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TAGUNG:
7.–8. JUNI 2006 Wiener
Wiesenthal Institut für Holocaust-Studien |
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| Donnerstag, 8. Juni, 12:00 Uhr | |
 Omer
BartovGuilt and Accountability in the Postwar Courtroom: The Holocaust in Czortków and Buczacz, East Galicia, as Seen in West German Legal Discourse |
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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.
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| 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). |