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.