Peter Filkins, the Richard B. Fisher Professor of Literature and the Division Head of Languages and Literature at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, is an award-winning poet and translator, as well as author of a 2019 biography of H.G. Adler: H.G. Adler: A Life in Many Worlds (Oxford).H.G. Adler (1910 – 1988) lived at the center of his times and on their margin. A survivor of Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and two other concentration camps, he chronicled his experience in two dozen books of seminal history, modernist fiction, formally intricate poems, and insightful essays. Despite close friendships with Leo Baeck, Elias Canetti, and Heinrich Böll, he remained a writer’s writer, largely unknown and neglected. Thus, the story of his life must be told through the times in which he lived, as well as how the same lived through him. Peter Filkins discussed the intersection of biography and history in shaping the story of Adler’s life and work.
This lecture wass presented by the German Department, and co-sponsored by the Chabraja Center for Historical Studies, the Comparative Literary Studies Program, the Crown Family Center for Jewish and Israel Studies, the Weinberg College Office of the Dean, and the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University.
March 6, 2018
Americans and the Holocaust: An Exhibition at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum
The Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University, along with the Department of History, celebrated the work of our colleague Daniel Greene, who curated an exhibition on Americans’ responses to the Holocaust at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. Greene discussed the exhibition and his contributions to it.
January 30, 2018
The Holocaust Educational Foundation, in partnership with the Buffett Institute for Global Studies and the Department of History, presented a panel discussion, “The Criminalization of Kindness: Forced Migration and Sanctuary from World War II until the Present.” The panel featured three Northwestern professors: Galya Ben-Arieh, “Sanctuary, Solidarity, and Sanctions: Civilian Assistance for Refugees and State Responses in the U.S. and Italy,” Benjamin Frommer, “Emigration, Flight, and Internal Resettlement during the Holocaust,” and Lauren Stokes, “Sanctuary Evanston: Refugees in The Daily Northwestern, from the 1930s to Now.”
November 2 and 7, 2017
Representing Queer Lives under Nazism: Two Films, Twenty Years
Aimee and Jaguar - Film Screening
Panel discussion
The Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University, in partnership with Northwestern Hillel, the Women’s Center, and the department of Gender and Sexuality Studies, presented a panel discussion, “Representing Queer Lives under Nazism: Two Films, Twenty Years.” The panel featured Northwestern Professors Sarah M. Cushman, Danny M. Cohen, and Phyllis Lassner discussing two films, Bent and Aimee and Jaguar, that focus on the lives of LGBT individuals during the Third Reich.
May 26, 2017
Jews and Justice in Communist Poland in the Immediate Aftermath of the Holocaust
In the aftermath of the Holocaust, survivors and Jews the world over were anxious to see Nazis and their accomplices put on trial for their crimes. Poland’s surviving Jewish remnant played a particularly active role in the effort to bring Nazis and Nazi collaborators before the bar of justice. Gabriel Finder (University of Virginia) examined various ways in which Polish Jews participated in the pursuit of justice for the victims of Nazi-era crimes. Although Jews operated within constraints, not least of which were those brought to bear by Poland’s communist regime, they were resolved to become agents in the legal response to the Holocaust.
This lecture was presented by the Department of German and the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University.
April 19, 2017
Trial by Documentary: The Harlans, from Jud Süss (1940) to Notre Nazi (1984)
In availing themselves of unconventional strategies and appealing to non-legal discourses, documentary films have exceptional latitude in critiquing the legal and judicial spheres. Brad Prager (University of Missouri) examined the 1984 documentary Notre Nazi, which was produced by Thomas Harlan, the son of the notorious Nazi filmmaker Veit Harlan, who was best known for directing the propaganda film Jud Süss (1940). In Thomas Harlan’s film Alfred Filbert, a former SS perpetrator, stands in for the elder Harlan, and the proceedings that take place in the film’s makeshift courtroom work through the German past by foregrounding all manner of affects, including filial ambivalence, shame, and rage.
This lecture was presented by the Department of German and the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University.
March 7, 2017
Confessional Performance and the Holocaust Perpetrator: Gitta Sereny’s 1971 Interview with Treblinka Commandant Franz Stangl
In this talk, Erin McGlothlin (Washington University in St. Louis) investigated the ethical implications of Gitta Sereny’s journalistic biography Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience (1974). The book is based on Sereny’s extensive interviews with Franz Stangl, who was then serving a life sentence for his role in the Holocaust. McGlothlin analyzed Sereny’s intersubjective encounter with Stangl and her construction of his experience as one of ethical epiphany.
This lecture was presented by the Department of German and the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University.
April 13, 2016 Evanston Public Library
The Crime and the Silence: Confronting the Massacre of Jews in Wartime Jedwabne
Anna Bikont’s book The Crime and the Silence tells the story of the July 1941 massacre of Jews in the Eastern Polish towns of Jedwabne and Radziłów, where local Poles rounded up their Jewish neighbors and burned them in a barn. She investigated the long silence in the years following these events, and the fierce debate initiated in Poland by historian Jan T. Gross’s book Neighbors. The debate broke some of the taboos central to the Polish sense of identity, but left many untouched, among them the anti-Semitism prevalent in the Catholic Church before, during, and after WW II and the scale of these crimes. She spoke about the events of 1941, telling the story of Stanislaw Ramotowski, one of the main characters in the book, and about the present-day impact of the Jedwabne massacre in Poland.
Anna Bikont is a nonfiction writer and a journalist for Gazeta Wyborcza, a major Polish newspaper which she helped found in 1989. Her book The Crime and the Silence: Confronting the Massacre of the Jews in Wartime Jedwabne, published in 2015 by FSG, was selected as one of the 100 Notable Books of the Year by the editors of New York Times and won a National Jewish Book Award.
The Evanston Public Library partners regularly with Northwestern. They host an ongoing Northwestern Humanities Lecture series from the Alice Kaplan Institute, and Northwestern faculty have contributed to the Mission Impossible classics and Muslim Journeys book discussions. The library welcomes Northwestern students, staff, and faculty.
October 15, 2014, Evanston Public Library
Who Owns Anne Frank in the 21st Century?
A brand-new adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank is now meeting with success on stage in Amsterdam. We are expecting two new Anne Frank movies and historians are working on two new scholarly editions of Anne’s work. Why then are the two different Anne Frank Foundations in Basel and Amsterdam fighting with each other?David Barnouw explored the contentious legacy of Anne Frank and her diaries in our time.
Dr. David Barnouw is a Dutch historian and an emeritus researcher at the Netherlands Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies (NIOD) in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. A writer, speaker, and scholar, Barnouw is a recognized expert on Anne Frank and World War Two in the Netherlands. He has appeared in multiple documentary films and his writings are frequently published by the Dutch and international media. Barnouw is the editor of The Diary of Anne Frank: the Revised Critical Edition.
The Evanston Public Library partners regularly with Northwestern on programming. They host an ongoing Northwestern Humanities Lecture series from the Alice Kaplan Institute, and Northwestern faculty have contributed to the Mission Impossible classics and Muslim Journeys book discussions. The library welcomes Northwestern students, staff and faculty.