Disturbing Pasts
Reverberations of the Second World War in Europe after 1945.
UCL, 3-5 July 2014
Organized by the AHRC-funded research group ‘Reverberations of War in
Germany and Europe since 1945’ under the direction of Professor Mary
Fulbrook and Dr Stephanie Bird, based at University College London (UCL).
This conference sets out to explore the complex and diverse reverberations of
the Second World War after 1945. The notion of ‘disturbing pasts’ refers to the
experience of war and violence. But the aim is to understand how and why these
experiences continue to disturb a later present, and how some people later
disturb an apparently dormant past. The focus is on conflicting, unexpected and
often dissonant interpretations and representations of these events among both
those who were the witnesses, victims and perpetrators of these events and
among different communities in the generations that followed. On a theoretical
level, therefore, one objective of this conference is to raise challenges to the
widely used and yet under-theorized concept of ‘collective memory’.
For the purposes of this conference, ‘disturbance’ is addressed on three
different levels which interrelate in what might be called a ‘dialectics of
disturbance’:
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•
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Those aspects of the past that remain disturbing, however hard people
try to repress, forget, contain or silence this past;
The ways in which people later actively ‘disturb’ this past; processes of
confronting, interacting and dealing with the past, that in turn affect and
alter how it is perceived and what its implications are for a later present;
The often disturbing ethical questions raised in relation to the role of the
analyst, historian and writer confronting this past.
Key issues include:
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TRANSMISSION: How are experiences of war and violence transmitted
between and across communities and generations?
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EMBODIMENTS: How were the experiences of war and violence and their
memories inscribed onto the human body? How is the body used to make sense
of or deal with these experiences, whether in daily life or in artistic interventions?
•
REPRESENTATION - How are the experiences of war and violence
represented in various media (films, literature, memorials, autobiographical
accounts, press) and what is the wider impact of these representations on
changing social perceptions?
•
DISPLACEMENT AND IDENTIFICATION: How did people interpret and
deal with the experience of losing their home and making a new one elsewhere?
What roles do place/space play for identification and identity construction?
This conference is supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council,
the UCL European Institute, the School for European Languages Culture
and Society and the UCL Faculty Institute of Graduate Studies.
Thursday 3 July
Wilkins Haldane Room, UCL, Wilkins Building, Gower Street, WC1E 6BT London
1:00 Registration
1:45 Welcome and Introduction
Panel I: Challenging Narratives
2:00-3:30
Mary Fulbrook (UCL), ‘Disturbing the Past / Disturbed by the Past’
Tsila Ratner (UCL),‘Unbearable Mending: The Holocaust in Contemporary
Israeli Literature’
Katya Krylova (Nottingham), 'Disturbing the Past: The Representation of the
Waldheim Affair in Robert Schindel’s Der Kalte'
Chair: Tim Beasley-Murray (UCL)
Panel II. Hauntings
4:00 – 5:00
Gilly Carr (Cambridge), 'Disturbing ghosts, German bunker restoration and
postmemory in the Channel Islands'
Uilleam Blacker (Oxford), ‘Haunted Cities: Remembering Vanished Others and
Urban Identity in Eastern Europe'
5:15 – 6:45
Susanne Knittel (Utrecht), 'The Uncanny Memory of Nazi Euthanasia'
Alexandra Hills (UCL), Victimhood through a Creaturely Lens: Reckonings with
the Holocaust in Ilse Aichinger and Primo Levi.
Joanne Pettit (Kent), 'Second Generation Perpetrators? Inherited Guilt and the
Holocaust'
Chair: Mererid Puw Davies (UCL)
7:30
Conference Dinner
TAS, 22 Bloomsbury St, London, WC1B 3QJ
Friday 4 July
Wilkins Haldane Room, UCL, Wilkins Building, Gower Street, WC1E 6BT London
Panel III. Fascination / Pleasure
9:30 – 11:00
Peter Krämer (UEA), ' “Mein Führer, I can walk!” References to the Nazi Past in
the Making and Reception of Dr. Strangelove (1964)'
Alissa Timoshkina (KCL), 'The Past is Still Present: Representing the Second
World War in Ordinary Fascism (documentary, Mikhail Romm, USSR, 1965)'
Julia Wagner (UCL), ‘Travelling to Remember, Travelling to Forget. German
tourists in Europe and reminders of a disturbing past’
11:30 – 1:00
Stephanie Bird (UCL), ‘"Comedy – or more precisely: the pure joke – is the
essential inner side of mourning which from time to time, like the lining of a dress
at the hem or lapel, makes its presence felt.” On comedy and suffering in postwar German texts.’
Isabelle Hesse (York), 'Disturbing Laughter? Hitler’s Return to Contemporary
Germany'
Caitríona Leahy (TCD), ‘Disturbing Anselm Kiefer’
Chair: Helena Flam (Leipzig)
1.00 - 2.00 Lunch
Panel IV. (Dis)Placing Identities and Disturbing Memories
2:00 - 3:30
Christiane Wienand (UCL), ‘Creating a better Future by Disturbing the Past?
Young West-Germans as Reconciliation Activists in the 1960s and 1970s’
Anna Zadora (Strasbourg), 'Disturbing, Changing and Controversial Memories
of the WWII in Belarus'
Ulrike Lang (Munich), 'From Oblivion to Complex Memoryscape: The Changing
Significance of the Łódź Ghetto for the Local Community after 1945 as a Result of
Interethnic and Interinstitutional Transmission of Memory'
4:00 – 5:00
Dominik Rigoll (Jena), '45ers and 68ers in France and West Germany'
Alexey Tikhomirov (Frankfurt am Main), 'Beyond “Fascist Sortie” and “Popular
Uprising for Democracy and Rights”: Rethinking the 17 June 1953 unrest in East
Germany'
5:15 – 6:15
Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe (Berlin), 'Survivor Testimonies and the Process of
Coming to Terms with the Holocaust in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia'
Gaelle Fisher (UCL), ‘Disturbance and coherence in contemporary accounts of
Germans and Jews from Bukovina’
Chair: Susan Morrissey (UCL)
6:15 – 7:30
Wine reception
7:30 – 9:00
Public lecture and discussion: Lisa Appignanesi
Gustave Tuck Lecture Theatre, UCL, Wilkins Building, Gower Street, WC1E 6BT
London
Saturday 5 July
Wilkins Haldane Room, UCL, Wilkins Building, Gower Street, WC1E 6BT London
Panel V. Redefinitions / reconstructing identities
9:00 – 11:00
Christiane Grieb (UCL), 'Communication, Declaration or Negotiation of Historic
Truth? The Presence of a Concentration Camp – 1945-2013'
Julian Peteley (Brunel), ‘Too Unpleasant for Public Exhibition’
Julia Lange (Hamburg), 'The past is a foreign country? German American
politics of memory and the Holocaust'
Jennifer Smyth (Warwick), 'Film, History, and the Search for Europe in Postwar
Czechoslovakia'
11:30 – 12:30
Antoine Burgard (Lyons / Montreal), '“A sympathetic boy whom the years of
suffering have not too heavily marked”. Identity construction, trauma’s
perceptions and stereotyping of Holocaust orphans through social workers’
words in immediate Postwar Europe'
Tamara West (Birmingham), 'Displaced Homes and Incomplete Narratives'
Chair: Mark Hewitson
12.30 – 1.30 Lunch
1:30 – 3:30
Closing Discussion
Helena Flam (Leipzig), Dorothee Wierling (Hamburg), Richard Overy (Exeter)
Chair: Stephanie Bird (UCL)