Examples Of Intolerance In Literature

Intolerance and the Holocaust As said by Primo Levi, a Holocaust survivor, “Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.” The Holocaust was the mass slaughter in the 1930s and 1940s of German Jews and those who ‘tainted’ Germany under the rule of Hitler and the ruthless Nazi party, who blamed the innocent for devastating their country. Even today, the Holocaust reflects intolerance through literature by depicting the discrimination, dehumanization and isolation of those deemed unworthy of a pure or ‘Aryan’, society. The Nazis intolerance is portrayed in literature by showing their discrimination towards others in several ways. The passage The Holocaust teaches that Hitler blamed the Jews, …show more content…
For example, in the Nuremberg Laws article, we learn that ‘Jews could not fly the German flag and were forbidden to hire German maids, cooks or other servants under the age of 45 years. There were 13 decrees that gave more details.’ Jews were isolated from German society and what was considered ‘pure’. This shows the lengths that the Nazis were willing to take in order to preserve their ‘perfect’ society. In The Holocaust, the text explains that people were separated from their families by order of age, gender and usefulness in an attempt to find those who would be easy to play for tools and get hard manual labour out of, and those who would be killed immediately. In another paragraph of The Holocaust, the quote ‘They rounded them up and relocated them to sealed ghettos, in which overcrowding and starvation were common.’ shows that the Jewish people and the other ‘impure’ people were isolated once and for all from society. The Nazis intended to not only eradicate them from their communities, in order to preserve the ‘Aryan race’, but to eradicate them from the face of the