Tim Corbett
Junior Fellow (10/2014 - 08/2015)

The Place of my Fathers' Sepulchres - The Jewish Cemeteries in Vienna

This project explores Vienna's historical Jewish cemeteries as sites of culture, identity and memory that trace the rise of the city's great and influential Jewish culture and its almost total destruction during the Shoah. The creation, extension and maintenance of these sites, the attempts that were made during the Shoah to appropriate and destroy them as well as the continuing discussion on their restoration and maintenance provide the basis for an in-depth analysis of the political and cultural relationship between Viennese Jewry and the City of Vienna in the past and the present. The tombstone inscriptions spell out the development of a specifically Viennese code of Jewish cultural identification before the Shoah and of conflicting approaches to re-establishing Jewish life after it. The cemeteries are analysed as spaces and as texts that cover a wide spectrum of modern Viennese history, demonstrating that they are both witnesses to and actors in the complex and often controversial Jewish history of Vienna and its significant memorial sites.

Tim Corbett is PhD candidate at Lancaster University, working on The Place of my Fathers’ Sepulchres: The Jewish Cemeteries in Vienna. Lancaster University stipend, numerous research and travel grants. Research stays and presentations in Austria, Germany, Israel and USA; studied Hebrew in Tel Aviv. Publications on Jewish Vienna forthcoming. Associate Lecturer in the History Department and Assistant Dean in the Graduate College at Lancaster University.

István Pál Ádám

Junior Fellow (03/2014 – 08/2014)

"Bystanders" to Genocide? The Role of Building Managers in the Hungarian Holocaust.

This project examines the role of an understudied group of everyday Hungarians in World War II: Budapest building managers, caretakers in Hungarian: the házmester, or in German der Hausmeister. In June 1944, the Hungarian government – when setting up a ghetto – separated the Jewish and Christian residents of Budapest not by entire quarters, but by assigning certain buildings as “Jewish houses”. The building managers of these approximately 2,000 houses did not officially belong to any authority; nevertheless, on a daily basis they were responsible for enforcing discriminative regulations. They acted as intermediaries between the authorities and the Jewish citizens, which gave them much wider latitude than other so-called bystanders. I am using the files of a post-war denazifying process, testimonies, autobiographical sources and contemporary journals to show how this otherwise insignificant group of ordinary Hungarians gained power over the Jewish Hungarian citizens.

István Pál Ádám, LL.D., entered the Central European University`s History MA program after working years in a compensation project for Holocaust survivors. At the moment, he is a PhD candidate at the University of Bristol, where his work is supervised by Drs. Josie McLellan and Tim Cole. In 2012, he was the recipient of an EHRI fellowship at Yad Vashem. From December 2012 until June 2013, Ádám continued his research at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Eva Reder
Junior Fellow (10/2013 – 08/2014)

Pogroms in Poland 1918-1920 and 1945/1946: Triggers, Motives, Practices of Violence

The project analyses pogroms in Poland comparing the periods 1918-20 and 1945/46, focusing on the triggers of pogroms, the role of the emerging statehood as well as the perpetrators’ self-perception. In both reference periods, pogrom violence referred closely to the establishment of Polish statehood, even though this happened under divergent circumstances. Both phases involved exceptionally large numbers of pogroms. In both cases profound socio-political ruptures and paradigm shifts took place, where the need to create enemies was tremendous. An examination of the perpetrators’ verbal utterances and actions during and after the pogrom allows to identify their symbolic reference points, which express anti-Semitic stereotypes and show how the pogromists defined their relations towards state authorities. The project will offer insights about prejudices during transitional phases, the dynamics of pogroms and how narratives of violence are preserved. The pogroms are re¬constructed by means of eyewitness accounts, military records and court files.

Eva Reder, doctoral student at the University of Vienna, Department of Eastern European History and Department of Contemporary History. Dissertation project (Working title): Pogroms in Poland 1918-1920 and 1945/46. After being a journalist in Vienna, she did archival research in Poland and Ukraine in 2009. From 2010-2013 she was a research associate at the Österreichische Mediathek, Technisches Museum Wien. Fellow at Herder-Institut, Marburg and German Historical Institute, Warsaw (2012/2014). 

Eva Waibel
Junior Fellow (04/2013 – 09/2013)

Austro-Fascism, National Socialism and Holocaust in post-Nazi Theatre. Politics of History and Cultural Practice 1955-1970

This research project focusses on the interchange of strategies of history of politics and cultural practice. The Viennese theatre will be analysed in order to research its role in the process of constructing history and identities regarding Austro-Fascism, National Socialism and the Holocaust in the time between 1955 and 1970. Discourse analysis and performance theory methods will be used in order to investigate theatre texts and productions of constructions of history and the Self. Furthermore, processes of production and reception will be analysed in the context of attempts to direct cultural politics and against the backdrop of political developments, antisemitism, xenophobia and restoration in the daily life of the 1950s and 1960s.

Eva Waibel studied Theatre, Film and Media Studies as well as History at the University of Vienna and the Free University Berlin. Since 2001, she has worked on concept and organization for various theatre and art projects in Vienna and Berlin. 2007 to 2010 she worked in marketing and cultural cooperation for the daily newspaper Der Standard. Since 2008 dramaturge in the independent theatre scene in Vienna.

Christina Winkler
Junior Fellow (04/2014 – 08/2014)

The Russian view on the Shoah: Official remembrance versus individual memory of the Holocaust in contemporary Russia – a comparison.

As the legal successor to the Soviet Union, public remembrance of the war and Nazi Germany’s Soviet victims lies with the Russian Federation. But even though more than two million Holocaust victims were Soviet citizens, the Nazi genocide is strangely absent in Russia’s official memory of World War II. Gorbachev’s politics of ‘Glasnost’ changed public remembrance dramatically. Following a period of transition during the Yeltsin era, today Russia has returned to the Soviet narrative of the heroic victory over fascism, a unifying link the majority of Russians identify with. But as memory studies have shown, there is always an exchange between the personal memories of an individual and the collective memory of the social group to which a person belongs. My dissertation aims to identify and analyze this exchange by comparing collective forms of remembrance to forms of historical transmission and individual memories of people living near former killing sites. I’m focusing my research on the city of Rostov-on-Don, Russia's largest Holocaust site.

Christina Winkler, born in Flensburg, Germany, MA in Slavic Studies and Macroeconomics (1999), as well as in Holocaust Studies (2009). Has worked at the Goethe Institute in Volgograd (2000-2001), the Otto Benecke Foundation (2002), the „Petersburger Dialog“ (2002-2005) as well as the program „Journalists International“ of the Freie Universität Berlin (2006-2009). Since 2010 doctoral scholarship student at the Stanley Burton Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, the University of Leicester and the Ernst-Ludwig-Ehrlich Studienwerk in Berlin (2011-2013).

Anna Szász
Junior Fellow (10/2012 – 06/2013)

Exploring the Memory of the Roma Holocaust in Hungary

The proposed research investigates the memory of the Roma Holocaust. By exploring it I prefer to use the term “collected memory” (Young, 1993) suggesting that instead of a coherently structured collective memory memories are scattered. Taking it as a methodological tool in each chapter of my research I explore an aspect of the cultural history of the memory of the Roma Holocaust: (1) the socio-historical context of its public discourse; (2) monuments, memorials and public remembrances; (3) museums, temporary and permanent exhibitions organized on the topic of the Roma Holocaust or on the Holocaust; (4) Roma Holocaust representations in photographs; (5) Roma Holocaust representations in films; (6) Roma Holocaust representations in visual art. In my research I propose that visual art has gained a relevant role in the maintanence of collective memory and has been a successful tool which transforms minds into visual and imaginative ways of framing various points of history.

Anna Lujza Szász, sociologist, got her degrees at the Central European University in Nationalism Studies and at the University College London in Critical Cultural Studies. Currently she has been a doctoral candidate in the Interdisciplinary Social Sciences Program, Eötvös Lóránd University, and one of the curators of the European Roma Cultural.

Zoë Roth
Junior Fellow (10/2012 – 09/2013)

The Narrative of Experience: The Jewish Avant-Garde, 1918-1956

Despite the large numbers of Jewish artists and writers involved in early twentieth-century European avant-garde movements, such as Dada and surrealism, to date no work has mapped the Jewish avant-garde’s extent and influence. This is partly an effect of their adoption of a cosmopolitan, universalist identity and disassociation from their origins, but the diversity of the Jewish avant-garde, concentrated in European milieus, but extending to North Africa and the Americas, also defies a syncretic narrative. Moreover, any Jewish avant-garde praxis must be placed within the historical context of European anti-Semitism and fascism’s political assimilation of modernist aesthetics. Thus, I will investigate the unexplored tension between the avant-garde discourses to which Jewish artists/writers were attracted, and the fascist politics that exploited currents of the same aesthetic movements.

Zoë Roth, has an MA in Comparative Literature from King’s College London, where she has also been a PhD candidate and teaching assistant since 2009. Her thesis explores the ways in which the Holocaust has shaped literary representations of the body and the bodily experience of space, time, and language in twentieth-century European literature. She has published papers Philip Roth, Michel Houellebecq, and Angela Carter.

List of Publications Zoë Roth

Katharina Friedla
Junior Fellow (10/2012 – 09/2013)

Jewish life worlds in Wroclaw, 1933-1949: Strategies of contact and survival, self-assertion and identity, experiences of persecution

Both the extermination the Jewish people of Wroclaw during the war and the politics of the People's Republic of Poland have contributed to the fact the Jewish life could not be reignited in Wroclaw. The memory of the Silesian and especially the Wroclaw Jews, their ostracism, suppression, persecution and extermination by the Nazi regime, as well as the history of Polish-Jewish Wroclaw were deleted during the Cold War: These events have so far hardly received any attention either in the collective memory or in academic discourses in Poland and Germany. This research project will depict the problems and issues of this hitherto hardly addressed history of the Wroclaw Jews in the 20th century. It sets out from an analysis of Jewish life worlds in Wroclaw during the era of national socialism, when state defamation and anti-Jewish violence escalated and which culminated in the ostracism and extermination of the Jews from Wroclaw. Further, I will depict and analyse the change after 1945, the situation of the surviving German Jews in Wroclaw, as well as the Polish-Jewish Holocaust survivors who were established in the city. What were their scopes of action, how did they respond to the situation of persecution, what survival strategies were possible? How was it possible to assert oneself, which identity constructions were possible and which were not? How did the Jewish lives in the city before and after the Second World War intersect?

Katharina Friedla studied History, Jewish Studies, East Europen studies and German studies in Wroclaw, Poznan and Berlin between 1997 and 2000. Since 2009. she has been a PhD student at the Dept. of History at the University of Basel.  Research stay at Yad Vashem Archives Jerusalem (2007), at the Deutsches Historisches Institut in Warsaw (2009), at the Leo Baeck Institut in New York (2009), at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research New York (2009/2010) as well as the Stiftung Dialogik (Mary and Hermann Levin Goldschmied-Bollag, Zurich/ University of Toronto 2010-2011).

Robby van Eetvelde
Junior Fellow (10/2012 – 04/2013)

The Sipo-SD in Occupied Belgium: One Country, Two policies? A Comparison between the Activity of the German Police and the Biographies of its Perpetrators in Antwerp and Liège

In occupied Belgium, the Sicherheitspolizei und Sicherheitsdienst (Sipo-SD), the SS police better known under the name of its executive branch, the Gestapo, was confronted with important internal differences regarding collaboration, resistance activity and distribution of Jewish population between the Dutch-speaking (Flanders) and French-speaking parts (Wallonia). By comparing the activity of the Sipo-SD in Antwerp in Flanders, which housed forty-five percent of the Jewish population in the country, and Liège in Wallonia, hotbed of resistance activity, the adaptability of the SS police to local circumstances and its dependency on local collaborators and on the assistance of other Belgian or German institutions will be discerned. Based on the post-war trials against the German officers and their Belgian collaborators, the following elements are being compared: the institutional development, the biographies of the main perpetrators, and their tactics of persecution and repression.

Robby Van Eetvelde,MA in History from Ghent University (Belgium); 2005 – 2009 affiliated with the Department of Contemporary History of Ghent University (Belgium); 2009 – 2012 PhD Candidate at the Department of Politics, History and International Relations at Loughborough University (UK). His dissertation topic is the activity of the Sipo-SD in occupied Belgium.