Understanding in the Absence of Meaning: Coming of Age Narratives of the Holocaust

Abstract

This working paper explores recent debates about teaching the Holocaust through literary representations written for and read by adolescents, asking how we can witness this event without idealizing or mythologizing victims and without necessarily ascribing coherent meaning to their experiences. Holocaust memoirs, such as the Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank and Night by Elie Wiesel, are now being supplemented by more recent works that employ different narrative strategies and call for new forms of witnessing in classrooms and for new ways of reading the Holocaust. A final version of this paper was published in The New Advocate, Volume 15, Number 4, and is printed here with the permission of Christopher-Gordon Publishers, Inc.