Thursday, 19. March 2020, 15:00 - 16:30

1010 Vienna, Rabensteig 3, Research Lounge, 3rd Floor

VWI invites Marcus J. Carney.

In Western Europe, there is a large body of research on how the Holocaust affected several generations, not only the families of survivors, but families of the perpetrators as well. In Lithuania, the issue remained taboo for many years. Following the Second World War, the Holocaust perpetrators were sentenced by the occupying Soviet forces, the defendants were framed as traitors to the Soviet Union and as enemies of the Soviet people, and their families were often subjected to poverty and insecurity. Haunted by the threat of further stigmatisation, families either chose to remain silent or defended themselves from pain by developing different kinds of myths where the guilty remained innocent. After the declaration of Lithuanian independence in 1990, many Holocaust perpetrators were rehabilitated in a hurry as “sentenced unjustly by the occupational regime” only later, when their crimes came to daylight, to be de-rehabilitated again, leaving families in confusion. How did ancestors of Holocaust perpetrators deal with their family past? The question was opened recently by Arkadijus Vinokuras in We Did not Murder (2017) and to some extent by Rūta Vanagaitė in Our People (2016). The materials presented in both volumes, plus extra material such as children and grandchildren’s letters to the Supreme Court and the stories narrated during interviews, reveal how families coped with uneasy pasts either through silence or self-deception, how families decided to accept the truth, and what happens when they do.

Commented by Marcus J. Carney

Rasa Baločkaitė is Associate Professor of Sociology at Vytautas Magnus University in Lithuania. Her scholarly interests include Soviet and post-Soviet societies and societies in transition. Baločkaitė has published in leading scholarly journals such as Problems of Post Communism (2009), the Journal of Baltic Studies (2011), Language Policy (2014), and the European History Quarterly (2015), among others. Her research paper Between Mimesis and Non Existence (2008) was made into the film Syndromes of Mimicry by Anastasia Pirozhenko (2016).

Marcus J. Carney is a US-Austrian writer-director (Mag. art., MDW University), researcher and SySt® certified practitioner. His feature-length film The End of the Neubacher Project was invited to numerous film festivals, broadcast throughout Europe and presented at the Museum of Modern Art (NY). In 2017, he held a teaching assignment at Witten/Herdecke University. Publications: Representative Perception and Related Phenomena in the Modeling Methodology ‘Systemic Structural Constellations’, conference contribution, Trends in Interdisciplinary Studies – 3rd Avant Conference – Understanding Social Cognition, Lublin, 2017. Letting Show.... Transverbal Migrations between Theorizing & Practice, conference contribution, IS4IS Summit, DTMD stream, Technical University of Vienna, 2015. The End of the Neubacher Project, feature-length film, 74 min., 35mm, Dolby Digital, 2006.Photo: © Rūta Stepanovaitė

After the lecture, we will screen the movie The End of the Neubacher Project by Marcus J. Carney.

Please register at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. by latest 18 March, 12.00 am and bring your ID.

Click here to download the invitation as a PDF file.