TAGUNG: 7.–8. JUNI 2006
THE LEGACY OF SIMON WIESENTHAL FOR HOLOCAUST STUDIES

Wiener Wiesenthal Institut für Holocaust-Studien
Institut für Zeitgeschichte der Universität Wien
IFK Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften

Veranstaltungsort: IFK, Reichsratsstraße 17, 1010 Wien
Dieser Vortrag wurde live auf dieser Website übertragen und ist im Videoarchiv abrufbar.
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Donnerstag, 8. Juni, 12:00 Uhr
 
Omer Bartov

Guilt and Accountability in the Postwar Courtroom:
The Holocaust in Czortków and Buczacz, East Galicia, as Seen in West German Legal Discourse
 
This lecture discusses the manner in which West German courts forged a certain perception of the Holocaust based on defining the guilt of German perpetrators and gauging the reliability Jewish witnesses. By examining the trials of several German officials involved in the murder of some 60,000 Jews in the Czortków area – located in former East Galicia and part of the German-occupied Lemberg District – this lecture reveals both the extreme intimacy of murder in these remote towns and villages, and the extent to which the intricacies of the German criminal code combined with the prevailing view of the Nazi past within the German legal profession largely determined the notions of guilt and accountability in the 1960s and beyond. The lecture further argues that those German perpetrators found guilty were often presented as untypical of “ordinary Germans” and yet as “victims” of their time and circumstances. Many of the murders with which this lecture is concerned took place in Buczacz, the hometown of the only Hebrew author who has won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Shmuel Yosef Agnon; of the great Polish Jewish historian, Emanuel Ringelblum; of one of Sigmund Freud’s grandparents; and of Simon Wiesenthal. Omer Bartov’s own mother also came from Buczacz. Founded in the 14th century as a private Polish town owned by a noble family, Buczacz, like many other towns in this region, contained a mixed ethnic and religious population made up mainly of Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews. This lecture is part of a larger research project, in which Bartov is reconstructing the history of interethnic relations in Buczacz between the 14th century and the end of World War II.
 
 
Curriculum Vitae, Publikationen

Omer Bartov, Prof. Ph.D., is the John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History at Brown University, Providence, RI. 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.

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).