A video with supporters of Jair Bolsonaro making gestures similar to the Nazi salute. A group of teenagers, students of Porto Seguro school, sharing Hitler stickers, exchanging messages with racist content and making apology for the Nazism after Lula’s election as president. Kanye West falling from grace after anti-Semitic comments. Brooklyn Nets player Kyrie Irving suspended for five games in NBA after releasing film anti-semitic on twitter. a cell neo-Nazi dismantle here. Nazi groups on Telegram there. The term Nazi in trending topics on Twitter. All this, in the middle of 2022.
From time to time, the Nazism back to the center of the debate – whether through individual manifestations by anonymous people or public figures, such as Roberto Alvim, one of Bolsonaro’s first secretaries of Culture, or through attempts to distort history. For example, in 2019, during a visit to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Remembrance Center, in Jerusalem, Jair Bolsonaro said that “there was no doubt” that Nazism was a leftist movement. He cited the name of the Nazi Party, led by Hitler, to try to justify himself: National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Years later, in 2012, German Christian Democrat MP Erika Steinbach did the same.
to understand the ideology which led to the extermination of around 6 million Jews during the Holocaust and which finds supporters all over the world a century after the founding of the Nazi Party, we have selected some books published in Brazil.
This is not a definitive list, as this is one of the most studied topics by historians and widely explored by fiction writers. The bibliography is therefore extensive. Who wants learn about Nazism and the Holocaust through films, the options are also diverse and range from blockbusters such as Schindler’s List and Life is Beautiful to classics like Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour documentary, Shoah.
Books for Understanding Nazism and Anti-Semitism and Knowing the Holocaust
Continues after advertising
In this monumental biography of Adolf Hitler published in Brazil in 2010 by Companhia das Letras, Ian Kershaw focuses on the trajectory of a person who seemed destined for failure and who ended up commanding one of the most developed, cultured and complex countries in Europe. He tries to find an explanation for the upward trajectory of Hitler the hold he exerted over German elites and the catastrophe he caused.
Richard Evans Trilogy
Richard Evans, one of the most important scholars of German history, wrote a trilogy on the Nazism formed by The Arrival of the Third Reich, Third Reich in Power and Third Reich at War. The books were published by the Crítica label, from Editora Planeta, and help to understand this sad chapter in history.
Hannah Arendt addresses the growth of antisemitism in Central and Western Europe in the 1800s, analyzes European colonial imperialism from 1884 to the outbreak of World War I and discusses the institutions and operations of these movements, focusing on the two main totalitarian regimes of our era: Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. . Origins of Totalitarianism is in the catalog of the Companhia de Bolso stamp, from Companhia das Letras.
In The Germans released here by Zahar, Norbert Elias analyzes the social development of Germany from the 17th century onwards, investigates the personality, social structure and behavior of the German people.
Until the beginning of the Second World War, Primo Levi was an Italian chemist of Jewish origin. After being captured, he was sent to a concentration camp at Fossoli and then to Auschwitz, where he spent 11 months until the camp was liberated by the Soviets. After this experience, Primo Levi became the leading Auschwitz memoirist, with books such as Is This a Man? (Rocco). In this title published in 1947, Levi recalls his suffering in a death camp, without, however, invoking any trace of self-pity or revenge. Another book for anyone who wants to know more about their survivor experience is That was Auschwitz in the Companhia das Letras catalogue, which brings together reports, testimonies, letters and comments published almost until the eve of his death, in 1987.
Continues after advertising
In the Holocaust literature, there are many accounts of survivors. There are also works by authors who try to understand how their family could join Nazism. This is the case of Uwe Timm, who launched for Dublinense, In My Brother’s Shadow: The Marks of Post-War Nazism on the History of a German Family. The title brother is Karl-Heinz, who died in Ukraine at age 19 fighting for a Nazi SS division in 1943 after voluntarily enlisting a few years earlier. Using as raw material a diary written in pencil by his brother at the front, his own memories and family trajectory, the author seeks to answer who this brother was, why he enlisted, if he was forced to kill, if he really had no choice, how can you go wrong so much and, finally, why did everyone close their eyes and shut up?
Based on questions such as the reliability of the victims’ memory, the possibility of narrating the horror and the right to memory, historian and journalist Marcos Guterman analyzes written and filmed works about the Holocaust from these personal narratives in Holocaust and Memory (Context).
An older book, available at second-hand bookstores. Swastika Hunt: The Nazi Party in São Paulo Under the Sight of the Political Police, by Ana maria Dietrich, co-edited by Humanitas, Imprensa Oficial do Estado de São Paulo and FAPESP, discusses the relationship that police discourse and activity established with the Nazi Party in São Paulo during the Estado Novo (1937-1945) and problematizes both producers and the processes of producing an image of the Nazi Party and the so-called “Germans” from São Paulo. Speaking of Estado Novo, another tip is olga, biography of Olga Benário Prestes, a German-Jewish communist activist who came to Brazil, married Luís Carlos Prestes and ended up being sent to Nazi Germany by the Getúlio Vargas regime. Olga died in the Bernburg extermination camp in 1942.
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
Continues after advertising
Fiction by John Boyne, the novel became a best seller and was adapted for the cinema – the film is available on major streaming platforms. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas narrates the attempt of two children separated by a fence to become friends. The protagonist, son of a Nazi agent, does not understand the situation of the child with shaved hair that arouses curiosity.
I Survived the Holocaust
The Dutch Nanette Blitz Konig, based in São Paulo, tells her experience in a concentration camp in the book I Survived the Holocaust (Universe of Books). It took 70 years before she could put into words what she saw and lived in the hands of the Nazis. A curiosity: Nanette was at the birthday party where her classmate Anne Frank won the diary that would make her famous around the world. Check out the interview given by Nanette when her book was released here.
Last Stop: Auschwitz
The interesting thing about this book is that it was written inside the Nazi concentration camp in Poland, by Eddy de Wind, a doctor and prisoner. Survivor, he published this fiction shortly after the end of the war and the book was forgotten. Recently rediscovered by his son, Last Stop: Auschwitz was released in several countries – in Brazil, it was released by Planeta. In 2020, Estadão spoke with Mercher de Wind, Eddy’s son, about the book and his father’s story. Check it out here.
For small children, Anne Frank’s World tells the story of a girl who went into hiding with her family during the persecution of Jews in Amsterdam during World War II. The book, published in Brazil by Rocco, was written by Janny Van Der Molen at the request of the Anne Frank House Museum and introduces the story that is usually discovered by readers in pre-adolescence.
A bestseller for generations, The Diary of Anne Frank was published 75 years ago, at the end of World War II, as a tribute to its author who died in a concentration camp shortly before the end of the Holocaust. It’s a portrait of horror in the making. The insecurity, the fear of a family that had an idea of what could happen if the hiding place was discovered, but couldn’t imagine what would come next, through the eyes of a 13-year-old girl. Anne Frank’s Diary has gone down in history as one of the main documents about the Holocaust and has sold over 30 million copies worldwide. There is also a HQ version, by Ari Folman and David Polonsky, published by Record. Here, you can learn more about the work, its backstage and its importance.
Continues after advertising
Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning comic book is a masterpiece that chronicles the experiences of Art Spiegelman’s father, a Polish-Jewish Holocaust survivor, but also addresses the problems of the relationship between Art and his father. In bad, the Jews are drawn like mice and the Nazis get the features of cats; non-Jewish Poles are pigs and Americans are dogs. The work is in the catalog of Companhia das Letras, which published this year MetaMaus, in which Art Spiegelman returns to his most famous work to answer questions such as why the Holocaust? Why mice? Why comics? The volume presents the genesis of the comic and includes a DVD with Maus in digital version, including links to a vast archive of audios (in English) with interviews between Art Spiegelman and his father, historical documents and a wide variety of notebooks and sketches. from the author.
Recent launch of Phosphorus, Dreams in the Third Reich it is the result of a research undertaken secretly by journalist Charlotte Beradt (1907-1986) starting in 1933, when Hitler came to power. She interviewed Germans to collect dreams related to recent political changes in the country and the spread of Nazi terror on a large scale. The work lasted until 1939 and only came to light in 1966, in this book in which the dreams of 300 people help “interpret the structure of a reality about to become a nightmare”.