Type of Document Master's Thesis Author Tahvonen, Eryk Emil Author's Email Address eryk@uchicago.edu URN etd-07272006-000412 Title Perpetrators & Possibilities: Holocaust Diaries, Resistance, and the Crisis of Imagination Degree Master of Arts Department History Advisory Committee
Advisor Name Title Jared Poley Committee Chair Alexandra Garbarini Committee Member Hugh Hudson Committee Member Keywords
- Janusz Koczak
- World War II
- Holocaust
- Jewish Diarists
- Holocaust Diaries
- Psychological Defense Mechanisms
- Trauma
- Diaries
- Textual Analysis
- Resistance
- Abel J. Herzberg
- Imagination
- Éva Heyman
- Hannah Senesh
- Dawid Sierakowiak
- Etty Hillesum
- Emmanuel Ringelblum
Date of Defense 2006-06-30 Availability unrestricted Abstract This thesis examines the way genocide leaves marks in the writings of targeted people. It posits not only that these marks exist, but also that they indicate a type of psychological resistance. By focusing on the ways Holocaust diarists depicted Nazi perpetrators, and by concentrating on the ways language was used to distance the victim from the perpetrator, it is possible to see how Jewish diarists were engaged in alternate and subtle, but nevertheless important, forms of resistance to genocide. The thesis suggest this resistance on the part of victims is similar in many ways to well-known distancing mechanisms employed by perpetrators and that this evidence points to a “crisis of imagination” – for victims and perpetrators alike – in which the capability to envision negation and death, and to identify with the “Other” is detrimental to self-preservation.
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