Three years ago, full of enthusiasm after my first semester back at Furman, I wrote a post called “Russian Reflections”, in which I looked back on my love of all things Russian and wondered whether I still wanted to specialize in German history. It is true that I have a fondness for Russian history and literature. In fact, I’m currently reading August 1914 by one of my favorite writers, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. However, my area of specialization is no longer in doubt: I’m going to stick with German history.
It took me a long time to reach this point. One of the reasons I applied to Clemson University for my M.A. was the opportunity to take Russian language courses there. As my professors at Furman reminded me, there was no way a Ph.D. program would accept me in Russian history if I didn’t already have a solid grasp of the language. So I entered Clemson with the intention of taking Russian classes. But I soon realized that my interest in Russian history was not as strong as I had thought. While I will always enjoy reading Russian literature and learning about Russian history, particularly the Soviet period, my first love is German and I want to build on the foundation of German language, history, and culture that I have cultivated over the years. Moreover, I have recently added the cornerstone of philosophy to this foundation. Through the mentorship of my advisor, Michael Meng, I have developed a deep appreciation for German philosophers such as Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Martin Heidegger, and Hannah Arendt. I hope to become more familiar with these and other important thinkers during my future Ph.D. studies.
In focusing on German history, I am also renewing my commitment to the field of Holocaust studies. Again, this was not a straightforward journey. There was a period earlier this year, thereafter known as “The Crisis,” when I seriously considered leaving European history entirely. I was frustrated and burnt out and thought that perhaps American history would be a better fit. After all, my summer research paper on the Campbell-Heller race had recently been published in Furman Humanities Reivew. I had also found a great deal of satisfaction in my thematic research collection, “Service and Sacrifice: Clemson Men in World War II,” which had then sparked an independent study on Captain Bill Cline. However, like my Russian history projects, this work in American history, as fulfilling as it was, could not shake my conviction that I should pursue Holocaust studies. There are certain things that a person is born to do, and for me, this is one of them.
That said, Holocaust studies is an interdisciplinary field. As such, it offers a wide range of opportunities to the scholar. On the one hand, I can utilize my knowledge of the German language to analyze survivor testimonies such as Richard Glazar’s Treblinka memoir, Die Falle mit dem grünen Zaun, which is a key text in my M.A. thesis on victim self-preservation in Nazi death camps. I can also draw from German philosophers such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. On the other hand, I am not (nor should I be) limited to a single language. This past summer, I studied Polish online in the Summer Language Program (SLI) at the University of Pittsburgh. My continued study of Polish will enable me to read primary sources in that language, such as Tadeusz Borowski’s Auschwitz stories. Polish is also a stepping stone to learning Ukrainian, which I will need to continue a research project I started at Furman on the motives of Soviet POWs such as Ivan Demjanjuk who worked as guards at the death camps. Of course, all scholars have unfinished projects to which they want to return some day. We’ll see.
Anyway, this is just an update on what I’ve been thinking and where I’m headed. It’s a relief to finally have a clear goal in mind. Now I just have to write that thesis!