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"Van Gogh and Me",,"Last November my grandmother was visiting and wanted to do something fun. Instead of fun, my mother dragged us to the traveling “Beyond Van Gogh” exhibit that was in Salt Lake City at the time. As we entered this big warehouse where the exhibit was located, my fears seemed to be confirmed. I walked along a winding path with backlit, large-canvas reproductions of Van Gogh’s paintings with excerpts of letters written between Vincent Van Gogh and his brother Theo written over top of the paintings. For me, because I have a visual field cut and other sensory processing issues, it was painful and overwhelming to look at. The backlighting of the artwork made every detail pop and screamed for my attention. So everything smeared together and my brain could not process anything. I did everything I could to avert my eyes as I felt myself slowly becoming overwhelmed and on the verge of melting down.
I did notice that not everything in this room was yelling at me. In between these paintings, there were various empty picture frames invisibly suspended from the ceiling. As people, including myself, walked by, we all became the subjects. I became part of the artwork for a fleeting moment as I was framed within the borders. Then, once I turned the last corner, I entered a dark room with projections of moving color on the wall and floor. I went from being the one who moved around stationary pieces of art into a stationary person watching as the brushstrokes of color and light moved around me and swallowed me whole. As my mind and senses adjusted to this new reality, I entered a huge warehouse-sized room, projections of Van Gogh's work enveloped me on all sides. I was completely immersed in all the colors and details. Music written about Van Gogh or his works was gently playing in the background. For me, it was like a reverse fishbowl effect. Instead of feeling alone and exposed while something stared at me, I was a natural being that was happily swimming amidst the wonder around me. As I watched colors and paint strokes slowly morphing one painting turned into another, for the first time, art moved me in ways I never experienced before. By magnifying details that I would never normally see, I finally understood why art is so powerful. I watched his artistic process from start to finish as sketches were recreated and deconstructed before my eyes. I did not know about his work as a portrait painter, but seeing his side-by-side gallery of his many subjects, including himself, showed such an incredible imagination. This was the first time that I felt art really move me. Van Gogh’s artwork is so powerful and now I understand why his work lives on today. Visiting the “Beyond Van Gogh” exhibit has made me rethink what is possible. Please do not tell my mom that she was right and that I had so much more than fun.
Works Cited: “The Immersive Experience .” Beyond Van Gogh Salt Lake City, 2 Dec. 2021, vangoghsaltlake.com/.",,"""Beyond Van Gogh"" traveling art exhibit",,"November 2021","Julia Reardon, Mountain Heights Academy, Utah",,,,,,van-gogh-and-me,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"Aesthetics,Art,Art Exhibitions,Cultural Awareness,Emotional Experience,Family,Museum,Painters,Paintings,van Gogh, Vincent",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/543/Van_Gogh_HM.jpg,,,1,1
"To Pimp a Butterfly",,"Some would say music is the most powerful of the arts. The album To Pimp A Butterfly by Kendrick Lamar is just that, powerful. The overall theme of the album revolves around the black experience in America. This album is an emotional, gut wrenching roller coaster. With George Clinton and Thundercat production, To Pimp A Butterfly has an authentic Afro-Funk sound to compliment the layered, complex subject matter in the lyrics. Kendrick speaks in depth about how having slave ancestors affects him in an honest and vulnerable way without compromising strength.
This album made me question whether I had spent enough time thinking about the effects of over 400 years of slavery. I highly recommend this album to everyone interested in the American black experience!!!",,"To Pimp a Butterfly by Kendrick Lamar",,2015,"Alex Azzi, Student at TAMU",,,,,,to-pimp-a-butterfly,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"Afro-Funk,Black History,Clinton, George,Emotional Experience,Lamar, Kendrick,Music,Slavery,Students,Texas A&M University,Thundercat,To Pimp a Butterfly",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/154/IMG_4300.PNG,Text,,1,0
"This Couldn’t Happen to Me",,"This past year my aunt, my mother’s sister, passed away very young at age 45. Her passing devastated me and my family. The thought that kept entering my head was there’s no way this could happen to me. Tragedies, catastrophes, and other huge losses have never affected me so directly.
Then, in one of my English classes we began to read a book Beyond Katrina, which detailed the destruction of Hurricane Katrina on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Reading about these people who lost so many family members so suddenly and so young just broke my heart in ways I had never understood until now. The same thought was most likely going through their heads, this can’t be happening to me.
It was at this time that I realized that we really are all in this together. Death and loss is a tragic thing, but it brings people so much closer and that is the most human thing I have ever felt. It was so beautifully sad.",,"Beyond Katrina by Natasha Trethewey",,"April 2018","Madison Forrest, 18, student ",,,,,,this-couldnt-happen-to-me,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast,Death,Emotional Experience,Environmental Humanities,Families,Grief,Natural Disasters,Students,Trethewey, Natasha",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/153/download.jpg,Text,,1,0
"The Power of Performance",,"One night during my first semester of undergrad, I flipped on PBS on my tiny dorm room TV to watch Richard II. Or, half-watch, I should say – I was still convinced that I could multitask, so I was also reading one of my history textbooks. As I nursed a cup of black tea and highlighted what was probably entire pages of that book, I would look up occasionally to see Ben Whishaw’s performance. My memories of the event are a little hazy (that’s what I get for multitasking, I suppose), but I can recall the ephemerality of the blue, gold, and white color palette, the powerful emotions captured in the cast's performance (especially during Richard's deposition), and the brilliant ways the cast played off each other, especially Whishaw's Richard and Rory Kinnear's Bolingbroke.
I also distinctly remember watching Whishaw write “Richard II"" in the sand, only for it to be washed away by the waves, and thinking how amazing it was. I did eventually sit down and watch Richard II without distractions (and on a better TV), but that first viewing shaped the way that I approach Shakespeare. Without that performance, I wouldn't have become interested in Richard II, and I wouldn't have become a graduate student studying early modern drama. My fascination with Whishaw's performance led to my undergraduate senior seminar paper and helped to shape part of my Master's thesis; I have no doubt that it will influence my dissertation, as well.
Most importantly, it changed how I think about plays and performance. I had always thought of Shakespeare’s plays as texts to be performed, but watching The Hollow Crown was the first time I realized just how much performance can bring to the text, as well. Whishaw’s writing on the sand, for example, isn’t in the text of Shakespeare’s play, but showing Richard's name being washed away provides a clear image of the fragility of Richard’s kingship. Now, when I open up Shakespeare (or any other drama, for that matter), my first thought is always “how would someone stage this?” In my own research, I focus on these questions of performance (both by the characters in the text and actors on a stage); I want to know how to bring those nuances and details to life myself – to help others see the powerful emotions that these plays can provoke, just as The Hollow Crown did for me.","William Shakespeare","The Hollow Crown: Richard II",,2013,"Angeline Morris, 25, Ph.D. Student",,,,,,power-performance,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"NHC Graduate Student Summer Residency Program","Adaptation,Drama,Early Modern Literature,Emotional Experience,Performance,Shakespeare, William",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/18/475/king-1304612_640.jpg,Text,"Graduate Student Residents 2021",1,0
"The Best Motivational Token",,"It was a late night on September 14th, and school was at an overwhelming high. My new organization had just kicked off so all of my time was completely taken over by it, I was behind on my chemistry homework and I hadn't even began studying for my psychology test that was the following day. I felt like I was about to break into a million minuscule pieces, and I felt so emotionally drained that I was putting my loved ones on hold.
I was avoiding the text messages on my phone to avoid further distraction and more procrastination, but after a sufficient amount of time I decided I earned a break long enough to read what they said. I saw I had a message from my mom, but before I read it I remembered she told me a few days ago that I had a package coming on the 13th. Assuming that's what her text was about, I went outside to check the mail at midnight. Inside the package was one of my mom's classic gifts, a cheesy desk decorations with a quote of some sort on it. She always gave me these, but this time it hit my heart much deeper. It read, ""You Make My Heart Happy."" Tears flooded my eyes instantly. In that exact moment, this little wooden piece of cheesy decor fulfilled the void in my heart in the utmost way I needed. A kind reminder that I am valued, which I knew would help me power through this rough patch of the semester.
Astonished by this powerful moment, I immediately begin to text to tell my boyfriend, who also loves moments like these, which I call ""God Moments."" But to my surprise, and further heart-filled satisfaction, I already had a text waiting from him that said, ""Keep a smile on that face, you brighten the world with it."" Another reminder. It was as if everything aligned in my life in that sweet moment and I just let out a much needed cry and counted my blessings. Who knew this tacky little piece of art would trigger this exponential amount of needed love?",N/A,"""You Make My Heart Happy""",,9/14/17,"Melanie, 20, Psychology major",,,,,,best-motivational-token,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"Emotional Experience,Kitsch,Mothers & Daughters,Students",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/136/care-package.jpg,Text,,1,0
"Purple Heart, Purple Prose",,"Griswold recalls how a childhood encounter with a sentimental, “middlebrow” poem about a dog and a veteran (which makes her cry to this day) tapped into wells of empathy. She explains how such responses to aesthetic experiences, so often downplayed in academic inquiry, deserve our sustained attention—and even respect. ",,"“They Called Him Rags,” by Edmund Vance Cooke, featured in The Best Loved Poems of the American People",,,"Wendy Griswold, professor of sociology, Northwestern University",,,,,,wendy-griswold-purple-prose,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"",,"2017–18 Fellow","Books & Reading,Cooke, Edmund Vance,Emotional Experience,Empathy,Felleman, Hazel,Middlebrow Culture,Poetry,Sentimentalism,The Best Loved Poems of the American People,They Called Him Rags",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/8/291/War_Dog_Training_in_Britain_C_1940_D442.jpg,"Moving Image","National Humanities Center Fellows",1,0
"Optimism in the Form of Self-Control",,"
Personally I’ve never been one to adopt a positive outlook when things go wrong. In my life, things tend to go wrong more than they go right. This time last year I was struggling. I was caught in some toxic friendships, a toxic situation with a guy, my best friend wasn’t returning my messages because she had stopped taking her anti-depressants, my grandmother was succumbing after a 3-year battle with stage 4 lung cancer, and my younger brother had attempted to commit suicide twice, was addicted to several narcotics and had premature dependencies on alcohol and marijuana. A lot of adult scenarios were thrown at me, someone who had just entered the adult realm and I wasn’t ready. My grades suffered, I lost weight, I lost my hair and I lost my sense of self. I had no true friends. I had no one to turn to and for once in my life, my mother needed a shoulder to cry on more than I did, which scared me. It’s very scary to see your strong, heroic mother bent over sobbing on the bathroom floor. I guess everyone has their kryptonite.
I usually take on a cynical approach to life. My daily statements always had an underlying tone of pessimism. I just so happened to pick up a self-help book, in the name of being cliche, but it made me feel better to read something that could progress/improve my life. Best decision I had made all year. Stephen R. Covey writes in his book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, that there are always going to be things in life we aren’t in control of, called pre-determined aspects. Genetic determinism (how we look), psychic determinism (our upbringing), environmental determinism (the people around us). These create stimuli in our life. We don’t determine the stimuli in our life, but we control our response to them. Nobody can tell us how to react to situations.
Here I was in a downward spiral, feeling so out of control and vulnerable when I realized I controlled everything from here on out. And I always will. There will be so many obstacles in my life and if I were to let each hardship determine who I am, that would be giving dominion of myself over to my fears. Fears are immobilizing. Self-control and optimism were my saviors. Highly encourage the reading of this book.
","Stephen R. Covey ","The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey",,"Freshman Year of College/Summer 2017 ",,,,,,,optimism-self-control,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"Adulthood,Advice Literature,Books & Reading,Coming of Age,Covey, Stephen,Emotional Experience,Life Skills,Optimism,Self-Help Techniques,Self-Realization,Students,Suffering,The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/133/harbinger_of_spring.jpg,Text,,1,0 "On First Encountering Francis Bacon’s Paintings",,"The disturbing art of Irish-born British painter Francis Bacon often violates formal boundaries of the human. Consequently, a visit to a retrospective of Bacon’s work at the Hirschhorn Museum left Robert D. Newman deeply unsettled. As a humanities moment, this encounter compelled Newman to grapple with Bacon’s art, sorting through “contradictory emotions,” ultimately growing “as a being and as a self.” ",,"Francis Bacon's paintings at the Hirshhorn Museum",,,"Robert D. Newman, President and Director, National Humanities Center",,,,,,robert-newman-francis-bacon-paintings,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"",,,"Art,Bacon, Francis (1909-1992),Emotional Experience,Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,Modern Painting,Museum Exhibits,Painters,Washington, D.C.",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/2/4/francis-bacon-crucify2.jpg,"Moving Image","Robert D. Newman ",1,0 "My Front Porch Looking In","Music helped transform my understanding of the world. There is a song for any emotion and the song can either exacerbate an existing emotion or help change the way you are feeling. It can cheer you up or allow you to wallow in whatever you are feeling but at the end of the day the fact that music can make you feel something is where its power comes from.","I was around seven years old. My dad and I were in the car when the song came on. ""My Front Porch Looking In"" by the band Lonestar was my favorite song and I knew every word. I loved singing the song at the top of my lungs every time it came on. Today though, I stayed quiet. I had just witnessed yet another argument between my parents and my dad had taken me for a drive around town to cool off. He looked over at me with a confused expression when he saw I wasn't singing. All of a sudden he started singing the song as loud as possible and started to sway back and forth. He smiled and nudged my arm and soon enough I was grinning and singing along. This was the first time that music helped me to cope with a difficult situation. Since that day, I have turned to music as a sort of therapy to help me get through any rough time and the power of music has never failed me. Music helped transform my understanding of the world. There is a song for any emotion and the song can either exacerbate an existing emotion or help change the way you are feeling. It can cheer you up or allow you to wallow in whatever you are feeling but at the end of the day the fact that music can make you feel something is where its power comes from.",Lonestar,"""My Front Porch Looking In"" by Lonestar",,2005,"Zachary Fine, 19, Student",,,,,,my-front-porch-looking-in,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"Emotional Experience,Families,Fathers & Sons,Lonestar,Music,My Front Porch Looking In,Singing,Students",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/117/Lonestar.jpg,Text,,1,0 "Learning to Sing Stories",,"Juan Felipe Herrera, a performance artist, activist, and U.S. poet laureate in 2015, recalls how his third-grade teacher’s compliment on his singing voice led to his lifelong belief in using his voice to encourage the beauty in the voices, stories, and, experiences of others. He goes on to speak about the power of the humanities to warm communities, create peace, and, move hearts.
To celebrate its 40th year anniversary of grant making, programming, and partnerships that connect Californians to each other, California Humanities invited a group of 40 prominent Californians to explore what the humanities mean to them. For more information visit California Humanities: We Are the Humanities.
",,,,,"Juan Felipe Herrera, performance artist, activist, and U.S. Poet Laureate in 2015",,,,,,juan-felipe-herrera,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"",,,"Activism,Emotional Experience,Listening,Oral Tradition,Performing Arts,Poets,Poets Laureate,San Diego, California,Singing,Storytelling,Teachers & Teaching",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/5/148/3BlindMice.jpg,"Moving Image","California Humanities: “We Are the Humanities”",1,0 "J.C. Bach and the Exhaustion of Feeling",,"I was around 16 years old at the time of my humanities moment. I had been playing the viola for 7 years. As usually occurred, I became bored with practicing the first movement of J.C. Bach's Viola Concerto in C minor that my teacher had given me for an upcoming recital, so I decided to skip to the next movement. The second one was not one that my teacher ever assigned her students, so I hadn't heard it before. After a somewhat cobbled together sight-reading attempt, I decided to look up a recording. The song was hauntingly beautiful, filled with slow, elongated melodies and fast, anxious lines. I don't know what Casadesus intended to communicate with it, but, for me, it was a song about grief. The slow passages are restrained emotion, how one might feel when they are trying to keep themselves from feeling their sadness. The piece then becomes more anxious, as if unable to stop from considering what's going on. After the climax, it wanes, as if exhausted by the full cycle of the feeling. All of this was clear to me immediately upon listening. The piece both changed the way that I played music, but also changed the way that I considered music in my life. It was what I turned to play immediately after the passing of a loved one. I played it in my senior recital. I have returned to it over and over ever since. It encouraged me to seek out musical moments in my life, and to consider the emotional and personal significance of humanities works.","J.C. Bach","J.C. Bach's Viola Concerto in C Minor, 2nd Movement",,2012,"Megan Kitts, 25, Philosophy Ph.D. Student",,,,,,bach-exhaustion-feeling,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"Through the National Humanities Center summer intensive program","Bach, J.C.,Classical Music,Emotional Experience,Music,Music Appreciation,Teachers & Teaching",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/18/449/HM_Bach_Image.jpg,Text,"Graduate Student Residents 2021",1,0 "Human Grace",,"In 2009, when I was a freshman in college, I went to France and Germany at the end of a year-long seminar exploring the emergence of European nationalism after 1848. As I majored in History and Art History & Archaeology, this class was right up my alley, so to speak. And not to mention, we traveled to Paris and Berlin!This episode of Westworld had me at its title, ""Genre."" I have been thinking about genre as part of my academic work since my dissertation, which became my first book, on contemporary (post-1980) neodomestic fiction, and most recently in my work on the contemporary (post-1970) American adrenaline narrative. So, as I sought a moment of escape from home and work via immersion in the alternate reality of a popular television series, my work and entertainment worlds—as so often happens in the humanities—collided.
While the shift from thinking about the American home to extreme sports to a futuristic world may initially strike one as nonsequiturs, our current social distancing reality highlights the distinct and blurred lines between such genres. Our lives are shaped by shifting and competing narratives about home, risk, and our control or lack of control of the future. We engage narrative—via family stories, the news, fiction—to make sense of the chaos. Yet, as the episode from Westworld demonstrates, knowledge may also produce panic, if not pandemonium. Laurence Gonzales in Deep Survival claims, ""We think we believe what we know, but we only truly believe what we feel"" (64). This is the power and danger of narrative.
",,"Westworld, Season Three, Episode 5, Genre",,"April 12, 2020","Kristin Jacobson, Professor of American Literature, Stockton University",,,,,,genre-control-chaos,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,email,"Emotional Experience,Genre,Home,Professors,Television Series,Westworld",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/371/george-coletrain-ZtSl6qxcgus-unsplash.jpg,Text,,1,0 "Don't Close Your Eyes",,"When I saw Beautiful Boy, I found myself closing my eyes every time a lighter and spoon appeared. I would sneak one eye open and look through blurred eyelashes to see if the scene had changed, often shutting my eye more quickly than I’d opened it. When I accidentally saw anything “too graphic,” my neck grew hot and my stomach churned. As my friends and I left the theatre, someone asked me, “Did you like the movie?” “No, I did not like the movie. It made me sick and anxious.”One of my earliest childhood memories is of a sweet voice reading sweet words to me from a simple children's book. The voice belonged to my grandmother and the words were ones of pure love. As for the book, its title is Love You Forever and its memorable blue cover has followed me from childhood to my young adulthood, saving me repeatedly.
A child may not be able to comprehend the notion or importance of unconditional love but the comfort linked to it is easily understood and craved, love is a universal language after all. The affection my grandma held for me then was easily found within her every action, her hugs and excitement to see me, spending her nights watching movies with me, and of course, reading to me my favorite, little book. The words “I’ll love you forever/ I’ll like you for always/ As long as I’m living, my baby you’ll be”, will forever invoke the purest, most childlike feelings of love and happiness. This love and understanding between my grandma and I is so important, and has become an important lifeline in times of trial.
Eventually, like we all do, I grew up and my memory of the book faded. My relationship with my grandmother did not fade, however, circumstances caused us both to move away from our home state of Arizona. While she was in Texas for work, my family was in Ohio to be an aid for my aunt during a hard time in her life. There I was, crammed in a house with ten other people, living in a state I’d never been to before, and on the other side of the country from everything and everyone I knew. It was, to say the least, difficult for me at 13 to cope with. My parents tried to make the best of it by taking day trips and getting occasional treats.
One small day trip in particular had us on the road to a little town I can’t remember the name of. As we explored, we found a quaint little bakery that sold donuts, so of course we went in. As my dad ordered, I found myself in the corner where there were some dusty books shelved up next to a fireplace. I glanced at the books and one blue cover caught my eye. At this point in my life, I was struggling to find peace or any kind of comfort. I know my family was doing their best but everyone was struggling to feel loved. This is the moment where I realized the importance of not only nostalgia but that eternal love I keep mentioning. All the warm, gushy feelings hit me at once as I pulled the familiar book from the shelf.
This book, on a dusty bookshelf, in a small bakery in Ohio had just changed my life, all because of the love a grandma has for her grandchild. To be brought back to such a perfect feeling of love in the midst of my unending depression was so staggering. This sudden change from despair to hope changed my life and my outlook from there forward. I was going to be okay because no matter what I did or who I became, there is someone out there who will always love me. This thought carried me through trials throughout my life to this point. Everyone needs somebody to love them without conditions. This is the reason for some people’s cruelty and others kindness, and I understand that now. This is why I will always choose kindness. This is my humanities moment.
",,"Love You Forever by Robert Munsch",,,"Hailey Rogers, 18, High School Senior ",,,,,,love-that-follows-you,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"School Assignment ","Books & Reading,Children's Literature,Emotional Experience,Family",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/423/books.jpg,Text,,1,0 "“Il faut le savoir:” Reflecting on France’s Holocaust History and Memory",,"“Nothing distinguished the gas chamber from an ordinary blockhouse,” writes Jean Cayrol in the screenplay for Alain Resnais’ iconic filmic meditation on the Shoah, Night and Fog (1956). “Inside, a fake shower room welcomed newcomers. The doors were closed. The newcomers were observed. The only sign – but you must know this (il faut le savoir) – is the ceiling worked over by fingernails. Even the concrete was torn.” At this point in the film, like an insistent investigative eye, the camera pans to the ceiling of the gas chamber, revealing the telltale scratch marks. The image of fingernails clawing into concrete in a desperate attempt for survival recurs in another work about Holocaust memory that we read this semester, Georges Perec’s W, or the Memory of Childhood (1975). Recalling an exhibit he had visited with his aunt shortly after the war – the same one, in fact, that led producers to ask Alain Resnais to create the film that would become Night and Fog -- the child survivor narrator writes: “I remember photos showing the walls of the ovens, lacerated by the fingernails of those who had been gassed.” Il faut le savoir. The phrase has haunted me throughout the semester. You must know this. Because it happened. Because many would deny that it did, depriving the victims of dignity and history of truth. Fingernail scratches in the crematoria walls of Auschwitz, asks the neo-Nazi website The Stormer? “Jewish mythology says ‘yes.’ Science says ‘no.’” You must know this, because soon there will be no more survivors, and those still alive often find it too painful, or shameful, to share their testimony, or else they have learned to suppress it so as not to trouble others. “No one wanted my memories,” writes Birkenau survivor Marceline Loridan-Ivens in But You Did Not Come Back. You must know this, because 2/3 of young Americans, according to a 2020 national poll, lack a rudimentary understanding of the Holocaust. “Where did the Holocaust happen?” educator Rhonda Fink-Whitman asks a Penn State student in her 2012 documentary, 94 Maidens. “I have no idea.” You must know this, as Cayrol writes in Night and Fog, because “war is sleeping, but with one eye always open.” As I write, genocide continues to be perpetuated against the Muslim Rohingya people by the military in Myanmar. “Who among us keeps watch from this strange watchtower to warn of the arrival of our new executioners?” But to know – and this is a second meaning of il faut le savoir -- one must be ‘in the know,’ know where to look, how to be on the lookout, how to decode the signs. You have to be tipped off to find the “Memorial to the Martyrs of the Deportation” (1962) tucked in a small square behind the behemoth of Notre-Dame Cathedral, just as you must be ‘in the know’ to be disturbed by the memorial’s identification of those deported from France as willing “martyrs” to a cause rather than victims of state persecution by both the Nazis and the Vichy regime. The French State headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain is nowhere mentioned in this memorial monument, yet it deported over 75.000 Jews from France to their deaths, along with, in smaller numbers, Roma, the disabled, Jehovah’s witnesses, gay men and lesbians, and other ‘undesirables.’ Stroll around to the main façade of Notre-Dame to contemplate the two female allegorical figures framing it; only if you’re ‘in the know’ about the anti-Semitic underpinnings of European Christianity through the mid-20th century will you understand that one figure represents the Church triumphant, while the other, with downward cast, blindfolded gaze and broken Torah tablets at her feet, symbolizes the Synagogue. As only one photograph of this event remains, you need to be on the lookout for the tiny plaque at the foot of a bustling Parisian office building marking the site of the former Vélodrome d’hiver, an indoor bicycle track where over 11,000 Jews, including over 4,000 children, were packed for several sweltering days in July 1942 before being herded to their deaths. “A peaceful landscape,” writes Cayrol, “An ordinary field with flights of crows, harvests, grass fires. An ordinary road where cars and peasants and lovers pass. An ordinary village for vacationers – with a marketplace and a steeple – Can lead all too easily to a concentration camp.” Il faut le savoir. “Every hour of every day,” writes Hélène Berr, a young upper-class French Jewish woman who survived a year in deportation before being beaten to death in Bergen-Belsen, “there is another painful realization that other folk do not know, do not even imagine, the suffering of other men, the evil that some of them inflict. And I am still trying to make the painful effort to tell the story. Because it is a duty, it is maybe the only one I can fulfill. There are men wo know and who close their eyes, and I’ll never manage to convince people of that kind, because they are hard and selfish, and I have no authority. But people who do not know and who might have sufficient heart to understand – on those people I must have an effect.” Let us – we who in Primo Levi’s words “live safe in [our] warm houses,” armed with all we have learned this semester, make the “painful effort to the tell the story” to all those who will listen, “those with sufficient heart to understand.” Because the world must know. Yes, il faut le savoir. ","Jean Cayrol, Alain Resnais","Night and Fog (1955)",,"Spring 2021","Willa Z. Silverman, 62, Malvin E. and Lea P. Bank Professor of French and Jewish Studies, Penn State University",,,,,,il-faut-le-savoir,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"From one of my graduate students at Penn State (Morgane Haesen, whose ""Moment"" you published)","Documentary Films,Emotional Experience,Film and Movies,Historical Memory,History,History Education,Holocaust,Memorials,Memory,Teachers & Teaching,War",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/433/syn-ecc_NotreDame1-296x300.png,Text,,1,0