Books by Matthew Boswell
Virtual Holocaust Memory, 2023
The Holocaust was the defining cataclysm of modernity. Now, more than three quarters of a century... more The Holocaust was the defining cataclysm of modernity. Now, more than three quarters of a century later, the immersive, interactive technologies of the digital age are dramatically refashioning our memory of that genocide. Virtual Holocaust Memory offers the first comprehensive account of a unique historical juncture, as twenty-first century digital culture meets the edge of living Holocaust memory. The book considers a range of projects that are being developed by museums, archives, businesses, and educational organizations in the USA and Europe, including interactive video testimony, Virtual Reality films, Augmented Reality apps, museum installations, and online exhibitions. Drawing on an original conceptual framework that incorporates connective memory, palimpsestic testimony, and a notion of 'truthfulness' first applied to testimonial writing by the survivor Charlotte Delbo, this groundbreaking book argues that the value of virtual Holocaust memory—that is to say its truthfulness—will ultimately come to rest on the connections that it establishes across a complex set of subject positions. These range from 'new bystanders', who encounter Holocaust memory from a position of relative safety, to the traumatized victims whose extreme physical and psychological experiences made communicating so difficult in the first place.
Holocaust Impiety in Literature, Popular Music and Film is an account of provocative and controve... more Holocaust Impiety in Literature, Popular Music and Film is an account of provocative and controversial representations of the Holocaust. Many well-known artists have attracted criticism for approaching the Nazi genocide in ways that have been deemed ill-conceived or offensive. Examples include Sylvia Plath's notorious claim that 'Every woman adores a Fascist' in her poem 'Daddy' and songs such as 'Belsen Was a Gas' by the Sex Pistols. The Holocaust has even provided material for stand-up comedy and gory Hollywood blockbusters such as Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. In this book, Matthew Boswell argues that while such works are often shocking, the value of shock should not be lightly dismissed in the context of the Holocaust. Drawing on the philosopher Gillian Rose's criticisms of what she termed 'Holocaust piety' and its claim that the only possible response to the Holocaust is a respectful silence, this book considers how irreverent works of fiction play an important role in shaping our contemporary understanding of the Nazi genocide and also of ourselves, prompting us to reflect on what it means to be human in light of the tragic events that they reference.
Papers by Matthew Boswell
Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2012
No succes de scandale ever stays truly scandalous for long. Works that ignite critical and public... more No succes de scandale ever stays truly scandalous for long. Works that ignite critical and public outrage soon lose their power to shock, not least because they tend to exert a powerful influence over the future direction of their medium, resulting in the mass reproduction of diluted replicas. The same can be said of whole cultural movements — one obvious example being punk, which emerged from the underground with the riotous rise to fame of the Sex Pistols in late 1976 and early 1977, thereafter influencing mainstream fashion, youth culture and music in a range of ways. Writing over a decade earlier, Plath might even be regarded as the first bona fide punk poet. Not only did she become a posthumous cultural icon who spawned a host of imitators, but her most scandalous poems, such as ‘Daddy’, contain a number of the hallmarks of British punk and its offshoots, including pervasive Nazi references combined with an irreverent antitheism (‘Not God but a swastika’); an aggressive, violent aesthetic (‘The boot in the face’); a gothic fascination with blood, vampirism and the occult (‘There’s a stake in your fat black heart’); and stylised gestures of provocation deliberately designed to antagonise middle-class sensibilities (‘Every woman adores a Fascist’). ‘Daddy’ also anticipates the bizarre, cartoonish monologues of a song such as ‘Holidays in the Sun’, in which Johnny Rotten finds himself having to climb under and over the Berlin Wall as he faces off an abstract invading army.
Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, Nov 1, 2013
... Diana Douglas, Barbara Engh, Frank Felsenstein, D. Ferrett, David Fox, Michelle Gewurtz, Tony... more ... Diana Douglas, Barbara Engh, Frank Felsenstein, D. Ferrett, David Fox, Michelle Gewurtz, Tony Hughes, Kurt Hirtler, David Jackson, Vivien Jones, Peter Kilroy, Katrin Kivimaa, Karima Laachmir, Sophie Mathieson, Martin McQuillan, Peter Nix, Josine Opmeer, Fred Orton, Will ...
Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2012
In its depiction of a summertime pastoral idyll, with rolling green fields set beneath a wide blu... more In its depiction of a summertime pastoral idyll, with rolling green fields set beneath a wide blue sky, the opening shot of Night and Fog is the absolute antithesis of what one might expect from a controversial Holocaust documentary. Jean Cayrol’s commentary refers to ‘a quiet country scene’, and Resnais holds the shot as flutes play a whimsical motif on Hans Eisler’s orchestral soundtrack. After a few seconds, however, the camera slowly starts to move downwards, bringing the barbed wire fence of a concentration camp into view, and immediately the opening glimpse of rural tranquillity is refashioned as a kind of primal scene: a scene of loss. Through the camera’s descent, the country landscape beyond the perimeter fence comes to represent a world of normality that Resnais will hereafter juxtapose to the gothic, violent and industrial world of the camps. Later, Cayrol’s commentary will attribute this perception of duality to the victims themselves: ‘First impression: the camp is another planet.’ The entire film is in fact structured around a series of such binaries that relate the ‘inside’ of the camps, as experienced by the victims during their imprisonment, to the ‘outside’ of the camps, variously understood in terms of those who lived beyond the wire during the war; the ante-bellum world (‘a real world, the one from before’); and, more broadly, the world of those whose lives were untouched by either the camps or the war.
Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds derives its title, French location and loose plot elemen... more Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds derives its title, French location and loose plot elements from Enzo Castellari’s Italian B-movie Inglorious Bastards (1978). The earlier film’s basic premise was pithily articulated when it was later re-edited and distributed with the title G.I. Bro and the tagline ‘If you’re a Kraut he’ll take you out’, with the black actor Fred Williamson repositioned as the lead in an attempt to capitalise on the success of the blaxploitation movies of the period. While Tarantino’s version broadly echoes Castellari’s basic moral justification — and at times unapologetic glorification — of the idea of slaughtering Nazis, the motives of the two sets of Nazi killers are entirely different. In the original film, a motley group of convicted soldiers are heading to military prison when their convoy is attacked by an air strike and they are able to escape. It is clear that these men are amoral criminals and deserters, and their subsequent killing spree is motivated solely by self-interest as they seek to blast their way to safety in Switzerland. The Nazis are the stereotypical bad guys, although a distinction is made between the Wehrmacht and the Nazi party through a ‘good German’ who deserts the army and joins the Bastards on the run. The Holocaust is not referenced, following a trend set by many war films of the period, but there is a strong anti-racist dimension, with the multi-cultural and multinational Bastards representing an ideological rebuff to the racial tenets of their Aryan adversaries.
Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2012
With their long hair, black leather jackets, tight jeans and shades, the Ramones were perhaps the... more With their long hair, black leather jackets, tight jeans and shades, the Ramones were perhaps the definitive American punk rock band, forming an integral part of a scene that grew up around two key nightclubs, Max’s Kansas City and CBGBs, in New York in the mid-1970s. They also formed a key link to the Nazi locations and artefacts that obsessed the bands that became involved in this scene. While earlier British musicians had flirted with swastikas and Nazi uniforms in the late 1960s (these included Brian Jones and Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones, Keith Moon of The Who and Ozzy Osbourne of Black Sabbath), in punk the use of the swastika was so pervasive that it was almost akin to an unofficial membership badge.1 In the case of the Ramones, the repeated visual and lyrical references to Nazi Germany can be linked in part to the Jewishness of lead singer Joey Ramone, born Jeffry Ross Hyman in New York in 1951, and drummer Tommy Erdelyi, who was born Erdelyi Tamas in Budapest in 1949; but more significant was the upbringing of songwriter, bass player and general provocateur Dee Dee, whose mother was German and who spent most of his childhood and early teens in Germany, where his father was stationed with the American army and where, in Dee Dee’s words, they would move ‘from one shit town to the next’.2
Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2012
The term ‘post-punk’ is generally taken to refer to the period from the late 1970s to the mid-198... more The term ‘post-punk’ is generally taken to refer to the period from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, when punk helped to shape the direction of a wide variety of popular music forms, from electronica to art rock. Signalling the enduring musical and cultural significance of punk, the term memorialises punk and confers on it the status of a legacy genre; but while punk marked a sea change in popular music, drawing in new subjects, new fashions, new people, this was a legacy that many of the bands of the period self-consciously sought to free themselves from. The musical influence of punk, for example, was often negative — with bands kicking against the grain of its blues rock roots — rather than positive, in the sense of a deliberate continuation of punk rock traditions. While post-punk classifies the music retrospectively, in terms of punk’s influence, the extreme musical and lyrical experimentation and technical innovation that marked much of the music of this period bears all the hallmarks of a forward-looking artistic avant-garde. Above all, post-punk broadly restored a respect for musicianship that the early DIY three-chord punk bands had derided. Using the term ‘post-punk’ to refer to a specific time period still usefully historicises the concept, allowing for the kind of broad consideration of musical, cultural and social factors that marks studies such as Simon Reynolds’s influential Rip It Up and Start Again: Post-punk 1978–1984 (2005).
Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2012
Wearing spray-painted shirts bearing culture-trashing slogans such as ‘CONDEMNED TO ROCK ‘N’ ROLL... more Wearing spray-painted shirts bearing culture-trashing slogans such as ‘CONDEMNED TO ROCK ‘N’ ROLL’, ‘GENERATION TERRORIST’ and ‘SPECTATORS OF SUICIDE’ and claiming they would make one classic album then split up, the Welsh band Manic Street Preachers were originally dismissed by many music writers as a kind of punk parody, with a 1980s stadium rock sound heavily influenced by Guns N’ Roses doing little to add to their credibility. By the time their seminal third album The Holy Bible was released in 1994, however, the band had established themselves as a critically-revered musical force; now wearing balaclavas, army jackets and war medals, the punk parodists had recorded an album bearing the influence of key post-punk bands such as Public Image Ltd and Joy Division, as well as more gothic bands such as The Cure and Cranes. The album took an encyclopaedic approach to the major human catastrophes of the twentieth century, with references ranging from Hiroshima to the Kennedy assassination and the Moors murders. Informed by Richey James’s and Nicky Wire’s extensive reading and the band’s visits to Belsen and Dachau in 1993, the album also offered one of the most sustained and challenging treatments of the Holocaust in twentieth century popular music.
are each commonly associated with the poetic movement known as 'confessionalism' which emerged in... more are each commonly associated with the poetic movement known as 'confessionalism' which emerged in the USA in the late 1950s and early 1960s. They did not, however, write works of undiluted autobiography; through close readings of their Holocaust verse, I take the poetry, rather than the lives of the poets, to be the ultimate authority on what they had to say about history, about the ethics of representing historical atrocity in art, and about the 'existential' questions that the Nazi genocide raises. Chapter 1 offers the first sustained analysis of Berryman's unfinished collection of Holocaust poems, The Black Book (1948-1958)-one of the earliest engagements by an American writer with this particular historical subject. In my second chapter I look at some of Plath's fictionalised dramatic monologues, which, I argue, offer self-reflexive meditations on representational poetics, the commercialisation of the Holocaust, and the ways in which the event reshapes our understanding of individual identity and culture. My third chapter focuses on W. D. Snodgrass's The Fuehrer Bunker (1995)-a formally inventive cycle of dramatic monologues spoken by leading Nazi ministers, which can be read as an heuristic text whose ultimate objective is the moral instruction of its readers. Finally, I suggest that while all three poets offer distinct responses to the Holocaust, they each consider how non-victims approach the genocide through acts of identification. For Snodgrass, it is important that we do identify with the perpetrators, who were not all that different from ourselves; for Berryman and Plath, however, the difficulty of identifying with the victims marks out the limits of historical understanding.
Berghahn Books, Jul 1, 2010
Holocaust Impiety in Literature, Popular Music and Film, 2012
Before managing the Sex Pistols, McLaren had spent a brief period in New York in 1974 managing th... more Before managing the Sex Pistols, McLaren had spent a brief period in New York in 1974 managing the New York Dolls, whom he had met previously when they were on tour in London. One of McLaren’s stunts as manager of the New York Dolls was to dress the band in tight red plastic outfits and make them perform with a huge red Soviet flag as their stage backdrop — a kind of ironic flip side to the emerging Nazi shtick of the period. An obviously provocative statement in post-McCarthy America, McLaren described this as a considered response to the Andy Warhol-led trend for apolitical art that made a fetish of its own commodity status: ‘I thought, Fuck it. I’m gonna try and make the Dolls totally the opposite. I’m not going to make them disposable. I’m going to give them a serious political point of view.’1 Unfortunately, the New York Dolls had major drug habits, little interest in politics, and even less enthusiasm for McLaren’s experimental approach to punk rock promotion through manufactured confrontation. This approach did, however, provide a kind of template for McLaren’s later involvement with English punk, where politics (this time, anarchy) and radical fashion were again overtly used as marketing devices. While McLaren’s experience with the New York Dolls did not change his methods, it did seem to change his attitude to the commodification of ideology through art; because what he now sought to create with the Sex Pistols was precisely what Warhol embodied in his own paintings and prints and in the whole Factory ethos, which is to say high art as a self-consciously manufactured product.
Holocaust Impiety in Literature, Popular Music and Film, 2012
Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds derives its title, French location and loose plot elemen... more Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds derives its title, French location and loose plot elements from Enzo Castellari’s Italian B-movie Inglorious Bastards (1978). The earlier film’s basic premise was pithily articulated when it was later re-edited and distributed with the title G.I. Bro and the tagline ‘If you’re a Kraut he’ll take you out’, with the black actor Fred Williamson repositioned as the lead in an attempt to capitalise on the success of the blaxploitation movies of the period. While Tarantino’s version broadly echoes Castellari’s basic moral justification — and at times unapologetic glorification — of the idea of slaughtering Nazis, the motives of the two sets of Nazi killers are entirely different. In the original film, a motley group of convicted soldiers are heading to military prison when their convoy is attacked by an air strike and they are able to escape. It is clear that these men are amoral criminals and deserters, and their subsequent killing spree is motivated solely by self-interest as they seek to blast their way to safety in Switzerland. The Nazis are the stereotypical bad guys, although a distinction is made between the Wehrmacht and the Nazi party through a ‘good German’ who deserts the army and joins the Bastards on the run. The Holocaust is not referenced, following a trend set by many war films of the period, but there is a strong anti-racist dimension, with the multi-cultural and multinational Bastards representing an ideological rebuff to the racial tenets of their Aryan adversaries.
Holocaust Impiety in Literature, Popular Music and Film, 2012
In his film-making practice, critical writing and interviews, Claude Lanzmann has inscribed the i... more In his film-making practice, critical writing and interviews, Claude Lanzmann has inscribed the ideals of Holocaust piety onto tablets of stone for the world of Holocaust cinema. The proscriptions are wellknown. At times, they verge on the mystic, as in the quotation already cited in the introduction to this book: The Holocaust is unique because it created a circle of flame around itself, a boundary not to be crossed, since horror in the absolute degree cannot be communicated. To pretend that one has done so is to commit the gravest of transgressions.1 This stern code stems from what Lanzmann regards as our innate incapacity to respond to direct representations of horror in a meaningful fashion: If there had been — by sheer obscenity or miracle — a film actually shot in the past of three thousand people dying together in a gas chamber, first of all, I think that no one human being would have been able to look at this. Anyhow, I would have never included this in the film. I would have preferred to destroy it. It is not visible. You cannot look at this.2 In its basic rejection of fictional recreations and archival representations, Lanzmann’s epic 9.5-hour documentary Shoah has cast a commensurately long shadow over the Holocaust films that have followed it.
Holocaust Impiety in Literature, Popular Music and Film, 2012
With their long hair, black leather jackets, tight jeans and shades, the Ramones were perhaps the... more With their long hair, black leather jackets, tight jeans and shades, the Ramones were perhaps the definitive American punk rock band, forming an integral part of a scene that grew up around two key nightclubs, Max’s Kansas City and CBGBs, in New York in the mid-1970s. They also formed a key link to the Nazi locations and artefacts that obsessed the bands that became involved in this scene. While earlier British musicians had flirted with swastikas and Nazi uniforms in the late 1960s (these included Brian Jones and Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones, Keith Moon of The Who and Ozzy Osbourne of Black Sabbath), in punk the use of the swastika was so pervasive that it was almost akin to an unofficial membership badge.1 In the case of the Ramones, the repeated visual and lyrical references to Nazi Germany can be linked in part to the Jewishness of lead singer Joey Ramone, born Jeffry Ross Hyman in New York in 1951, and drummer Tommy Erdelyi, who was born Erdelyi Tamas in Budapest in 1949; but more significant was the upbringing of songwriter, bass player and general provocateur Dee Dee, whose mother was German and who spent most of his childhood and early teens in Germany, where his father was stationed with the American army and where, in Dee Dee’s words, they would move ‘from one shit town to the next’.2
Holocaust Impiety in Literature, Popular Music and Film, 2012
Wearing spray-painted shirts bearing culture-trashing slogans such as ‘CONDEMNED TO ROCK ‘N’ ROLL... more Wearing spray-painted shirts bearing culture-trashing slogans such as ‘CONDEMNED TO ROCK ‘N’ ROLL’, ‘GENERATION TERRORIST’ and ‘SPECTATORS OF SUICIDE’ and claiming they would make one classic album then split up, the Welsh band Manic Street Preachers were originally dismissed by many music writers as a kind of punk parody, with a 1980s stadium rock sound heavily influenced by Guns N’ Roses doing little to add to their credibility. By the time their seminal third album The Holy Bible was released in 1994, however, the band had established themselves as a critically-revered musical force; now wearing balaclavas, army jackets and war medals, the punk parodists had recorded an album bearing the influence of key post-punk bands such as Public Image Ltd and Joy Division, as well as more gothic bands such as The Cure and Cranes. The album took an encyclopaedic approach to the major human catastrophes of the twentieth century, with references ranging from Hiroshima to the Kennedy assassination and the Moors murders. Informed by Richey James’s and Nicky Wire’s extensive reading and the band’s visits to Belsen and Dachau in 1993, the album also offered one of the most sustained and challenging treatments of the Holocaust in twentieth century popular music.
Holocaust Impiety in Literature, Popular Music and Film
Tim Blake Nelson’s The Grey Zone is set in the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp and tells the story ... more Tim Blake Nelson’s The Grey Zone is set in the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp and tells the story of the largely Jewish Sonderkommandos, or ‘death squads’, that were responsible for running the camp’s crematoria. Taking its title from an essay of the same name by Primo Levi in his final book, The Drowned and the Saved (1986), the film charts the days leading up to a chaotic rising in October 1944 led by the twelfth Sonderkommando: a revolt that resulted in the destruction of half the camp’s ovens but which was ultimately put down by the SS in ruthless fashion. Portraying the day-to-day running of death factories against a backdrop of corpses and a rumbling industrial soundtrack, the film opened to mixed reviews and performed poorly at the US box office. Despite a stellar Hollywood cast that included Harvey Keitel, Steve Buscemi, David Arquette and Mira Sorvino, it played for just nine weeks and grossed only around a tenth of the $5 million it cost to make.1 The film was not widely distributed in Europe and was only made available on DVD in Europe seven years after its original release, in 2008. Considering the notable critical and financial successes of other Holocaust films during the period such as Schindler’s List (1993), Life Is Beautiful (1997) and The Pianist (2002), The Grey Zone seemed to mark the limits of just how much atrocity the movie-going public was prepared to pay for, bringing to mind Stanley Kubrick’s assertion that to make an accurate film about the Holocaust it would have to be unwatchable.2
Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 2013
... Diana Douglas, Barbara Engh, Frank Felsenstein, D. Ferrett, David Fox, Michelle Gewurtz, Tony... more ... Diana Douglas, Barbara Engh, Frank Felsenstein, D. Ferrett, David Fox, Michelle Gewurtz, Tony Hughes, Kurt Hirtler, David Jackson, Vivien Jones, Peter Kilroy, Katrin Kivimaa, Karima Laachmir, Sophie Mathieson, Martin McQuillan, Peter Nix, Josine Opmeer, Fred Orton, Will ...
Oxford University Press eBooks, Mar 6, 2023
The Dimensions in Testimony project, led by the USC Shoah Foundation, involves 360-degree filming... more The Dimensions in Testimony project, led by the USC Shoah Foundation, involves 360-degree filming of Holocaust survivors in a light stage as they answer in the region of one thousand questions over the course of a week. The interviews create a database of answers that can be accessed through a “virtual conversation” in which a museum visitor interacts with a two- or three-dimensional display of the survivor interview. This chapter reflects on Dimensions in Testimony pilots held at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington in 2016 and the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York in 2018, then contextualizes the project by exploring how the public understanding of holographic technology has been culturally constructed through Hollywood films. We then explore how interactive testimony’s distinctive form of “truthfulness” is shaped through the active participation of museum visitors, arguing that performative encounters with the Holocaust have the potential to provide a charged, embodied experience of historical disappearance and loss.
Oxford University Press eBooks, Mar 6, 2023
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Books by Matthew Boswell
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