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VWI invites/goes to...

 

Cycle of VWI Fellows’ Colloquia

 

The VWI fellows present their intermediary research results in the context of colloquia which are announced to a small audience and are open to a public audience with an academic and topical interest. The lectures are complemented by a response or commentary by an expert in the given field and are discussed with the other fellows.

 

Due to the previous lack of an appropriate space, the colloquia were held at other Viennese research and cultural institutions with a topical or regional connection to the given subject. From this circumstance was born the “VWI goes to …” format.

 

With the move to a new institute building at Rabensteig 3, the spatial circumstances have changed, so that the VWI is now happily able to invite other research and cultural institutions. Therefore, the VWI is now conducting its colloquia both externally and within its own building, in the framework of continued co-operation with other institutions.

 

The new cycle of fellows’ colloquia “VWI invites/goes to …” is not only able to reach a broader circle of interested persons, but moreover integrates the VWI further into the Viennese scholarly establishment, perhaps even crossing borders into the greater regional research landscape.

 

 

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VWI invites/goes to...
Anastasia Felcher: Debates on the Holocaust in Jewish Samizdat. Political Agenda, Self-Identification and Memory Work
   

Thursday, 27. April 2023, 19:00 - 21:00

Vienna Wiesenthal Institute, Research Lounge, 1010 Vienna, Rabensteig 3, 3rd Floor

 

VWI invites the Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena

pixabay typewriterThe lecture is an attempt to understand the interplay between uncensored media, Jewish nationalism and Holocaust remembrance under the restrictive conditions of Soviet state policy, memory politics and the cult of victory during World War II. It aims to explore the cultural afterlife of the Holocaust in the post-1945 Soviet Union as it appeared on the pages of Soviet Jewish Samizdat periodicals. These versatile clandestine periodicals unsystematically “published” non-conformist political and cultural-literary works in the Soviet Union, from the late 1960s to the late 1980s. Distributed through unofficial channels and read in secrecy, the samizdat periodicals supported the Jewish struggle to emigrate from the Soviet Union. Moreover, these texts stimulated interest in Jewish heritage and revival among Jewish readerships. By closely reading more than a hundred issues of the uncensored periodicals, this lecture intends to reveal political and memorial functions of bringing traumatic pasts to pages of clandestine texts on the Jewish subjects. By doing so, the lecture targets a better understanding of various alternative channels through which Soviet Jews had a chance to discuss the Holocaust as an integral part of their identity and their collective Jewish experience behind the Iron Curtain.

Commented by Irina Sherbakova

Anastasia Felcher is a historian and an archivist. She holds a PhD in Cultural Heritage Studies from the Scuola IMT Alti Studi Lucca (2016). She has received fellowships at several research institutions in Europe and the US. As a practitioner, she worked as a country expert for EHRI (2018-19). Since 2020, she is employed as the Slavic Archivist at the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives at CEU in Budapest. Anastasia has published on the heritage of minorities in pluralistic societies, Jewish heritage in the post-Holocaust age, and literature and politics in Eastern Europe.

Irina Sherbakova is a historian as well as a journalist and translator. In the late 1970s, she began compiling taped interviews of victims of Stalinism and since 1991 has been researching the archives of the KGB. Irina Sherbakova was a founding member of Memorial in 1988, the first independent, civil society organisation in the Soviet Union. Memorial is committed to shedding light on Soviet repression and the protection of human rights in Russia today. In October 2016, Memorial was placed on the list of “foreign agents” by the Russian Ministry of Justice. Irina Sherbakova has been the director of youth and education programmes, coordinated oral history projects as well as the yearly, nationwide student competition “People in History: Twentieth Century Russia.” As an author and editor, Irina Sherbakova has published numerous books on Stalinism and remembrance culture, many of which have been published in German.

Photo credit: ‘vintage typewriter, Russian alphabet’ @ Pixabay

Please register at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. by latest 26 April, 12.00 am and bring your ID.
By attending, you consent to the publication of photographs, video and audio recordings made during the event.

Click here to download the invitation as a PDF file.

In cooperation with:
ImreKerteszKolleg

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The Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI) is funded by:

 

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