News – Events – Calls
24. April 2024 19:00 BuchpräsentationIngeborg Bachmann, Marie Luise Kaschnitz, Hilde Domin, Nelly Sachs: Über Grenzen sprechend. Briefe. Piper/Suhrkamp, München, Berlin, Zürich 2023Ingeborg Bachmann stand mit zentralen Protagonistinnen der deutschsprachigen Literatur im Austausch, nun werden ihre Briefwechsel mit Marie Luise Kaschnitz, Hilde Domin und Nelly Sachs erstmals zugänglich gemacht. Die Briefe geben Einblick in die Lebensbedingungen, das literarische S...Weiterlesen... |
02. May 2024 18:30 Simon Wiesenthal LectureNever Too Late to Remember, Never Too Late for Justice! Holocaust Research and Commemoration in Contemporary PolandIn 1994, Simon Wiesenthal received a doctorate honoris causa from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow for his lifelong quest for justice – half a century after he had been, for a short time, prisoner of the local Nazi Concentration Camp (KL) Plaszow. The 1990s were the decade when t...Weiterlesen... |
07. May 2024 00:00 - 04. June 2024 00:00 WorkshopDealing with Antisemitism in the Past and Present. Scientific Organisations and the State of Research in AustriaThis series of talks, presented by antisemitism experts from different organisations that research antisemitism using a variety of academic approaches, aims to provide a snapshot of historical evolutions, current events, prevalent perceptions and declared (and undeclared) attitudes. I...Weiterlesen... |
Johannes Dieter-Steinert
Senior Fellow (03/2014 - 08/2015)
Jewish Child Forced Labourers
During the Second World War, a substantial number of children became victims of the National Socialist forced labour system. In National Socialist Germany and German occupied Eastern Europe, Jewish children were forced to work in ghettos, concentration and labour camps, in industry and agriculture. The Wehrmacht and SS deployed children in particular in construction work on fortifications, roads and airfields. My research project provides the first comprehensive study of Jewish child forced labourers in National Socialist Germany and German occupied Eastern Europe by drawing on a wide range of archival documents and former forced labourers’ testimonies. By using age and gender as central categories for analysis, the research will identify the historical background of Jewish child forced labour and its place within the Holocaust between 1938 and 1945. Special consideration will be given to the working and living conditions of Jewish children forced to work, their treatment and contacts with the German population as well as with other forced labourers. Finally, the project will discuss the experience of liberation as narrated in published and unpublished testimonies.
Johannes-Dieter Steinert is Professor of Modern European History and Migration Studies at the University of Wolverhampton, United Kingdom. His Research interests include: forced migration, forced labour, survivors of Nazi persecution and international humanitarian assistance. Most recent book publication: Deportation und Zwangsarbeit. Polnische und sowjetische Kinder im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland und im besetzten Osteuropa 1939–1945 Essen 2013
Alexander Korb
Research Fellow (10/2013 – 03/2014)
The end of Violence. Transformation in Yugoslavia, 1944-1953.
My last book was dedicated to the research of mass violence that shook the Balkan during the Second World War. I will now use my stay at the VWI in order to address the question of how violence comes to an end. The German capitulation on May 8, 1945 did not necessarily signify the onset of peace; this is particularly true for Southeast and East Central Europe. The civil wars that had erupted under German occupation in many cases continued for months to come; not only Jewish survivors faced grave difficulties in recovering their possessions or returning to their apartments and houses; in several places, returning Jews were murdered by the local villagers, other places saw the eruption of pogroms. At the same time, the mass persecutions and resettlements of members of those ethnic groups that were considered collaborators escalated, as civil war, guerrilla warfare, ethnic cleansing, pogroms, revenge violence and the violent communist takeover of power all combined to form a dense scenario of violence that shaped many parts of Southeast and East Central Europe. The survivors of the violence of the Second World War found themselves in another threatening situation, some of them had to continue to fight. I want to use the example of Yugoslavia in order to research the transition from war to peace and understand the end of violence. The research will contribute to a book project I am working on together with Dieter Pohl as well as being the subject of an article. Beyond that, I will work on a special edition of a magazine together with Philipp Ther during my time in Vienna. This special edition will provide a platform to the authors we had invited to the Vienna conference „Homogenising Southeastern Europe. Balkan Wars, Ethnic Cleansing and Postwar Ethnic Engineering since 1912" in 2012.
Alexander Korb studied history and gender studies at universities in Berlin as well as spending several semesters studying abroad in Aix-en-Provence, Prague and Voronezh (Russian Federation). His Masters thesis on the German population's reaction to the November pogroms 1938 was awarded with a prize by the foundation "20. Juli 1944" and was published in book form in 2008. He achieved his doctorate in 2010 at the Humboldt-Universität Berlin with a dissertation that was published in 2013 as „Im Schatten des Weltkriegs. Massengewalt der Ustaša gegen Serben, Juden und Roma in Kroatien 1941–1945" [In the shadows of the world war. Ustaša mass violence against Serbs, Jews and Roma in Croatia, 1941-1945] at Hamburger Edition, and which has already been awarded five research awards, including the Fraenkel Prize of the Wiener Library London. Since 2010, Korb has been lecturer in Contemporary European History at the University of Leicester (GB), where he is also deputy director of the Stanley Burton Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
Kinga Frojimovics
Research Fellow (12/2013 – 08/2014)
The Relations between the Jewish Community of Pest and the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien from the Anschluß until the Beginning of the Deportations, 1938-1941.
In 1938 — the year that brought the Anschluß for Austria and the first (anti-)Jewish Law for Hungary — the Jewish Community of Pest [Pesti Izraelita Hitközség, (PIH)] and the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien (IKG) were the two largest Jewish communities of Central Europe. By 1938, the two Jewish communities had cultivated strong relationships with one another for over a century.
However, the nature of the relationships between the two Jewish communities had changed drastically in 1938. Until then, the typical relationships had predominantly been liturgical/ceremonial ones as well as social ties between individual members of the two communities. From 1938 onwards, as a consequence of the increasingly worsening official anti-Jewish discrimination, ties of social and legal aid had exclusively replaced any other kinds of relationships.
A systematic study of the relationships between the two largest Central European Jewish communities between 1938 and 1941 will enable us to understand how these increasingly adversely influenced central institutions of Jewish life attempted to assist their members and one another during the first phase of the Holocaust. To show how the two communities collaborated and tried to help each other is crucial, since these Jewish institutions are routinely portrayed even in historical works as isolationist bodies that were utterly uninvolved and uninterested in the problems of the Jewish world in general.
Kinga Frojimovics, historian and an archivist. From 2007, she is the director of the Hungarian Section in Yad Vashem Archives (Jerusalem, Israel). From 2010 she is also a research associate at Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, Brandeis University (Waltham, MA, USA).
Her field of research is the history of the Jews in Hungary in the nineteenth and in the twentieth centuries. She focuses on the history of the Jewish religious trends in Hungary, and on the Holocaust. She is the co-editor of the MAKOR, the Series of the Hungarian Jewish Archives (Budapest).
José David Lebovitch Dahl
Research Fellow (10/2013 – 08/2014)
Antisemitism, Nationalism and the Austrian Province of the Society of Jesus, 1918-1939, in a Comparative Perspective.
This project analyses the Austrian Jesuits’ attitudes to antisemitism and nationalism in the interwar period. The research is part of a broader study of the variations in the positions towards nationalism and racism within the Jesuit Order in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. It is the assumption of the research that the Jesuits’ postures were influenced both by supra-national doctrinal concerns and by more local pastoral concerns and that the analysis of the tensions and debates within the Order regarding nationalism and antisemitism will increase our understanding of the factors determining the support or resistance toward antisemitism within Catholic institutions. The Austrian case is particularly important because of the role of Catholicism in Austrian politics and because of the role of Austria in the Holocaust. In addition, by studying the developments in the positions of the Jesuits in the interwar period, the project addresses the question of the continuity of antisemitism in the period from the late 19th century to World War II.
David Lebovitch Dahl holds a Ph.D. in History from the European University Institute (2008). His research has focused on antisemitism, nationalism and the Roman Catholic Church in the 19th and 20th centuries. Among his most important publications are articles in Modern Judaism (2003), Rivista di Storia del Cristianesimo (2010) and Modern Italy (2012).
Katherine A. Lebow
Research Fellow (10/2013 – 03/2014)
Postwar Testimony, Polish Survivors, and the Cultural Specificities of Narrative Practice
One of the most remarkable early responses to the Holocaust was the collection of testimony. This response, however, was neither inevitable nor universal. My project considers the particular legacies that shaped Polish Jewish survivors’ turn to testimony after World War II. Among them was the role of “everyman autobiography” in interwar Polish social science and public discourse—a set of research and literary practices foregrounding the voices of ordinary individuals. Best-selling compilations of memoirs by unemployed workers and destitute peasants, e.g., had focused Poles’ attention on the human face of poverty in the 1930s, using personal narratives as a powerful form of “moral witness.” At VWI, I will explore the influences of this legacy on survivors as they faced the unprecedented requirements of Holocaust documentation and memorialization.
Katherine A. Lebow (Ph.D., Columbia) has taught at the University of Virginia and Newcastle University. Recent publications include Unfinished Utopia: Nowa Huta, Stalinism, and Polish Society, 1949-56 (Cornell, 2013) and “The Conscience of the Skin: Interwar Polish Autobiography and Social Rights,” Humanity 3, 3 (2012). She is writing a book about “everyman autobiographies” in transatlantic space from the Great Depression to the Holocaust.
Miloslav Szabó
Research Fellow (10/2013 – 08/2014)
Antisemitism in Slovakia during the 1920s and 1930s
This research project is the first to aim for a systematic treatment of the history of antisemitism in Slovakia in the time of the First Czechoslovak Republic. It aims to show that while antisemitism did not take on an institutionalised form until 1938, it was certainly an effective tool as semantic construct and object of political and social practice. Not least, the research will address the issue of in what way the antisemitic radicalisation in the autumn of 1938 could be based on factors of foreign or domestic policies. Beyond that, the continuities that exist in the antisemitism before and after 1938 are to be defined. The research project is aimed to contribute to the explanation of the Holocaust in Slovakia, that is, the planned disfranchisement of the Jewish population, the looting of Jewish property and the extradition of most of the Jewish citizens to Nazi Germany. It will do so by showing how the propagandistic invocation of a "Jewish Question" by the authoritarian regime and the search of a "solution" thereof shaped Slovakian politics as early as the 1920s and 1930s.
Miloslav Szabó, historian, PhD in 2004 from the Charles University in Prague with a dissertation on Alfred Rosenberg. Since 2007 study of the history of Slovakian antisemitism in the framework of the research group „Antisemitismus in Europa, 1879-1914" at the Centre for Antisemitism Research at the Technische Universität in Berlin, scholarship recipient of the Gerda Henkel Stiftung and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. Since 2011 engaged at a research project at the Jewish Museum in Prague.
Elisabeth Gallas
Research Fellow (10/2012 – 09/2013)
Contemporary diagnoses from New York: Jewish interpretations of the Holocaust during the 1940s
This research project focusses on the attempts at documentation and interpretation of the catastrophic events in Europe made by European emigrants as well as American-Jewish persons during the 1940s in New York. Using publications from the surroundings of the Institute of Jewish Affairs, the Jewish Social Studies, the American Jewish Committee and more, which have hitherto hardly been regarded, it can be demonstrated that especially the dense Jewish organisation landscape of New York housed countless initiatives to report and comment on the developments in Europe. These provide not only valuable contemporary sources that cast a new light on the extra-European Jewish perception of the Holocaust and the resultant plans for the reconstruction of Jewish existence after the end of the war. The texts produced here also provide a hitherto unknown basis for axes of interpretation and horizons of understanding, which developed in the later decades of historical approaches to the fact of the Holocaust and thus question the current periodisation of the history of coming to terms with the Holocaust.
Elisabeth Gallas studied Cultural Sciences and German Studies at the University Leipzig as well as Sociology at the University of Copenhagen; 2005 M.A. at the University Leipzig with a thesis on the reception of literary text by Holocaust survivors in Germany. Since autumn 2005 research assistant at the Simon-Dubnow-Institute for Jewish History and Culture e.V. at the University Leipzig, since November 2012 as the deputy director of the section on Law, Institutions, Politics; 2011 doctoral degree at the University Leipzig with the topic: ‘Saving books. From the Offenbach depot to Jewish thought on history after the Holocaust’.
List of Publications Elisabeth Gallas
Raul Cârstocea
Research Fellow (10/2012 – 09/2013)
Negotiating Modernity – The Role of the Jewish Community in Shaping Perceptions of Tradition and Progress in Interwar Romania
The project addresses the role of the Jewish community in Romania in the intellectual debates surrounding the issue of the country’s modernisation. In a late modernising country with many of its traditional social structures still intact, the interplay between tradition and modernity represented the focus of the discussions regarding possible patterns of development ever since the creation of the new state in the 19th century. In such a context, the issue of the Jewish minority, predominantly urban, more literate and skilled than the majority population, while at the same time perceived by the Romanian majority as a competing group that had preserved its solid community bonds and was much more united along national lines, was inextricably linked with the discussion surrounding the process of nation-building. The present project explores the dynamics of the relationship between the Jewish minority and the Romanian majority in a country ‘negotiating’ its passage to modernity.
Raul Cărstocea obtained a PhD degree in History from University College London in 2011, with a thesis examining the role of anti-Semitism in the ideology of the ‘Legion of the Archangel Michael’, Romania’s interwar fascist movement. From January to June 2012 he held a Teaching Fellowship in History at the same institution. He has published several articles dealing with extreme right groups and the development of anti-Semitism in Romania.
List of Publications Raul Cârstocea