Mittwoch, 14. Mai 2025, 13:00 - 16:30

Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI), Research Lounge, 1010 Wien, Rabensteig 3, 3rd Floor

VWI invites the Department of Contemporary History, University of Vienna

Chair: Regina Fritz (Department of Contemporary History, University of Vienna) and Éva Kovács (VWI)

Programme

13:00-13:45
Irina Nastasă-Matei (Gerda Henkel Research Fellow at VWI)
The United Romanian Jews of America and Its Responses to Antisemitism and the Holocaust in Romania (1918–1970s)
Commented by Julie Dawson (Department of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna)

13:45-14:30
Konstantin Fuks (Gerda Henkel Research Fellow at VWI)
Confronting the Holocaust: Latvian Jews at War
Commented by Claudia Kraft (Department of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna)

14:30-15:00 Coffee Break

15:00-15:45
René Schlott (VWI Senior Fellow)
Raul Hilberg (1926-2007): Biographical Studies on His Life, Work, and Impact
Commented by Johanna Gehmacher (Department of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna)

15:45-16:30
Hanja Dämon (VWI Research Fellow)
Early Holocaust Feature Films in Austrian Cinemas in the Post-war Period – Film Policy, Screening Framework and Reception
Commented by Monika Bernold (Department of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna)

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Abstracts and Short Bios

Irina Nastasă-Matei (Gerda Henkel Research Fellow at VWI): The United Romanian Jews of America and Its Responses to Antisemitism and the Holocaust in Romania (1918–1970s)

The project aims to analyse the United Romanian Jews of America (URJA)’s roughly 60 years of activity in supporting Romanian Jews in the face of various and fluid forms of antisemitism – those from the interwar period that culminated in the Holocaust as well as the more insidious ones from the communist period. URJA documented the Romanian governments’ violations of the Jewish minority rights, negotiated with the Romanian and US authorities for their safeguarding and for conditioning financial and economic aid on fair treatment of Jews, and denounced the antisemitic laws of Octavian Goga’s government from 1937. During the Second World War it reported to the whole world on pogroms, deportations and mass murders of Romanian Jews, advocated for rescue measures, and collaborated with other Jewish aid organisations, such as the Joint Distribution Committee. The organisation remained active until the 1970s. It continued to support Romanian Jews living in the US and Israel, protested the Romanian communist regime’s mistreatment of the Jewish population, and fought to bring war criminals to justice; the most prominent case being the successful efforts of Charles Kremer – a dentist and Wiesenthal ally who had fled Romania – to denounce and expel from the US the Archbishop Valerian Trifa, a former leader of the Iron Guard.

Irina Nastasă-Matei is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Bucharest. In 2013, she concluded her PhD in history on the topic “Students from Romania in the Third Reich. 1933-1945” at Babeș-Bolyai University Cluj. She has held several fellowships, e.g. from Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich (DAAD Research Scholarship) and the German Culture Forum for Central and Eastern Europe in Munich and directed international projects about Romania’s transnational and Jewish history. She is the author of the monograph Education, Politics and Propaganda: Romanian students in Nazi Germany (in Romanian, 2016), co-author of the book Culture and Propaganda. The Romanian Institute in Berlin, 1940-1945 (with Lucian Nastasă-Kovacs, 2018 in Romanian and 2023 in German), and author of over thirty articles, including several on Jewish life in interwar Romania.

Commented by Julie Dawson

Julie Dawson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Vienna’s Department of Contemporary History. Her dissertation examines postwar Jewish life in Romania through the lens of recently found diaries of a Transnistrian survivor. Dawson has worked extensively in and with Romanian archival repositories, directing the Leo Baeck Institute’s archival survey of Transylvania and Bukovina (jbat.lbi.org) from 2012-2019. She has held fellowships from the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute/Yale University (2020-2021) and the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah (2022-2024). She is co-editor of Precarious Archives, Precarious Voices: Expanding Jewish Narratives from the Margins (2023) and has published in, amongst others, European Holocaust Studies Vol. 3: Places, Spaces and Voids in the Holocaust and Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History.

Konstantin Fuks (Gerda Henkel Research Fellow at VWI): Confronting the Holocaust: Latvian Jews at War

The project focuses on the story of the struggle for survival of Latvian Jews who fled east and joined the Soviet war effort during the Second World War. Using newly discovered sources, such as wartime letters, interviews, memoirs and evacuation cards, the study sheds light on the reaction of local Jews to the Soviet conquest of Latvia, the decision-making process of Latvian Jews to seek refuge in the Soviet Union during the German invasion, knowledge and awareness of the mass killings of Jews in occupied Latvia among those Jews who fled to the Soviet interior, and what it meant to be a Latvian Jew and a Red Army soldier in a war of total annihilation on the Eastern Front. Situating the study in the broader context of the history of Stalinist society at war, the project aims to tell the unknown story of armed resistance and survival of Latvian Jews during the Second World War and the Holocaust.

Konstantin Fuks holds a PhD in history and Jewish studies (2024) from the University of Toronto. His dissertation monograph, “The Soviet Latvian War Effort: Experiencing, Remembering and Narrating the History of the Second World War” explores the social history of the war, occupation and revolution in Latvia, reclaiming the untold stories of Latvians who fought on the Soviet side during the war. He has authored articles exploring the Jewish dimension of the history of the Soviet Union and Latvia during the war and the Holocaust published in the annual Archive of Jewish History and Tablet Magazine in 2020. His latest article, published in The Journal of Slavic Military Studies in 2025, explores the military mobilization and integration of Latvians, including Jews, into the Red Army during the Second World War.

Commented by Claudia Kraft

Claudia Kraft is a Professor at the Department of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna. Her main fields of research are history of everyday life in state socialist societies after World War II, gender history, history of forced migrations after World War II, memory cultures and politics of history in Central and Eastern Europe, comparative legal history and new approaches to area studies (for instance postcolonial studies, critical geography).

René Schlott (VWI Senior Fellow): Raul Hilberg (1926-2007): Biographical Studies on His Life, Work, and Impact

Shortly after the end of the war, Raul Hilberg, Professor of Political Science at the University of Vermont from 1956 to 1991, was one of the first academics worldwide to deal with the Nazi genocide of the Jews of Europe. Hilberg, a Jewish exile who was born in Vienna in 1926 and fled to the USA in 1939, had returned to Europe as a young US soldier during the Second World War. After the end of the war, as a native German speaker, he spent years sifting through and evaluating the confiscated Nazi file material on behalf of the US government and thus gained the guiding idea for his scientific qualification work, in which he interpreted the Holocaust as a huge bureaucratic process. This biographical study aims not only to trace the life of this extraordinary scientist, but also to follow the history of the reception of his early opus magnum The Destruction of the European Jews (1961). It was not translated into German (1982) and French (1985) until more than twenty years after its first publication. Each of these editions faced publication problems and triggered a variety of academic debates, not least because Hilberg relied entirely on the perpetrators' files and largely dispensed with testimonies from the victims. Hilberg also had to put up with harsh criticism from other historians due to his critical portrayal of the Jewish councils in the ghettos and his skeptical assessment of the Jewish resistance. The task of the project will be to historise these disputes and to contrast them with Hilberg's memoirs (The Politics of Memory, published in 1996).

René Schlott initially completed a diploma in business administration alongside his commercial training. He then studied history, politics and journalism at the Free University and the Humboldt University Berlin and at the University of Geneva. From 2007, he was a scholarship holder at the graduate school “Transnational Media Events” at the University of Giessen, where he received his doctorate in 2011. From 2014 to 2022, he was a research associate at the Center for Contemporary History Potsdam. In 2013, he examined the estate of Raul Hilberg at the University of Vermont with a scholarship from the German Historical Institute Washington. Since 2008, Schlott has worked as a freelance author and book critic, e.g., for Spiegel Online, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Die Zeit and Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Commented by Johanna Gehmacher

Johanna Gehmacher teaches history at the Department of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna. Her main fields of research are women's and gender history, transnational history, theory of life writing and biography and the history of social movements. Her last book Feminist Activism, Travel and Translation around 1900 (Cham 2024) explores transnational practices of transfer and translation in women’s movements.

Hanja Dämon (VWI Research Fellow): Early Holocaust Feature Films in Austrian Cinemas in the Post-war Period – Film Policy, Screening Framework and Reception

The project examines how the first Holocaust-themed feature films were received in Austria. Where and in which contexts were they shown, and how did cinema owners, politicians and the contemporary press react to them? A central case study is The Last Stage (OT: Ostatni etap) about the Auschwitz extermination camp by the Polish director and Auschwitz survivor Wanda Jakubowska. It was shown in 1948 in Salzburg as part of a festival and later also in Vienna. Reactions to Allied documentary films about concentration and extermination camps have already received attention. In this project the focus will be on discussions on early post-war feature films dealing with this topic.

Hanja Dämon obtained her PhD from King’s College London. Her research on film policies in post-war Germany was funded by the European Research Council-sponsored project “Beyond Enemy Lines. Literature and Film in the British and US Zones of Occupation”. Recent publications include a contribution to the Yearbook of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies (2023) focusing on music and exile.

Commented by Monika Bernold

Monika Bernold is a Media and Cultural Historian and Senior Lecturer at the Department of Contemporary History, University of Vienna. 2022-2024 Visiting Professor for Cultural History of Audiovisual Media at the Department of Theatre, Film and Media Studies (tfm), University of Vienna. The main fields of her research and teaching are television history in Austria, gender- and media history, the history of consumption and feminist auto/biography studies.

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