The Book as Provocative Artifact : a New Relevancy for Holocaust Literature in the 21st Century

Abstract

In the context of the Holocaust, Technology, and Culture, my interest in digital artifacts led me to recognize three key factors that mutually influence aspects of knowledge and understanding across each of those area: access, agency, and action. In today's technology-driven era, 'books' are no longer a 'fixed' form. Studying Holocaust Literature as an artifact is one way to bring together enabling technologies for scholarly exploration and civic engagement about the Holocaust. To catalyze interest in Holocaust Literature, I examined contemporary authors' initial responses to the Holocaust as they relate to Holocaust-related Literature. My case study methodology details relationships within and across three independent and interlinked pairs of selected books: Miklós Radnóti's Tajtékos ég and Zsuzsanna Ozsváth's In the Footsteps of Orpheus: The Life and Times of Miklós Radnóti; Anne Frank's Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, and David Barnouw's The Phenomenon of Anne Frank; the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, and Steven Jacobs and Mark Weitzman's Dismantling the Big Lie: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The results demonstrate how an educational framework can be used to effect change by fostering a shift in how we see images, how we read words, and in computational representation.