Professor Hannah Holtschneider's Inaugural Lecture

Professor Hannah Holtschneider (Professor of Contemporary Jewish Cultural History) delivers her Inaugural Lecture 'Eavesdropping on other people’s conversations: German Jewish refugee family correspondence in Holocaust historiography' on 5 March, 5:15pm in the Playfair Library and also livestreamed online.

Lecture Title

Eavesdropping on other people’s conversations: German Jewish refugee family correspondence in Holocaust historiography

Abstract

What tools do we have to understand how individuals negotiate the social, political and economic situations they find themselves in? How can we understand their circumstances, their responses, and the complexity of an individual’s multiple identities? In the last two decades, Holocaust historiography has embraced a range of methods developed by social and cultural historians in order to meet these challenges. This work has extended the focus of scholarly analysis towards specific places, particular population groups, and towards a broad range of sources, so that we may explore the relationships between an individual’s choices and the challenges they encountered. 

In this body of literature, scholars are now drawing an ever more nuanced and diverse picture of how individuals and collectives experienced persecution, war and mass violence. This historiographical turn towards the study of experience and agency is currently leading to a new, more serious engagement with personal documents and ephemera. These shifts stem from a growing recognition that by changing our perspective on the evidence we have, we can gain a better appreciation of the self-understandings, worldviews, and decision-making horizons of inhabitants of the past. 

In this lecture, I explore the lives of individual refugees through their personal correspondence to cast a better light on the ways in which they interpreted and experienced the historical circumstances that disrupted their lives and brought about their displacement or their murder. Listening to the conversations of one family, as partially preserved in letters exchanged in the 1930s and 1940s (and beyond), foregrounds questions about the experience of the past and permits us to interpret changing family relationships, identities, social-political, economic and cultural choices as they were negotiated and reflected upon. Such a close-up engagement with personal documents yields a richer, more complex picture of how large historical events played out in the social contexts of the lives of individual refugees.