Markéta Bajgerová Verly

Junior Fellow (10/2024 – 08/2025)

One Past, Two Histories: Exhibiting the Shanghai Jewish Refugees in China and Austria in Comparative Perspective

Many museums around the World launched exhibitions on the topic of Shanghai Jewish refugees in the past few years, putting the history of 20,000 Jews who fled to Shanghai 1933–1941 on display. Though connected in topic, the exhibitions do not present a unified historical account. This research project will analyse and compare two Shanghai Jewish Refugees history exhibitions that opened in 2020: the temporary exhibit titled “Little Vienna in Shanghai” by the Jewish Museum in Vienna and the reworked permanent exhibition of the Shanghai Jewish Refugees. The two exhibits present diametrically different versions of the experience of the European Jewry in wartime Shanghai, the former addressing the challenges that awaited the refugees in Shanghai, the latter romanticising the situation and claiming utopian harmony between the Chinese and the Jews. This project will deconstruct both exhibitions, exploring the question: What does the memorialisation of the Shanghai Jewish refugees reveal about the politics of the globalisation of the Holocaust?

Markéta Bajgerová Verly is a PhD student in the ERC project “Globalized Memorial Museums” at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and at the University of Vienna. Her research focuses on “War of Resistance against Japan” museums in contemporary China. In 2020, she obtained an MA degree in China Studies at the Yenching Academy of Peking University. In China, she led a Dean’s Grant project mapping 30 museums across China devoted to the memory of the War of Resistance and studied its memory politics. She holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Glasgow in Politics and History.

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