Holocaust Nazi Social Organization Exhibits

Holocaust

Nazi social organization exhibits psychological, physical, aesthetic, and infrastructural dimensions. These dimensions were already in place at the time National Socialism and the Nazi party became a political entity, and a manifestation of underlying anti-Semitic sentiments in the German populace. Anti-Semitic tendencies had in fact surfaced and re-surfaced throughout the history of the diaspora so much so that patterns of Jewish population migrations begin to resemble a Jackson Pollack painting by the time the Nazis did come to power. Indeed, Zionism was vocalized before Nazism, showing that the drive and determination to leave inhospitable and tenuous residences was endemic among the scattered Jewish populations. As Said points out in "Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims," the consequences of colonization in Palestine had a devastating effect on the Arabs living there, and the consequences of that colonization continue to reverberate in the 21st century. In fact, the political and social injustices that characterize the Middle East conflict are an ironic manifestation of a vicious cycle of oppression.

Hansen, in fact, points out the peculiar continuities between Schindler's List and D.W. Griffith's "racist blockbuster of 1915, Birth of a Nation. Both films bear witness to the "vicissitudes of public history," (127). Although Hansen acknowledges that the comparison is not much more than a "disanalogy," there do still remain some points of continuity that bear mentioning (128). After all, the displacement of Africans from their homeland to a position of servitude and political oppression can be compared with the Holocaust in terms of both issues having a collective as well as personal dimension; and each reflecting racism and its link to political and social power.

Creative or non-documentary representations of the Holocaust, as with Eli Wiesel's Maus and Stephen Spielberg's Schindler's List allow for a thorough recreation of the Nazi ethos. Whereas documentary evidence presents photographic testimonies, the artistic renditions allow for the impressions of how the reality of Nazism impacted the primary stakeholders. Using this line of thinking, it is important to understand the different modes of witnessing: the "heterogeneous points-of-view" that comprise the Nazi social organization (Felman 207). There were victims (Jews and survivors), perpetrators (Nazis), and perhaps most importantly, the bystanders (Poles, in the case of Auschwitz and documentaries related to the Warsaw ghetto; Germans in the case of the Nazi endeavors in German-speaking lands). The Nazi social organization must be understood on all these dimensions. There are bystanders that watched while their neighbors were being forcibly removed and displaced; these bystanders are crucial for understanding the narrative of Nazism. The Nazi social organization depends on cohesion and collective identity under the rubric of German nationalism.