Franklin Littel has died at 91. He lived not far from where I write. I met him several times in the late 1980s at Holocaust conferences. I never warmed to him personally but I was utterly impressed by his focus on the religious aspects of the European genocide. He was among the first intellectuals to delve into the question of how baptized Christians in the heart of Christian Europe could have either killed or ignored the killing of six million Jews. Today the Times is running a fairly long obit. Possibly no one has been more influential in creating awareness of Christian complicity, shortcoming, indifference in the face of what was happening to Jews. One profile puts it this way: "Professor Franklin Littell is rightfully known as the Father of Holocaust education in America. He was the first American scholar to offer courses on the Holocaust and genocide."
Saturday, May 30, 2009
first to teach Holocaust
Franklin Littel has died at 91. He lived not far from where I write. I met him several times in the late 1980s at Holocaust conferences. I never warmed to him personally but I was utterly impressed by his focus on the religious aspects of the European genocide. He was among the first intellectuals to delve into the question of how baptized Christians in the heart of Christian Europe could have either killed or ignored the killing of six million Jews. Today the Times is running a fairly long obit. Possibly no one has been more influential in creating awareness of Christian complicity, shortcoming, indifference in the face of what was happening to Jews. One profile puts it this way: "Professor Franklin Littell is rightfully known as the Father of Holocaust education in America. He was the first American scholar to offer courses on the Holocaust and genocide."
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
