Humanities Arts Cultural Stu 0296 - Visual Culture & the Holocaust

This course will explore the aesthetic policies of the Third concentration camps, and the more recent trends to memorialize the Holocaust in visual terms. Topics will include: the Weimar Republic and the inter-war critiques of German society by German artists, the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and National Socialism, Hitler as a failed artist and the effects his lack of success had on the official aesthetic policies of the Third Reich, Leni Riefenstahl's films, artists who continued to produce their work while hiding, artistic production at the concentration camps, the "Degenerate Art" exhibition and the mass destruction of avant-gardist art in Germany, and the "rape" of Europe and the Nazi "collection" practices. We will examine notions of collective memory as they are constructed in holocaust monuments in Europe and the U.S. and recent cinematic representations of this crucial period.

Independent Work Writing and Research In this course, students can generally expect to spend 8 to 10 hours weekly on work and preparation outside of class time.