Confronting Mortality in the Holocaust and Ourselves
What do we learn about death from the Holocaust and how does it impact our responses to mortality today?
This book brings together the work of eleven Holocaust and genocide scholars who address this difficult question, convinced of the urgency of further reflection on the Holocaust as the last survivors pass away. The volume is distinctive in its dialogical and introspective approach, where the contributors position themselves to confront their own impending death while listening to the voices of victims and learning from their life experiences. Broken into three parts, this collection engages with these voices in a way that is not only scholarly, but deeply personal.
The first part of the book engages with Holocaust testimony by drawing on the writings of survivors and witnesses such as Elie Wiesel, Jean Améry, and Charlotte Delbo, including rare accounts from members of the Sonderkommando. Reflections of post-Holocaust generations—the children and grandchildren of survivors—are housed in the second part, addressing questions of remembrance and memorialization. The concluding essays offer intimate self-reflection about how engagement with the Holocaust impacts the contributors’ lives, faiths, and ethics.
In an age of continuing atrocities, this book provides careful attention to the affective dimension of coping with death, in particular, how loss and grief are deferred or denied, narrated, and passed along.
Author Sarah K. Pinnock is a professor of contemporary religious thought at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. In Hamburg Germany (1997-98) she held a DAAD (German Academic Exchange) doctoral fellowship at the Faculty of Protestant Theology. She joined the Trinity faculty in fall 2000 after two years teaching at California State University Chico. She won a Fulbright award to hold a visiting professorship at the Faculty of Theology of Latvia University in Riga (2006-07). She served as the Religion Department Chair at Trinity from 2012-18.
For more information on the publication, click here.