Brownbag Lunch: Teaching Hiroshima and the Holocaust
December 1, 2003 (Monday)
Brownbag Lunch: Teaching Hiroshima and the Holocaust
Professor Alan Tansman (Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, University of California, Berkeley)
403 Kent Hall, Columbia University (116th St. and Amsterdam Ave.)
12:00 PM – 2:00 PM
| “But it is the knowledge of how contingent my unease is, how dependent on a baby that wails beneath my window one day and does not wail the next, that brings the worst shame to me, the greatest indifference to annihilation.” |
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J.M. Coetzee, Waiting For The Barbarians, 1980
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The Nazi murder of the Jews and the dropping of the Atomic bomb on Hiroshima have occupied our modern historical and literary imaginations. The imprint of these events, after more than half a century, is deep and indelible.
Nevertheless, the comparison of the two events will strike some as distasteful. Dare we ask whether the Japanese were victims the way the Jews were? The very question seems to suggest that degrees of suffering can be measured and that styles of mourning can be judged. It risks robbing victims of their claim that their suffering was uniquely their own and that the particular history that caused their pain was unprecedented and unparalleled. Comparing suffering leads us to judge suffering‹and that is a delicate thing to do.
In this lecture Professor Tansman will discuss his experience teaching this comparison in the American university classroom.
Co-sponsored by the the Weatherhead East Asian Institute
