Location: Jewish Museum Vienna, Dorotheergasse 11, A-1010 Vienna

Address of welcome: DI Georg Haber, Director of the Jewish Museum Vienna

Introduction: Dr. Lutz Musner, Deputy Director of the IFK International Research Center for Cultural Studies

This lecture discussed the ways in which Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews remember the Holocaust in the formerly multiethnic town of Buczacz, Simon Wiesenthal's birthplace (as well as that of the speaker's mother). Once located in the Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia, then in the eastern territories of Poland, and now in Western Ukraine, Buczacz had an ethnically and religiously mixed population for many centuries. During World War II the Nazis murdered its entire Jewish population, while the Polish inhabitants underwent ethnic cleansing by Ukrainian nationalists and the Soviet authorities. Based on written and oral testimonies by the victims and survivors of these events, this lecture examined the relationship between memory and history, individual fate and vast historical transformations, and made a case for the healing effects of recalling and coming to terms with the past. The lecture was accompanied by numerous images relating to the town of Buczacz and the speaker's research in that town.

Omer Bartov, Prof. Ph.D., is the John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA. A recipient of fellowships from Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the Guggenheim Foundation, he was also a Junior Fellow at Harvard’s Society of Fellows, a Visiting Fellow at Princeton’s Davis Center, and an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow. Bartov was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005. Currently he is a Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, Hans Arnhold Center. Omer Bartov is a member of the future International Scientific Advisory Board of the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI).

Publications (Selection): Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich, 1991; Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation, 1996; Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity, 2000; Germany’s War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories, 2003; The “Jew” in Cinema: From The Golem to Don’t Touch My Holocaust, 2005; ERASED: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine, to be published in September 2007.

With the support of the Department of Culture of the City of Vienna

Omer Bartov with auditory

Address of welcome: Georg Haber

Introduction: Lutz Musner

Lecture: Omer Bartov