Kolloquium: Missing Berlin. “Former Berliners” from Aaround the World in Correspondence with their Hometown

  • Datum: 15.01.2019
  • Uhrzeit: 17:00
  • Vortragende(r): Joachim Schlör
  • Ort: Max-Planck-Institut für Bildungsforschung, Lentzeallee 94, 14195 Berlin
  • Raum: Kleiner Sitzungssaal
  • Gastgeber: Forschungsbereich Geschichte der Gefühle
  • Kontakt: sekfrevert@mpib-berlin.mpg.de

The Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, led by Prof. Ute Frevert, cordially invites all interested to attend its summer semester 2019 colloquium:

Joachim Schlör, University of Southampton

Missing Berlin. “Former Berliners” from Aaround the World in Correspondence with their Hometown

In the early 1990s, the Berlin Senate set up a working group to produce a ‘Memorial Book for the Murdered Jews of Berlin’ – an act of memory politics and a means to document Germany’s maturity in dealing with its past and to prevent new nationalism and chauvinism. This is at least how the initiative has been regarded (and welcomed) by a very specific group of people: Jews who had been born or grown up in Berlin, had to emigrate after 1933, were dispersed all over the globe, from Melbourne to Cape Town, from Buenos Aires to San Francisco. Contacted by the working group and asked about the fate of their relatives in the Holocaust, these ‘Berliners’ provided, in addition, stories of their own survival and of their relationship with the ‘former’ hometown. This correspondence is full of emotions, and Schlör will discuss questions arising from this emotional exchange.

Joachim Schlör received his PhD from Tübingen University in 1990 (Nachts in der großen Stadt. Paris, Berlin, London 1840-1930) and his habilitation from Potsdam University in 2003 (Das Ich der Stadt. Debatten über Judentum und Urbanität, 1822-1938). Since 2006 he has been Professor for modern Jewish/non-Jewish Relations at the University of Southampton, trying to bridge and bring into dialogue urban studies, migration studies, and Jewish cultural studies. His latest book has been based on a collection of family letters and told the story of one family’s emigration to the UK (“Liesel, it’s time for you to leave”. Von Heilbronn nach England. Die Flucht der Familie Rosenthal vor der nationalsozialistischen Verfolgung).




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