Course description
For a long time, the historiography of the Holocaust focused on the perpetrators and the Nazi state. The analytical perspectives have fundamentally changed in recent decades and transnational, regional and local approaches with a focus on Jewish and other victim groups and thus on other source genres have brought new knowledge in terms of time and space of the Holocaust. With this shift, early Holocaust scholarship carried out by survivors themselves also came to the fore as well as the question of why it was neglected for so long. In the seminar, we will deal with these newer approaches and topics (e. g. geographies of the Holocaust, Jewish responses, the Holocaust of Sinti and Roma, queer Holocaust studies, Holocaust literature and testimonies) and methods (e. g. digital humanities, oral history). In addition to regular readings, we will have several excursions to visit places, institutions, researchers and curators in Vienna dealing with the history and memory of the Holocaust.
- Instructor: Ines Koeltzsch