Past Events 2012
A workshop for new recruits and experienced veterans of the Wiener Library’s Volunteer Translation Programme. This session will provide an opportunity to get to know the team, to welcome new members and to share experiences.
Part of the FilmTalk lecture series: Sleeping with the Enemy held in partnership with the Leo Baeck Institute London.
The National Socialists actively pursued the mobilisation of women in order to achieve military victory in the Second World War. Nicole Kramer’s research, which was jointly awarded the 2011 Fraenkel Prize for Contemporary History, argues that women were actively mobilised at an earlier stage that is commonly assumed.
NB: This event did not take place, and was cancelled due to unforseen circumstances.
Philip Kerr is the creator of an engrossing series of thrillers centred around Bernie Gunther, a private detective and wry observer of Central Europe from the rise of Nazism to the aftermath of World War Two. The latest addition to the series, ‘Prague Fatale’, is set in 1942 and touches on the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich.
The Wiener Library will be hosting an international workshop on Holocaust testimonies within the framework of EHRI. Topics for discussion at the workshop include: the timing of testimony, testimony as evidence, evidence as testimony, translation of Holocaust testimonies and false testimony. This workshop will focus on some core issues currently facing researchers, archivists and scholars across all disciplines and collection-holding institutions.
Eduard Stehlik is the author of ‘Lidice - the story of a Czech village’, which recounts one of the most barbaric acts of the Second World War from the point of view of the lives of the ordinary people who lived there. An honorary citizen of Lidice, Stehlik’s work offers a distinctive insight into the destruction of Lidice and the murder of its 173 male inhabitants.
This session is designed to introduce visitors and new readers to the Wiener Library’s Reading Room, to give an overview of our collections and to provide help with using the library’s finding aids.
The most infamous graduate of Dachau’s School was Rudolf Höß, the future Auschwitz Kommandant whose first four years in the camp system were spent as a guard and officer in Dachau. Despite a number of recent studies in German on SS concentration personnel elsewhere, there is still little focused scholarship on Dachau. Drawing on original research, Christopher Dillon will discuss how these guards were recruited and trained, and the factors that shaped the SS School at Dachau.
In commemoration of Yom Hashoah, Keith Lowe will be giving a talk that will examine the Jewish experience of the aftermath of the Second World War. The talk will focus on how Jews reacted to the new and uneasy world that confronted them in 1945. It will touch on the issues of continued anti-Semitism, Jewish vengeance, postwar pogroms, and the flight to Palestine; but it will also show how these themes fitted in with the broader issues that Europeans were beginning to confront as warfare drew to a close. This lecture will draw on Keith Lowe’s most recent book 'Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II', published by Penguin, which has already received outstanding reviews from leading historians.
In honour of the International Day of Reflection on the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda, the Wiener Library will screen ‘Coexist’, a remarkable independent documentary film examining the unique social experiment of reconciliation in Rwanda. The film documents the stories of an array of women survivors, who have made the extraordinary decision to reconcile with the people who killed their husbands and children, and others who understandably cannot bring themselves to forgive or reconcile.
For those who are curious to see the interior of the new building, or for anyone who wants to visit us for the first time, the Open Day will also offer the chance to take a tour around the Library's exhibition, as well as an opportunity to view our new Reading Room.
The plot to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich, which was hatched in London and executed in Prague on 27 May 1942, was the only successful assassination of a leading Nazi during World War II. This remarkable moment in history is examined in a compelling film documentary by Jan and Krystyna Kaplan, combining original black and white footage with reconstructions. As well as being an award-winning documentary film-maker, Jan Kaplan is also an historian who has also co-authored several books including ‘Prague in the Shadow of the Swastika’, ‘Prague: The Turbulent Century’ and ‘Prague 1900-2000’.
In association with the Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain, this special workshop on genealogy and family research is targeted at any individual interested in exploring personal histories connected to the Holocaust. The workshop will explore how to begin researching your family history, and what resources The Wiener Library can provide.
This lunchtime talk discussed Samantha's research concerning what happened to Jewish children, specifically adolescents, who were refugees in Switzerland during World War II. The “sejour en Suisse” for many refugees is not well documented, and the last survivors of the Holocaust are becoming older and harder to speak with.
Through in-person interviews with the child survivors themselves in addition to archival work, Samantha will share her research findings and discuss the specifics of the refugee story. Photographs of the people and places important to this story, taken by professional photographer and former Fulbright scholar Laura Bernier, will also be shown.
We would like to hear your views on how we can best use our collections to support your work. If you are a teacher, we would be delighted if you, or any of your colleagues, would like to attend. This is a great opportunity for us to build links with local schools and sixth forms and to find out how we can enable educators to access and use our unique collections.
For those who are curious to see the interior of the new building, or for anyone who wants to visit us for the first time. There will be the chance to take a tour around the Library's first ever exhibition about childhood under the Nazis, as well as an opportunity to view our new Reading Room.
Part of the FilmTalk lecture series: Sleeping with the Enemy held in partnership with the Leo Baeck Institute London. Professor Yosefa Loshitzky (University of East London) discusses the fears of “forbidden love” between Israeli Jews and Palestinians as they are expressed and transgressed in the iconic film Hamsin.
Yosefa Loshitzky is the author of The Radical Faces of Godard and Bertolucci, Identity Politics on the Israeli Screen, Screening Strangers: Migration and Diaspora in Contemporary European Cinema, and the editor of Spielberg’s Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler’s List.
Historians of the Holocaust know teaching values through history is not always an easy task. The event discussed the ‘uses of history’ in the context of growing awareness about the persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany in British schools.
Speakers on the panel included Lou Hart, the Director of Camden LGBT Forum, and William Spurlin, Professor of English at Brunel University, who has published extensively on the persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany. The evening was chaired by Jack Gilbert, a Trustee on the Board of HMDT.
On 16 September 1933 Adolf Hitler attended the much-anticipated premiere of Hitlerjunge Quex in Munich. The film directed by Hans Steinhoff, was based on a successful novel of the same name by Karl A. Schenzinger, and the English language version was described as ‘genuinely entertaining’ by the New York Times in July 1934. The main character of the film was based on the life of Hitler Youth Herbert Norkus, who was killed in a Berlin street fight in 1932. The screening will be introduced by Daniel Siemens (UCL/SSEES), the author of an acclaimed book on Horst Wessel, another celebrated ‘martyr’ of the Nazi movement.
Dr Tim Grady presented his new book, The German-Jewish Soldiers of the First World War in History and Memory, published by Liverpool University Press. The book explores the changing relationship between Jewish and non-Jewish Germans through the prism of remembrance for the German-Jewish soldiers who fought in the First World War.
Part of the 'Making Histories' Lecture Series in partnership with the Pears Institute for the History of Antisemitism. During 1941-3, the murder of the Jews became well-known in Germany and widely commented on, both in private and public. What this spreading awareness of the genocide meant to German society has been widely discussed amongst historians. In this lecture, Nicholas Stargardt argued that German perceptions of the Holocaust were primarily shaped by their changing views of the war, with their own predicament, rather than that of the Jews, taking centre stage.
Nick Stargardt is the author of Witnesses of War: Children's Lives under the Nazis (Cape, 2005), and is completing a social history of Germany during the Second World War. He is Professor of Modern European History at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Magdalen College.
The Holocaust Research Centre, Royal Holloway College, University of London and The Wiener Library held a one-day workshop on the Wansee Conference exploring the view from Berlin, mass murder in Lithuania and the Balkans, and the transition to the 'Final Solution'.
Learning about the Holocaust is part of the National Curriculum for all secondary school students in Britain, but a growing number of primary schools participate in Holocaust Memorial Day. Since more information about the past than ever before is freely available to children via the internet, the likelihood of young children asking parents or teachers about the Holocaust is higher than ever before. The panel discussion brought together three different points of view on the best ways of introducing the subject to young people. The event was chaired by former children's laureate Michael Rosen, and the speakers included Sue Berelowitz, the Deputy Children’s Commissioner for England, Dan Stone, Professor of History at Royal Holloway, University of London, Rachel Donnelly, Holocaust Learning Officer at the Imperial War Museum and Emma O’Brien of the Holocaust Education Development Programme at the Institute of Education.
For those of you who are curious to see the interior of the new building, or for anyone who wants to visit us for the first time, we are holding an Open Day on Sunday 29 January. There will be the chance to take a tour around the Library's first ever exhibition about childhood under the Nazis, as well as an opportunity to view our new Reading Room.
Dr Caroline Sharples (University of Liverpool) addressing the theme of Speak Up, Speak Out in a lunchtime talk examining the resonance of war crimes trials in West Germany and the importance of speaking out in the struggle between critical engagement with the past and comfortable notions of German victimhood.
Dr Dan Plesch, Director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at the School of Oriental and African Studies presented a lecture on the 1942 UN Declaration on the Persecution of the Jews and the creation of the UN War Crimes Commission in 1943. 2012 marks the 70th anniversary of the 1942 Declaration, and Dr Plesch revisits the explicit, public and multi-national condemnation of the extermination of Europe's Jews in Poland and the subsequent creation of the seventeen nation UN War Crimes Commission of 1943-48.
The Wiener Library welcomed Dr Alexander Korb (University of Leicester), joint winner of Category A of the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History 2011 to present his work, 'In the Shadow of the World War. Mass violence by the Ustaša against Serbs, Jews and Roma in Croatia, 1941-45'.
The Wiener Library welcomed Dr Josie McLellan (University of Bristol), joint winner of Category A of the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History 2011 to present her work, 'Love in the Time of Communism: Intimacy and Sexuality in the GDR'.