If music sustained camp prisoners during the Holocaust, as Rita Dove describes in this poem, the arts can sustain us during our current pandemic.
Tag Archives: Nazis
Feeding on Beauty in the Midst of Horror
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Transit", Alice Herz-Sommer, concentration camps, Fascism, Holocaust, Music, Rita Dove Comments closed
How Nazis Used Art’s Soft Power
Hitler and Mussolini took the arts seriously and tried to use them to extend their power. They had mixed results.
Nazis and the Classics
Do the classics make us better people. F. R. Leavis thinks so while Terry Eagleton disagrees and cites as an example concentration camp commandants who read Goethe.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged book burnings, Fascism, Goethe, Terry Eagleton, William Shakespeare Comments closed
The Burning of the Books
In Ben Clickâs post yesterday on the banning history of Huckleberry Finn, he tells the story of a man who remembers hearing the book read to him when he was a child in a concentration camp. Horst Kruse never forgot that reading experience and would go on to become a Twain scholar. Ben talks about […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Banning of the Books", Bertolt Brecht, book burning, censorship Comments closed
Is There a Price for Doing Evil?
In a dinner conversation with academic colleagues and novelist Rachel Kranz, we grappled with the question of whether those who commit atrocities pay a price for doing so. I came to the conclusion that it is a question that novelists and poets are sometimes better at answering than academics.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Mask of Evil", Bertolt Brecht, Evil, Rachel Kranz, racism, Suffering Comments closed
