Colloquium: Laughing about Nazism, Jealousy and Love. Emotions in Court Cases in Nazi Germany, 1936-1944

The Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, led by Prof. Ute Frevert, cordially presents its winter semester 2021/2022 colloquium.

Alexandra Oeser, University of Paris Nanterre

Laughing about Nazism, anger, fear and joy. Emotions in court cases in Nazi Germany, 1936-1944

The Nazi past is a serious subject. The rationalized extermination of millions of people demands silence, sadness, reflexivity. But people have joked and continue to joke about Nazism: from Nazi perpetrators and bystanders to Jewish concentration camp inmates and survivors but also contemporary citizens all over the world. This project analyses from a sociological perspective ordinary German citizens who joked about Nazism between 1936-1944 and who were tried for it. How did prosecutors and judges evaluate the jokes? How did they use emotions such as anger, fear and joy in order to judge the accused? And how did the witnesses and accused use emotions in court? What role did gender play in the expression of these emotions? Which expressions of emotions “helped” to reduce a sentence, and which had a negative effect? And did judges evaluate these utterances differently depending on whether they were expressed by a man or a woman? Finally, what emotions does the researcher confront when working with these files?

Alexandra Oeser is professor of sociology at the University of Paris Nanterre. She works on the memory of Nazism and the ordinary appropriation of politics. Her work on the transmission of the Nazi past in two German schools was recently translated into English as When will we talk about Hitler. German students and the Nazi Past (2019 Berghahn). She has also published extensively on family memory in French. Alexandra has taught at the University of Marne La Vallée, the IEP Toulouse, the Universities of Geneva and Chicago and Sogong University (Korea); she is currently Mercator Fellow at the University of Erfurt. Recently she has been working on the intersection between politics, work and the family, with a strong focus on class and gender, and has coordinated a collective project about the political engagement of workers during the closure of a factory in southern France, the result of which was the collective monograph, Quand ils ont fermé l'usine. Lutter contre la délocalisation dans une économie globalisée (2017 Agone). She completed her habilitation at the University Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne; it is due to be published in May 2022 under the title Comment le genre construit la classe. Masculinités et féminités à l'ère de la globalisation (CNRS Editions).

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