Thursday, 12. March 2015, 12:00 - 13:30

Institut für Zeitgeschichte der Universität Wien, Seminarraum 1, Spitalgasse 2 – 4, Hof 1, 1090 Wien

VWI goes to the University of Vienna

The lecture investigates the material, political and affective afterlives of the human remains at the sites of the former National Socialist extermination camps in occupied Poland. Specifically focusing on Belzec, Dziuban considers the various forms of engagement with the ashes and bones of its victims, as well as political and symbolic strategies constructed around the mass graves from 1943 until today. By addressing practices as distinct as grave-robbery, archaeological investigations at the camp site, artistic and architectural interventions, and religious reburials of bones and body parts, the lecture discusses the complex relations between the conflicting and shifting 'articulations' of the human remains and the transformations of the 'politics of dead bodies' in post-war and post-communist Poland. The spatially mediated and framed struggles over the meaning of and sovereignty over human remains resulting from the extermination in the Nazi death camp are considered to both reflect and shape the unsettled relations between the living and the dead, the 'Poles' and the 'Jews', the 'subjects' and the 'objects'.

Chair: Bertrand Perz

Zuzanna Dziuban holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. She has been a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Konstanz (Research Group 'Geschichte & Gedächtnis'), at the Humboldt University of Berlin and the House of the Wannsee Conference in Berlin. Her current research interests focus on the relation between violence, memory, and space, the Holocaust and the post-war cultural politics of grief.

Bertrand Perz is historian, Professor of contemporary history at the University of Vienna.

In cooperation with: 

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