Category: Compromised Identities

About Historical Others and Imagined Others: representations of Nazi perpetrators in exhibitions and public imagination

Post author By compromisedidentities
Post date June 3, 2020

For my doctoral thesis, I examined exhibitions at memorial sites and documentation centres in Germany and Austria. The question of my research was how these exhibitions represented the NS-perpetrators. I was interested in the explanations and interpretations they provided for the perpetrators and what statements, possibly unintended ones, the exhibition design had created. But beyond the exhibitions, I am concerned with contemporary approaches to National Socialist crimes and their perpetrators.

Tags Commemoration, Exhibitions

Compromising roles: German actresses in Nazi-occupied Minsk

Anne-Lise Bobeldijk Compromised Identities Featured

Post author By compromisedidentities
Post date January 7, 2020

Image 1: Photograph ‘Three men and a woman at the sign of the Wehrdorf Maly Trostenets, near the forced labour camp Maly Trostenets’. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archive #71952, courtesy of Belarusian State Archive of Documentary Film and Photography.

“Dear Mutti, everything is as crazy as you would imagine during a tour. We have been on the train continuously since Monday 7 am, everywhere we have 6 to 10 hours delays, and at the moment we are sitting in a Red Cross wooden barrack and have not been able to wash ourselves for days. We received rations behind Warsaw and have to wait until afternoon (now 6 o’clock in the morning, about minus 15 degrees) for the connecting train to Minsk, which we were not allowed to use this evening due to danger.”

Tags Culture, Family Life, Occupation

Silent is the Country or Culture of Remembrance in Klagenfurt

Christoph Thonfeld Compromised Identities

Post author By compromisedidentities
Post date June 4, 2019
Sticky post

When you think of the city of Klagenfurt, illustrious names of German language literary and popular culture come to mind. Robert Musil, Ingeborg Bachmann or Udo Jürgens. You will find the house where Musil was born right in front of the train station, while a sculpture of Bachmann is in one of the many parks which form a green belt around the history-laden old city centre. What brought me here, though, was a more notorious side of the city’s past or, to be more precise, that of a number of its former residents.

Tags Commemoration, Culture, Trials

Soviet Collaboration Trials

Compromised Identities Franziska Exeler

Post author By compromisedidentities
Post date March 21, 2019

From 14 to 17 July 1943, eleven Soviet citizens stood trial in Krasnodar, a city in southwestern Russia. During the German occupation of the town from August 1942 to February 1943, all but one of the defendants had worked for the SS, primarily in auxiliary functions. Accused of having committed crimes under German rule, a Soviet military tribunal sentenced eight of the defendants to death, and three to long prison sentences.

Tags Occupation, Trials

A Tale from the Third Reich’s Interior Ministry

Compromised Identities Featured Helen Roche

Post author By compromisedidentities
Post date December 23, 2018

A little while ago, I happened to be working through a seemingly innocuous file from the German Interior Ministry during the mid-1930s, collated by one Hans Pfundtner, who was a Staatssekretär (a very high-ranking civil servant) in the Ministry. It contains a series of letters to (and about) Pfundtner’s son Reinhard, who has just been sent to a Napola, one of the Nazi elite-schools which I’ve been researching for the last few years.

Tags Family Life, Functionaries, Hostile Environment

‘Falsification of memory, falsification of reality, negation of reality’: The question of individual and collective memory in Holocaust fiction – guest post by Kim Sherwood

Compromised Identities Kim Sherwood

Post author By compromisedidentities
Post date November 9, 2018

The novelist David Mitchell has suggested there are three ‘themes hardwired into all novels: identity, memory and time.’ With narrative comes time; with time, memory; with memory, identity. In the six years it took me to write my debut novel, Testament, I was grappling with Joseph Silk, a protagonist who reorders time, denies memory, and […]

Tags Commemoration, Culture

‘Ausgewiesen’

Compromised Identities Dr. Alina Bothe

Post author By compromisedidentities
Post date September 16, 2018

On 8th August 2018, the first exhibition on the so-called “Polenaktion” in Berlin opened at the Centrum Judaicum in Berlin. The exhibition tells the stories of the Berlin families who were the first to fall victim to a mass action which bore a resemblance not only to earlier expulsions, but also to forthcoming deportations. It was the first time that Jews, based on their citizenship, were arrested and transported “to the East”, which was at that time the still sovereign state of Poland.

Tags Deportations, Exhibitions, Functionaries

Significant Sites and Memorial Unease

Compromised Identities Featured Mary Fulbrook

Post author By compromisedidentities
Post date August 22, 2018
Sticky post

In summer 2018, the Zaglembie World Organization organized a tour of the Zaglembie (Zagłębie Dąbrowskie) region of southwestern Poland for Holocaust survivors and their descendants – those whose families had lived in this area and so many of whom had been murdered in the Nazi machinery of ghettoization, starvation, slave labour, and the gas chambers of nearby Auschwitz.

Tags Commemoration, Memorials

‘Understanding Perpetration and Complicity’ Workshop, 28th June 2018

Compromised Identities

Post author By compromisedidentities
Post date July 18, 2018

On 28th June 2018, the ‘Compromised Identities’ project held its first annual workshop, which considered the different ways in which we can understand perpetration and complicity, including comparative perspectives.