Research Area: The Holocaust and the Cold War - WORKSHOP

05. June 2025 - 09:30
Venue: German Historical Institute, Warsaw
Organizer: Imre Kertész Kolleg, Katrin Stoll

Microhistory from the perspective of critique of culture. The topographical study of Holocaust sites in Poland

Workshop at the German Historical Institute, Warsaw

25 years after the publication of Neighbors by Jan T. Gross, which achieved a breakthrough in research on the Holocaust in German-occupied Poland, we are still writing the history of the Holocaust anew by examining the role of the dominant majority and its cultural practices.

Murder and plunder were a collective project. They depended on the initiative and agencies of plenty of individuals. The fact that the Nazi policy makers had chosen Poland as the geographical center of the Shoah meant that crimes against Jews were committed at a huge number of sites and places throughout the country. The way Polish neighbors have felt and thought about their own role in the crimes against Jews, does not make it go away. It is forever inscribed in the landscape of Poland, as Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah (1979–1985) depicts. The most significant event during the German occupation cannot be made insignificant on the level of representation, topographically and symbolically speaking, in a situation in which it is visible and omnipresent, both in public spaces of cities, towns, villages as well as in discourse.

The workshop titled “Microhistory from the perspective of critique of culture. The topographical study of Holocaust sites in Poland” focuses on the production of the landscape – now and then – as well as narratives at the sites of the Holocaust by drawing on selected examples. Emphasis will be placed on the following subjects: the marking of the sites of the six former Nazi extermination camps in Poland undertaken by Jewish-survivor researchers in the immediate postwar period; the establishment of documentary evidence for future trials; survivor-led exhumations of family members and loved ones; the engagement of Polish neighbors with Jewish material traces and spaces of murder; the issue of profanation; denialist narratives and their legitimization; the Catholic church as the dominant element of the Holocaust landscape; new scholarly narratives and narrations from an analytical perspective.

The one-day workshop will take place on 5 June 2025 at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw. Concept and realization: Katrin Stoll; assistants: Marie Bullerschen & Felix Schulte.