Centre for Historical Studies
Jawaharlal Nehru University
Invites you to a lecture by
Professor Anthony McElligot
University of Limerick, Ireland
on
“Remembering and Forgetting – The Holocaust in Post-war Narratives of Survivors and Perpetrators”
Our primary encounter with the past is through memory. This has been the case in popular culture, but also in the past 40 years, professional historians have returned to memory through oral narratives and witness testimonies; its evocation through artefacts and heirlooms passed on from the dead; more frequently throughthe medium of photographs, where these have survived. In various ways people look for evidence of the past and frequently for evidence of their own lineal existence in it. But the fragments of the past that one encounters do not tell a linear or even coherent story. As Mary Henderson, the Greek-born wife of the British diplomat, Sir Nicholas Henderson, who lived through the war in Greece, observed in her own memoir: ‘memory plays tricks, chooses, forgets, and enhances certain events and feelings.’ Recalling events from her life, she likens them to a pile of unordered photographs: ‘some of the pictures as I look through them are blurred, foggy and faded but others are sharp and clear – they reveal every detail. Some are missing.’ Henderson’s astute observation is germane to reconstituting a memory of the Holocaust, especially for those who survived the camps and for their families. But it also applies to the perpetrators who remember the same events but construct a different narrative of these. This talk is based on my current research into the Holocaust in the Eastern Aegean and explores some of the problems the historian encounters when trying to reconstruct the evidence from memories of both survivors and perpetrators.
Venue : Room 326, CHS, SSS III
Time and date: 12:45 pm, Thursday, 9th Nov 2017
Prof McElligot is founding professor and head of the history department at the University of Limerick. He is a founding editor of Cultural and Social History: The Journal of the Social History Society, launched in 2004 and currently sits on its Editorial Board. He has authored many articles in various collections and scholarly journals over three decades, and has written several books, including Contested City: Municipal Politics and the Rise of Nazism in Altona, 1917-1937 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998, paperback 2016), The German Urban Experience 1900-1945, Modernity and Crisis (London: Routledge, 2001), and Rethinking the Weimar Republic, Authority and Authoritarianism 1916-1936, (Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2014). Among the books he has edited or co-edited are:with Jordan Goodman and Lara Marks, Useful Bodies, Humans in the Service of Medical Science in the Twentieth Century, (Baltimore and London, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), with Tim Kirk (eds.), 'Working Towards The Führer': Essays in Honour of Sir Ian Kershaw (Manchester University Press, 2003); Weimar Germany (=Short Oxford History of Germany (Oxford University Press, 2008), with Ciara Breathnach, Liam Chambers, Catherine Lawless, Power in History: From the Medieval to the Post-modern World Historical Studies XXVII (Irish Academic Press, Dublin & Portland Or., 2011); with Klaus Weinhauer and Kirstin Heinsohn, Germany 1916-1923: A Revolution in Context (Transcript-Verlag, Bielefeld, 2015) and most recently: with Jeffrey Herf, Antisemitism Before and Since the Holocaust: Altered Contexts and Recent Perspectives (Palgrave: New York & London, 2017). He is currently completing a monograph on the Holocaust in the Aegean to be published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2018: The Last Transport: The Holocaust in the Eastern Aegean.
