As followers of our project may be aware, we are planning to launch a touring exhibition, bringing the insights and research of the project team to visitors at museums and heritage sites across the UK. The exhibition focuses both on people explicitly designated as ‘perpetrators’ and on the many more who facilitated, collaborated with, or … More Help Shape Our Digital Exhibition
For my doctoral thesis, I examined exhibitions at memorial sites and documentation centres in Germany and Austria. The question of my research was how these exhibitions represented the NS-perpetrators. I was interested in the explanations and interpretations they provided for the perpetrators and what statements, possibly unintended ones, the exhibition design had created. But beyond … More About Historical Others and Imagined Others: representations of Nazi perpetrators in exhibitions and public imagination – guest blog by Sarah Kleinmann
“Dear Mutti, everything is as crazy as you would imagine during a tour. We have been on the train continuously since Monday 7 am, everywhere we have 6 to 10 hours delays, and at the moment we are sitting in a Red Cross wooden barrack and have not been able to wash ourselves for days. … More Compromising roles: German actresses in Nazi-occupied Minsk – guest blog by Anne-Lise Bobeldijk
Silent is the Country or Culture of Remembrance in Klagenfurt, Austria When you think of the city of Klagenfurt, illustrious names of German language literary and popular culture come to mind. Robert Musil, Ingeborg Bachmann or Udo Jürgens. You will find the house where Musil was born right in front of the train station, while … More Silent is the Country or Culture of Remembrance in Klagenfurt
From 14 to 17 July 1943, eleven Soviet citizens stood trial in Krasnodar, a city in southwestern Russia. During the German occupation of the town from August 1942 to February 1943, all but one of the defendants had worked for the SS, primarily in auxiliary functions. Accused of having committed crimes under German rule, a … More Soviet Collaboration Trials – guest post by Franziska Exeler
A little while ago, I happened to be working through a seemingly innocuous file from the German Interior Ministry during the mid-1930s, collated by one Hans Pfundtner, who was a Staatssekretär (a very high-ranking civil servant) in the Ministry. It contains a series of letters to (and about) Pfundtner’s son Reinhard, who has just been … More A Tale from the Third Reich’s Interior Ministry – guest post by Helen Roche
The novelist David Mitchell has suggested there are three ‘themes hardwired into all novels: identity, memory and time.’ With narrative comes time; with time, memory; with memory, identity. In the six years it took me to write my debut novel, Testament, I was grappling with Joseph Silk, a protagonist who reorders time, denies memory, and … More ‘Falsification of memory, falsification of reality, negation of reality’: The question of individual and collective memory in Holocaust fiction – guest post by Kim Sherwood
