Katherine A. Lebow

Research Fellow (10/2013 – 03/2014)

Postwar Testimony, Polish Survivors, and the Cultural Specificities of Narrative Practice

One of the most remarkable early responses to the Holocaust was the collection of testimony. This response, however, was neither inevitable nor universal. My project considers the particular legacies that shaped Polish Jewish survivors’ turn to testimony after World War II. Among them was the role of “everyman autobiography” in interwar Polish social science and public discourse—a set of research and literary practices foregrounding the voices of ordinary individuals. Best-selling compilations of memoirs by unemployed workers and destitute peasants, e.g., had focused Poles’ attention on the human face of poverty in the 1930s, using personal narratives as a powerful form of “moral witness.” At VWI, I will explore the influences of this legacy on survivors as they faced the unprecedented requirements of Holocaust documentation and memorialization.

Katherine A. Lebow (Ph.D., Columbia) has taught at the University of Virginia and Newcastle University. Recent publications include Unfinished Utopia: Nowa Huta, Stalinism, and Polish Society, 1949-56 (Cornell, 2013) and “The Conscience of the Skin: Interwar Polish Autobiography and Social Rights,” Humanity 3, 3 (2012). She is writing a book about “everyman autobiographies” in transatlantic space from the Great Depression to the Holocaust.

Katherine Lebow's Homepage

Miloslav Szabó
Research Fellow (10/2013 – 08/2014)

Antisemitism in Slovakia during the 1920s and 1930s

This research project is the first to aim for a systematic treatment of the history of antisemitism in Slovakia in the time of the First Czechoslovak Republic. It aims to show that while antisemitism did not take on an institutionalised form until 1938, it was certainly an effective tool as semantic construct and object of political and social practice. Not least, the research will address the issue of in what way the antisemitic radicalisation in the autumn of 1938 could be based on factors of foreign or domestic policies. Beyond that, the continuities that exist in the antisemitism before and after 1938 are to be defined. The research project is aimed to contribute to the explanation of the Holocaust in Slovakia, that is, the planned disfranchisement of the Jewish population, the looting of Jewish property and the extradition of most of the Jewish citizens to Nazi Germany. It will do so by showing how the propagandistic invocation of a "Jewish Question" by the authoritarian regime and the search of a "solution" thereof shaped Slovakian politics as early as the 1920s and 1930s.

Miloslav Szabó, historian, PhD in 2004 from the Charles University in Prague with a dissertation on Alfred Rosenberg. Since 2007 study of the history of Slovakian antisemitism in the framework of the research group „Antisemitismus in Europa, 1879-1914" at the Centre for Antisemitism Research at the Technische Universität in Berlin, scholarship recipient of the Gerda Henkel Stiftung and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. Since 2011 engaged at a research project at the Jewish Museum in Prague.

Elisabeth Gallas
Research Fellow (10/2012 – 09/2013)

Contemporary diagnoses from New York: Jewish interpretations of the Holocaust during the 1940s

This research project focusses on the attempts at documentation and interpretation of the catastrophic events in Europe made by European emigrants as well as American-Jewish persons during the 1940s in New York. Using publications from the surroundings of the Institute of Jewish Affairs, the Jewish Social Studies, the American Jewish Committee and more, which have hitherto hardly been regarded, it can be demonstrated that especially the dense Jewish organisation landscape of New York housed countless initiatives to report and comment on the developments in Europe. These provide not only valuable contemporary sources that cast a new light on the extra-European Jewish perception of the Holocaust and the resultant plans for the reconstruction of Jewish existence after the end of the war. The texts produced here also provide a hitherto unknown basis for axes of interpretation and horizons of understanding, which developed in the later decades of historical approaches to the fact of the Holocaust and thus question the current periodisation of the history of coming to terms with the Holocaust.

Elisabeth Gallas studied Cultural Sciences and German Studies at the University Leipzig as well as Sociology at the University of Copenhagen; 2005 M.A. at the University Leipzig with a thesis on the reception of literary text by Holocaust survivors in Germany. Since autumn 2005 research assistant at the Simon-Dubnow-Institute for Jewish History and Culture e.V. at the University Leipzig, since November 2012 as the deputy director of the section on Law, Institutions, Politics; 2011 doctoral degree at the University Leipzig with the topic: ‘Saving books. From the Offenbach depot to Jewish thought on history after the Holocaust’.

List of Publications Elisabeth Gallas

Raul Cârstocea
Research Fellow (10/2012 – 09/2013)

Negotiating Modernity – The Role of the Jewish Community in Shaping Perceptions of Tradition and Progress in Interwar Romania

The project addresses the role of the Jewish community in Romania in the intellectual debates surrounding the issue of the country’s modernisation. In a late modernising country with many of its traditional social structures still intact, the interplay between tradition and modernity represented the focus of the discussions regarding possible patterns of development ever since the creation of the new state in the 19th century. In such a context, the issue of the Jewish minority, predominantly urban, more literate and skilled than the majority population, while at the same time perceived by the Romanian majority as a competing group that had preserved its solid community bonds and was much more united along national lines, was inextricably linked with the discussion surrounding the process of nation-building. The present project explores the dynamics of the relationship between the Jewish minority and the Romanian majority in a country ‘negotiating’ its passage to modernity.

Raul Cărstocea obtained a PhD degree in History from University College London in 2011, with a thesis examining the role of anti-Semitism in the ideology of the ‘Legion of the Archangel Michael’, Romania’s interwar fascist movement. From January to June 2012 he held a Teaching Fellowship in History at the same institution. He has published several articles dealing with extreme right groups and the development of anti-Semitism in Romania.

List of Publications Raul Cârstocea