Bystanding & the Holocaust in Europe - Lecture & Conversation

Bystanding & the Holocaust in Europe - Lecture & Conversation with Christina Morina, Saul Friedländer, and Norbert Frei. Moderared by David Kim. Recorded on November 16th, 2023 at the Thomas Mann House Los Angeles.
Christina Morina, Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Bielefeld, visited the Thomas Mann House for a lecture and conversation on the topic of “Bystanding and the Holocaust in Europe. Experiences, Ramifications, Representations, 1933 to the Present.“ After the lecture, Prof. Morina engaged in a conversation with award-winning Israeli/American historian and UCLA Professor Emeritus Saul Friedländer and renowned historian Norbert Frei . With an introduction by Prof. David Kim.
The Holocaust was a social process driven not only by the Nazi regime and a few hundred thousand perpetrators but also by the more or less active involvement of the non-Jewish majority populations in Germany and the occupied countries. To this day, the role of so-called bystanders remains unclear and contested. After decades of scholarship focusing first on the perpetrators and subsequently, on the victims’ perspective, the role, (in)actions and experiences of bystanders remain to be explored systematically. The lecture introduces the premises and some first empirical findings of a project that constitutes the first comprehensive analysis of the perceptions and actions of bystanders during the Holocaust - as well as its ramifications and representations up until the present. The collaborative project undertakes a systematic analysis of a large sample of published and unpublished diaries written by Jews and non-Jews in Germany, Austria, Poland, the Netherlands, France, Romania, Switzerland, the U.K. and the U.S. By exploring the language for bystanding in Jewish diaries and the language of bystanding in non-Jewish diaries - and their mutual reflection - the goal is to establish new empirical, conceptual, and narrative grounds on which the Holocaust (and other contexts of systemic discrimination and mass violence) can be understood as not only the result of social but also interpersonal processes.
An event by the Thomas Mann House, co-presented by Saul Friedländer’s Balzan Prize, the DFG and the University of Bielefeld.
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