HIST-LIT 90GT: World War II in Image, Text, and Sound

Instructor: Jules Riegel
Meeting time: Tuesday, 9:45-11:45 am

Almost eighty years after the end of World War II, its legacies are alive as ever. The conflict was fought across much of the globe, ravaging landscapes and ecosystems and wiping villages, towns, and even cities from the face of the earth. Estimates of combined civilian and military deaths typically range between 50,000,000 and 85,000,000, an almost unimaginably devastating toll. Yet how does our understanding of World War II change when we return to literature, art, music, and other cultural works of the time? This course examines civilians’ and soldiers’ everyday experience of the war through sources such as diaries, photographs, films, songs, and visual art. We will focus on the war in Europe, while considering sources from the war’s other theaters, including the Pacific. Topics will include life and death under occupation; the impact of strategic bombing; documentation of wartime atrocities, especially through photography; partisan warfare and resistance fighters; children’s and teenagers’ lives during the war; and gendered experiences of war. In the final weeks of the course, we will turn to examine collective memory of World War II as expressed in monuments, film, and song to consider its ongoing resonance in our world today.