Hey Y’all Max here.
As the school year comes to a close, the last project we did for Humanities was on the Holocaust. The Holocaust will become mandatory teaching as of next year, so I guess we were just jumping the gun a bit.
The driving question for this project was “How can multi-modal communication enhance our ability to humanize and understand complex issues?”
This project began with the knowledge we would be doing our learning through the graphic novel Maus.
Maus is a detailed account of the Holocaust, told through the perspectives of both the author and the authors father. It is unique as a narrative and specific as it shows many details of the Holocaust in an unconventional way. Maus is a highly acclaimed book and was the first graphic novel to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize.
We would read the book over the course of a few weeks. Personally I felt it took a lot longer to read than I expected. I read a lot of graphic novels when I was younger but I had never read a story in this format that was so deep, so real, and that had so much meaning.
The way we showed our learning during this project was fairly standard. Ms. Madsen had us create and detail a Theme Statement. I struggled with this quite a bit but ultimately I chose to focus on how grief and trauma in Maus affected the characters in the book, all of whom were/are very real. I felt like other topics such as death and physical laceration would be written about by other people, so psychological trauma would be more interesting and unique to write about.
I want to take this moment to mention the two events we attended as a class. The first was the Holocaust Symposium which was held at UBC. I totally thought it was a symphony and I was very disappointed when there were no instruments. It was a very interesting and insightful day of learning ( not to mention long ). The panel that gave speeches included a historian / professor at UBC, a filmmaker who is the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, and most importantly, Mariette Doduck who survived the Holocaust as a child. Her recollection of the Holocaust, and narrowly escaping death on several occasions, was very engaging. It made me think about the importance of Holocaust survivors telling their stories before it is too late.
The other event we went to was at Seycove, and it was a panel of multicultural speakers called The Other People. The goal of these other people is to promote tolerance and inclusion across all people, regardless of ethnicity or faith or anything else. The panel gave pretty interesting speeches and very in-depth answers to some questions. Ultimately what I took away from this presentation wasn’t new. I already know there is a lot of intolerance and racism in the world, and there is passive and subtle, even unconscious, racism in our community. What I realized soon afterwards is that the latter form of discrimination has the potential to be almost as terrible as the former, as it normalizes and plants racist ideas within people and societies that have no right to harbour such resentment.
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Back to the project. The next part of this project was writing a full literary critique about Maus and about my theme statement. As I said earlier, the theme statement was difficult to create, but the literary critique was way harder to plan and write. I had really never written an organized or formatted piece before; typically my ethos when it comes to writing is just put down whatever comes to mind, and organize later. But there were all sorts of rules and what seemed like really stupid formatting laws when it comes to essays.
I finished it very shortly before it was due. Ultimately, it received a lot of annotations in Showbie and as of writing this it still needs some revision. You can read my most recent literary critique below.
This is a good point to mention my own personal research and interest in this project. I enjoyed reading Maus, but sometime in the middle of the project I thought to myself “what other ways can the horrors of the Holocaust be communicated?” So it was at this point I started watching films about the Holocaust, or generally about the Second World War from a German/Jewish perspective.
The films I watched were The Zone of Interest, Inglorious Basterds, and The Pianist. Oh, as a class we watched Schindlers List and in April I watched All Quiet on the Western Front.
I watched all these films pretty close to each other and my biggest takeaway is that they are all very different in terms of theming, characters, and approach to such a dark topic. The only similarity to each other is the general topic of war and the holocaust. It’s funny how different directors and ideas can make what I thought initially to be a completely inflexible topic totally interpretable. For example, Inglorious Basterds feels very much like a typical action movie, albeit the theme of, uh, killing and scalping Nazis. It adds a humorous tone to a lot of the film, maybe because making an entertaining film about Nazi Germany is hard to do respectfully? ( Jojo Rabbit ) might be another great example of this ). On the other end of the spectrum there are films like All quiet on the Western Front which is not about the Second World War but it displays the horrors of war in general in the worst possible sense, and the spirit of wartime Germany during the 20th century; the self-righteous nationalism and justification of death in it’s full glory.
The Zone of Interest is totally unique as it does not feel at all like a film about the Holocaust, or the Second World War, or an other type of film really. The best way to describe it is a really messed-up episode of Downton Abbey crossed with a gallery piece on still life imagery. It is really difficult to put into words. The storyline of the film is simple in comparison but coming from the classroom learning about the Holocaust makes it a much more engaging viewing experience; it follows the commandant of Auschwitz as he and his family live an idyllic life parallel to the camps. I would say more but I do not want to spoil the rest of it, if you do watch it just make sure it’s somewhere without distraction. A theatre-like experience is necessary to enjoying and appreciating this amazing piece of Holocaust-period cinema.
Anyways, I think this should be required viewing for this project moving forward. If this does happen, let future classes know so that everyone knows about my great taste in movies.
So, how does this project relate to the present? Why does Maus matter?
The Holocaust itself was obviously a terrible event, perhaps the worst one group of humans have ever treated each another group of humans. Millions of people killed simply because their religion or their beliefs were different. The dangers of misinformation and misconceptions was an important part of the project despite being mainly focused on the Holocaust. I can understand why this would also be taught now, with the rise of antisemitism in the world and the ongoing Israel/Hamas war. It is alarming the similarities between then and now. Have we learnt nothing?
But anyways, the media that portrays the Holocaust.
During the beginning of this project there was the focus on how storytelling is a powerful vehicle to communicate important ideas. I didn’t come to this conclusion but I agree with the statement that nothing important can really be communicated unless it is memorable, or otherwise different. I mean different from the ordinary, different from the typical. You could relate this to the entire business of marketing. I mean, correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t the point of advertising to create unique and memorable ads that communicate a larger message? ( the message being “buy our products” in most cases ).
So yes, I believe any half-decent story can only be communicated through a creative medium. Whether this is a film or a graphic novel or something else, no one will know be able to recognize significance and greatness if a piece of work looks like a research paper from Google for Scholars. Instead, make it interesting. Simple as that.
I really enjoyed this project, and this is also my last project post of grade 11. I just have to write about the exhibition now, so stay tuned for that. Thanks for reading.