Heritage Recovered.

Jewish archives are repositories of the heritage of the Holocaust. They serve as institutions of preservation and research as well as sites of remembrance. The first archival material created by Jewish communities or ghetto administrations under Nazi control during the time of persecution and annihilation are ambivalent sources, enforced by the perpetrators. At the same time Jews created clandestine reports as acts of resistance in the face of imminent destruction. Immediately after the liberation Jewish initiatives started to collect survivor testimonies. However, many Holocaust archives are not located in the countries where the persecution and murder of Jews was carried out but in the new home countries of refugees or survivors. Just as the Holocaust shapes contemporary Jewish identity, the frame of the society where the Holocaust archive is located also influences the interpretation of the Holocaust. The conference will explore how this effects the collection of materials as well as the very comprehension and interpretation of the Holocaust.

Besides traditional collections of written documents, photographs and artefacts, audio and audiovisual testimonies of survivors have become important sources for the research of the Holocaust and have helped to present it to a broader, also non-Jewish audience. In the latest turn, developments and possibilities involving digitisation and online archives have offered new forms of preserving and presenting archival material. The internet has created new globalised forms of accessibility and fosters new approaches for the local/national formation of Jewish identity – especially in post-communist Eastern Europe – and new perceptions and methods in the understanding and narration of the Holocaust in general.

In cooperation with the Institute of Culture Studies and Theatre History of the Austrian Academy of Science and co-funded by the Rothschild-Foundation (Hanadiv) Europe.

Programme

Abstracts & CVs