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In 1964, the Anglo-German Agreement was formalised, which saw the Federal Republic of Germany provide the United Kingdom with a £1 million political settlement to form a compensation scheme for British victims of Nazi persecution. This bilateral agreement was part of West Germany's wider international policy between 1959 to 1964, to settle claims for compensation with several Western European nations for the crimes of its fascist predecessor. By exploring the legal aftermath of the Nazi atrocities from a British perspective, this research contributes to a transnational history on how European nations dealt with the dark and difficult Nazi past, both on a state and ground level. This thesis investigates the development of British legal approaches to seeking justice for the mass murder and war of extermination perpetrated by the Nazi regime, with a strong focus on some of the victim responses to this. This doctoral research firstly examines the ways, and extent to which, the British Government negotiated and administered redress for Nazi victims between 1945 to 1969. This is complemented by my analysis on the different ways in which some of the victims of Nazi persecution being addressed within these British policies reacted and responded to them. Specific attention is given to the many poignant and emotional petition letters which were sent to the British Government by Nazi victims who had been unsuccessful in their applications for compensation under the Anglo-German Agreement. The appeals from both individual victims and collective groups who united to campaign against the British Government are explored. These petition letters showcase that many victims did not simply accept having their compensation claims rejected, and they used any medium available to them to have their voices heard. Voices which demanded justice for a time in their lives when they had been so grievously denied of this. This thesis gives space to, and represents, the voices of these Nazi victims.

In poetry, the unsaid is vital to the production of meaning. In order to investigate the theoretical framework of this claim and its practical application, my research comprises a critical component, The Poetics of Reticence, and a research-led creative practice, a collection of poems, Boat of Letters. The critical study introduces and explores the idea I have coined 'the poetics of reticence', a new term in the field. I argue that narrative gaps are central to the poetics of reticence. The creative practice exhibits and challenges that poetics. Boat of Letters collects poems that build on my instinctive understanding of reticence and stand in relation to the theory I lay out in my critical thesis. The theory emerged from the poems I have read. The collection includes poems that are obviously reticent as well as those that may at first appear to be non-reticent. I intentionally experiment with both approaches in order to test my theory that the unsaid lies at the heart of poems. The Introduction to The Poetics of Reticence includes a memoir of my development as a poet in relation to reticence, defines key terms and concepts, and provides an outline of the subsequent four chapters. The first chapter, a literature review, 'Critical Approaches to Reticence,' offers an overview of scholarly debates on this subject and evaluates critical texts about reticence. The second chapter 'A Methodology of Reticence', presents my methodology, which combines both conceptual and textual analysis. Here I apply a Levinasian theory to my argument in order to illuminate the notion that withheld information in a poem represents the speaker's vulnerability and otherness. This chapter includes a special section on Emily Dickinson whose work is explored as a test case to support my theory. In the third 3 chapter, 'The Ethics of Reticence', I maintain that narrative gaps invite the reader to accept the vulnerability and ultimate inscrutability of the poem and to turn inward and confront and develop the self, leading to a sense of responsibility. Dickinson is discussed here again, but this time through the lens of this chapter's concerns regarding ethics. The fourth and final chapter, 'Writing Boat of Letters', sheds light on how the poetics of reticence functions in contemporary poetic practice from the point of view of a poet. I reflect on my own work in this chapter, supporting my assertions in the previous chapters, through an analysis of my writing practice. This last chapter offers an intimate and practice-based answer to my research question: how does reticence produce meaning? In the Conclusion, I review my findings and discuss how my research can extend to further investigations.

This thesis uses practice-based research to ask how I can write a textual deep map from an investigation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. As a key part of the research, I made repeated visits to the environs of Auschwitz-Birkenau, walking and cycling extensively around the area in a search for contemporary fragments in the landscape, for example buildings, routes, sites, landmarks, place names, signposts and found objects. I used my own collection of guides, documents, textual, cartographic and photographic fragments and other ephemera related to the town and the Auschwitz museum in addition to support from the Auschwitz Museum itself and external archives such as the Arolsen Archives ("International Center on the Nazi Era - Arolsen Archives," n.d.) and the Weiner Holocaust Library ("Home - The Wiener Holocaust Library" n.d.) in London. These all acted as points of departure as I embarked on making my deep map. The research translates into a complex textual map of my subject combining autoethnographic stories with tales from psychogeographical drift, non-fiction examinations of place and semi-fictionalised histories. The research is presented as two conjoined texts, one a form of creative non-fiction and the other a critical reflexion, which between them constitute an examination of how a place as imbued with meaning as Auschwitz can be written about in a new way. I refer to the writings of a variety of writers, philosophers and theorists, including Giorgio Agamben's spatial grey area, or soglia , Walter Benjamin's 'alternative model for organising things in the field of knowledge' and Charlotte Delbo's entrances, exits, boundaries and markers that delineate Birkenau. My process is deeply personal and predicated on a form of personal exposure to the landscape with few specific notions or processes of exploration. A process of constant sorting is fundamental to my production as I examine place as a series of complex, palimpsestic texts.

My thesis analyses the ways in which individuals experienced and responded to Holocaust history exhibitions in the UK, immediately after their visit by interpreting their emotional and personal narratives. This research aims primarily to understand what triggers people to visit/revisit Holocaust exhibitions, the nature of the visitors' experience within Holocaust exhibitions, as well as understanding both how and why individuals engage with the difficult past in certain ways. Consequently, the thesis examines how emotional responses were contextualised within museum and whether emotional engagement has any significance in visitors' thoughts, feelings and attitude, in relation to the past and its contemporary meaning. The fieldwork took place in two museums in the UK: The National Holocaust Centre and Museum in Nottingham and the Jewish museum in London. The use of interpretative qualitative approach, and open-ended interviews were conducted to enhance the exploration and understanding of how visitors responded to difficult past. The visitors' diverse emotional responses shed light on the ways in which they related and interpreted historical narratives within museums' exhibitions. The contribution of this thesis is also enhanced by providing insights regarding the extent in which individuals used the museum exhibitions to reinforce their established ideas and values, and/or validate their identities, and how this engagement shaped their museum experience. Furthermore, by bridging together theories and methodologies from different disciplines (museum studies, media psychology, theory of emotions and sociocultural paradigms) the research has enriched our understanding of how the emotions work and how visitors used them within the museum space. Finally, this research questions the assumption that creating Holocaust exhibitions encourages visitors to engage effectively in ideas that affect their thoughts and actions in the future.

Discussions surrounding musical meaning and traumatic memory both focus on the ineffability of their subjects, the fact that words and concrete narrative structures will never capture the inner reality of musical expression or the traumatic past. This study seeks to explore how this overlap of disciplinary concerns can be used as a lens through which to examine musical representations of trauma. Musicologists interested in the nature of musical meaning more broadly tend to overlook composer Arnold Schoenberg's conception of the musical idea, which engages with the complex relationship between what music expresses (which he believes is fundamentally ungraspable) and its comprehensible means of expression (its analysable musical structures). In creating this distinction, Schoenberg establishes a model for engaging with music that allows for analytical modes of engagement, while simultaneously preserving the notion that musical meaning is fundamentally spiritual and exists beyond the confines of human logic. As a result of recent developments in neurobiology, contemporary trauma studies has begun to turn away from the notion that traumatic memory exists solely in the mind, and instead locates it within the entire body's response to trauma. As we learn more about the somatic traces that trauma leaves behind, we must examine the emphasis placed on linguistic linear narratives, both in the treatment and representation of trauma. In many discussions surrounding how aesthetic works engage with trauma, there is a tendency to treat these representations as if they are suffering from, rather than communicate the disruptive effects of traumatic memory. I would like to build on contemporary musicological studies that suggest music has the capacity to embody the disruptive effects of trauma by examining how traumatic memory is manifested in Schoenberg's String Trio, Op. 45 (which was written while he was still recovering from a heart attack) and his Holocaust cantata, A Survivor from Warsaw. Ultimately, this study seeks to examine whether the overlap between Schoenberg's conception of the musical idea and contemporary understandings of traumatic memory can provide a valuable lens through which to view his engagement with trauma in his String Trio and Survivor, and point to music's broader capacity to communicate the disruptive effects of trauma rather than perform a failure of representation.

This study investigates the engagement of students in a single school learning about the Holocaust. Using qualitative methods, to explore the experiences of four classes, and 20 students in depth, half of whom were refugee students. Their experiences, engagement and understanding were examined. A thematic analysis was conducted, and themes were identified, analysed and discussed. The themes were emotional engagement (how the students felt about studying the subject) and cognitive engagement (why the students thought they learnt about the subject, and if and why it was important to them), and behavioural engagement (how students behaved when learning about the subject) was looked at for context. The behavioural context showed that there was generally good behaviour when learning about the Holocaust but that there were some students that were badly behaved and disaffected. These were not the refugee students. The emotional engagement theme revealed that most students found learning about the Holocaust emotionally difficult and complicated. It highlighted that the refugee students empathise more than other students which caused other emotional complications that were not dealt with in class. The cognitive engagement theme showed that although there were discrepancies in what the students learnt, refugee students had a larger understanding of why they learnt about the Holocaust and resonated with the importance of learning about it more than non-refugee students. The study's conclusions are drawn making recommendations to amend Holocaust education within diverse classrooms and through an approach for entrance into and exit out of learning about the Holocaust.

This study analyses the conceptions of masculinity in the wartime letters written by Waffen SS officer Maximilian Guttenbrunner to his wife and mother. It examines how control formed the leitmotif of Guttenbrunner's identity. This identity was constructed in the context of his upbringing in Nazi Germany, his experiences as an SS member during the Second World War and his participation in the perpetration of the Holocaust, as well as his personal life as husband, son, and invalid. His desire to control others helped to explain his attraction to Nazi ideology, celebration of military conquest and dehumanisation of the non-Germans he encountered in occupied territory. When injury and illness undermined control over his own body and mind, he responded by escalating his attempts to control spaces, situations and other people, whether enemy combatants or loved ones. As such, Guttenbrunner serves as a case study of how adherence to the ideals of Nazi masculinity led a man like Guttenbrunner to oscillate between elation and mental breakdown, romantic love and war crimes, personal ambition and devotion to a genocidal cause.

This thesis offers a comprehensive insight into the lives and motivations of the Aufseherinnen (female guards) stationed within the Auschwitz complex of Nazi concentration camps. Through a detailed examination of records and secondary sources, a picture of the feminine relationship to Nazi propaganda and the role of women as perpetrators within the Holocaust has been established. The Aufseherinnen are a subject which has mostly been neglected in previously accepted historical narratives of the Holocaust as defined by patriarchal ideas. However, through the research in this thesis, the balance is readdressed. The focus of the project is on understanding the women individually before attempting to analyse the Aufseherinnen as a whole. The research enables the return of womanhood and agency to the women as individuals. The return of agency is also of importance when seeking to analyse how these characters are now perceived in wider popular culture and the consequences that misrepresentation has had upon broader societal knowledge about the role of female Nazi guards. The thesis argues for the inclusion of all genders in the analysis of the Holocaust and recognition of the differing experiences of both perpetrators and survivors based on gender. Above all, this study offers a piece of unique inquiry as it casts a critical reflection on a group of women who have never before been studied as a whole or in detail and opens up the possibility of a further wide-ranging survey on women as perpetrators in Nazi Germany.

This thesis explores British and French anti-racist memory culture from 1980 to 2001. Specifically, it explores the complex development, articulation and tentative intersections between Holocaust and colonial memory. Taking a largely textual approach through anti-racist print media, it makes the case that anti-racists on both sides of the Channel possessed profoundly historicist approaches to their contemporary activism against racism and wielded the memory of past instances of racism as a challenge to received national narratives of the past. The differing national experiences of the Holocaust, the Second World War, the Vichy regime as well as the shared experience of colonialism contributed to the formation of highly supple memory cultures. While there was not always consensus over the prioritisation or interpretation of certain memories – indeed, in some cases, anti-racists were bitterly divided over competing memories – there was nevertheless a shared belief in the value of the past in teaching and warning the present of the consequences of racism. Compared to Holocaust memory, anti-racist colonial memory was highly fragmented over the case of the 1980s, with the legacy of the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962) largely serving as the nodal point around which colonial memory revolved in France. In the British case, colonial memory was more fragmented still, though by the 1990s it underwent some tentative negotiation. While primarily national in scope throughout the 1980s, anti-racists on both sides of the Channel underwent a ‘European turn’ in the early 1990s which had profound implications for the development of their complex memory cultures. History and memory served a pedagogical and didactic function in which the racism of the present could be interpreted and challenged through reference to the past.

This study analyses appropriations of King Lear in post-war British playwriting, from Edward Bond's 1971 play Lear to Dennis Kelly's 2010 play The Gods Weep. It shows that post-war playwrights have variously appropriated King Lear in response to the disaster of the Holocaust and its near-total destruction of human subjectivity. I concentrate particularly on the playwrights David Rudkin, Howard Barker and Sarah Kane, all of whom appropriate King Lear in the service of a type of playwriting and drama called 'Catastrophism' - a form deeply influenced by Frankfurt School theorist Theodor Adorno and his conceptualization of aesthetics and subjectivity 'after' Auschwitz. Catastrophism names a form of tragic drama that eschews resolution and retains the autonomy of the tragic subject, who cannot be finally constrained by any form of aesthetic or ideological closure. Over and against repressive systems of thought and society, the Catastrophist subject retains his/her freedom. I show that appropriations of King Lear have played a vital role in Catastrophism and its response to the degradation of human subjectivity and freedom in the Holocaust.

Despite being an equal in the most significant partnership in British cinema, Emeric Pressburger has largely been overshadowed by his long term collaborator Michael Powell in both critical and academic studies. While there have been countless books on Powell and Pressburger as a team, those who have sought to separate the partnership have, until now, focussed almost exclusively on Powell. This thesis will attempt to redress the balance within Powell and Pressburger scholarship and attempt to break away from director-centric film studies. It will aim to examine Pressburger’s morally ambiguous characters, such as the recurring “good German” and his propensity to humanise characters who would normally be termed evil or corrupt, in conjunction with the central themes of displacement and exile within Pressburger’s screenplays and novels. The thesis will also utilise both unpublished and unfilmed material and demonstrate that the study of these works that exist only in archives provide a greater insight into the working practises of authors and filmmakers, while providing a valuable point of comparison to their more widely known works. Specifically, this thesis will address four separate aspects of Pressburger’s canon. First, it will discuss Pressburger’s war films which he made with Powell, which have suffered to an extent from neglect by many Archers’ scholars. It is clear that Pressburger’s key hallmarks and mirroring of his own experiences during the war can be seen to develop within these works and provide an ideal point of comparison with that of his later projects such as his novels. Chapter two will then examine the often overlooked filmed operetta, Oh ... Rosalinda!! (1955) along with Pressburger’s unfilmed screenplay The Golden Years (1951) a biopic of Richard Strauss, and provide a comparison to demonstrate the manner in which Pressburger’s love of opera overlapped with his development of complex characters and response to the war. Chapter three will analyse Pressburger two published novels, both of which have been largely ignored by both cinema and literary critics. Through the study of these novels, the difference in approach after the transition from screenwriter to novelist will be examined, along with the further development of his seeming neutrality in the portrayal of morally unsound characters. Chapter four will then focus on Pressburger’s two unpublished novels, The Unholy Passion and A Face like England, with consideration of Pressburger’s developing ideas of morality and forgiveness in his later years. In conclusion, by closely examining works that have been overlooked by Powell and Pressburger scholars, the thesis will shed new light on Pressburger, both as a filmmaker and an author and demonstrate the complexities of both his characters and his writing.

Inspired by 2009 pastiche Inglourious Basterds (US/DE), my research presents counterfactual historical film, firstly, as a marginalised type of film: the 2000s and 2010s have seen an abundance of overtly fictional films which do not intend to represent the past but nonetheless playfully refer to imageries of National Socialist and Holocaust history. These films have so far been neglected by historical film studies which, despite a consensus not to judge films according to their factual accuracy, tend to focus on genres close to historiography. My research considers as historical films the counterfactual parodies Churchill: The Hollywood Years (GB 2004) and Mein Führer: Die wirklich wahrste Wahrheit über Adolf Hitler (DE 2007), as well as Inglourious Basterds and, in a brief conclusion, Nazi zombie films. In this sense, counterfactual historical film is, secondly, a research approach which suggests reconfiguring academic definitions of the field of history and film and historical film. Assuming that historical film never visualises past reality but engages with a history that is always already medialised, I propose that the above films despite their counterfactual plots embark on a visual historical discourse, and what is more reflect upon cinema and history in their own enlightening ways. My analyses show how twenty-first century counterfactual historical films revise Nazi and Holocaust visual history, and how they describe National Socialist history as visually constructed and historical Nazism as an eclectic amalgamation drawing on fictional as well as factual media sources. In regard to the present, they explore tensions between popular and academic culture through the dissolving binaries of fiction film and historiographical fact, and propose to recognise the reciprocity of media representation and actual past as an object of research in its own right. My research demonstrates the value of cinema's playful engagement with history as a potential contribution to the theory and practise of historical film studies.

Concentration camp scholarship has been impacted by an ‘island syndrome’: most research limits itself to one site, focuses either on its life or afterlife, and overlooks interactions among functionaries, inmates, and local people. Central themes connected to the camps thus remain shrouded in popular misconceptions. This study breaks with historiographical orthodoxies and addresses common confusions through a new framework. Drawing on Ebensee and the Loiblpass, two forced labour outposts of the Mauthausen complex, it presents the first integrated account of the divergent factors that shaped the legacies of these sites and the fates of their subjects. A focus on Ebensee shows how gravely the local bureaucracy, relief workers, and US Army impacted on the early postwar lives of former camp inmates. Victim groups were marginalised by local and Allied actors precisely because of a broad awareness and continued survivor presence. The Loiblpass figured less prominently in the postwar lives of its surrounding communities. At the core of postwar views lay pre-1945 experiences. Living in an epicentre of territorial struggles, Loibl Valley inhabitants did not externalise a strong political agenda and instead communicated a binary ‘selective association process’. The memory of the camp prompted a positive association in socioeconomic terms; political allusions provoked a relativizing of brutality and a claim to personal victimhood. The local context and postwar dimension constitute a missing link in our understanding of these sites, their neighbouring communities, and the early postwar period more broadly. While the causal relationship between a social reintegration of Nazis and a re-marginalisation of genuine victims has thus far been viewed chiefly through the lens of federal politics, this development was already long under way—aided by all local actors—when amnesty laws encouraging the rehabilitation of former National Socialists came into effect; national and Allied policy decisions in the wake of the burgeoning Cold War only further catalysed this development from 1947 onwards.

This thesis investigates fascist Jewish policy in Italian-occupied southeastern France between November 1942 and August 1943. The fascist government repeatedly refused to hand over to its Nazi ally or to its French enemy foreign Jewish refugees in the Italian occupation zone. This decision, which was tantamount to a refusal to collaborate in the extermination of the Jews, was partially overturned in mid-July 1943. This thesis seeks to explain the rationale for the fascist government’s decisions concerning the fates of foreign Jewish refugees in southeastern France. Current scholarship justifies the fascist government’s decisions as a manifestation either of humanitarianism or political expediency. This thesis argues instead that the Italian refusal to partake in the extermination of the Jews was ideological. As the fascist and Nazi leaderships attributed different relevance to the ‘Jewish question’, they consequently prescribed different methods to ‘solve’ it, in the context of their common military effort to win the war. Through the in-depth reconstruction of fascist Jewish policy in southern France, this thesis argues that although the fascist rulers acknowledged the existence of a ‘Jewish problem’, they never considered its solution as vital to their effort to win the war. Unlike the Nazis who considered their war against the Jew as the pivotal issue, thus rendering the physical eradication of all Jews as a conceivable action in the context of a total war, the Italians considered Jews as a secondary threat compared to communists or enemy aliens residing in their occupation zone. In turn, by analysing fascist Jewish policy in the broader geopolitical, diplomatic and military context of the occupation of southeastern France, this thesis demonstrates how, and to what extent, other ethical and practical considerations interacted with the larger ideology in operation. The overall result was a policy in which the murder of Jews was considered politically inexpedient and morally unacceptable, but which was, nevertheless, still persecutory (the Italian authorities interned foreign Jewish refugees in southern France and took measures to prevent their arrival in the Italian occupation zone). At the same time, this thesis reveals that, although the Jewish policy was consistent with the regime’s declared goal to ‘discriminate, but not persecute’ the Jews, it was not a necessary consequence of that goal. Instead, this policy could be negotiated and adjusted should the political need arise, as proved by the decision (ultimately without consequences) to surrender German Jews in mid-July 1943.

Storytelling holds a significant place in peace education and dialogue work with young people in Israel/Palestine, reflecting the popularity of the dual narrative approach as a framework for understanding the conflict. The approach is predicated on the assumption that there are two competing national narratives that have collided in the same geographical space, with young people only able to come to terms with the ‘other’ narrative through a process of concession and compromise, mediated by adults. Recognising the constraints and limitations of the dual narrative approach, my thesis focuses on the lives of Israeli and Palestinian youth who inhabit a border of some kind (physical, linguistic, ethnic, or intergenerational) and analyzes how stories are transmitted across and influenced by such boundaries. Special attention is given to traumatic histories that carry a social taboo, such as the Nakba in Israeli society and the Holocaust in Palestine, and how young people may develop and express their conceptions of community, belonging, and exclusion through storytelling. The research is grounded in ethnographic fieldwork and practical storytelling workshops conducted over sixteen months in Israel/Palestine (March 2014 to July 2015), with various methods of narrative inquiry forming the basis for data analysis, notably Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). The thesis is divided into four chapters, which are based on the dominant themes that emerged through fieldwork. ‘Language and the Hidden Landscape’ is an applied linguistic analysis of how young people living in segregated communities imagine and narrate places that are off-limits to them. ‘Violence in the Narration of Self and Other’, an examination of the violence inherent in face-to-face storytelling that is grounded in the phenomenological theory, discusses how the storytellers deal with violence through narrative, their depiction of members of the ‘other’ community’, and the more disturbing and potentially violent functions of storytelling in peace education for youth. ‘Forbidden Histories in Contested Spaces’ unpicks the shadowy interweave between Holocaust and Nakba memory, while ‘Happily Ever After?’ examines how the narrators view and construct endings – both for the conflict, and in their narratives. These themes bring together time, place, and inhabitants’ interaction with place and memory, resulting in a more complex and nuanced understanding of how young people growing up with intractable conflict use storytelling to interpret their histories and make sense of their lives in the present day, as well as the ways in which stories may interact even in a highly polarized and segregated society. In conclusion, the role of storytelling with children in conflict zones is re-evaluated, with the research suggesting that there needs to be a shift in emphasis from storytelling as a means of therapy to storytelling as a social and political act, a means of enabling young people to take a more active role in community-building, rehabilitation, and ultimately reconciliation.

This thesis examines the ways in which the Holocaust and the Jewish past have been remembered in Kraków, investigates the impact local memory work has had on Polish collective memory, and problematises the importance of the 1989 threshold for that memory work. Looking at Kraków, an exceptional and exceptionally important case study, between 1980 and 2013, the thesis investigates heritage creations in Kazimierz, the old Jewish Town, and traces the genealogies of Holocaust exhibitions presented in Kraków. It also traces the emergence of urban critical narratives about the past, pertaining both to the city and to Poland as a whole. Created in opposition to the mainstream ethno-nationalist narrative, which was often supported by both the Communist and the democratic governments, the interpretation of the past laid out in Kraków gradually incorporated the Jewish past into the narrative on Polish history. The thesis demonstrates how, over the course of thirty years, Jews came to be presented as rightful members of the Polish national community, and the Holocaust as an integral part of Polish war history, albeit still distinct to other sufferings. At the forefront of the process of excavating and presenting Kraków’s Jewish past were local memory activists. In particular, this thesis highlights the pivotal role played by mid-ranking officials from municipal administration and by fictive kinships in the process of urbanisation of memory. These individuals and groups translated the ideas of critical engagement with the nation’s history, propagated by some sections of the national elite, into a form that could be consumed by a mass audience. In addition, the thesis demonstrates that memory work on a local level persisted almost uninterrupted through the transition to democracy. Activists responsible for the creation of inclusive narratives in the 1980s, and the Krakowian intelligentsia in general, carried those ideas forward through the collapse of Communism – no radical reformulation of representations of the Jewish past or the Holocaust took place in the early 1990s. The local narratives grew progressively more critical and increasingly more cosmopolitan from the 1980s onward, but this process only truly accelerated after 2010. The present thesis argues that this post-2010 intensification was only possible after local activists had embraced new forms of commemoration and new modes of authentication within museum exhibitions. In particular it points toward the espousal of ‘complementary authenticities,’ a mode of authentication of narratives strongly anchored in history that at the same time aimed to incite an emotional response. This incorporation of ‘complementary authenticities’ allowed for the creation of narratives that sensitised audiences to the suffering of Poles regardless of their ethnic background. Thus the thesis relates the developments of memory work in Kraków to broader changes in culture, rather than solely to changes in political life.

Since unification the memorial landscape of Berlin and its surrounding territories has shifted and expanded exponentially. The majority of this change has occurred within the past ten years, as commemoration of the Holocaust and educational programmes on the National Socialist period have become not only prevalent, but a necessary and expected contribution to the shaping of German identity and memorial culture. In the past decade memorial museums and sites of remembrance, such as the House of the Wannsee Conference, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, and the former Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück concentration camps, have contributed to and been impacted by the formation of a globalised memory of the Holocaust. As major and internationally renowned institutions, these sites offer unique insight into the nature of current memorial culture and recent approaches to memorialising and commemorating the past. Through an analysis of their exhibition spaces (online, permanent, temporary) and educational programmes (guided tours, seminars, and workshops), this dissertation will attempt to identify how these sites contribute to the formation of a globalised memory. Though each of these four sites possesses a different connection to the history of the Holocaust, and their own alternative approach to presenting and commemorating this history; this variation will provide insight into the divergent landscape of memorialisation within Germany, while also highlighting the common approaches, and practical issues that are of concern to these institutions. Overall the main aim of this thesis will be to demonstrate how memorialisation of the Holocaust, at sites within Berlin and Brandenburg, is no longer defined and shaped solely by the nation state, but rather is influenced by and contributes to international trends of remembrance and a globalised memory of the Holocaust.

This thesis offers creaturely readings of Holocaust literature, where a creature as defined by Anat Pick is 'first and foremost a living body - material, temporal, and vulnerable'. I also use the concept of creatureliness to approach animal suffering: a question which many authors have compared to the Holocaust. In Chapter One, I analyse moments in Holocaust testimonies where survivors compare themselves, their situation or their perpetrators to animals. In Chapter Two, I analyse Beatrice and Virgil by Yann Martel. This novel gestures towards a creaturely poetics as Foer compares human victims of atrocity during the Holocaust with animal suffering and vice-versa. I read it through two models of creatureliness offered by Anat Pick and Eric Santner in order to gauge which model best suits my thesis. In Chapter Three, I move forward using Pick's model of creatureliness to analyse two novels by J. M. Coetzee: in Disgrace, Coetzee traces a shared sense of vulnerability and affliction between humans and animals in Post-Apartheid South Africa, and in Elizabeth Costello the protagonist directly compares animal cruelty to the Holocaust. In my final chapter, I analyse Eternal Treblinka by Charles Patterson and 'The Letter Writer' by Isaac Bashevis Singer as two, contrasting ways by which authors compare our treatment of animals to the Holocaust, and see how well both forms fit with Michael Rothberg's multidirectional model of memory. This allows me to question whether it is desirable or even possible to apply a multidirectional ethics to all creatures. Overall, this thesis questions how and why creatures are depicted in literatures of atrocity (particularly the Holocaust), and how and why we might choose to read literature through a creaturely prism.

On June 7, 2000, the Holocaust’s position as an official part of British history and memory became solidified with the opening of a permanent Holocaust exhibition within London’s Imperial War Museum. This important national museum embodies Britain's cultural memory of war, of which the Holocaust has become a central part. Situated within debates of museology and memory, this thesis offers a compelling case study on the performative role of the museum in the construction of an official Holocaust memory within Britain and its relationship to national identity. While the Holocaust has become a ‘moral touchstone’ of contemporary society it seems urgent we raise questions of not only why we remember the Holocaust, but what, exactly, it is we are remembering. The oft cited dictum to 'never forget' requires remembrance of the Holocaust to serve a purpose; so that events of Nazi Europe may never be repeated. This ambition has proven hollow, yet countries invest millions of pounds in official Holocaust remembrance, commemoration and education. What purpose does the Holocaust serve in twenty-first century Britain? Questions of Holocaust narrative, material culture and testimony dominate the study, underpinned through wider concepts of history, memory, identity and museology in a British context. Using the Imperial War Museum as a case study, this thesis presents a challenge to the place of the Holocaust within British memory of war and questions how this limiting framework affects the way the Holocaust is remembered and understood throughout British society more broadly. Each chapter focuses on a specific aspect of the Holocaust exhibition and its display. A history of the exhibition provides detail on how and why the Holocaust became a central theme for the Imperial War Museum, while a study of the photographic, object and testimony displays in each dedicated chapter draws conclusions on how the Holocaust is shaped within this specific context. The relationship between the exhibition displays and Holocaust education more broadly throughout Britain is explored in detail in the final chapter of the thesis. Beyond the Imperial War Museum, this study points towards the future of Holocaust memory in Britain with an aim to highlight a limited understanding of the wider context of Britain and the Holocaust within popular narratives. How Britain connects to Holocaust history and memory remains central to this research, but it also considers how Britain could connect in more meaningful ways beyond learning the 'lessons' of the Holocaust.

Art Spiegelman is one of the most important figures in the history of American comics. His work Maus (1980 and 1991) is arguably the landmark text in the field of comic book studies. Given the relatively recent reissue of his first collection Breakdowns (2008) and the publication of his interview/essay collection/scrapbook Metamaus (2011), it is likely that his work will continue to be the subject of critical interest. This thesis concerns the collections Breakdowns (1977 and 2008), Maus (1980 and 1991) and In the Shadow of No Towers (2004). It represents the first book-length extended study of Spiegelman s three major works. The central argument put forth in this thesis is that the Spiegelman oeuvre articulates and manifests a madness which its author perceives to underlie supposedly rational society. In support of this thesis I will employ critical models from the following fields: Holocaust studies, trauma theory, the anti-psychiatry movement, theories concerning the representation of madness, formalist analyses of comics, and Genette s narratological taxonomy.

1. Sweetness and Light. A novel. Judi lives in a nice, clean house with her seventeen year old stepson, who won’t talk to her in anything but monosyllables. His father, Nelson, and she are struggling to relate to each other, since they fell out over Judi’s continued desire to have a baby, despite many miscarriages. She’s forty-one. Her relationship has lost its spark, she doesn’t know how to talk to the man that she lives with anymore. To make matters worse, he is her boss too. Judi needs answers, what she discovers instead is The Secret, Rhonda Byrne’s internationally bestselling guide to shaping the world around you with the power of your mind. Judi soon discovers she’s pretty good at it. Uncanny things start to happen. A wine-do with literary pretentions leads to an unexpectedly spiritual interlude, during which Judi is led, by a cosmic vision, to discover the sinister happenings at her work place. Hope, a schizophrenic woman in their care, has been raped, and is pregnant. Worse, Judi has strong reason to suspect that her abuser is the man she has shared her life with. With The Secret as her moral compass, Judi decides to kidnap Hope and raise the baby as her own. The relationship on the brink, becomes a game of brinkmanship. As Judi struggles to build a dream-life from the wreckage of the old, the burden of past makes its weight felt. A novel of secrets, and The Secret. An exploration of cosmic ordering, and its consequences. 2. Making Light Of The Holocaust: Modelling Calvino’s concept of lightness as an appropriate literary response to the Shoah in Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces. In Six Memos For The New Millenium, Italo Calvio proposes that lightness is a literary value which can act against cultural and creative paralysis. Given the ongoing cultural obligation to bear witness to the events of The Holocaust, might lightness be a necessary approach to post-holocaust literature? Calvino’s concept of lightness is deconstructed and examined in relation to the Memorial to The Murdered Jews Of Europe. The understandable critical hesitancy surrounding a light approach to the atrocities is examined, with special reference to Benigni’s La vita è bella Finally, taking Anne Michaels’ novel Fugitive Pieces as an exemplar of the lightness Calvino advocated at work in the field of holocaust literature, the case is made for the appropriateness, and potential necessity, of this approach in works that address The Holocaust, in the specific context of Michaels’ work and more generally.

This project sets out to frame and examine the theoretical and practical challenges involved in the process and effect of translating Holocaust testimony, which has been largely overlooked in Holocaust discourses. Research pertaining to the fields of Holocaust memorialisation, historiography, literary theory, and translation studies is drawn together, with a view to shedding light on what it means to write Holocaust testimony, what it means to read it, and how these often conflicting processes affect and are affected by translation. Using a canonical testimonial text by Elie Wiesel as a case study allows the exploration of these questions to be grounded in detailed and wide-ranging textual analysis, demonstrating the extent to which translation impacts Holocaust testimony. The Holocaust is an unparalleled event in the twentieth century and testimony to it is born of a unique desire to relate one’s experiences, coupled with a certainty that these experiences cannot be expressed. This dual set of challenges requires a distinctive approach to reading testimony, which is shaped through a range of textual and paratextual features. Furthermore, the reader’s perception of the author figure is argued here to have a discernible bearing on this reading process. Translation has the potential to unsettle this reading, by undermining the readers’ belief in the author figure and in the referential status of the text. The analysis of Wiesel’s La Nuit in translation demonstrates that translation not only has a marked effect on the content and nature of this piece of testimony, but that the way in which this effect is presented to the readership is a reflection of the text’s shifting target locale and strongly impacts the reading of testimonial texts.

This thesis considers the prevailing historical representation of Jewish masculinity in Holland, Belgium, France and Poland during the Holocaust and asks to what extent it is an accurate reflection of the source material available. Having concluded that such scholarship as exists on the subject is inherently flawed, my thesis will attempt to consider exactly how it might more accurately be represented. Beginning with a broad understanding of theories of masculinity and discussions of Jewish gender my thesis will lay out a clear approach both to the study of masculinity and to the questions and key features of Jewish masculinity in the interwar period in Europe. Treating the period largely chronologically, this thesis will then go on to its substantive research, looking at the sources, contemporary and modern, written both by survivors and those who died during the Holocaust, to attempt to determine the impact of persecution upon several elements of male gender identity, specifically, conformity to normative identities, the impact of gendered environments and, finally, more individual elements of masculinities. Ultimately, this thesis will argue that whilst Jewish masculinities were severely damaged in the initial phases of persecution, particularly due to an environment which was gendered feminine and the near impossibility of practising normative gender identities, the period of enclosure, and particularly ghettoisation, which followed was one in which many men were, within reason, able to reassert clear masculine identities. Finally, my thesis will conclude by considering the role of fatherhood and father-son relationships in the Holocaust and what this can tell us about generations within masculinity and the impact of fatherhood on the masculine identity of the individual.

This study employs qualitative methods to investigate the types of learning that occurred when students in a single school encountered the Holocaust. The study explored the experiences of 48 students, together with two of their teachers and a Holocaust survivor who visited the school annually to talk to the students. A thematic analysis was conducted to identify prevalent similarities in the students’ responses. Three themes were identified, analysed and discussed. The three themes were: ‘surface level learning’ (their academic knowledge and understanding of the Holocaust), ‘affective learning’ (their emotional engagement with the topic) and ‘connective learning’ (how their encounter with the Holocaust fitted their developing worldview). The first theme revealed that students had a generally sound knowledge of the Holocaust, but there were discrepancies in the specifics of their knowledge. The second theme revealed that learning about the Holocaust had been an emotionally traumatic and complicated process. It also revealed that meeting a Holocaust survivor had a significant impact upon the students, but made them begin to question the provenance of different sources of Holocaust learning. The third theme showed that students had difficulty connecting the Holocaust with modern events and made flawed connections between the two. Finally, the study examines the views of the Holocaust survivor in terms of his intentions and his reasons for giving his testimony in schools. The study’s conclusions are drawn within the context of proposing a new conceptualisation of the Holocaust as a ‘contested space’ in history and in collective memory. A tripartite approach to Holocaust Education is suggested to affect high quality teaching within the ‘contested space’ of the event.

This thesis explores ways in which the reality of Kantor’s existence at a key moment in occupied Kraków may be read as directly informing the genesis and development of his artistic strategies. It argues for a particular ontological understanding of human being that resonates strongly with that implied by Kantor in his work and writings. Most approaches to Kantor have either operated from within a native perspective that assumes familiarity with Polish culture and its influences, or, from an Anglo-American theatre-history perspective that has tended to focus on his larger-scale performance work. This has meant that contextual factors informing Kantor’s work as a whole, including his happenings, paintings, and writings, as well as his theatrical works, have remained under-explored. The thesis takes a Heideggerian-hermeneutic approach that foregrounds biographical, cultural and aesthetic contexts specific to Kantor, but seemingly alien to Anglo-American experience. Kantor’s work is approached from Heideggerian and post-Heideggerian perspectives that read the work as a world-forming response to these contexts. Read in this way, key writings, art and performance works by Kantor are revealed to be explorations of existence and human being. Traditional ontological distinctions between process and product, painting and performance, are problematised through the critique of representation that these works and working practices propose. Kantor is revealed as a metaphysical artist whose work stands as a testament to a Heideggerian view of human being as a ‘positive negative’: a ‘placeholder of nothing’, but a ‘nothing’ that yet ‘is’ …