Europe of Dictators 1922-1953: readings
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Claudia Koonz, Duke University
Bibliography: Written and Visual Texts
Besides our textbook, we will read autobiographical accounts, novels, and propaganda. Excerpts from the six dictators’ speeches and/or writing, will provide us with the opportunity to read primary sources critically. A biography of Mussolini will be complemented by essays from Moshe Levin and Ian Kershaw, eds. Stalinism and Nazism. Works by victims and resisters reveal aspects of dictatorial rule that most Europeans never glimpsed. Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz inspires moral questioning in the “gray zone.” Ignazio Silone’s Bread and Wine (and the controversy about his political allegiances unleashed by Elizabeth Leake’s study) provides an exercise in critical historical reading of a text. Chapters from Jan Karski’s Story of a Secret State take readers into the clandestine world of Polish underground fighters. Selections from Eugenia Ginzburg’s Journey into the Whirlwind convey the agony of prisoners who were tortured in the Gulag because of their heretical ideas. We will conclude by discussing selected chapters from Amartya Sen’s Identity and Violence: the Illusion of Destiny. Claudia Koonz's The Nazi Conscience (Harvard University Press) and Mothers in the Fatherland (St. Martin's).
Film clips from festivals, parades, memorial celebrations, and holidays will give us a sense of the dynamic popular cultures that flourished in these dictatorships. Segments from the recently discovered color film of Chaplain’s The Great Dictator satirize the rhetorical styles of Hitler and Mussolini. The newsreel footage in Luis Buñuel's España (1936) reconstructs the Spanish Civil War. Two films provide “snapshots” of Soviet visual culture: Dzyga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) and Helmut Hanke’s East Side Story (1994) illustrate, respectively, the extremes of modernist innovation and Stalin’s beloved ersatz Broadway Kitsch. Two Italian films (Blasetti’s Terra 0Madre [1931] and Mario Camerini's Grandi Magazzini [1939]) illustrate the escapist entertainment that was so crucial in censored public culture.
Besides our textbook, we will read autobiographical accounts, novels, and propaganda. Excerpts from the six dictators’ speeches and/or writing, will provide us with the opportunity to read primary sources critically. A biography of Mussolini will be complemented by essays from Moshe Levin and Ian Kershaw, eds. Stalinism and Nazism. Works by victims and resisters reveal aspects of dictatorial rule that most Europeans never glimpsed. Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz inspires moral questioning in the “gray zone.” Ignazio Silone’s Bread and Wine (and the controversy about his political allegiances unleashed by Elizabeth Leake’s study) provides an exercise in critical historical reading of a text. Chapters from Jan Karski’s Story of a Secret State take readers into the clandestine world of Polish underground fighters. Selections from Eugenia Ginzburg’s Journey into the Whirlwind convey the agony of prisoners who were tortured in the Gulag because of their heretical ideas. We will conclude by discussing selected chapters from Amartya Sen’s Identity and Violence: the Illusion of Destiny. Claudia Koonz's The Nazi Conscience (Harvard University Press) and Mothers in the Fatherland (St. Martin's).
Film clips from festivals, parades, memorial celebrations, and holidays will give us a sense of the dynamic popular cultures that flourished in these dictatorships. Segments from the recently discovered color film of Chaplain’s The Great Dictator satirize the rhetorical styles of Hitler and Mussolini. The newsreel footage in Luis Buñuel's España (1936) reconstructs the Spanish Civil War. Two films provide “snapshots” of Soviet visual culture: Dzyga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) and Helmut Hanke’s East Side Story (1994) illustrate, respectively, the extremes of modernist innovation and Stalin’s beloved ersatz Broadway Kitsch. Two Italian films (Blasetti’s Terra 0Madre [1931] and Mario Camerini's Grandi Magazzini [1939]) illustrate the escapist entertainment that was so crucial in censored public culture.
