Berel Lang

Knowledge Products (Giants of Philosophy) (Library Edition)

Plato

Art & Inquiry

Ariella Lang

Presents the life of the Italian Jewish author, examining his dual intellectual role as a scientist and writer and the legacy of his works in which he details his life as a survivor of Auschwitz.

The Matter of a Life

Primo Levi

Simone Gigliotti

This interdisciplinary collection of primary and secondary readings encourages scholars and students to engage critically with current debates about the origins, implementation and postwar interpretation of the Holocaust. Interdisciplinary content encourages students to engage with philosophical, political, cultural and literary debate as well as historiographical issues. Integrates oral histories and testimonies from both victims and perpetrators, including Jewish council leaders, victims of ghettos and camps, SS officials and German soldiers. Subsections can be used as the basis for oral or written exercises. Whole articles or substantial extracts are included wherever possible.

A Reader

The Holocaust

In The Future of the Holocaust, Berel Lang continues his inquiry into the causal mechanisms of decision-making and conduct in Nazi Germany and into responses to the genocide by individuals and nations—an inquiry that he began in Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide and pursued in Heidegger's Silence. Raising the question now of what the future of the Holocaust is, he addresses among other topics how history and memory together shape views of the Holocaust; how the concept of "intention"—which played a crucial part in the events of half a century ago—shapes history and memory themselves; and how future views of this genocide may alter those of today. In addition, Lang explores cultural representations of the "Final Solution"—from monuments to public school curricula—within the Jewish and German communities. He analyzes ethical issues concerning such concepts as intention, responsibility, forgiveness, and revenge, and puts forward a theory of the history of evil which provides a context for the Holocaust both historically and morally. Addressing the claims that the Nazi genocide was unique, Lang argues that the Holocaust is at once an actual series of events and a still future possibility. If the Holocaust occurred once, he argues, it can occur twice—and this view of the future remains an unavoidable premise for anyone now writing or thinking about that event in the past.

Between History and Memory

The Future of the Holocaust

the Holocaust as presence

Philosophical witnessing

Forrest Williams

Writings in Aesthetics and Criticism

Marxism and Art

This work is an analysis of the ideology, causal patterns, and means employed in the Nazi genocide against the Jews. It argues that the events of the genocide compel reconsideration of such moral concepts as individual and group responsibility, the role of knowledge in ethical decisions, and the conditions governing the relation between guilt and forgiveness. It shows how the moral implications of genocide extend to linguistic and artistic presentations of the Nazi extermination of the Jews.

Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide

A ground-breaking attempt at a prolegomenon to the study of style, this collection brings together eleven essays by distinguished philosophers, literary theorists, art historians, and musicologists, all addressing the role played by style in the arts and literature.

The Concept of Style

Berel Lang's Genocide: The Act as Idea analyzes and defends the distinctiveness of the concept of genocide as a notable advance in the history of moral and political thinking and practice.

The Act as Idea

Genocide

Aharon Apelfeld

Several prominent writers reflect on the degree to which the atrocities of the Holocaust have affected contemporary writing on the subject. a very extensive and well documented historiographical and literary analysis.

Writing and the Holocaust

In What Is Called Thinking, Martin Heidegger wrote, "Man speaks by being silent." Berel Lang demonstrates that Heidegger's own silence spoke consciously and deliberately in response to what has been called the "Jewish Question." Posed simply, the Jewish Question, as it gained currency in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries, asked how (or if) the Jews were to live among the nations. The Holocaust radically altered the significance of the Jewish Question and, still, the great philosopher did not speak. Lang interrogates Heidegger's silence for its possible meanings. He asks: What does it tell us about someone who prided himself on his ability to think that Heidegger never felt compelled to address the Jewish Question or to respond to the Nazi genocide? Lang demonstrates that Heidegger's silence after the Holocaust had its foundation in his silence on the Jewish Question before its occurrence. That earlier silence, he suggests, was based in the conceptual and historical role Heidegger ascribed to the Volk and in particular to the German Volk. Heidegger's silence, Lang concludes, was thus not simply an expression of prejudice or of his public persona. It derived from his philosophical thought and becomes, therefore, a necessary consideration in assessing Heidegger as a thinker. In this context, Lang suggests, Heidegger's silence still speaks.

Heidegger's Silence

A philosopher addresses conceptual and ethical questions that arise from historical accounts of the Holocaust.

Interpretation, Misinterpretation, and the Claims of History

Post-Holocaust

This collection of essays examines issues of race in a variety of historical and geographical settings, ranging from classical Greece to the contemporary Americas, Europe and Asia. The authors provide a perspective on race both in theoretical origins and appearances.

Race and Racism in Theory and Practice

Since Theodor Adorno's attack on the writing of poetry "after Auschwitz," artists and theorists have faced the problem of reconciling the moral enormity of the Nazi genocide with the artist's search for creative freedom. In Holocaust Representation, Berel Lang addresses the relation between ethics and art in the context of contemporary discussions of the Holocaust. Are certain aesthetic means or genres "out of bounds" for the Holocaust? To what extent should artists be constrained by the "actuality" of history—and is the Holocaust unique in raising these problems of representation? The dynamics between artistic form and content generally hold even more intensely, Lang argues, when art's subject has the moral weight of an event like the Holocaust. As authors reach beyond the standard conventions for more adequate means of representation, Holocaust writings frequently display a blurring of genres. The same impulse manifests itself in repeated claims of historical as well as artistic authenticity. Informing Lang's discussion are the recent conflicts about the truth-status of Benjamin Wilkomirski's "memoir" Fragments and the comic fantasy of Roberto Benigni's film Life Is Beautiful. Lang views Holocaust representation as limited by a combination of ethical and historical constraints. As art that violates such constraints often lapses into sentimentality or melodrama, cliché or kitsch, this becomes all the more objectionable when its subject is moral enormity. At an extreme, all Holocaust representation must face the test of whether its referent would not be more authentically expressed by silence—that is, by the absence of representation.

Berel Lang

Books

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