A couple of years ago, I started doing something I never really thought I’d do: I began to read and research more about the Holocaust and World War II. I grew up with media depicting the Untied States’ perspective during World War II, specifically the heroic acts of United States service members in the fight against fascism. All of this, of course, positioned the United States as heroic and on the right side of history, and as I have said before, this is all true. We did help to defeat the Nazis during World War II; however, that narrative left out so much, including the fascists tendencies at home and the ways that the United States actually influenced the Nazi’s and the Holocaust. This exploration led to my “Jim Crow and the Holocaust” syllabus.

Following that course, and leading up to my “Black Expatriate Writers in France” study travel course, I started digging deeper into World War II in Europe. I did not necessarily plan this, but leading up to the study travel trip, I tried to find more texts and information about the South of France, specifically Marseille. This led me to watch the first episode of Transatlantic, a limited series on Netflix based on Julie Orringer’s The Flight Portfolio. I haven’t finished Transatlantic yet because I wanted to read Orringer’s novel first, and I did that before leaving for France. Orringer’s novel, coupled with things I learned from Nicholas Hewitt’s Wicked City: The Many Cultures of Marseille, got me thinking more and more about texts, written either during or looking back after the war, and how to incorporate them into a course. This post offers some initial thoughts on what that course would look like and some texts I am considering for it.

I really started thinking about this course while reading The Flight Portfolio. Orringer’s novel got me thinking, for one, about questions that Varian Frye, the Emergency Rescue Committee, and others faced during this period. Mainly, I thought about one of the main tensions in the novel: who is “worthy” of saving from the Nazis and why? Along with this, I thought about Frye’s goal to save artists and intellectuals because they, as he argues, could tell the world about the atrocities occurring in Europe. The question of the role of art in relation to large existential issues during times of crisis comes up again and again in the texts I’ve been thinking about for this course. The course would ask: What role, if any, does art have in combatting fascism, hate, and oppression?

Orringer’s book led me to Victor Serge, a writer and Russian revolutionary who fled Europe during the war and settled in Mexico where he died in 1947. I have not, at this point, had a chance to read Serge’s work; however, his novel Last Times, written for an American audience, deals with the fall of France and the move to Marseille, that port at the end of Europe, in hopes of finding refuge across the sea. As well, I found his notebooks and other texts that I could incorporate into the course. Last Times reminds me of German writer Anna Seghers’ novel Transit, which I learned about from Hewitt’s Wicked City. Transit follows a similar trajectory to Last Times, a move from Paris to Marseille, but it also, as I have written about, deals with questions of art as resistance and the realities of bureaucracy during times of crisis.

After I read Transit, I picked up Hungarian writer Magda Szabó’s Katalin Street, a novel that, through the spectral presence of Henriette, a Jewish teenager murdered outside her home after her parents have been deported, chronicles the lingering of trauma of World War II as it begins in 1933 during the lead up to the war and ends in the 1960s during communist rule. Two main themes run throughout this novel, connecting it with others. For one, it deals with the effects of trauma on the characters and society. As well, it deals with the banality of evil and the ease with which well-meaning individuals fall into upholding oppressive systems. This becomes clear with Mr. Elekes, Henriette’s neighbor, who while rejecting the fascists’ “beliefs and attitude” nevertheless submitted to them because of his belief in “submission to one’s superiors, in whatever circumstances and however painful.” He felt this was his “absolute duty.”

Mr. Elekes submission to the Nazi’s power, even though he did not morally agree with their beliefs, makes him complicit in the murders of Henriette and her parents, and this knowledge haunts him for the rest of his life. We always ask ourselves how people could live in Europe, specifically Nazi Germany or nations they conquered, amidst the Holocaust and not resist. This is what Hannah Arendt deals with in a lot of her writings, and it was what Austrian-born, Romanian author Gregor von Rezzori deals with his Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, a collection of five stories told through the eyes of an apolitical narrator who imbibes anti-Semitisim while having Jewish friends and lovers both before and during the war.

In her introduction to von Rezzori’s book, Deborah Eisenberg lays out the questions that Memoirs of an Anti-Semite addresses. The narrator in Seghers’ Transit comments, at numerous points, on the quotidian nature of life for some in Marseille during this period, notably how they went about their day to day lives amidst such destruction. Eisenberg points out that von Rezzori asks us to think about these people and she asks, “What might such a person have been experiencing at each turn, at each of the moments that, in retrospect, appear as so strikingly significant?” How does one remember these events? How do they become distorted?

These questions, and more, lie at the heart of a lot of the books I have been reading lately and that I plan to read very soon. They are questions posed amidst and following the atrocities of World War II, and they are questions that we need to think about today in the face of legislation and movements that appear very similar, in numerous ways, to the raise of fascism in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s. We can easily look back, as many do, and say we would stand up and fight back. But, would we? What do we do today in the face of similar winds blowing throughout the land?

I am not sure, at this point, what books I would use in a course like this, or what I would call the course. Along with the texts mentioned above, I have been thinking about Cynthia Ozcik’s The Messiah of Stockholm along with some works by Polish writer Bruno Schultz. I am considering essay by Arendt alongside Simone Weil’s “The Illiad, or the Poem of Force” and Rachel Bespaloff’s “On the Illiad.” I am thinking about Claude McKay’s Amiable with Big Teeth which deals with the Italian Ethiopian War and German author Hans Herbert Grimm’s Schlump which deals with World War I and which the Nazis burned in 1933.

These are all very initial thoughts, and I will update you when I come up with a more cohesive syllabus. Until then, what texts would you suggest? What are your thoughts? As always, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Twitter @silaslapham.