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This book investigates cinematic representations of the murder of European Jews and civilian opposition to Nazi occupation from the war up until the twenty-first century. The study exposes a chronology of the conflict's memorialization whose geo-political alignments are demarcated by vectors of time and space-or 'chronotopes', using Mikhail Bakhtin's term. Camino shows such chronotopes to be first defined by the main allies; the USA, USSR and UK; and then subsequently expanding from the geographical and political centres of the occupation; France, the USSR and Poland. Films from Western and Eastern Europe and the USA are treated as primary and secondary sources of the conflict. These sources contribute to a sentient or emotional history that privileges affect and construct what Michel Foucault labels biopolitics. These cinematic narratives, which are often based on memoirs of resistance fighters like Joseph Kessel or Holocaust survivors such as Primo Levi and Wanda Jakubowska, evoke the past in what Marianne Hirsch has described as 'post-memory'.
About the author
Mercedes Camino is Professor of History at Lancaster University, UK. She has published five monographs, one edited book and more than fifty articles on the topics of colonialism and 20th century conflicts.
Summary
- Unique cultural history that links the Holocaust and WWII resistance
- Original treatment of film as historical sources (both primary and secondary)
- Investigation of the role of film in memorialization of WWII and the Holocaust
- Investigation of WWII as civil war
- Research into (real and imagined) roles of civilians in resistance and the Holocaust
- Development of
chronotopes
in Memorialization of Resistance in WWII and the Holocaust
