and pulling together. This myth, through its perpetuation in an enormous array of cultural practices - notably a cycle of combat films in the 1950s such as “The Dam Busters” (1955) and “Reach for the Sky” (1956) - became the accepted view and was almost impossible to dislodge. It was a myth that was officially ratified in the British state’s commemoration of the war and, like all dominant discourses, served to marginalise alternative constructions of the conflict, particularly those that represent it as a traumatic and possibly brutalising experience. By analysing “Silent Dust” in detail and in relation to its social and cultural context, I hope to recover this repressed narrative and restore it to its rightful place as an important discourse about the Second World War.
How have Jewish intellectuals reflected on the German language both in relation to and in the aftermath of the ›catastrophe‹? This essay explores one perspective, that of H.G. Adler (Prague, 1910 – London, 1988), a scholar, author, and survivor of the Shoah. Adler’s relationship to and reflections on the German language offer insights into the experience of persecution and survival as well as into the memory and representation of the Holocaust. His vast body of work testifies to both the possibility and the necessity of writing ›after Auschwitz‹, and indeed to the necessity of writing in German after the Holocaust. A survivor of Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and two satellite camps of Buchenwald (Niederorschel and Langenstein-Zwieberge), Adler went on to write in various forms, from the analytic to the poetic, about National Socialism, antisemitism, and life and death in the concentration and extermination camp system. His scholarly work made an important contribution to establishing the international and interdisciplinary field of Holocaust Studies, and his poetry and novels bear witness to his own personal experiences in the camps, albeit not in a directly autobiographical form.