Compromised Identities

“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

On 8th August 2018, the first exhibition on the so-called “Polenaktion” in Berlin opened at the Centrum Judaicum in Berlin. The exhibition tells the stories of the Berlin families who were the first to fall victim to a mass action which bore a resemblance not only to earlier expulsions, but also to forthcoming deportations. It … More ‘Ausgewiesen’ – guest post by Dr. Alina Bothe

In summer 2018, the Zaglembie World Organization organized a tour of the Zaglembie (Zagłębie Dąbrowskie) region of southwestern Poland for Holocaust survivors and their descendants – those whose families had lived in this area and so many of whom had been murdered in the Nazi machinery of ghettoization, starvation, slave labour, and the gas chambers … More Significant Sites and Memorial Unease