How modern writers connect with the Holocaust

Prof Taberner on R3 discussing literary responses to the Holocaust and German Jewish identities.

Prof Stuart Taberner, Director of the Horizons Institute has featured on Free Thinking on BBC Radio Three for Holocaust Memorial Day. He was talking about the ways modern writers connect to the Holocaust. Listen to the programme

Professor Taberner said, “More than seven decades after the genocide, the Holocaust still motivates writers around the world, often drawing parallels between the horrors of that time and contemporary atrocities and human rights abuses”.

Professor Taberner has been awarded £1m from the Arts and Humanities Research Council to create the Cambridge History of Holocaust Literature, to be published by Cambridge University Press (CUP) and is leading an international team.

More than seven decades after the genocide, the Holocaust still motivates writers around the world, often drawing parallels between the horrors of that time and contemporary atrocities and human rights abuses.

The project, Rethinking Holocaust Literature: Contexts, Canons, Circulations will be co-created iteratively through online and face-to-face workshops and with an international Advisory Board and runs for three years, beginning this month.

The project will explore how with the passing of the final survivors, the Nazi genocide of European Jews is at last truly becoming historical. Although In the context of ethnic and religious conflict, popularism, social and economic precariousness, and even pandemic, the Holocaust is variously invoked as a warning from history; a moral, legal, and political imperative to promote and even enforce universal human rights; and in social and cultural controversies from abortion, animal rights, and climate change to COVID-19 mask mandates and anti-vaccination misinformation.