Yehuda Bauer (1926–2024) – ein großer Historiker hat uns verlassen

Yehuda Bauer wurde am 6. April 1926 als Martin Bauer in Prag geboren. Nach langen Vorbereitungen gelang es der Familie im März 1939 noch rechtzeitig aus dem nationalsozialistischen Machtbereich zu flüchten. Über Polen, Rumänien und die Türkei gelangten sie in das damalige britische Mandatsgebiet von Palästina, heute Israel. Dort absolvierte Yehuda Bauer die Schule, mit Hilfe eines Stipendiums konnte er in Cardiff, Wales, sein Geschichtsstudium absolvieren, das er an der Hebräischen Universität in Jerusalem abschloss, wo er später dann selbst lehrte. Seine Lehrtätigkeit führte ihn in der Folge auch an verschiedene Universitäten der USA.

Nationale Geschichtsverengung war Bauer stets fremd. Ausgehend von seinen umfassenden Sprachkenntnissen waren ihm Quellen und Fachliteratur der wesentlichen am Holocaust beteiligten Länder zugänglich. Damit erarbeitete er sich einen globalen Überblick, der ihm ein hohes Maß an Kontextualisierung sowie beeindruckenden Überblick über das Gesamtgeschehen ermöglichte. Schuldzuweisungen im Kontext der Holocaustinvolvierung einzelner Mitgliedsländer waren ihm fremd, Erkenntnis von Verantwortung und Mitverantwortung hingegen wichtig. Von 2006 bis 2009 war Yehuda Bauer Mitglied des Gründungsbeirats des Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI). Als Mitbegründer und zuletzt Ehrenvorsitzender der International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) mit ihren heute bereits 35 Mitgliedsländern in Europa, Nord- und Südamerika, Asien und Australien betonte er stets, dass alle Länder sich ihrer Verstrickung in den Holocaust stellen und aus dieser Erkenntnis heraus zusammenarbeiten sollten, um die Geschichte ohne Rücksicht auf nationale Empfindlichkeiten aufzuarbeiten und besorgniserregende Tendenzen der Gegenwart zu bekämpfen. Bauer sah den Holocaust als präzedenzlos, aber warnte stets davor, dass er sich auch wiederholen könnte, also kein singuläres abgeschlossenes Verbrechen sei. Ein großes Anliegen war ihm die korrekte Geschichtsdarstellung, bis zuletzt setzte er auch im Rahmen der IHRA alles daran, wachsende, in vielen Ländern auch aus nationalistischen Motiven zu beobachtende Verharmlosungen und Verfälschungen in der Darstellung des Holocaust zu bekämpfen unter dem Grundsatz „protect the facts“.

Read more: Nachruf Yehuda Bauer

Connected Histories. Memories and Narratives of the Holocaust in Digital Space

Edited by: Eva Pfanzelter, Dirk Rupnow, Kovács Éva and Marianne Windsperger
De Gruyter Brill Oldenbourg

New Open Access Publication by EHRI-AT Partners:
The edited volume Connected Histories. Memories and Narratives in Digital Space has been published in the De Gruyter Series "Studies in Digital History and Hermeneutics". Contributions are based on the first EHRI-AT Conference.

The World Wide Web (WWW) and digitisation have become important sites and tools for the history of the Holocaust and its commemoration. Today, some memory institutions use the Internet at a high professional level as a venue for self-presentation and as a forum for the discussion of Holocaust-related topics for potentially international, transcultural and interdisciplinary user groups. At the same time, it is not always the established institutions that utilise the technical possibilities and potential of the Internet to the maximum. Creative and sometimes controversial new forms of storytelling of the Holocaust or more traditional ways of remembering the genocide presented in a new way with digital media often come from people or groups who are not in the realm of influence of the large memorial sites, museums and archives. Such "private" stagings have experienced a particular upswing since the boom of social media. This democratisation of Holocaust memory and history is crucial though it is as yet undecided how much it will ultimately reinforce old structures and cultural, regional or other inequalities or reinvent them.

The “Digital space” as an arbitrary and limitless archive for the mediation of the Holocaust spanning from Russia to Brazil is at the centre of the essays collected in this volume. This space is also considered as a forum for negotiation, a meeting place and a battleground for generations and stories and as such offers the opportunity to reconsider the transgenerational transmission of trauma, family histories and communication. Here it becomes evident: there are new societal intentions and decision-making structures that exceed the capabilities of traditional mass media and thrive on the participation of a broad public.

Authors:
Eva Pfanzelter, Éva Kovács, Dirk Rupnow, Marianne Windsperger, Mykola Makhortykh, Aleksandra Urman, Roberto Ulloa, Marya Sydorova, Juhi Kulshrestha, Mia Berg, Stefania Manca, Silvia Guetta, Anna Carolina Viana, Bárbara Deoti, Maria Visconti, Anja Ballis, Josefine Honke, Edith Blaschitz, Heidemarie Uhl, Georg Vogt, Rosa Andraschek, Martin Krenn, Wolfgang Gasser, Iris Groschek, Nicole Steng, Beth S. Dotan, Archie Wolfman & Anna Menyhért

Funded by: University of Innsbruck , Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies und University of Luxembourg

Schließtage der VWI-Bibliothek – Closing days of the VWI Library

Die Bibliothek ist in der Woche von 29. Apri bis 3. Mai 2024 geschlossen.

The library will be closed during the week of  29 April to 3 May 2024.

Obituary: Hella Pick (1929–2024) 

“1939: a Kindertransport refugee designated as an ‘Enemy Alien’. 2000: Commander of the British Empire. 2018: first an Honorary Doctorate from Sussex University and then the accolade of a new identity as a BBC podcast destined to remain for all eternity on a distant desert island. These are markers in a colourful life and a long career that offered a role model for women in journalism. It has been quite a journey.” (Hella Pick, Invisible Walls, p. 293)

Hella Pick died in London on the night of 4 April at the age of 94. As a foreign correspondent for the Guardian, she reported on turning points in the history of the 20th century – from the end of British colonial rule in West Africa, the highlights of the US civil rights movement and the student protests in Paris in 1968 to the end of the Cold War. Her memoirs read like a Who’s Who of the 20th century and provide insights into the struggle for recognition as a female journalist in a male-dominated field of work.

The Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies mourns the loss of the journalist, Wiesenthal biographer, contemporary witness, and advocate against forgetting. We remember Hella Pick’s visits, most recently in November 2022, when she presented her autobiography Invisible Walls. A Journalist in Search of Her Life.

It has been quite a journey.

Photo: © VWI

The Lodz Ghetto and the Kriminalpolizei: Jews, Neighbors, and Perpetrators in the Holocaust

VWI Senior Fellow Winson Chu will hold the Max Weinreich Fellowship Lecture in Eastern European Jewish Studies at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York on Thursday, 4 April 2024.

The German criminal police (Kriminalpolizei, or Kripo) maintained a permanent station in the Lodz ghetto, which over the four years of its existence imprisoned some 200,000 Jews. Responsible for stopping smuggling networks and for gathering information about hidden possessions inside and outside the ghetto, the Kripo relied heavily on local ethnic Germans, the so-called Volksdeutsche. These policemen exploited their prewar social networks in their investigations and carried out violent acts against Jews familiar to them. They deployed their Polish and Yiddish language skills in interrogations of suspects, and they used their knowledge of Jewish religious practices and local customs to spy on the Jews and later to evaluate their confiscated property.

In this talk, Winson Chu focuses on how police records in Poland and survivor sources at YIVO enable a better understanding of such prewar connections with wartime perpetrators. By providing additional detail and context to existing accounts of ghetto experiences, this approach re-embeds Jews into interethnic relations in prewar Lodz and Nazi-occupied Poland and questions the common perception of the Lodz ghetto as “hermetically sealed.”

https://www.yivo.org/Kriminalpolizei 

EHRI Workshop and Microarchives in Austria

The full-day workshop "EHRI and Microarchives in Austria" took place at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI) on 4 March 2024. The Institute presented EHRI's plans to improve support for microarchives and invited Austrian microarchive owners and experts to discuss the opportunities and challenges of collaboration. The microarchive owners shared their wishes and requirements with the VWI-EHRI team, which may lead to further cooperation.

Workshop: Europe and the USSR. Literature in the Face of the Persecution and Extermination of the Jews

A workshop organised by VWI Senior fellow Atinati Mamatsashvili, hosted by the VWI on 22 March 2024

The workshop’s purpose is to examine the literary, artistic, musical and cinematographic responses to the rise of anti-Semitism in the 1930s, which led to the systematic persecution and extermination of Europe’s Jews. It will focus on the period before as well as after the war. This will allow to consider, on the one hand, the capacity of literature (and other media) to project an aftermath as a consequence of ongoing events, and on the other hand the aftermath as it was felt in the years following the Shoah.
What was the response or capability of writers who were subjected to censorship during the Stalinist and post-Stalinist regimes? How did authors depict the re-emergence of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union and European countries in the decades before and after the Second World War in their literary (artistic) works? This workshop aims to raise initial questions on a vast subject that is still very under-explored in certain areas and from certain perspectives, such as minor literature and forgotten writers.

Organisers

Anke Bosse (Universität Klagenfurt/Musil-Institut/Kärntner Literaturarchiv)
Atinati Mamatsashvili (Ilia State University / Wiener Wiesenthal Institut für Holocaust-Studien)

Statement by the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI) On the Current Rise in Antisemitism Worldwide

The VWI condemns the drastic rise in anti-Semitic incidents of verbal and physical violence and the global threat to Jews following the terrorist attacks by Hamas on Israeli residential areas on 7 October 2023. On the night of 1 November 2023, the ceremonial hall in the Jewish section of Vienna’s Central Cemetery was set on fire.

Read more: Statement by the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (Vwi) On the Current Rise in...

New EHRI Podcast: A Sunflower for Simon Wiesenthal

The first episode of the second season of the EHRI Podcast "For the Living and the Dead. Traces of the Holocaust“ has just launched. This episode is called "A Sunflower for Simon". Katharina Freise talks to VWI's Marianne Windsperger and Kinga Frojimovics about Simon Wiesenthal’s sunflowers, real ones, or artificial and made from paper or any other material. In 1969, Holocaust survivor and author Simon Wiesenthal wrote The Sunflower. On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness. In this book, he recounted his experience with a mortally wounded Nazi soldier during World War II, and then asked prominent figures from politics, science and theology the question about what they would do under the circumstance.

The “Sunflower” in the title referred to Wiesenthal's observation of a German military cemetery, where he saw a sunflower on each grave, while he was imprisoned in the Janowska concentration camp near Lviv and feared for his own body to end up in an unmarked mass grave.

The book touched many people, some of whom then expressed their emotions by sending sunflowers, real or crafted, to Wiesenthal’s office.

Listen to the episode on Buzzsprout, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts or on the webpage: https://www.ehri-project.eu/podcast-episode-sunflower-simon.

Was geschah in der Ankerbrotfabrik während der NS-Zeit? Ein Inselmilieu-Podcast

Inselmileu Reportage hat einen zweiteiligen Podcast über die Ankerbrotfabrik während der NS-Zeit produziert. Teil eins der Doppelfolge befasst sich mit der Arisierung und dem späteren Umgang des Unternehmens mit der NS-Geschichte bzw. deren Ausblendung. Die zweite Folge – für die der wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiter des VWI Philipp Rohrbach sowie Direktor Jochen Böhler interviewt wurden – widmet sich den Verstrickungen der Vorfahren vieler Österreicher:innen in die Verbrechen der NS-Zeit sowie ungarisch-jüdischer Zwangsarbeit in der Ankerbrotfabrik, die bis heute wenig thematisiert wurde. Die Inhalte des Gesprächs basieren unter anderem auf den Recherchen folgender VWI-Projekte zu ungarisch-jüdischer Zwangsarbeit 1944/45:

Ungarisch-jüdische Zwangsarbeit in Wien 1944/45
Projektbeschreibung
Kinga Frojimovics and Éva Kovács: Jews in a ‘Judenrein’ City: Hungarian Jewish Slave Laborers in Vienna (1944–1945)

Anzuhören auf: Spotify, Apple Podcasts oder auf der offiziellen Website.