Workshops & Tagungen
Die einzelnen Forschungsvorhaben und -projekte des Wiener Wiesenthal Instituts für Holocaust-Studien (VWI) bedürfen einer laufenden Diskussion und tiefgehenden wissenschaftlichen Erörterung und Feinadjustierung.
VWI-Workshops dienen so der Vertiefung und Diskussion von Themen, die gerade im Fokus der Tätigkeiten des Instituts stehen. Das Grundsatzpapier und die empfohlenen Forschungsschwerpunkte des Internationalen Wissenschaftlichen Beirats bzw. dessen Empfehlungen dienen dabei als Richtschnur, wobei aber Themen, Ideen und Konzepte durchaus auch vom VWI selbst aufgegriffen bzw. formuliert und umgesetzt werden können. Häufig werden oder wurden auch externe Fachleute für die Konzeption eines Workshops herangezogen, deren akademische Institutionen dann auch als Partnerorganisationen bei der konkreten Veranstaltung dienen.
Für die Vorbereitung der Workshops hat sich seit 2011 – dem Jahr des ersten VWI-Workshops – eine Mischung aus Beiträgen, die über einen Call for Papers an die Organisatorinnen und Organisatoren herangebracht werden, bzw. die Einladung von ausgewiesenen Fachleuten für einzelne Panels oder die Keynote als durchaus produktiv erwiesen.
Darüber hinaus beteiligt sich das VWI auch finanziell, inhaltlich und organisatorisch an diversen Konferenzen, deren Inhalte mit dem Institutsprofil korrelieren.
| Workshop | |||
| What are Interviews About the Shoah Telling us Beside Hard ‘Facts’ | |||
Mittwoch, 30. Oktober 2019, 15:00 - 18:00 Vienna Wiesenthal Institute, Research Lounge 1010 Vienna, Rabensteig 3, 3rd Floor
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Selma Leydesdorff is professor emerita of oral history and culture in Amsterdam. Her career is part of the transformation of oral history from mostly a fact-finding method to research on the ways memories are framed and modified over time. Publishing books and editing volumes that have shaped oral history is the main thread running through her academic career. As an editor, she has been co-responsible since 2001 for the publication of many volumes, the themes of which are totalitarianism, subjectivity, trauma, and the transmission of stories. She is an expert on Jewish working-class history. She teaches an annual PhD course on oral history that is attended by doctoral students and postdocs from many countries. Over the past fifteen years, she has interviewed on life in concentration camps and recorded interviews with survivors of Auschwitz and Mauthausen participating in international projects. In 2002, she started a project with survivors of Srebrenica, which brought her major international attention as an oral historian of trauma. The book detailing the Srebrenica story was published first in Dutch, then in Bosnian, and finally in English translation. Since 2008, she has recorded life stories surrounding the trial of John Demjanjuk in Munich, including survivors of Sobibor and co-plaintiffs in the trial. In 2015, she started to collaborate on refugee stories together with ‘unknown singular’, a project that involves refugees in creating life narratives. The project will be continued as an effort to connect various local archives and the creation of connections in databases. In 2017, she published a biography of Aleksandr (Sasha) Pechersky, the leader of the Sobibor Uprising, who fell victim to the antisemitic Stalinist purges after his return to his hometown Rostov-on-Don. She has been using material from archives all over the world and has travelled to meet people who knew about his history. Selma Leydesdorff is a public speaker on the Shoah, Jewish history, trauma and memory, and on oral history. The Workshop
Please register at Diese E-Mail-Adresse ist vor Spambots geschützt! Zur Anzeige muss JavaScript eingeschaltet sein! by latest Friday, 25 October, 6.00 pm and bring your ID. Material that will be discussed will be sent to you upon registration. |
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During the workshop, we will try to answer the question concerning the knowledge we create by interviewing. Traditionally, historians look for facts, and since the discipline of history is influenced by testimony in court, people want proof of stories. Let us analyse what happens during an interview (Portelli) and how people talk about the Shoah while trying to avoid addressing it directly. How can patience and the creation of a life story create new stories that speak to us and tell in a different way? During the workshop, we will discuss interview fragments of the project The Long Shadow of Sobibor with survivors of Sobibor and the co-plaintiffs at the Demjanjuk trial. This material has been used for the book on the leader of the uprising of 1943: 
