Volha Bartash

Research Fellow (10/2015 - 03/2016)

Survival as a Daily routine. Roma in the German-Occupied Belarusian-Lithuanian Border Region 1941-1944 

The interviewing of Romani families opens a completely new perspective on the life of people under occupation. For them, survival was an everyday routine consisting of three essential “how and where” questions – where to hide, how to provide for their families, and how to keep on the move. Focusing on the survival experiences of Roma, the book project addresses the on-going debates on the difference between the plight of nomadic and sedentary Romani communities, the role of local Nazi collaborators in the persecutions, and the Romani Resistance. A methodological originality of the study is that it combines ethnographic and historical approaches. In order to gather data for the project, Volha Bartash carried out interviews in the Romani communities in Belarus and Lithuania and worked in the archival and oral history collections of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington DC. During her research stay at the VWI, she will analyse the collected materials and start working on a book manuscript.

Volha Bartash studied History and Ethnology at the Belarusian State University in Minsk and earned her PhD from the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus. Her current research focuses on the Holocaust memories and identities of Roma in Belarus and Lithuania. Volha is the recipient of several academic honors including the Marian Madison Gypsy Lore Society Young Scholar's Prize in Romani studies and the Jeff and Toby Herr Fellowship at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Rory Yeomans
Research Fellow (10/2015 - 03/2016)

Victims, Beneficiaries, Consumers: Social Mobility, the Holocaust and the Economics of Destruction in Croatia 1941-1945

This research project seeks to answer a deceptively simple question: what is the impact of processes of mass terror on everyday, economic and social life? And how do both victims and potential beneficiaries negotiate such a system? Taking the Holocaust in Croatia as a case study, this project examines the first year of the fascist Independent State of Croatia, established in April 1941 under the rule of the Ustasha movement. Focusing on the economic destruction of the state’s Serbian and Jewish elite, it examines the various ways in which individual Serbs and Jews sought to negotiate their dispossession. It also aims to provide an inside view of the terror, looking at the working culture, plans and aspirations of the economic agencies and institutes tasked with implementing the ‘final solution’ of the Serbian and Jewish ‘problem’. Likewise, it considers the ways in which the destruction of the Serbian and Jewish middle classes impacted everyday economic, commercial and working life, feeding the demand for consumer goods, social mobility and career advancement in a time of scarcity while simultaneously exacerbating economic, resource and cost of living imbalances.

Rory Yeomans gained his PhD from University College London. He is the author of Visions of Annihilation: the Ustasha Regime and the Cultural Politics of Fascism and editor of The Utopia of Terror: Life and Death in Wartime Croatia. He has been an advanced academia fellow at the Centre for Advanced Study, Bulgaria and a Cantemir fellow at the University of Oxford. His main research interests are the social, economic and cultural history of fascist Croatia.

Carson Phillips
Research Fellow (04/2016 - 08/2016)

(Re)Ordering Constructions of Gender in Post-War Vienna 1945-2015

By locating, analysing, and putting forward concise models of gender constructs that emerged in Vienna in the aftermath of the Second World War, the project bridges two historical periods while demonstrating the continued effects of the Holocaust upon societal conceptualisations of gender. How new conceptualisations of gender emerged, how they were shaped by political, cultural and religious factors – past as well as present – and how they laid the foundation for contemporary expressions of gender is at the core of my project.

Carson Philipps takes as his point of departure the crisis of masculinity that engulfed German-speaking Europe at the end of the Second World War. How men re-conceptualised themselves and established their place in the newly emergent society of post-World War II Europe has been of increasing interest and importance to contemporary scholars. Drawing on the fields of Holocaust Studies, Gender Studies, Comparative Literature, and Cultural Studies, the work focuses on the intersection of German and Jewish studies, cultures and identities.

Carson Phillips holds a PhD in Humanities from York University in Toronto, Canada and is Managing Director of the Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre. He served as a Canadian delegate to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance from 2009-2013 and continues to serve on the Funding Review Committee. He is the recipient of numerous scholarly awards including the 2013 BMW Canada Award for Excellence from the Canadian Centre for German and European Studies. His research interests focus on post-Holocaust conceptualisations of gender, Väterliteratur and cultural representations of the Holocaust in screen and visual culture.

Norman Domeier
Research Fellow (03/2016 - 09/2016)

Dictatorship and the World Public. Foreign Correspondents and the ‘Third Reich’ 1932-1949

Until its downfall, the ‘Third Reich’ wooed, persuaded, deceived and threatened its foreign correspondents. If all means of direction, prescribed terminology and press control failed, the regime did not hesitate to isolate, imprison and expel foreign journalists. Nonetheless, they constituted a force which the National Socialist regime regarded in a modern way, from the perspective of media history, until the very end. In contrast to the public spheres of the Allies, the ‘Third Reich’: never formally introduced pre-censorship, except for radio broadcasts. Hence this research project concentrates on foreign correspondents in the ‘Third Reich’ as independent creators of and actors in media events. In doing so we should also be able to provide an answer to what has been a crucial question of the ‘Third Reich’ since at the latest 1941-42: What did foreign correspondents know about the murder of European Jews, and what did they report? The findings of this project go beyond the timeframe of the years from 1932 until 1949. The aim is to establish basic principles for contemporary history on how to deal with the relationship between dictatorships and a potentially democratic public audience – which is a pressing issue today still.

Norman Domeier is Assistant Professor of Modern European History at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. He studied history, political science and journalism at the University of Göttingen (2000-2003) and completed his MPhil in Modern European History at Cambridge in 2004. His PhD thesis on the Eulenburg Scandal in the German Empire – defended at the European University Institute in 2009 – was awarded the 'Geisteswissenschaften International' Prize of the German Booksellers’ Association. He is currently working on a study of foreign journalists in Germany during the ‘Third Reich’.

Gábor Szegedi

Research Fellow (10/2014 - 08/2015)

Antisemitism and Sexuality: Sex Education, Marriage Prohibitions and Race Defilement

In interwar Hungary the wave of antisemitic legislation after 1938 and the closely related social and economic policies that aimed at redistribution of wealth at the cost of ‘the Jews‘ resulted in various attempts to defining Jewishness. Jews became a ‘race‘ and a particular ‘spirit‘ and therefore, aside from rolling back Jewish alleged economic and social influence, the Hungarian state started a project aimed at separating ‘Jews‘ and ‘non-Jews‘ on a physical level, marking out desirable and undesirable bodies. The most far-reaching measure of this body politics was the 1941 Marriage Law: It prohibited marriage on a racial basis and introduced a practice of race defilement. In the race defilement proceedings individual bodies were then used to mark the boundaries of the nation using ‘respectable sexuality‘ as the threshold between belonging and otherness. In my dissertation I examined various discourses on sexuality in inter-war Hungary, with a particular emphasis on producing sexual knowledge for young, unmarried adults. In the current project I will juxtapose these texts and practices of sex education and premarital counselling with the biopolitical normalization process of the race defilement cases after 1941; I wish to draw attention to the importance of sexuality for understanding the antisemitism of interwar Hungary.

Gábor Szegedi studied American Studies and Political Science at ELTE and History at the Central European University in Budapest, but also in Turku/Åbo, Berlin, and Durham. He defended his doctorate on sex education, marriage counselling and premarital health examinations in 20th century Hungary in June 2014 at CEU's History Department. He has worked as a translator, as a history teacher in a secondary school and for five years as policy analyst at the Australian Embassy in Budapest.

Ines Koeltzsch
Research Fellow (10/2014 - 08/2015)

Between Oblivion and Nostalgia. Rural Jews in Central European Cultural Memory Before and After the Shoah: The Bohemian Lands and Czechoslovakia

One of the most common stereotypes about Jews in modernity has been that „Jew are an urban population“: it is as much an autostereotype as a heterostereotype. This perception of the 19th and early 20th century has significantly shaped historiography (and more) until our day. The history of the rural Jews can thus be understood as being doubly marginalized: it has either been forgotten or subjected to extreme idealization. My research project at VWI will use the example of the Bohemian lands and Czechoslovakia in order to investigate collective and individual forms of remembering rural Jewish life in Central Europe before and after the Shoah. I am particularly interested in issues and topoi that are either specific to particular regions or comprehensively span larger areas as well as the roles of oblivion and nostalgia in the cultural memory of "village and rural Jews". These will be explored at hand of various media (literature, autobiography, memorial books, etc.). I want to highlight that collective patterns of memory were formed in parallel to individual memories not only after the Shoah but indeed earlier, as urbanization and the decline of rural Jewish communities took hold.

Ines Koeltzsch is a researcher at the Masaryk Institute and Archive of the Academy of Sciences Prague; her research specializations are the history of relations between Jews and non-Jews, urban history and the history of migration in 19th and 20th century Central Europe.

Zuzanna Dziuban

Research Fellow (12/2014 - 08/2015)

The Afterlife of the ‚Aktion Reinhardt‘ Extermination Camps

The project aims at providing a comprehensive and interdisciplinary analysis of the afterlife of the ‘Aktion Reinhardt’ extermination camps. By tracing the fate of the former camps in scholarly research, memory cultures, public debates and art, from 1943 until today, the project attempts to portray Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka as complex and multidimensional social, cultural, and political phenomena. The former camps are to be understood as both constantly changing physical sites and as challenging subjects of historical research, legal proceedings, cultural and artistic representations, and arenas of private and public commemorative activities. At the same time, the project seeks to explore and investigate the interdependencies between these distinct but inevitably interrelated realms. In this way, a historical, empirically based study is located within a framework of a broader theoretical reflection on history, politics, justice, memory, and space – the former ‘Aktion Reinhardt’ extermination camps become a prism through which post-war memory politics and, more generally, the dynamics of Holocaust memory can be analysed.

Zuzanna Dziuban holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. She has been a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Konstanz (Research Group ‘Geschichte & Gedächtnis’), at the Humboldt University of Berlin and the House of the Wannsee Conference in Berlin. Her current research interests focus on the relation between violence, memory, and space, the Holocaust and the post-war cultural politics of grief.

Johannes Dieter-Steinert

Senior Fellow (03/2014 - 08/2015)

Jewish Child Forced Labourers

During the Second World War, a substantial number of children became victims of the National Socialist forced labour system. In National Socialist Germany and German occupied Eastern Europe, Jewish children were forced to work in ghettos, concentration and labour camps, in industry and agriculture. The Wehrmacht and SS deployed children in particular in construction work on fortifications, roads and airfields. My research project provides the first comprehensive study of Jewish child forced labourers in National Socialist Germany and German occupied Eastern Europe by drawing on a wide range of archival documents and former forced labourers’ testimonies. By using age and gender as central categories for analysis, the research will identify the historical background of Jewish child forced labour and its place within the Holocaust between 1938 and 1945. Special consideration will be given to the working and living conditions of Jewish children forced to work, their treatment and contacts with the German population as well as with other forced labourers. Finally, the project will discuss the experience of liberation as narrated in published and unpublished testimonies.

Johannes-Dieter Steinert is Professor of Modern European History and Migration Studies at the University of Wolverhampton, United Kingdom. His Research interests include: forced migration, forced labour, survivors of Nazi persecution and international humanitarian assistance. Most recent book publication: Deportation und Zwangsarbeit. Polnische und sowjetische Kinder im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland und im besetzten Osteuropa 1939–1945 Essen 2013

Alexander Korb
Research Fellow (10/2013 – 03/2014)

The end of Violence. Transformation in Yugoslavia, 1944-1953.

My last book was dedicated to the research of mass violence that shook the Balkan during the Second World War. I will now use my stay at the VWI in order to address the question of how violence comes to an end. The German capitulation on May 8, 1945 did not necessarily signify the onset of peace; this is particularly true for Southeast and East Central Europe. The civil wars that had erupted under German occupation in many cases continued for months to come; not only Jewish survivors faced grave difficulties in recovering their possessions or returning to their apartments and houses; in several places, returning Jews were murdered by the local villagers, other places saw the eruption of pogroms. At the same time, the mass persecutions and resettlements of members of those ethnic groups that were considered collaborators escalated, as civil war, guerrilla warfare, ethnic cleansing, pogroms, revenge violence and the violent communist takeover of power all combined to form a dense scenario of violence that shaped many parts of Southeast and East Central Europe. The survivors of the violence of the Second World War found themselves in another threatening situation, some of them had to continue to fight. I want to use the example of Yugoslavia in order to research the transition from war to peace and understand the end of violence. The research will contribute to a book project I am working on together with Dieter Pohl as well as being the subject of an article. Beyond that, I will work on a special edition of a magazine together with Philipp Ther during my time in Vienna. This special edition will provide a platform to the authors we had invited to the Vienna conference „Homogenising Southeastern Europe. Balkan Wars, Ethnic Cleansing and Postwar Ethnic Engineering since 1912" in 2012.

Alexander Korb studied history and gender studies at universities in Berlin as well as spending several semesters studying abroad in Aix-en-Provence, Prague and Voronezh (Russian Federation). His Masters thesis on the German population's reaction to the November pogroms 1938 was awarded with a prize by the foundation "20. Juli 1944" and was published in book form in 2008. He achieved his doctorate in 2010 at the Humboldt-Universität Berlin with a dissertation that was published in 2013 as „Im Schatten des Weltkriegs. Massengewalt der Ustaša gegen Serben, Juden und Roma in Kroatien 1941–1945" [In the shadows of the world war. Ustaša mass violence against Serbs, Jews and Roma in Croatia, 1941-1945] at Hamburger Edition, and which has already been awarded five research awards, including the Fraenkel Prize of the Wiener Library London. Since 2010, Korb has been lecturer in Contemporary European History at the University of Leicester (GB), where he is also deputy director of the Stanley Burton Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

Kinga Frojimovics
Research Fellow (12/2013 – 08/2014)

The Relations between the Jewish Community of Pest and the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien from the Anschluß until the Beginning of the Deportations, 1938-1941.

In 1938 — the year that brought the Anschluß for Austria and the first (anti-)Jewish Law for Hungary —  the Jewish Community of Pest [Pesti Izraelita Hitközség, (PIH)] and the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien (IKG) were the two largest Jewish communities of Central Europe. By 1938, the two Jewish communities had cultivated strong relationships with one another for over a century.
However, the nature of the relationships between the two Jewish communities had changed drastically in 1938. Until then, the typical relationships had predominantly been liturgical/ceremonial ones as well as social ties between individual members of the two communities. From 1938 onwards, as a consequence of the increasingly worsening official anti-Jewish discrimination, ties of social and legal aid had exclusively replaced any other kinds of relationships.
A systematic study of the relationships between the two largest Central European Jewish communities between 1938 and 1941 will enable us to understand how these increasingly adversely influenced central institutions of Jewish life attempted to assist their members and one another during the first phase of the Holocaust. To show how the two communities collaborated and tried to help each other is crucial, since these Jewish institutions are routinely portrayed even in historical works as isolationist bodies that were utterly uninvolved and uninterested in the problems of the Jewish world in general.

Kinga Frojimovics, historian and an archivist. From 2007, she is the director of the Hungarian Section in Yad Vashem Archives (Jerusalem, Israel). From 2010 she is also a research associate at Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, Brandeis University (Waltham, MA, USA).
Her field of research is the history of the Jews in Hungary in the nineteenth and in the twentieth centuries. She focuses on the history of the Jewish religious trends in Hungary, and on the Holocaust. She is the co-editor of the MAKOR, the Series of the Hungarian Jewish Archives (Budapest).