Since childhood, I’d been fed the constant patriotic narrative of World War II, imbibing the events in which the United States had direct involvement from Pearl Harbor to D-Day to the Battle of the Bulge and more. I never really veered from those stories until I started looking deeper into World War II a few years ago, specifically the connections between Jim Crow and the Holocaust. This led me to start reading non-American narratives of the war, specifically European writers who wrote either during or after the war. When I did this, I knew I wanted to teach a world literature course focused on these authors and texts. Here is the syllabus for the course I am teaching this fall. Maybe I will expand this course at some point, but for right now, I had to limit it to on;y about five novels. I would love to hear your suggestions for other texts in the comments below.

Course Overview:

When you think about World War II what do you think about? Pearl Harbor? D-Day? The Battle of the Bulge? Iwo Jima? Midway? Hiroshima and Nagasaki? The Holocaust? The internment of Japanese Americans? These events center on the United States and our involvement in the war; however, World War II, as the name implies, was a global conflict with far-reaching geo-political impacts that lasted well beyond the fighting. In this course, we will read literature from German, Hungarian, Russian, Pakistani, and Japanese authors who wrote about the leadup to World War II in 1939 and about the global impacts of the war long after 1945.

On June 14, 1940, Paris fell to the Nazis, and many fled South towards the Mediterranean seeking to escape the Nazi push towards the port of Marseille in Vichy France, the provisional authoritarian government that collaborated with the Nazis after the June 22 armistice. Anna Seghers, a German writer, and Victor Serge, a Russian writer, both fled Paris for Marseille, both making it out of Europe to Mexico. Seghers’ Transit and Serge’s Last Times detail this flight through fiction. Writing to Nancy Macdonald as he and others made their way South, Serge told her that he had lost everything — “clothes, books, writings — ” and that his letter was “a sort of S.O.S.” to people who knew him and his work, to inform them about the atrocities taking place.

The Hungarian writer Magda Szabó details both the lead up to World War II, the Holocaust, and life under Soviet rule following the war in her novel Katalin Street. The novel explores a myriad of themes we think about with World War II, from how fascism rose throughout the region to how individuals could get sucked into participating in horrendous atrocities against fellow human beings to what happed after the war when NATO and the Warsaw Pact countries arose out of the ashes. As Scott Neuffer puts it, the novel “explores the way the past is alive, in the present, still shaping life in mysterious ways that are hard to understand.”

During World War II, the British Indian Army took part in the European and African theaters. Following the war, in 1947, the British relinquished their rule over India which they held in some form since 1757. The British withdrawal culminated in the Partition of India which led to the creation of modern-day Pakistan and India. Pakistani writer Intizar Husain’s semi-autobiographical Basti focuses on post-partition Pakistan and the impact of history on the present. In Urdu, basti means anyplace where people live together. The novel explores how partition impacted relationships between Muslims, Hindus, and others who had lived together side-by-side for centuries but who now see themselves in two different countries.

While Nazi Germany deployed the idea of lebensraum, the concept that they must expand to acquire living space for the nation, Japan sought to expand its footprint in the Pacific through colonization to obtain living space for a rapidly increasing population. Japan annexed Korea in 1910, meaning that the nation existed under Japanese rule for thirty-five years until the end of World War II. Japanese writer Yasa Katsuei wrote two novels about Japanese colonialism: Kannani and Document of Flames. While Katsuei turned, later in life, towards Japanese nationalism and calling for Koreans to assimilate into Japanese culture, the two early novels have a distinctly anticolonial view of Japan’s control over Korea. In fact, the Japanese government initially censored them for their anticolonialism.

One course, no matter the discipline, can cover every aspect of a topic. We cannot cover everything that happened in World War II and its lasting impact on us today. However, it is my hope that this course will provide you with a broader understanding of what led to the war, the war itself, and the reverberations that continued to impact the world long after the ink dried on the treaties.

Primary Texts:
Husain, Intizar. Basti.
Katsuei, Yasa. Kannani and Document of Flames: Two Japanese Colonial Novels.
Seghers, Anna. Transit.
Serge, Victor. Last Times.
Szabó, Magda. Katalin Street.

Along with the primary texts, I will have students get in groups and read a graphic novel set during the time period covered in the course. The groups will have to, at the end of the course, make a presentation to the class. For the presentation, they will have to summarize the text and relate it to one or more of the novels that we read during class. I wanted to add this into the syllabus to expose them to more voices about the war. While the novels we will read were written by individuals who experienced the war firsthand, only one of the graphic novelists, Miriam Katin, lived during the war, being born in 1942. Each deals with the history of the war and the remaining trauma. As well, two of the graphic novels deal with the lead up to the war, Ronald Wimberly and Brahm Revel’s graphic narrative about Eugene Bullard explores African Americans who fought in World War I and the years between that war and World War II while Jason Lutes’ Berlin focuses on the fall of the Weimar Republic between 1929 and 1933.

Secondary Texts:
Gendry-Kim, Keum Suk. Grass.
Katin, Miriam. We Are On Our Own: A Memoir.
Lutes, Jason. Berlin.
Spiegelman, Art. The Complete Maus: A Survivor’s Tale.
Wimberly, Ronald and Brahm Revel. Now Let Me Fly: A Portrait of Eugene Bullard.

What are your thoughts? As always, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Twitter @silaslapham.