Jonathan Kaplan

Junior Fellow (10/2018–06/2019)

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the German Democratic Republic and the National Socialist Past

This project deals with different perspectives on the post-war confrontation with the National Socialist past in the East German Ministry of Foreign Affairs. First, I analyse biographies of former members of the National Socialist Party and of other Nazi organisations who after 1945 developed a diplomatic career in the GDR. I then turn to the story of East German Jewish diplomats and politicians and portray their significant role in designing GDR foreign policy. The political attitude of these Jewish diplomats towards Israel, Zionism, and the Jewish world had a central place in their diplomatic activities. An example of confronting historical issues in actual foreign policies will be given by concentrating on the GDR’s international campaigns against former Nazi criminals in the Federal Republic. These efforts were followed by publishing incriminating material on former Nazis and by reaching out to and co-operating with international Jewish organisations. The confrontation of “the first Socialist state of workers and farmers on German soil” with its own past, despite its initial denial of this past, paints a fascinating picture of post-war German society that affects Germany to this very day.

Jonathan Kaplan is a PhD candidate in History at the Free University of Berlin. He holds a BA in Political Science and History and an MA in History from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His MA thesis was entitled ‘The German Question’ in the East-German Historiography, 1945–1961. Culture, Territory and Enemies. From 2009 to 2012, he was a fellow at the Richard Koebner Minerva Center for German History.

Benedetta Carnaghi

Junior Fellow (09/2018–02/2019)

Feeding the Concentrationary Universe. How Nazi Spies Contributed to Deportation in the Second World War

Benedetta Carnaghi’s dissertation compares the activity of spies in the Italian Fascist secret police, called OVRA (Organizzazione per la Vigilanza e la Repressione dell'Antifascismo), and its Nazi counterpart, the Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei), from 1927 (the genesis of the OVRA) to 1945.

Her plan is to shift the focus from institutional stories of the police to a detailed analysis of the police informers’ profiles and motives, while using history as a tool for actively engaging in current debates about surveillance. The specific goal of her stay at the VWI is to lay the groundwork for a chapter of her dissertation that will investigate the connection between spying and deportation.

She aims to look at the scale and chain of command of the Nazi terror system from the bottom up: The last wheels of this system were spies, who pretended to be allies of the antifascist resistance members, but constantly worked to feed their names to the Nazi regime. Who were these spies? What motivated them to orchestrate the arrest and deportation of resistance members, Allied soldiers, and Jews?

Benedetta Carnaghi is a PhD candidate in History at Cornell University. She has been the recipient of numerous fellowships, most recently from the Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, the Chateaubriand Fellowship Program, the Lemmermann Foundation, and Trinity College’s Cesare Barbieri Endowment.
Her most recent article Three Layers of Ambiguity. Homosexual Spies and International Intrigue in Fascist Italy was published in the 2017 special issue of The Space Between. Literature and Culture 1914–1945.

Kathryn L. Brackney

Junior Fellow (10/2018–06/2019)

Phantom Geographies: An Alternative History of Holocaust Consciousness

My dissertation poses two major questions: Why have realism, fragmentation, and minimalism become the primary aesthetic conventions of Holocaust memory in Western Europe, North America and Israel? Before these conventions predominated, how did writers and artists describe the destruction of Europe’s Jewish communities? The sources in this project speak to the wide range of imaginative strategies used by figures such as Avrom Sutzkever, Anna Langfus and Claude Lanzmann to work through the past, and reveal an interplay between an under-studied surreal tradition of representation and more canonical modes of remembering the Holocaust. With a particular focus on spatial configurations of memory, I show how portrayals of victims and survivors have moved over time from an otherworldly “Planet Auschwitz” to the intimate domestic spaces of documentary testimony.

Kathryn L. Brackney is a PhD candidate in the field of modern European intellectual and cultural history at Yale University. Her research has been supported by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the USC Shoah Foundation, DAAD, and the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism.

Pavel Baloun

Junior Fellow (10/2017–07/2018)

“Slaughter them all!” Collective Violence and the Dynamic of Anti-Gypsy Measures in Czechoslovakia Between 1918 and 1942

This project examines the processes of creation and implementation of anti-Gypsy measures in interwar Czechoslovakia and after the Nazi occupation of Czech lands in 1939. The analysis focusses on the ways in which various state authorities such as gendarmerie, municipalities, district offices, courts etc. dealt with the population labelled as Gypsies and conflicted over their status, while simultaneously exploring their agency and defensive strategies. Another intention is to trace the demands for a ‘solution of the Gypsy question’ in the 1930s in order to explore the dynamic of anti-Gypsy measures at the beginning of the Second World War in Czechoslovakia and the Nazi-occupied Czech lands along with their violent consequences.

Pavel Baloun is a Ph.D. candidate in Historical Anthropology at the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University in Prague. He is currently collaborating with the Terezín Initiative Institute on the project Database of the Roma Holocaust Victims in Czech Lands.

Elisabeth Weber

Junior Fellow (10/2017–07/2018)

The First World War and the Emancipation of Romanian Jews

Romania only decreed the full equality of its Jewish population immediately after the end of the First World War. There had been hefty conflicts over whether and how Romania’s Jews were to be emancipated since the middle of the nineteenth century, with the topic being considered by governments and Jewish organisations in Romania as well as in Western Europe and the USA. This project examines the debate surrounding the emancipation of Romania’s Jews during the First World War. The point of departure for this analysis is the Uniunea Evreilor Pământeni (Union of Indigenous Jews), founded in 1910, and its efforts towards the emancipation of the Romanian Jews and against antisemitism in Romanian society. As the activities of the union were always related to the actions and positions of the Romanian government, the great powers, and western Jewish organisations, these perspectives will – following Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann’s notion of histoire croisée – be examined in all their manifold interconnections. This will allow for the logic of the various agents to be examined against the background of the lines of conflict manifesting themselves during the war on the international, national, regional, and inner-Jewish levels.

Elisabeth Weber is a Ph.D. candidate in the research group The First World War and the Conflicts of the European Postwar Order (1914–1923) or: The Radicalisation of Antisemitism in Europe at the Centre for Research on Antisemitism at the Technical University in Berlin. From 2009 to 2013, she worked on various exhibitions at the Deutsches Historische Museum in Berlin. Since 2016, she has been involved in various book and exhibition projects among others for the Berlin City Museum.

Alicja Podbielska

Junior Fellow (10/2017–05/2018)

The Memory of Holocaust Rescue in Poland

When, how, and why did Polish rescuers become official national heroes? They constituted a minority, threatened with denunciation by their fellow countrymen. After the war, fearful of their neighbours’ reactions, they kept their actions secret. Concomitantly, a narrative about widespread and community-supported assistance emerged in official discourse. In Polish collective memory today, the rescuers represent the entire nation’s heroism and provide an alibi against any allegations of antisemitism. Examining aid to Jews in present-day Polish public discourse and culture, I explore how the focus on rescue became the preferred, indeed the only acceptable, mode of Holocaust memory. Prolific commemoration of rescuers, I argue, does not complement but overshadows remembrance of the victims.

Alicja Podbielska is a Ph.D. candidate at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. She has worked at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and received fellowships from EHRI, Yad Vashem, and the USHMM in Washington, D.C.

Franziska A. Karpinski

Junior Fellow (02/2018–06/2018)

In Defence of ‘Honour’ and ‘Masculinity’. Social Pressure, Violence, and Punishment within the Nazi Elite 1933–1945

This project examines how the concepts of collective and individual honour and masculinity were defined, negotiated, and practised within the SS, as well as how these concepts fuelled violent peer interaction. Rooted in Holocaust perpetrator research, I explore perpetrator peer dynamics within the SS, based on a close reading of archival material such as SS directives, SS court documents, private letters, and internal correspondence amongst the SS leadership. This analysis will be embedded into a discussion of socio-political conditions of the Third Reich. Honour and masculinity became state-sanctioned entities, interwoven with the fabric of National Socialism, its judicial, social, and political institutions, as well as concepts used in daily interactions. Within this framework, specific ‘SS-worthy’, i.e. honourable behaviour and unconditional loyalty was especially demanded within the SS, which conceived of itself as an elite order of political soldiers in the service of Nazism. Particularly, I examine what was considered ‘SS-worthy’: What ‘virtues’ and ‘ideals’ did the SS leadership prescribe for SS members? How were masculinity and honour appropriated by the SS and woven into mandatory SS directives? Why, how, and with what consequences did this appropriation happen? What implementation mechanisms were to translate masculinity and honour into entities informing SS peer interaction? Mechanisms of implementation towards the dishonourable were punitive and shaming in nature and included SS court-ordered dismissals, expulsions, incarcerations, disciplinary measures, and social ostracism. I will also highlight how shame and shaming within the framework of the SS functioned as a tool of social control and punishment. An analysis of honour, masculinity, and emotional dynamics within the SS can help understand its processes of radicalisation and both its immensely violent and self-destructive nature.

Franziska A. Karpinski, B.A. in North American Studies at the Free University in Berlin (2011), M.A. in Holocaust and Genocide Studies (with Distinction) at the University of Amsterdam (2012), has been a Ph.D. candidate at Loughborough University since 2014. She has been the recipient of an EHRI Fellowship at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich and at the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen. Her latest publication is Sexual Violence in the Nazi Genocide – Law, Gender and Ideology, in: Uğur Ümit Üngör, Genocide. New Perspectives on its Causes, Courses and Consequences. Amsterdam 2016.

Junior Fellowships 2017/2018 at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI)

The Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI) invites applications for its junior fellowships for the academic year 2017/2018.

The VWI is an academic institution dedicated to the study and documentation of antisemitism, racism and the Holocaust. Conceived and established during Simon Wiesenthal’s lifetime, the VWI receives funding from the Austrian Ministry of Science, Research and Economy as well as the City of Vienna. Research at the institute focuses on the Holocaust in its European context, including its antecedents and its aftermath.

Ph.D. candidates from anywhere in the world are eligible to apply for a junior fellowship. Junior fellows will be able to work on a research project of their choice in the field of Holocaust studies at the institute. Beyond the research work itself, the stay at the institute is intended to encourage communication and scientific exchange among the fellows at the institute. Junior fellows will receive support and advice from the VWI as well as its senior and research fellows. Junior fellows are expected to regularly attend the VWI and take on an active role in the institute’s research activities.

Research projects are to focus on a topic relevant to the research interests of the VWI. Within this parameter, applicants are free to choose their own topic, approach and methodology. Fellows will have access to the archives of the institute. It is expected that fellows will make use of relevant resources from the collection in their research projects. Research results will be the subject of formal fellows' discussions and will be presented to the wider public at regular intervals. At the end of their stay, fellows are required to submit a short research paper which will be peer-reviewed and published in VWI‘s e-journal S:I.M.O.N. – Shoah: Intervention. Methods. Documentation.

Junior fellowships are awarded for a duration of between six and eleven months. Junior fellows will have a work station at the VWI with computer and internet access and will receive a monthly stipend of € 1,200. In addition, junior fellows who are not Vienna residents will receive accommodation funding of € 340 per month. VWI will also cover the costs of a round-trip to and from Vienna (coach class airfare or 2nd class train fare). There is an additional one-off payment of € 500 available for research conducted outside of Vienna or photocopying costs outside of the institute, where applicable.

Junior fellows will be selected by the International Academic Advisory Board of the VWI.

Applications may be submitted in English or German and must include the following documents:

• completed application form,
• a detailed description of the research project, including the research objectives, an overview of existing research on the topic and methodology (12,000 character max.)
• two letters of recommendation (please indicate when sent separately),
• list of publications (if applicable),
• a CV (optional: with picture).

Please send your application in electronic format (if possible in one integral *.pdf-file) with the subject header "VWI Junior Fellowships 2017/2018" by 29 January, 2018 to:

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 

If you do not get confirmation that we have received your proposal, please contact us.

Future junior fellows are advised to endeavour to finance a part of their fellowship via a stipend from the Stipendienstiftung der Republik Österreich  and to submit an application to this end after they have received notification of being awarded their fellowship.

Junior Fellowships 2018/2019 at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI)

The Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI) invites applications for its junior fellowships for the academic year 2018/2019.

The VWI is an academic institution dedicated to the study and documentation of antisemitism, racism, nationalism and the Holocaust. Conceived and established during Simon Wiesenthal’s lifetime, the VWI receives funding from the Austrian Ministry of Science, Research and Economy as well as the City of Vienna. Research at the institute focuses on the Holocaust in its European context, including its antecedents and its aftermath.

Ph.D. candidates from anywhere in the world are eligible to apply for a junior fellowship. Junior fellows will be able to work on a research project of their choice in the field of Holocaust studies at the institute. Beyond the research work itself, the stay at the institute is intended to encourage communication and scientific exchange among the fellows at the institute. Junior fellows will receive support and advice from the VWI as well as its senior and research fellows. Junior fellows are expected to regularly attend the VWI and take on an active role in the institute’s research activities.

Research projects are to focus on a topic relevant to the research interests of the VWI. Within this parameter, applicants are free to choose their own topic, approach and methodology. Fellows will have access to the archives of the institute. It is expected that fellows will make use of relevant resources from the collection in their research projects. Research results will be the subject of formal fellows' discussions and will be presented to the wider public at regular intervals. At the end of their stay, fellows are required to submit a short research paper which will be peer-reviewed and published in VWI‘s e-journal S:I.M.O.N. – Shoah: Intervention. Methods. Documentation.

Junior fellowships are awarded for a duration of between six and eleven months. Junior fellows will have a work station at the VWI with computer and internet access and will receive a monthly stipend of € 1,200. In addition, junior fellows who are not Vienna residents will receive accommodation funding of € 340 per month. VWI will also cover the costs of a round-trip to and from Vienna (coach class airfare or 2nd class train fare). There is an additional one-off payment of € 500 available for research conducted outside of Vienna or photocopying costs outside of the institute, where applicable.

Junior fellows will be selected by the International Academic Advisory Board of the VWI.

Applications may be submitted in English or German and must include the following documents:

• completed application form,
• a detailed description of the research project, including the research objectives, an overview of existing research on the topic and methodology (12,000 character max.)
• two letters of recommendation (please indicate when sent separately),
• list of publications (if applicable),
• a CV (optional: with picture).

Please send your application in electronic format (if possible in one integral *.pdf-file) with the subject header "VWI Junior Fellowships 2018/2019" by 31 January, 2018 to:

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 

If you do not get confirmation that we have received your proposal, please contact us.

Future junior fellows are advised to endeavour to finance a part of their fellowship via a stipend from the Stipendienstiftung der Republik Österreich  and to submit an application to this end after they have received notification of being awarded their fellowship.

Junior Fellowships 2019/2020 at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI)

The Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI) invites applications for its junior fellowships for the academic year 2019/2020.

The VWI is an academic institution dedicated to the research and documentation of antisemitism, racism, nationalism and the Holocaust. Conceived and established during Simon Wiesenthal’s lifetime, the VWI receives funding from the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research, the Federal Chancellery as well as the City of Vienna. Research at the institute focuses on the Holocaust in its European context, including its antecedents and its aftermath.

Ph.D. candidates from anywhere in the world are eligible to apply for a junior fellowship. Junior fellows will be able to work on a research project of their choice in the field of Holocaust studies at the institute. Beyond the research work itself, the stay at the institute is intended to encourage communication and scientific exchange among the fellows at the institute. Junior fellows will receive support and advice from the VWI as well as its senior and research fellows. Junior fellows are expected to regularly attend the VWI and take on an active role in the institute’s research activities.

Research projects are to focus on a topic relevant to the research interests of the VWI. Within this parameter, applicants are free to choose their own topic, approach and methodology. Fellows will have access to the archives of the institute. It is expected that fellows will make use of relevant resources from the collection in their research projects. Research results will be the subject of formal fellows' discussions and will be presented to the wider public at regular intervals. At the end of their stay, fellows are required to submit a short research paper which will be peer-reviewed and published in VWI‘s e-journal S:I.M.O.N. – Shoah: Intervention. Methods. Documentation.

Junior fellowships are awarded for a duration of between six and eleven months. Junior fellows will have a work station at the VWI with computer and internet access and will receive a monthly stipend of € 1,200. In addition, junior fellows who are not Vienna residents will receive accommodation funding of € 340 per month. VWI will also cover the costs of a round-trip to and from Vienna (coach class airfare or 2nd class train fare). There is an additional one-off payment of € 500 available for research conducted outside of Vienna or photocopying costs outside of the institute, where applicable.

Junior fellows will be selected by the International Academic Advisory Board of the VWI.

Applications may be submitted in English or German and must include the following documents:

• completed application form,
• a detailed description of the research project, including the research objectives, an overview of existing research on the topic and methodology (12,000 character max.)
• two letters of recommendation (please indicate when sent separately),
• list of publications (if applicable),
• a CV (optional: with picture).

Please send your application in electronic format (in one integral *.pdf-file) with the subject header “VWI Junior Fellowships 2019/2020” by 13 January 2019 to:

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 

If you do not get confirmation that we have received your proposal, please contact us.

Future junior fellows are advised to endeavour to finance a part of their fellowship via a stipend from the Stipendienstiftung der Republik Österreich  and to submit an application to this end after they have received notification of being awarded their fellowship.