Episode 348: Nazi Zombies (with Dr. Claire E. Aubin)
/This week we’re joined by historian Dr. Claire E. Aubin to talk about Nazism, monsters, and the combination of the two. We also discuss researching heavy topics, creating a supportive community, and Sharkenstein.
Content Warning: This episode contains conversations about or mentions of the Holocaust, antisemitism, racism, violence, murder, dehumanization, child death, and genocide.
Guest
Dr. Claire E. Aubin is a historian of Holocaust perpetration, American public conception of Holocaust perpetrators, and Nazism. She also researches and teaches on antisemitism within the American Christian/far/alt-right. She is currently in the process of adapting her PhD dissertation on Holocaust perpetrators as immigrants to the post-war US into a book.
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Cast & Crew
- Co-Hosts: Julia Schifini and Amanda McLoughlin
- Editors: Eric Schneider and Brandon Grugle
- Music: Brandon Grugle, based on "Danger Storm" by Kevin MacLeod
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About Us
Spirits is a boozy podcast about mythology, legends, and folklore. Every episode, co-hosts Julia and Amanda mix a drink and discuss a new story or character from a wide range of places, eras, and cultures. Learn brand-new stories and enjoy retellings of your favorite myths, served over ice every week, on Spirits.
Transcript
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AMANDA: Welcome to Spirits Podcast, a boozy dive into mythology, legends, and folklore. Every week we pour a drink and learn about a new story from around the world. I'm Amanda.
JULIA: And I'm Julia.
AMANDA: And we are so excited to be joined by Dr. Claire E. Aubin, who is going to tell us a whole lot about monsters and Nazis, and everything in between. And maybe ghost stories, maybe what you love about academia, and monsters, and monstrousness. God, I'm excited. Welcome, Claire, to the show.
CLAIRE: Thank you for having me. I'm excited to get into it.
JULIA: We are so stoked as well. Just to kind of start off, can you tell people a little bit about what your work tends to focus on in academia?
CLAIRE: Sure, yeah. So I've just finished my Ph.D., and my Ph.D. dissertation. And most of what I worked on was on Holocaust perpetrators. So not just like general Nazis, but people who specifically perpetrated the Holocaust as immigrants to the post-war US. So looking at the sort of, like, Nazi next-door trope and the sort of imagination that surrounds what a Nazi, after the war, looks like, and specifically like hidden or concealed Nazis in America look like. So I do a lot of sort of work, obviously, on that, and on their actual lives and experiences, and how those compared to the narratives that we have about them, but also a lot of work on sort of what Nazis in popular culture and American culture look like and sort of the conception that we have around them. So, that's a lot of what I do. I also do a lot of stuff on sort of the— the Right and Anti- Semitism in the US at the moment, but it still kind of tends to come back to our idea of, like, what evil and Nazism and all of these things look like versus what they actually are.
JULIA: Yeah, that— that's such a fascinating subject. And, like, you think about kind of the way that— I guess after the Cold War, we kind of went away from Nazis as the bad guy in, like, films, and how we're kind of coming back to it the same time. Like, I know we got Nazis again in the Indiana Jones movie, which I feel like it can't be an Indiana Jones movie without the Nazis, so—
CLAIRE: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: —I'm very, very curious to get us started, and I'm sure there's a lot of great examples out there in the universe. But can you tell us a little bit, I guess, about— when— when you talk about the kind of Nazi monsters, which is what we were so excited to talk to you about today. I think of my husband playing Call of Duty and the entire like oeuvre of the Nazi Zombie.
CLAIRE: Yeah, that, I think, is probably, especially now, the most common idea that people would have of the trope, but it's existed since World War Two.
JULIA: Whoa.
CLAIRE: So the first Nazi Zombie movie came out in 1941, it's called King of the Zombies. And then the second one, which is kind of a sequel to it, is called Revenge of the Zombies, and that came out in 1943.
AMANDA: Just really in the thick of it. They were like—
CLAIRE: Oh, yeah.
AMANDA: —like, checks headlines, "What should we make today, lads?" And then that's what they made.
CLAIRE: Yeah. They were, like, right in with the— with the Nazi Zombie thing. So that's— it's not like it's some retroactive thing that started after the war, and people were like, "These guys were really bad. Let's make them even worse." They were, like, in the middle of it, "These guys are bad," and here's— we need to really, really stress all of the potential ways they could—could be bad. Yeah, it's— it's not like a new— relatively new thing compared to sort of age, the age of Nazism and the Third Reich. So yeah, I mean, it's been around for a while.
JULIA: That's amazing. I never would have guessed that was true. I would been like, "Yeah, you know, that was probably a thing that started happening in, like, the 2000s, right?" Like, you're blowing my mind here. I love it.
CLAIRE: No. I mean, even like, the Wikipedia page for Nazi Zombies has, like, almost 30 or 30-ish movies listed.
AMANDA: Yeah.
CLAIRE: And so, that would be just movies that are large enough for someone to include them in this trope. So, there are— are a million, I'm sure, like, indie small, whatever level of production ones that aren't even in— included in this. And there are a million other ones that kind of are outside the bounds of Nazi Zombies, but still fit into sort of Nazi monsters, and Nazi voodoo, and Nazi all kinds of other stuff. And the most recent one was made in 2018, it was produced by J.J. Abrams. This is also still an ongoing thing. It's not like it started a while ago. There was a brief pause in the '90s for about 10 years— 10 to 15 years where nobody was making Nazi Zombie movies. And then they just reappeared in the early 2000s.
JULIA: Can I ask what happened in the mid-90s that they were just like, "Oh, we're gonna take a quick pause on Nazi Zombies for a little bit."?
CLAIRE: I have no idea. I have— there's— I mean, I'm sure there are a lot of reasons you could speculate. Like, maybe there's the fall of the Iron Curtain, and there's a bunch of other stuff going on that people were like, "We can focus on that." There's also the rise of the Middle East and Middle Eastern people being like—
JULIA: Yeah.
CLAIRE: —the— the villains in— in movies, and Arabs specifically being like the villains— big villains in movies. But then we get right back to it in the sort of early 2000s. And there's a real, like, major resurgence of the Nazi Zombie thing, starting in like the 2010s-ish.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
CLAIRE: So right around, like, when a lot of video games started really popularizing the Nazi Zombie thing as a— as a video game trope rather than just a movie trope.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm. So, what's the fascination? I— I know that you mentioned sort of like, "Ah, yeah, like, these are the— these are the worst bads, and killing them wasn't even enough." Like, that would kind of be my assumption, right? That you sort of— can sort of, like, raise them back from the dead, and that's, you know, especially, you know, egregious. It's also, like, satisfying to snipe a Nazi Zombie like that, I totally understand. What, in your scholarly perspective, sort of is the fascination of some of these monster tropes?
CLAIRE: Well, I think it's— I think you're right. There's— I was reading some of these, like, commentaries about this the other day, because I was thinking about, "Well, how are other people conceiving of this when— or what are the conceptions that are really popular about this before coming on the show?" And one of the people— I wrote this down somewhere on here. Oh, one of two writing about it, Issy van der Velde calls— calls Nazi Zombies a bad guys 2-for-1 sale.
AMANDA: Hmm.
CLAIRE: Like, it's like— so you're not just killing zombies, you're also killing a Nazi Zombie. And so it really kind of doubles down on the, like, thing that happens— especially when you play things like first-person shooters—
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
CLAIRE: —which are like, "Just kill as many people as possible, as brutally as possible. Get extra points for blowing them up," or whatever crazy thing you're gonna put them through, basically. And you can just remove any ethical compulsion whatsoever from that, by being like, "Oh, it's a zombie. It's also a Nazi." So, there's just no— there— you feel no sense of immortality. Not that that is, you know, a real factor for most people playing these games, but the— there's just— you just don't have to worry about it. You can just—
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
CLAIRE: —you can just— like in some of these games, you can, like, stick a Nazi zombie in a jet engine and, like, you can just feel totally good about yourself while you're doing it, pretty much. So, I think that's pretty much the appeal, to be honest.
JULIA: Yeah. And I mean, like, the problem with kind of the zombie genre, and a lot of different zombie movies and media, and stuff have talked about this. It's like, "These used to be people." Like, this is like— you know, you see, like, the one guy, you know, mourning his wife's death, but she's a zombie now, and he can't kill her, and then it ends up leading to his own death. And, like, the moral quandary of like, "These used to be people that we love, and now they're, like, these kind of mindless eating and killing machines." But when you make it a Nazi, it's fine. It's okay. Like, you don't even feel bad about it. You're just like, "Man, it sucks that Nazis came back in the first place, Better kill it again."
AMANDA: Yeah.
CLAIRE: Yeah, absolutely.
AMANDA: And something I know you've commented on and that I see a lot in discussions about Nazis and pop culture too, is these are not former people like zombies. These are current people. And, you know, that sort of collapsing of, like, human evil and monstrousness can, like you indicated, kind of remove some sense of, like, agency, or sort of dehumanize perpetrators who— ideas are still active and plans are still happening today. So, how does kind of, like, monstrosity and, like, humanization sort of intersect?
CLAIRE: I think that's a very good question and it's one that we've been asking ourselves since the Holocaust, since a million other sort of— not million but, you know, lots of other genocides that have happened in the— in the intervening period. Because in order to grapple with monstrous acts or with inhuman acts, it requires an acceptance of humanity as not a wholly good thing or not—
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
CLAIRE: —an entirely good set of actions, behaviors, whatever it is. And it's really hard to— to try to explain to people that, like, lots of people do really evil things, or have done what we would conceive as really evil things. And being able to acknowledge that without immediately finding monstrosity in the sense of, like, classical monstrosity. Like, you are a monster, you are a nonhuman entity, or a post-human entity, or—
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
CLAIRE: —undead or whatever. Saying that, you know, humans can do evil things without being monsters can be really, really hard for people to accept. And— and I don't mean without being monsters in the— in this sort of, like, metaphorical sense. They can do evil things without being literally a monster—
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
CLAIRE: —a nonhuman thing. I mean, even when people talk about Hitler, for example, there's— it's a really common misconception, and the fact that I'm having to talk about this is wild. But a misconception that Hitler was possessed by a demon is something you hear a lot, actually, particularly during like the Satanic Panic that comes up a lot. That he only did an evil thing because he was possessed by a demon, and it's because he, at one point, underlined a passage in a book called Magic: History Theory and Practice, that says, "He who does not carry demonic seeds within him will never give birth to a new world." So people were like, boom, evidence that Hitler was possessed by a demon. So, it's like even when they talk about like Hitler, like the guy, they still are like, "Well, maybe he wasn't really a human, maybe— or he was a human, but it was demonic possession that caused this."
AMANDA: These plans couldn't come from within a human being without external source or, like, fertilization.
JULIA: Hmm.
CLAIRE: Yeah, absolutely. There has to be some supernatural force acting on people to make them behave in this way, and it's like, "No, actually, they can just do it." They— there doesn't need to be some external, supernatural occult thing that's causing it, that— and even those things are born out of human desire, born out of human consciousness, all these— like even the occult is something that we came up with. So it's— you know, at the— at the end of the day, all of it together is very deeply human behavior, rather than something that is an indicator of monstrosity as an— as a non-human sort of concept.
JULIA: Yeah.
AMANDA: Totally.
CLAIRE: If that makes sense.
JULIA: No, absolutely. I think it's really interesting too, because obviously, this is kind of something that is— I assume, when they were making the 1940s zombie movies, that they weren't aware as much of, like, the now really publicized, like, how much Hitler loved the occult kind of stuff.
CLAIRE: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: And it's really interesting that, like, nowadays, anything involving the Nazis that is not just, like, straight historical fiction has some sort of occult twist on it, whether it's Indiana Jones, or Hellboy, or the Call of Duty Nazi Zombies stuff. And I'm wondering where that comes from, I guess. Is it from the Satanic Panic like you mentioned?
CLAIRE: I'm not sure. I think there's a modern turn at the moment to be really into occult stuff anyways. Things like astrology, tarot, all of those things are incredibly popular, like—
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
CLAIRE: —at the moment. They're having this massive cultural resurgence in this sort of, like, re-enchantment thing is happening right now. And this desire to look at sort of the dark side of the occult, while there's this resurgence of, like, what people would call sort of the light side or the bright side of it. They're looking at the dark side of it, too, as this sort of foil to what they see as the good positive nature of re-enchantment. Or what— what some people would consider this sort of good positive nature re-enchantment. You know, I don't actually know if there's like a good answer to why this is such a big thing at the moment. I mean, I went and saw Indiana Jones in theaters, like, a week ago, and was, like, really taken aback when the bad guy was a Nazi living in America under a fake name, because I was like, "That is jumpscare for me." Like, man, I just wanted to go watch a movie.
AMANDA: I did consent to have my— my thesis brought up right now, yeah.
CLAIRE: Yeah. And then it was like, "Oh, and it's about magic and time travel, and Nazi— the Nazi plan to travel back in time and, you know"— and that was like— well, I mean, not that specifically, but this search for supernatural objects and religious relics and stuff, that was real. Like—
JULIA: Yeah.
CLAIRE: —the Nazis had a group called the Ahnenerbe that were, like, doing that, looking for supernatural objects and religious relics, and treasures, and things like that. So, you know— and it was fairly certain it was founded by Himmler, who was, like, a big occult guy. Part of it is that it is— there is some basis in reality. There is some grounding in reality for some of this. But we just— through the use of, you know, movie magic and— and video games, and whatever, we just really inflated it massively into this whole other thing. There's no evidence that the Nazis were trying to make zombies, which also feels very silly to have to say but, like, they were into a lot of stuff, zombies, raising the undead, not one of the things that they were, as far as we know, actively trying to do.
JULIA: Now, I'm just wondering if, like, George Lucas read a really weird book one time and now that's why we're obsessed with the Nazi search for the occult. Like it— it might have just been that. It might have just been, like, one really big thing kind of snowballed all of the other stuff later.
CLAIRE: I mean, maybe. I don't see why not.
JULIA: I just like to theorize. Obviously, I'm not the doctor here, but I just like to theorize some kind of stuff. I'd be like, "George Lucas wrote a weird book at a airport library once, and then, like, you know, went off."
CLAIRE: Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of books on this. People love to— okay. People love to talk about magic, love talking about Nazis, and if you can put them together in one book, research, project, whatever, they're all about it. It's—
JULIA: There you go.
CLAIRE: That's like— you know, it's their sort of perennial interest for people of all different sorts of political persuasions. Because if you're on one side, you will read that as like, "This is the most evil thing ever."
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
CLAIRE: And if you're on one side, you're like, "How interesting." Like there's, you know, there's— everybody can find something that they are interested in, when it— when it comes to— especially things like Nazi zombies, Nazi monsters, et cetera. It feels like it should be a really niche interest, but in actuality, pretty much everyone can find something in it that they're like, "Ah, I didn't know that, and I would like to bring that up in a pop quiz or something." You know?
AMANDA: Yeah. Sure. I—I don't know if this is just my kind of speculation, but I think that people, especially non-Jews, trying to wrap their heads around the— the scope and fact of the Holocaust. Are sort of like— your brain sort of is— is thankful for the release valve of like, "Oh, well, they were trying to time travel." Like, "Oh, well, they were trying to, you know, like, figure out magic." Like, "Oh, they were trying to sort of, like"— you know, Sorcerer's Stone, like Philosopher's Stone, you know, do something otherworldly, instead of the very like— again, like banal and common evil of, you know, a white supremacist-like racial and political agenda, which feels like part of the kind of subconscious fascination or almost like relief at some explanation that isn't. No, this was a, you know, a forecast and, like, fairly logical extension of, like, very clear public policy.
CLAIRE: Yeah, absolutely. And I think there's something that feels— probably can feel relieving in the idea that, "Oh, they were doing this undead— they had this undead project, they had this monstrous project. There's a— there's a movie that came out not that long ago. I think 2016, called Sharkenstein, where it was like, "They were making a Nazi super shark." Like, you know, there's this whole thing where it's like, "Okay, it's relieving, they were doing this to someone else." When the actual reality of it is things like human experimentation that were happening on victims of the Holocaust, or that wasn't happening on victims of the Holocaust was for, like, human improvement, supposedly.
AMANDA: Very banal, yeah.
CLAIRE: It was of great— yeah. And it was like these things that we're imagining as being about creating, like, you know, Frankenstein's monsters, were actually about creating like a stronger uber human race, which is much scarier actually, if you— if you really think about it. And so, you know, in order to— to create these monstrous things like a shark, you don't necessarily need to be experimenting on humans to do that.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
CLAIRE: There was a— a project to bring back some extinct animals, and that's real. The auroch and the tarpan, which is like an ox and a horse from, I think, like the Jurassic period. And so—
JULIA: There's so many better options than those animals.
CLAIRE: I don't know. It was— it was to bring back sort of, like, Germanic native wildlife from a time gone by kind of thing.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
CLAIRE: It was like, you know, to— to bring back Germany's forest fairy tale place, like genuinely.
AMANDA: Yeah.
CLAIRE: And, you know, learning about that can be easier for people. They feel more like, "Whoa. What a wacky bunch of guys doing that.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
CLAIRE: "That's so stupid." But, you know, the counterpoint to that is that they're doing human experimentation for, like, looking at the future of space travel. Like, so— and people don't want to necessarily— it can be really difficult to connect with that and to really, like, digest that. And so, I— I can understand how it can be relieving. Imagine it just being about scary monsters, and sharks, and zombies, and whatever else.
AMANDA: I think the— the scariness of the, like, evil next door is also another aspect of, like, Nazi lore and— and monsters that really interests me. So, can you tell us a little bit more about the Nazi next-door trope?
CLAIRE: Yeah. So, the Nazi next-door trope is usually one that's used to be— or used in circumstances. Like the Indiana Jones movie, where there's a guy, he comes to the US, he changes his name. He's usually like a scientist or a spy. He does lots of, like, dastardly secretive things, someone catches him, he goes, you know, wild, blow stuff up. Or, you know, is— is part of a secret network of— of Nazis operating in the US in some sort of secret capacity to—
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
CLAIRE: —mess up some part of the US government or, you know, manipulate policy, whatever. It's— basically, there's a Nazi who came to the US, who concealed everything, and he's trying to do something, you know, sneaky and subversive while he's— while he's here.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
CLAIRE: That's not really the kind of Nazi that came to the US for the most part, or specifically when you talk about Holocaust perpetrators. Because in most of these scenarios, the Nazi next door, it's not some guy who was like a paper stamper person who would— or someone who is in just like the German army. It's not that.
AMANDA: Right.
CLAIRE: Like the Nazi next-door trope is specifically about a guy, or almost always a man, very, very rarely a woman, who came to the US after working in something like a concentration camp, or after leading the Nazi party in some aspect of something related to the Holocaust. And that's why—
AMANDA: It's like policy decision-makers or, like, researchers are often most present in this trope, too.
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
CLAIRE: Yes, absolutely, 100%. People who are, like— especially scientific researchers, that's a big part of this, who then came to US to, like, build rockets or whatever.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
CLAIRE: And while a few of them did— the perpetrators that I look at— I look at about 150 who were reliably accused of perpetration through fraudulent immigration. Because in the US, we can't actually prosecute anyone for Holocaust perpetration. But we can prosecute them for immigration fraud—
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
CLAIRE: —via Holocaust perpetration, because they lied in order to enter the US. Because if we knew that they'd done that, we theoretically would not have let them in.
JULIA: Theoretically being the key word there.
AMANDA: Theoretically. Theoretically.
JULIA: Yeah.
CLAIRE: Theoretically. But the majority of what people imagine to be a Nazi next-door in the US is someone who entered through something called Operation Paperclip, or Project Paperclip, which is where Nazi scientists were brought into the US to work on scientific things like space travel, et cetera. Of the 150 that I looked at, only 3 of them were involved in Operation Paperclip.
AMANDA: Hmm.
CLAIRE: So the majority of the people involved in Operation Paperclip, not all, but a huge proportion of them were actually just like normal everyday scientists who didn't really know what was going on, didn't really have involvement, and things like this— in this sort of, like, hardcore Holocaust perpetration aspects of it. And only about three of them actually knew— or were involved in the decision-making processes around this. The majority of Nazis living in the US— or former Nazis living in the US were just, like, low-level concentration camp guards. They were mostly not German or Austrian, which is the most common misconception. They were mostly Eastern European concentration camp guards, so, like, Ukrainians or very common immigrants to the US who had had involvement in the perpetration of the Holocaust. A lot of people from the Baltics, so Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia. The— that's really— when we talk about a Nazi next door, that's really the guy we're talking about.
AMANDA: Hmm.
CLAIRE: Is a guy who, like, worked at a concentration camp in some capacity, or was an auxiliary policeman, and came after that. Usually, they use the same name that they had— like their actual name, but because of the Cold War, we didn't have access to their records that would have shown us that they were a Nazi until the sort of fall of the Iron Curtain. So, we— a lot of these people that we let in, we didn't really like know how— like, we didn't know that they were Nazis, and we didn't really have a way of knowing that they were Nazis necessarily. We also had really terrible procedures to keep the Nazis out, so it was—
AMANDA: Yeah.
CLAIRE: It's kind of— it's bad on all fronts, basically.
AMANDA: Yeah.
CLAIRE: But, yeah, it's— it's really important to— when we think about the sort of Nazi next-door trope to, like, really start to divorce it from our idea of, like, Nazi leadership and Germans and Austrians, because for the most part, that's not who— who actually came into the US. And it dilutes our idea of the Holocaust itself.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
CLAIRE: Like, because it leads us to believe that the Holocaust and all of its perpetration was an exclusively German and Austrian phenomenon, rather than one that was enthusiastically perpetrated and— and collaborated with, like, by people all over Europe and all over Eastern Europe. That's— like, so much of what we imagine to be just a German plan, while the plan was German, its execution was, like, very often not carried out by Germans or carried out by local people who— who wanted to participate in a pogrom. You know, it's— so it's really important when we think about this and it— it plays ov— I think it affects these like monstrous tropes as well.
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: We have so much more to ask you about these monstrous tropes, about your time as a researcher, and in academia, and other stories that you may have grown up with. So, let's grab a quick refill and then we'll be right back to it.
JULIA: Let's do it.
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You can find all kinds of TikTok and YouTube videos about why Cirie is incredible, and these are very fun small moments of people not knowing how good she is in the Big Brother House, or that her son is with her. They have the same face and no one knows. It's incredible. Except for one person. Anyway, welcome, Denise. And welcome and thank you are supporting producer-level patrons who supports, sustains this podcast and makes our work possible, Uhleeseeuh, Anne, Brittany, Froody Chick, Hannah, Jack Marie, Jane, Kneazlekins, Lily, Matthew, Megan Moon, Nathan, Phil Fresh, Rikoelike, Captain Jonathan MAL-uh-kye Cosmos, Sarah and Scott. And our legend-level patrons, Arianna, Audra, Bex, Chibi Yokai, Morgan, Morgan H., Sarah, and Bea Me Up Scotty. You should join us today. 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JULIA: Now, we always love to ask our guests what you have been drinking lately, whether that's cocktails, mocktails, sodas, lemonades, coffee creations, what have you. What have you been enjoying lately?
CLAIRE: Well, I am a non-drinker, but I spent a very long time working in cocktail bars, so I'm like very— if I want to recreate the experience of drinking cocktails and drinking nice things without the alcohol. So lately, I've been having a lot of, like, water from— wa— water from a tap, but with lemon and mint from my garden.
AMANDA: Yeah.
CLAIRE: That's been really nice. Doing that like pretty much every day. Now, we have a picture of that. That's what I have in my glass next to me. There also are a lot of really good non-alcoholic liquors at the moment.
AMANDA & JULIA: Uh-hmm.
CLAIRE: So like zero-proof liquors, which are— I'm getting really, really into.
AMANDA: Yes.
CLAIRE: So I've been having a lot of Negronis—
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: Yes.
CLAIRE: —at—at restaurants. If you can get one at a bar, if you just ask, "Do you have any like non-alcoholic gin or anything like that?" And then you tell them you want a Negroni, "They’re usually like, "Yes."
JULIA: We get to finally use this.
CLAIRE: Yeah.
AMANDA: So, our— our studio is right by St. Agrestis distilling—
CLAIRE: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: —which makes like a bottled phony Negronis, is what they call it.
CLAIRE: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: —and, like, liquors and stuff that are all zero proof. It’s— it's very cool.
CLAIRE: There's a— a place near us that has this on tap— or not on tap, but like on in-stock non-alcoholic Amaro, which has been—
AMANDA: Hell yeah.
CLAIRE: —pretty wild to get to have. I was like, "Oh, that's amazing. Yes, I want that, please."
JULIA: Incredible. Oh, my gosh. That sounds so good. I— I need some recommendations for really good brands for non-alcoholic liquors, so please send them my way. I'm so stoked.
CLAIRE: Yeah, I will.
JULIA: So let's get back into talking about Nazis. You know, they’re a classic—
AMANDA: You know, Julia, we're living in a banner time not just for non-alcoholic spirits and beverages, but also for Anti- Semitism. That's the— that's the transition that— that I would say right now.
JULIA: Amanda, thank you.
AMANDA: You're welcome.
JULIA: That's way better.
AMANDA: You're welcome. Yeah.
CLAIRE: And you're right. And you're right.
AMANDA: It's— it's the— it's the new hotness. There's the old kind and there's the new hotness. And it's just like— you know wha— what a time to be a scholar of this stuff.
JULIA: Yeah.
CLAIRE: Yeah. I mean, I think one of the weirdest things has been— I don't think I have a single day on the internet where I don't encounter something totally wild, like in terms of Anti-Semitism, some, like, new Nazi thing happening, I get tagged into some conversation, I was not prepared to have, like, every single day. And, you know, like—it's like the Indiana Jones thing, that you go into a movie and you're like, "This is gonna be a fun, you know, nostalgic throwback to my childhood," Nazi, like, immediately.
AMANDA: Well, one thing that really— I'm sorry to, like, quote your academic biography to you, but—
CLAIRE: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: —I did read on University of Edinburgh's website, that you co-created the Emotionally Demanding Histories Group, which as soon as I read it, I was like, "Ah, of course, emotion and emotional burden, and the emotional effect of research and secondary trauma are a thing among researchers and scholars." Can you tell us about that and how you either found or didn't find an unmade community among other researchers of weighty topics?
CLAIRE: Yeah, absolutely. It's one of my favorite things to talk about because—
AMANDA: Good. I was like, "I don't want to make you talk about your, like, extracurricular work, but—"
CLAIRE: No. Basically, EDHG was born out of a— a really depressing coffee conversation that one of my very good friends, Dr. Emily Rose, hey, she and I had. She works on child homicide. And basically, we were in the first year of our Ph.D., and our cohort would, like, meet up for these big brunches, or whatever, and— and we'd have these classes together. And then everyone talked about their, like, fun, interesting topics. So they're like—
AMANDA: The fun facts.
CLAIRE: —things that are like—
AMANDA: Yeah.
CLAIRE: "—I'm— yeah, I'm doing the history of gaming, and I'm doing all this stuff." And it was like, "That's great." And then she and I would emerge from these meetings feeling like, "Well, I feel like shit."
AMANDA: Yeah.
CLAIRE: Like, you know, I can't— I mean, you can't have— people would be like, "Let's do Halloween, and let's dress up as our topic, and she and I were like—
AMANDA: No, no.
JULIA: "Oh, as a child murder? Good."
AMANDA: Yeah. I mean—
CLAIRE: I'm like, "I can't do that one."
AMANDA: Yeah, like there wasn't a cult belief that, like, Aryans are descended from the people from Atlantis. But as soon as they started explaining it, it's gonna get real dark real fast.
CLAIRE: Yeah. Oh, yeah, exactly. So, like, she and I had this coffee conversation one day, and she and I — and I actually didn't really know each other at that point. Like we were our— the same cohort together, but we hadn't really, like, connected in any real meaningful way. And she was like, "Hey, I want to talk to you about the fact that I feel really sad about my research sometimes, and I don't feel like anyone else that I'm talking to is going through this." And I was like, "Well, I definitely am." And we were like, "Well, let's start talking about this more frequently." And then we're like, "Well, what if we start a group? Or do these groups exist?" And it turned out that they existed for people who do like social sciences.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: Hmm.
CLAIRE: Like psychologists, for example—
AMANDA: Right.
CLAIRE: —will have these emotionally demanding research groups. Some anthropologists that would come up with— with would sort of come up in their circles. And it just didn't exist for history, like at all. And we were kind of baffled because we were like, "Okay, but we're studying— just because it's in the past doesn't mean I'm not studying straight-up genocide." Like when I'm talking about Holocaust perpetrators in the US, that also requires me to be very specifically and deeply researching their behavior during the Holocaust—
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
CLAIRE: —in order to understand the sort of mental state that follows them after that. And so we were like, "Okay, well, then maybe we should think about this becoming a thing." And we made this group, which ended up being the first group ever to— to work on emotionally demanding aspects of history and— and secondary trauma in— in history and historical research. And we've had scholars of all different kinds of things, genocide, sexual violence, colonial violence, all kinds of stuff, like, who are working with really, really difficult, really heavy topics. Come and join us and speak at our events, and do our conferences and things like that in our workshops. But, yeah, it's— it's a— it's a field that really deserves a lot more attention, because so many researchers feel really deeply affected by the work that they're doing. And you don't even necessarily have to be a part of a group that would be targeted. Like, you don't have to be a child or a mother to—
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
CLAIRE: —read all day about child homicide and feel like horrified by it. And also to have actual experiences of secondary trauma. And that, I think, is what we were trying to do, is to connect the idea of, like, this feeling you're having is actually not normal, is actually not a feeling that you should be having, and what you're experiencing is a secondary trauma response. And I think that gets thrown around a lot. Like the idea of trauma responses and trauma gets sort of like thrown around with— sometimes— or somewhat trivial things now. But we were talking to people who are like, "Oh, I have nightmares every single night about—"
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
CLAIRE: —what I research or—
JULIA: Yeah.
CLAIRE: —I— there's one woman who said like, "I double-check the locks on my doors or triple, quadruple check the locks on my doors every single night—"
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
CLAIRE: —because I'm so scared of someone breaking in, because I work on robbery and violence in the— I think it was, like, in the 1800s. Like, it's— it's— we're not talking about things that happen now, but it's— you get so engulfed in this thing. You're so entrenched in it, that it's just like, your whole mind gets altered by it, and you experience real feelings. Yeah, like, it's— I mean, the way that Emily Rose deals with it is, you know, she'll— she runs a— or used to run a Brownies Troop, which is like a little—
AMANDA & JULIA: Aw.
CLAIRE: —girl scout troop in the UK to— because she could get to, like, see kids play and do something fun.
AMANDA: Exactly.
CLAIRE: But we also need professional organizations to help you with those things.
JULIA: Yeah.
CLAIRE: You can't just be like, "Well, here's my personal solution to this problem."
AMANDA: Yeah. No, I—
CLAIRE: You know?
JULIA: Yeah, I suggest you all start being a mentor to a girl scout troop. That's a—
CLAIRE: Yeah.
JULIA: That's my solution to this problem.
AMANDA: It also—
CLAIRE: Yeah.
AMANDA: It feels like a fantasy of like the— like heteropatriarchy to say that, like, emotion never factors into research, especially in academia, especially—
CLAIRE: Yeah.
AMANDA: —in higher education, but, like, of course. And it, you know, it would be lying to say that the emotion and perspective of the researcher, or the writer, or the professor, you know, has nothing at all to do with the output that they have in the historical record and, like, all kinds of other aspects of history.
CLAIRE: Yeah. And I think one thing that's important is that ethics play a huge role in— in history. And the idea of— of ethical compulsions and what you owe to your— to your subjects that comes up a lot, particularly when you work on like modern and contemporary history, because your subject might still be alive.
JULIA: Yeah.
CLAIRE: Their family members might still be alive, their grandkids. Like it— it comes up a lot, so you— there are other aspects that are emotionally difficult that you have to consider. Like, not just the thing that you're researching, but like, how do you talk about it? How do you avoid traumatizing your readers?
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
CLAIRE: Which is real, like you can spend all— you can write about violence, but are you writing about violence in a way that is ethical to the people experiencing it or who experienced it? Are you— are you writing about them in a respectful way or a sort of scandalized way? Are you— or sort of, like, in a way that trivializes the violence that they experienced, because you're focusing on the person who perpetrated it?
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
CLAIRE: You know, are you using their full names? Are you using acronyms? Are you using aliases? Like, these are real questions that we have to think about. And some researchers of other things don't have to think about that in that same way.
JULIA: Yeah. Yeah.
AMANDA: Yeah, like single-celled bacteria aren't necessarily like reading work about their grandfather or something. Yeah.
CLAIRE: No. Someone working on— on some aspects of history, that's not even— like if you're working on monarchies, for example, Aalot of the times, you know, you're not too worried about. It's already all public knowledge. It's all— you're not working on these sort of, like, really granular niche areas that will— you know, I don't want someone who's a child of Holocaust survivors, or child of Holocaust victims even, I don't want them to read something in my work that feels disrespectful to what their family experienced. Someone who is a Holocaust survivor, I don't want to read— them to read something I've written and feel like it's— it's somehow does them or the people around them a disservice, like—
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
CLAIRE: —so you know, there's a— there's a lot of a sort of consideration that needs to go into the work that we do at any given moment, in a way that other researchers don't have that same sort of like emotional burden. And, like, they aren't facing the same sort of risks also. If you write about child homicide, you're putting yourself as a researcher at risk.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
CLAIRE: If you write about Nazis, you are putting yourself at risk.
AMANDA: Yeah.
JULIA: Yeah.
CLAIRE: Like it's a real thing. And I think you're right to say that a lot of it has to do with this sort of hetero-patriarchal thing, because academia, in general, fits into that paradigm. And it's very common, especially with women, that in these sort of like hardcore violence areas or studies of them that we get pushed out very easily. And it happens for anyone who's in any sort of minoritized or marginalized group. But with women in sort of violent studies, it's like this is for men.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
CLAIRE: This is what men study. Women don't study this because it's too emotionally difficult.
AMANDA: Right.
CLAIRE: So we were like, "Well, let's— let's work on that."
AMANDA: Yeah. No, a 100%.
CLAIRE: Basically.
AMANDA: And I'm— I'm so glad you brought up ethics too, because something that my— my husband, Eric Silver, and I talk about a lot is like the ethics of portraying Nazis. And his rule, but I definitely want to hear what yours perhaps is or your suggestion would be, is that it's cool to put Nazis into a gamer story only if you can punch them, that— the, you know, the— the, like, representation like, you know, in his words, "Video games are a power fantasy." And role-playing games to the same extent as well storytelling of any kind. Where being able to— you know, as a Jewish person punch a Nazi or not, or a queer person or, you know, political dissident to do that is, you know, there is something reparative or at least, you know, reclaiming in that act. So, how do you feel about representing Nazism as a trope, or just a character, or like a background setting in any kind of piece of fiction?
CLAIRE: I think it's absolutely fine as long as the point— the point of it, or the purpose of it isn't to give them a redemption arc. Like, if your goal is to redeem a Nazi, to make them un-punchable, to make them an empathetic, sympathetic, whatever, character. If the goal is to find your shared humanity amongst— between you and the Nazis, I think that's bad. And I— I don't think that that is really an appropriate way of framing it. And I think it's also— it fits under the category of like, "Too soon on that one?"
AMANDA: Yeah.
CLAIRE: We're not— the— we're not far enough removed for— to be able to play around with those— with those sort of ideas. Because what it ends up doing is something that I have done a lot of other work on, which is— it ends up often doing something called Holocaust Instrumentalisation, which is where you take the Holocaust, and you turn it into an instrument. You do— any context around it, is divorced from it, and it just becomes about bad people doing bad stuff. Mean— mean guys did a mean thing, and if we just have more empathy for them, if we just offer them a chance at redemption—
AMANDA: Yeah.
CLAIRE: —then we'll discover a shared humanity and everything will be better. And then people will stop being mean. It's like we teach children sometimes— and there's a lot of pushback against this now, which is good, and we should be working against this. About teaching children the Holocaust in the context of bullying is bad, like—
AMANDA: Right.
CLAIRE: —being mean to people is bad. And so—
AMANDA: Yeah.
CLAIRE: — then— so it'll say, "And here's an example of what happens if you're mean to people." And you give them the Holocaust. And it's like— it teaches you absolutely nothing about the Holocaust.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
CLAIRE: Absolutely nothing about. It says nothing about the historical context, says nothing about how hatred grows, how hatred is weaponized, none of those things. And so, when you put a Nazi in— or you set something in— in Nazi Germany, or you make the Nazis win World War Two, and then come back, and you're giving them a redemption arc. You're doing the same thing, essentially. You're saying, "It's not the genocide they did that was bad. It's just them in general, and if you just— you know, if we just understand them as individuals a little bit more— with a little bit more nuance, then, you know, maybe there— maybe there's some good in the Nazi is kind of like— it doesn't teach anyone anything, but it kind of pretends to, I would say. Very often sort of purports to teach people something, but there's not really any lesson being learned anywhere in there.
AMANDA: Yeah. And removes it from Jewishness and Anti-Semitism specifically, which is another thing that, you know, people seem very eager to be like, "Yeah, yeah." But, like,, all lots of groups have been, you know, targeted in lots of ways, and sort of move away from, you know, that specific context because, they're uncomfortable for whatever reason that I don't necessarily care that much about, you know, in like looking at those exact details.
CLAIRE: Yeah, absolutely. I— I think there's a movement to reframe Nazi terror as not being directed towards any specific groups, but being just sort of, like, a general evil and terrorism that's happening against a lot of people. When in actuality, like, there were very specific groups targeted for very specific reasons.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
CLAIRE: And if we just say the Nazis were bad to everybody, we lose that, you completely lose that. And— and you do those people a wild disservice, and an enormous disservice. And it's—it's very bad and in it— and it— and it is, to me as a researcher of it, very worrisome, especially in this current moment when Anti-Semitism is on the rise, and there seems to be a push to call people who call out Anti-Semitism, Nazis, and fascists.
AMANDA: Yeah.
CLAIRE: Which is—
AMANDA: Incredible. And that cannot give me incredulity way. And I— I— sorry to, like again, quote your Twitter bio to you, but you call yourself in Twitter a— a literal— a historian of literal Nazis in America. Why is that distinction important to me? Maybe a softball question, but I'd love to hear you tackle it.
CLAIRE: Yeah. It's because people on the internet like to interpret things just in the wildest ways possible. They like to interpret things to just mean whatever they think that you mean, and that's fine, but I spend a lot of time saying, "I study Nazis in America," and people would go, "Well, your side are always calling everybody a Nazi—
AMANDA: Oh, boy.
CLAIRE: "—and I'm not a Nazi. You're ca— and I have to be like, "I'm talking about goose-stepping, uniform-wearing SS member Nazis." I'm not talking about modern conceptions of Neo-Nazis, which, you know, anybody can fall on. Any sort of spectrum on whether they think that that counts as a Nazi or not, whatever. I'm not talking about those. Like, I'm talking about the literal ones.
AMANDA: Yeah.
CLAIRE: And even that, I get a lot of pushback on, because people refuse to believe that I could mean literal Nazis when I say literal Nazis in America.
AMANDA: Do you, like, carry around like a few flash drives at this point, and you're like, "I have many gigabytes of— of, like, this historical record, I can show you."?
CLAIRE: Yeah, I mean, I have a dissertation you want to read it? It's called Holocaust perpetrators as Immigrants in the Post-War US. And that's just a little bit less pithy—
JULIA: Yeah.
CLAIRE: —differ— I'm not going to use that in my Twitter bio, you know? Like, it's— it's just like, I find it very strange and very frustrating, and I get so much pushback on it for no reason. Like other than people are— especially on the internet, they just want to be mad.
AMANDA: Yeah.
CLAIRE: They just want to be mad at you, and they want to— they want to misinterpret whatever it is. Even something as clear as saying, "I study literal Nazis in America." The— and I'm not using the word literal incorrect there. I'm meaning the literal ones.
AMANDA: Exactly. My final question for you is around the experience of studying effects and survivors and also perpetrators of the Holocaust in the US from the UK. And I'm curious kind of what that was like for you and how Holocaust memory and also denial differs in the US versus the UK or other places.
CLAIRE: Yeah. So one thing that's very good— especially because Covid lockdowns are happening in the UK during my— my dissertation writing period. One thing that's very good is that because Holocaust survivor networks are so widespread now, an enormous amount of the research that I was doing was publicly digitally available. So a lot of the things I looked at, you right now could go Google them, and find them in the archive that I was looking at. A lot of the things I looked at are not publicly available necessarily, but a huge, huge portion of them were. So I get asked that a lot, how do I study the US? How was I a historian of the US from the UK? And the answer was, honestly, without that much difficulty.
AMANDA: To be clear, I believe you were, and I believe you can. I just— I'm—I'm curious how that context sort of affected your work.
CLAIRE: Yeah, of course. I did not take it as you being someone criticizing that. But it— it was also interesting because I'm obviously from the US, I was born and raised here. I originally went to the UK to do my master's in human rights law, because Edinburgh is one of the best schools in the world for that. And interestingly, Edinburgh also has one of the best programs in the world for US history. And a lot of people do not realize this, because the American context is so— people are so used to thinking that you can only study America from America.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
CLAIRE: And that was not what I found. And I had things like Zoom. I could— I used to have oral history interviews with Holocaust survivors over Zoom during the pandemic, or during lockdowns. And— and a lot of things that I looked at— like I was able to go to— to Israel, to go to Jerusalem to work at Yad Vashem quite easily, while— while there, because it's much cheaper and much easier to go—
AMANDA: And closer.
CLAIRE: —to Jerusalem—
AMANDA: Yeah.
CLAIRE: —from— from England— or from the UK. I mean, I did fly out of London, but from— from the UK than it was to do it from the US. And there are more, like, grants available. The Royal Historical Society will pay for things like that. So, I found part of it pretty— pretty interesting, because I wasn't just looking at people who were in the US. I was also looking at their life before coming to the US.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
CLAIRE: So I had to have—
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
CLAIRE: —access to— to European archives, or like— pretty easily. I had to be able to go to Germany or go wherever and— and work in archives there, too. Or at least be able to call them and contact them without it being in the middle of the night for me.
AMANDA: Yeah.
CLAIRE: So that part was good. The context of studying the Holocaust in the US and the UK is very different. The UK has a very robust Holocaust education system in a way that the US absolutely does not. They have something called the Holocaust Educational Trust, Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, which both of those, like, actively teach Holocaust education and— and work around it, and are constantly holding conferences, and workshops, and whatever to talk about how they educate young people on the Holocaust. So, there's, I think, a much stronger understanding of it there than there is here. Here—
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
CLAIRE: — it's terrible. Our teaching of the Holocaust here is just awful. And while there are museums like the US HMM or the UCLA Shoah Center that are doing incredible work. The issue is that on a— on a very widespread public policy level. Children are not learning about the Holocaust, and now it's even more difficult for them to learn about the Holocaust. So, I know a lot of Holocaust scholars in the US who are constantly sort of stymied in their— in their work here, in a way that I was not—
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
CLAIRE: —in—in the UK. I— so I had— I would say a lot— I would say, yeah, quite— quite a lot less restrictions there than a lot of people do here, which is really terrible. So, that— that's my experience, at least.
AMANDA: Fascinating.
JULIA: I'm gonna pull us back very quickly to Nazi zombies and Nazi monsters as a whole—and, like, this is kind of just like a parting for people to maybe do their own watching or researching and stuff like that. Is there a piece of Nazi monster fiction that you think is actually like a good representation of what that genre should be?
CLAIRE: Oh, man. A good representation of what it should be or what it—
JULIA: Yes, what it should be.
CLAIRE: Honestly, I have no idea. It's—
JULIA: Okay.
CLAIRE: It doesn't— which sounds is a bad— which is a bad answer—
JULIA: No.
CLAIRE: —but there's— it's so— it's so difficult to find something that does it in a really good, appropriate way, and I am very open to suggestions as well.
JULIA: Yeah.
CLAIRE: If anyone comes across something, I would love to interact with it. I think very often is just used as sort of a cheap— like Nazi zombies, monsters are all this vector for evil if you come into contact with them, you— you become evil, too. And I haven't—
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
CLAIRE: —thus far, experienced one that I thought was like, "Oh, this is doing a really good job of making me think in some deeper way about it." That being said, if— if anyone comes across one, I would genuinely love to —to read it, watch it, whatever it is. But unfortunately, no, which I'm sorry that's not a very good answer.
JULIA: No, no, that's— that's genuinely, actually, what I was kind of expecting to be the answer, because it feels like it's almost, like, disrespectful in—in several ways. And I feel like maybe if there is a Jewish writer out there that, like, actually, like, wrote about this and is doing it in a way that I should know about, like, I want to hear about it, you know?
AMANDA: Yeah, I always recommend—
CLAIRE: Yeah, absolutely.
AMANDA: —The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, but that's kind of like a, you know, a Jewish joy, you know, like kind of superhero, like, speculative fiction novel. Which there's also a lot of, I think, space for and, you know, completely understand if Jewish writers don't want to, like, really heavily engaged with, like, Nazism and representing them in fiction. But Dr. Claire Aubin, where can people find you online to recommend reading for pleasure and for work to you, and also just enjoy your stellar tweets?
CLAIRE: I'm on Twitter @ceaubin, C-E-A-U-B-I-N, and that's kind of the main— that's the main spot to get me at. And my DMs are sometimes open, sometimes not. Depending on what the mood of online Nazis are.
AMANDA: Yup. I know the feeling. Incredible. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. I'm so glad that Eric was like, "Hi, you two should know each other." And indeed, it has been an incredible time. So, thank you very much. And folks, remember, when you are staring into the gaping maw of history.
JULIA: Stay creepy.
AMANDA: Stay cool.
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