The Holocaust and the Cold War - Culture and Justice
Joint Annual Conference 26–28. Mai 2021
Die Tagung The Holocaust and the Cold War
Meldung vom:
Scholarship on the Holocaust and its representations has benefitted beyond measure from the end of the Cold War thirty years ago. The manifold opportunities of improved access to archives in Central and Eastern Europe and increased exchange with scholars in the region have revitalized the field. Recently, early research conducted by witnesses and survivors of the Holocaust, post-war trials in Central and Eastern Europe, and the perspective of victims have come into focus of scholarship. While there is consensus on the Holocaust having been a transnational historical process, there is no understanding of the extent to which the Cold War conditioned, framed and formed the histories of the Holocaust constructed between 1945 and 1990.
The Fritz Bauer Institut in Frankfurt and the Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena are joining forces to explore this field. The aim is to focus on the interplay between the gradual awareness of the Holocaust and the advancing Cold War and to look at the ways in which both influenced narratives about the other. Since a larger part of the knowledge about the Holocaust was produced between 1944 and 1989, the question arises to what extent the Cold War affected representations of the Holocaust in historiography, legal investigations and trials, the arts and how this has formatted political discourse until today. The conference will take stock of the confrontational nature of the Cold War and discuss how debating on the Holocaust became a discursive and ideological weapon in the arsenals of both blocks. Exploring artistic visions and moral values shared on both sides of the Iron Curtain promises new insights both into the culture of the Cold War and its effect on addressing the Holocaust after World War II. This will be the focus of the first part of the conference.
A special emphasis will be on the particularly significant arena of the 1960s Holocaust trials. After a series of highly publicized legal proceedings in all formerly occupied countries in the immediate post-war years, many trials were held in the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany during the 1960s. The second part of our conference will examine the confrontation with the crimes and the representation of the Holocaust in the trials, focusing on the interstate dynamics and competitions between Eastern Bloc states – a consideration that is often overlooked in the analysis of the systemic competition between East and West.
Please note: The conference will be held entirely online. In order to have enough time for the discussion, we decided to make the speakers‘ presentations available in advance. The video or audio recordings will be accessible on the conference website from May 10. The conference itself will focus on the discussion, therefore the presentations will only be briefly introduced by the moderators in the individual panels. We ask all participants to listen to and view the contributions before the conference to gain the necessary background for a meaningful participation. The discussions will be streamed live on YouTube, questions can be asked via the chat function. Access links can be found on the conference website. A separate registration is required to attend the film screening on the evening of May 26. Please register by email at: h.hecker@fritz-bauer-institut.de.