2017–2022

The topic of helping persons persecuted as Jews during the Holocaust is particularly relevant at the Selma Stern Center: Erhard and Charlotte Oewerdieck not only accommodated a Jewish office worker during the war and financed the Lachmann family’s escape, but they also helped Selma Stern herself and her husband Eugen Täubler to emigrate to the USA at the last minute in March 1941, which led them to also keep part of their library and personal documents. For this help, they were honored as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem on September 21, 1978.

The political use of the topic of “rescue” in recent years – for example, in the case of the Polish government under the PiS party – shows the relevance of the topic not only for historical research on the Holocaust, but above all for its interpretation, representation, commemoration, and politicization.

The aim of our research group, which existed for five years between 2017 and 2022, was to understand narratives of the “rescue of Jews” after 1945 both in terms of their own complexity and comparatively and to complement and enrich each other’s work by appreciating the different questions and country-specific characteristics. In doing so, we discussed the topic in over forty internal workshops, to which we were often able to invite experts in the field.

 

TEAM

Manja Herrmann, PhD (director)

The director of the research group, Manja Herrmann, is a cultural historian of German-Jewish studies whose research focuses on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with a theoretical emphasis on aspects of transculturalism, global history, and gender. Trained in Germany and Israel, Herrmann studied Jewish studies and modern history in Berlin, Potsdam, and Jerusalem, receiving her PhD from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer Sheva, in 2015 (committee members: Mark H. Gelber, Steven E. Aschheim, and Paula Kabalo).

Manja Herrmann’s second book manuscript was written during her directorship of the research group and examines Yad Vashem’s Righteous Among the Nations program (est. 1963) from a transcultural perspective, focusing on both the “traveling” and “localizing” (Astrid Erll) portrayal of the West German Righteous in Israel and the FRG between 1945 and 1980. It thereby points to the different political uses and functions of narratives of the “rescue of Jews” across national borders after 1945. As such, it is the first scholarly work to analyze the West German Righteous files stored at Yad Vashem and to trace them from the application process through the honoring itself to the perception of the Righteous in the FRG.

 

 

Ida Richter, MA (research associate)

Ida Richter’s research focuses on the history of the Holocaust and its commemoration, as well as the history of human rights and international criminal law. She studied political science at Science Po’s Franco-German campus in Nancy and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and completed a master’s in human rights at Sciences Po Paris. An article resulting from her master’s thesis was published in the Journal of International Criminal Justice in 2020.

Richter’s PhD dissertation inquires into the universalistic framing of rescue during the Holocaust throughout the decades after 1945 by examining the case of Raoul Wallenberg’s reception history. Today, Wallenberg is one of the most iconic rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust, known for his help in Budapest from July 1944 on, as well as for his disappearance in the Soviet Union in January 1945. He has become a heroic figure representing concepts with a claim to universal validity – for instance, since 2012, the Council of Europe has awarded a “Raoul Wallenberg Prize” for outstanding work in humanitarian action and human rights. While framing Wallenberg in these ways may seem self-evident today, the study’s analysis of his transnational reception history from 1945 until the 1990s reveals the complex – and often highly politicized – attribution processes leading to his iconic status.

 

 

Charlotte Weber, MA (research associate)

Charlotte Weber's research focuses on gender history, the history and memory of the Holocaust, and German-Jewish history. She studied history at the Humboldt University in Berlin and completed her master’s in the history of Jewish cultures at the Hochschule für Jüdische Studien in Heidelberg and the Center for Jewish Studies in Graz. In her dissertation Weber offers a detailed analysis of three of the most influential women in West Germany memory concerning the topic of helping persons persecuted as Jews during the Holocaust: Else Behrend-Rosenfeld (1891–1970), a Holocaust survivor who wrote the first monograph on the subject in 1945; Gertrud Luckner (1900–1995), probably the best-known and most decorated Catholic intellectual from Freiburg; and Inge Deutschkron (1922–2022), a social democrat and political journalist who was strongly committed to honoring those who had helped her survive the persecutions and whose publications and theatrical play created structures in the German memory of rescue that are still influential today. Through this, Weber shows how important “rescue narratives” were to them in giving legitimacy and voice to their interpretations of the past and how deeply gendered attributions and biases have shaped and continue to shape our understanding and interpretation of the subject.

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE 2020

“New Approaches to the Rescue of Jews during the Holocaust: History, Politics, Commemoration” (2020)

In 2020, our research group organized and convened the Selma Stern Center’s annual conference, which addressed the topic of “New Approaches to the Rescue of Jews during the Holocaust: History, Politics, Commemoration.” It brought together various experts from history, literary studies, Holocaust studies, Jewish studies, and cultural studies, and all the papers presented during the three-day international conference not only explored new insights into the history of rescue during the Holocaust and examined new perspectives on the narratives of the “rescue of Jews” after 1945 in a variety of national and cultural contexts, but also vividly illustrated the relevance of the topic in academic discourse and beyond.

Detailed Conference report (in English):

Ida Richter, Charlotte Weber, Tagungsbericht: New Approaches to the Rescue of Jews during the Holocaust: History, Politics, Commemoration, In: H-Soz-Kult, 08.05.2021, <www.hsozkult.de/conferencereport/id/fdkn-127495>.

 

 

PUBLICATION 2022

7. Jahrbuch des Selma Stern Zentrums für Jüdische Studien Berlin-Brandenburg: Rettung als Konzept: Interdisziplinäre Lesarten (2022, in German)

 

This volume of the Selma Stern Center for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg’s Yearbook explores the concept of “rescue” across the boundaries of the disciplines represented at the Center. One focus is the rescue of and help for Jews during the Holocaust and its interpretation after 1945. In addition, there are also considerations that approach rescue from a conceptual angle.

This volume combines historical, literary, political, philosophical, and gender-specific analyses and thus makes an important contribution to illustrating the complexity of a topic that is often examined in a one-sided and abbreviated way.