Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust

by Elizabeth R. Baer (Editor), Myrna Goldenberg (Editor), John K. Roth (Contributor)

The many powerful accounts of the Holocaust have given rise to women’s voices, and yet few researchers have analyzed these perspectives to learn what the horrifying events meant for women in particular and how they related to them. In Experience and Expression, the authors take on this challenge, providing the first book-length gendered analysis of women and the Holocaust, a topic that is emerging as a new field of inquiry in its own right. Accessible to readers on many levels, the essays portray the experiences of women of various religious and ethnic backgrounds, and draw from the fields of English, religion, nursing, history, law, comparative literature, philosophy, French, and German.

The collection explores an array of fascinating rescue and resistance, the treatment of Roma and Sinti women, the fate of female forced laborers, Holocaust politics, nurses at so-called euthanasia centers, women’s experiences of food and hunger in the camps, the uses and abuses of Anne Frank, and the representations of the Holocaust in art, film, and literature in the postwar era. The introduction provides a thorough overview of the current status of research in the field, and each essay seeks to push the theoretical boundaries that shape our understanding of women’s experience and agency during the Holocaust and of the ways in which they have expressed their memories.

Genres: History, Holocaust

483 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 1, 2003

About the author

Elizabeth Baer is a Research Professor at Gustavus Adolphus College in Saint Peter, Minnesota. Baer holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Manhattanville College, a master’s degree in English from New York University, and a Ph.D. in English from Indiana University. Her scholarly work spans the fields of history, religion, pedagogy, literature, and women’s studies. Baer has lectured, traveled, and taught all over the world including courses in Germany, the Czech Republic, Northern Ireland, South Africa, and Namibia. She has also garnered major awards including a Bush Foundation Fellowship, a Fulbright Scholar Award, a Pew Scholarship, and a fellowship at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. A leitmotif of Professor Baer’s scholarship is the tenacity with which she investigates important and difficult issues such as sexual violence in the Holocaust and genocide in Rwanda. Her focus is social justice and the role of literary texts in achieving such justice.

Reviews

[Tiffany · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a tough read, but extremely informative. By blending theoretical frameworks as well as modes of Holocaust knowledge, this anthology give a great education on specific points of women’s experiences during the Holocaust.