Virtual Exhibition Panel: Jewish Archives, Artefacts and Memory in Transit

The Wiener Holocaust Library’s current exhibition, Holocaust Letters, examines Holocaust-era private correspondence as sites of knowledge production as well as for their traces of the material past, including enforced Jewish migration.

With the soon-to-launched virtual Holocaust Letters exhibition as a starting point, this virtual panel will explore new ways and research into thinking about archives, artefacts and other primary sources, including material sources as well as those not held in traditional archives to help us gain deeper insight into the history of Jewish refugees in transit and the knowledge those migrants possessed, produced, transmitted, or lost.

The panellists will discuss what happens when migrants leave their homes and try to convey both the sense of loss and the disorienting experience of learning to live somewhere new, in correspondence and artefacts that capture experiences before, during or after their migration. In terms of correspondence, how are their words crafted and understood, depending on who they are writing to and when? How do Holocaust-era letters, photographs, and other artefacts communicate experiences? What happens to the “archive” in the context of transoceanic migration or persecution, such as the Holocaust?

This event is organised as part of the Holocaust Letters exhibition events series organised by the Holocaust and Genocide Research Partnership in partnership with the German Historical Institute London, the German Historical Institute Washington with its Pacific Office at UC Berkeley, and the California Institute of Technology.

Speakers:

Dr Christine Schmidt, Deputy Director and Head of Research, Wiener Holocaust Library: Introduction and Holocaust Letters

Prof Simone Lässig, Director, German Historical Institute Washington: The Research Field „In Global Transit“ – An Introduction

Dr Anna-Carolin Augustin, Research Fellow, German Historical Institute Washington: Jewish Ritual Objects in Transit: Archives of Knowledge or Vessels of Memory?

Dr Indra Sangupta, Head of India Research Programme, German Historical Institute London: Notes on The City as Refuge: Jewish Calcutta and Refugees from Hitler’s Europe. An Exhibition held in Calcutta in February 2018

Prof Christina von Hodenberg, Director, German Historical Institute London: Closing Remarks