Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich
Associate Professor of German | University of Mary Washington
Fredericksburg, VA, UNITED STATES
Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich specializes in German-Jewish literature and Holocaust Studies.
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Biography
Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich earned a Ph.D. in Germanic Languages and Literatures from the University of Virginia in 2011. She published a book, Holocaust Memory Reframed: Museums and the Challenges of Representation, with Rutgers University Press in 2014, and has published a number of articles and essays on the topics of Holocaust museums and memorialization, German Jewish life writing, and German literature and film. Dr. Hansen-Glucklich has taught as visiting faculty at the Universität Wien and the Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz, and has held fellowships at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. and with the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).
Areas of Expertise (10)
Life Writing
Memory and Memorials in Germany
German Literature
German-Jewish History
Jewish Literature
Holocaust Studies
German Language
Jewish Studies
Holocaust Memorialization
German Jewish Studies
Education (1)
University of Virginia: Ph.D., Germanic Language and Literature 2011
Media Appearances (2)
Protests cannot be compared to Kristallnacht
The Free Lance-Star online
2020-06-12
It was with great dismay that we saw the June 3 editorial cartoon in The Free Lance–Star, a comparison of the infamous pogrom of Nov. 9, 1938, in Germany (often referred to as “Kristallnacht”—or “Night of Broken Glass”) with the anti-racist street protests of June 2020.
Professor talks Holocaust museums and Jewish remembrance
Massachusetts Daily Collegian online
2017-12-06
Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich, assistant professor of German at the University of Mary Washington, gave her lecture entitled “Holocaust Memory Reframed: Museums and the Challenges of Misrepresentation” Tuesday afternoon. Her presentation centered on how three distinct museums of Jewish remembrance – Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Israel, the Jewish Museum Berlin in Berlin, Germany and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. All of these museums craft different narratives through their use of aesthetic, spatial and ritual techniques, reflecting their own national identities and cultures...
Articles (6)
Father, Goethe, Kant, and Rilke: The Ideal of Bildung, the Fifth Aliyah, and German-Jewish Integration into the Yishuv
Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish StudiesJennifer Hansen-Glucklich
2017 This paper examines the ideal of Bildung (self-development and education) as an obstacle to integration for German-Jewish immigrants of the Fifth Aliyah to Palestine. Drawing on a number of unpublished memoirs of German Jews, including several memoirs written by women, the article argues that the salient values of Bildung, including an individualistic view of the self, impacted the ability of the new immigrants to assimilate to the dominant pioneer, Zionistsocialist ethos of the Yishuv. By privileging the voices and stories of memoirists not previously discussed in scholarly literature, this article illuminates a unique aspect of German-Jewish life in the Yishuv, namely, the role of the imagination in immigrant experience and the way that the values and ethos of Bildung impacted shifting cultural identities.
Poetics of Memory: Aesthetics and Experience of Holocaust Remembrance in Museums
Dapim: Studies on the HolocaustJennifer Hansen-Glucklich
This essay offers a comparative analysis of Holocaust commemoration in three museums: The Jewish Museum Berlin; Yad Vashem: The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. In particular, the essay examines exhibition techniques, architecture and the visceral, physical experience of the visitor in each museum. My argument focuses on the way that museums draw on aesthetic technique, design and the manipulation of visitor experience to create Holocaust narratives that resonate with and reflect each country’s dominant Holocaust discourse. In Yad Vashem, this narrative is a distinctly Zionist one that relies on the symbolism of autochthony and redemption in contrast to Jewish suffering in exile. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Holocaust narrative, in contrast, is rooted in the idea of American exceptionalism and democracy as the antidote to Fascism and anti-Semitism, while the Holocaust narrative of the Jewish Museum Berlin, as developed in its architecture, memorial spaces and select exhibits, draws on the symbolism of the void to emphasize the loss of Germany’s Jewish communities as irreparable rupture and self-inflicted wound.
“Süß im Licht, Wach im Wind”: Rainer Maria Rilke’s Search for a Locus Amoenus in Paris
Seminar: A Journal of Germanic StudiesJennifer Hansen-Glucklich
2016 This essay argues that Rainer Maria Rilke creates alternative realms evocative of an earlier time and sensibility in select poems of the Neue Gedichte in an attempt to overcome certain disturbing aspects of the Großstadt. In these alternative realms, which reveal traces of a vanished world, Rilke draws on the topos dimension of landscape and stages theatrical scenes within the Parisian cityscape. Here, exotic places and objects triumph over ordinary ones and encourage the reader to imagine faraway spaces and times. Rilke thus creates within the Großstadt a locus amoenus and a utopian vision of what an ideal city might be.
Disfigured Memory: The Reshaping of Holocaust Symbols in Yad Vashem and the Jewish Museum in Berlin
Nexus: Essays in German Jewish StudiesJennifer Hansen-Glucklich
2011-10-01
Walking through the Jewish Museum in Berlin and the new Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the visitor may be struck by the aesthetic innovation of video installations and displays that often rely on postmodern aesthetics and suggest new, creative ways of remembering. Contemporary Holocaust exhibits present a unique challenge to museum planners: they are called upon to tell the story of the Holocaust in accessible and engaging terms while preserving a sense of the sanctity that the Holocaust has acquired in contemporary memory culture. Given both the emotional power of the Holocaust as a subject for representation and also the danger...
Evoking the sacred: Visual Holocaust narratives in national museums
Journal of Modern Jewish StudiesJennifer Hansen-Glucklich
2010 This essay examines how Yad Vashem: The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem and The Jewish Museum in Berlin move beyond the usual informative and communicative functions of museum exhibits to visually evoke sacred feelings in regard to Holocaust memory. Ideas and images of the sacred vary in the two museums, reflecting two very different memorial cultures and commemorative goals, and these contrasting contexts frame the analysis. Theoretically informed by religious and ritual studies, both sacred time and space are considered through close readings of museum architecture, visual exhibits and the movement of the visitor through the museums.
The Art and Science of Reading Faces: Strategies of Racist Cinema in the Third Reich,
Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish StudiesJennifer Hansen-Glucklich
The 1940 Nazi propaganda film Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew) is infamous for its brutal anti-Semitism and claims of being a documentary film. Scholarship on the film focuses on its unique construction, its content, and its use as a tool for Nazi ideology, but has not fully addressed the cinematic techniques that accomplish its goals. This article demonstrates through the lens of physiognomic and film theory the manner in which Der ewige Jude emerges as a more complex and sophisticated film than it first appears, employing a shrewd method of racial indoctrination.
