Events
The Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI) organises academic events in order to provide the broader public as well as an expert audience with regular insights into the most recent research results in the fields of Holocaust, genocide, and racism research. These events, some of which extend beyond academia in the stricter sense, take on different formats ranging from small lectures to the larger Simon Wiesenthal Lectures and from workshops addressing an expert audience to larger international conferences and the Simon Wiesenthal Conferences. This reflects the institute’s wide range of activities.
The range of events further extends to the presentation of selected new publications on the institute’s topics of interest, interventions in the public space, the film series VWI Visuals, and the fellows’ expert colloquia.
VWI invites/goes to... | |||
Daniel Cohen: Between Charity and Solidarity. ‘Philosemitism’ in Post-Holocaust Europe 1945–1950 | |||
Wednesday, 10. October 2018, 15:00 - 17:00 Wiener Wiesenthal Institut für Holocaust-Studien (VWI) Rabensteig 3, 1010 Wien
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VWI invites the Institute of Contemporary History, University of Vienna Although antisemitism did not vanish with the end of Nazism, various forms of philosemitic discourse appeared in Western Europe in the wake of the Holocaust. Philosemitism, to be sure, did not necessarily involve ‘love for Jews’. In West Germany, positive pronouncements on Jews by politicians or government officials contrasted with the silence on Jewish victims among a public still “unable to mourn”. As the historian Frank Stern has demonstrated, manifestations of philosemitism in the early Federal Republic secured Germany’s acceptance in the West while erasing the Nazi past. Yet in Western Europe, philosemitism emerged as the dominant form of public discourse about Jews. Self-imposed or externally enforced, a moratorium on the public airing of anti-Jewish sentiment reduced the possibility of openly antisemitic attitudes. There were of course numerous ways to transgress this prohibition. As Theodor Adorno has argued, a “secondary antisemitism” conceived as a defence mechanism against guilt and accountability replaced the tabooed biological racism of the Nazi era.
Commented by Frank Stern G. Daniel Cohen is a Senior Fellow at the VWI and Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Rice University, Houston. He has published widely on Jewish refugees, human rights, and humanitarianism in the twentieth century. He is currently completing a history of ‘philosemitism’ in Europe from 1945 to the present. Frank Stern is Professor of Cultural History at the Institute for Contemporary History at Vienna University. His main focus lies on visual culture, film and the media. He is curator of film retrospectives in Austria, Germany, Israel and co-director of the Jewish Film Club Vienna. His numerous academic publications include The Whitewashing of the Yellow Badge. Antisemitism and Philosemitism in Postwar Germany, Oxford 1992. Click here to download the invitation as a PDF file. Please register at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. by latest Tuesday, 9 October, 12.00 am and bring your ID. In cooperation with: |
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