16 Weeks Trad
This Course Requires Departmental Approval
Crosslist Course: HIS 3305
Course Texts:
Roger Scruton, Beauty: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford, 2011.
She Who Imagines: Feminist Theological Aesthetics, Eds. Laurie Cassidy and Maureen H. O’Connell, Liturgical Press, 2012.
John O’Donohue, Beauty: The Invisible Embrace, Harper, 2005.
The Holocaust—the systematic destruction of millions of people, mainly Jews (to whom the term refers) but others as well, by the Nazis and their collaborators—stands out as the most notorious case of mass murder in human history. It epitomizes the human capacity for evil, which capacity, in the Holocaust’s dark light, appears to be virtually unlimited. The word “genocide” was coined after the Second World War to describe that evil and to galvanize efforts (in human rights and international law) to contain it. This course explores the history of the Holocaust, tracing the rise of the Third Reich, its unleashing of the Second World War, and its implementation of the “Final Solution.” Topics include the history of European anti-Semitism, Nazi ideology, the role of “ordinary Germans,” and collaboration, resistance, and indifference outside Germany.
We shall examine the Holocaust as a pan-European event, placing it in the broader perspective of the history of genocide and comparing it in particular to Stalinist mass murder in the Soviet Union. Finally, we shall consider philosophical and theological questions about the meaning of the Holocaust and other forms of radical evil. Readings will consist of works of scholarship and witness.
Fulfills Veritas Integrations History, Cross-listed with HIS 3305
