Racial discrimination against the Jews in Germany as portrayed in Elie Wiesel’s night

ABSTRACT

Racial discrimination is a negative attitude on how a group of people look at the others based on their certain characterictic such as race. It refers to the uniqual treatment of a group and its members. During the Nazi regime, Jews have been the victims of racial discrimination. The racial discrimination obtained by
the Jews when they were treated as if they were bad people. They were treated inappropriately as a human being and even murdered at the end. Racial discrimination happens in every lines of our life, such as: in our social life, economy and politic. Elie Wiesel, who lived in that time, wrote a novel about anything happened in his life. He was only sixteen years old when he started writing and he wrote it between 1945 and 1946. This literary work talks about the life of the Jews under the Nazi’s power and the anti-Jews policy. The researher choose this novel to be analized because it contains the facts of racial discrimination. it harms and limits people rights.

Based on the above reason, the researcher comes up with three research questions. The first research question: what racial discriminations are discribed in Elie Wiesel’s Night? The second is the factors that caused racial discrimination and the last is how the racial discrimination reflected the real condition of Germany in 1943-1945.

This literary criticism uses sociological approach to analyze the literary work and uses discrimination theory as the tool in analyzing the novel. The theory used discrimination theory, specifically the theory of discrimination by Andrew Altman which explains about the concept of discrimination.

After analyzing the data, the researcher found four kinds of racial discrimination described by Elie Wiesel in his novel, i.e. direct racial discrimination, indirect racial discrimination, institutional racial discrimination and organizational racial discrimination. Then, he found the kinds of institutional racial discrimination such as institutional racial discrimination in social issue, politic and economy. He also found the causes of racial discrimination in that novel such as social structural factors and social psychological factors. The researcher found about how does racial discrimination reflected the real condition of Germany in 1943-1945.