LBI London

LBI London

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LBI London episodes

  • A German-Jewish Athlete During The Age of Extremes: Alex Natan (1906–71)

    Prof. Kay Schiller

    University of Durham, UK

    As a gay high-performance runner, antifascist intellectual and sportswriter, Alex Natan was a quintessential outsider in Weimar Berlin. His marginal status also remained a constant during his forced emigration to Britain, as a precarious refugee in pre-war London, as a long-time internee during World War II, as well as a schoolteacher in the Midlands and author and journalist in post-war Britain and West Germany. This lecture will demonstrate how an unusual German Jew was affected by the ‘age of extremes’, making his life story quite typical of the predicaments of the 20th century.


    Kay Schiller is Professor of Modern European History at the University of Durham. He has published articles and books on German cultural and sports history, including on the history of the Olympics, on football history, on modern German-Jewish history and on the history of the Federal Republic and the GDR. He is currently researching (with Udi Carmi) the influence of German sports models on sports in Palestine and Israel, with a special focus on the activities of the Zionist functionary Emmanuel Ernst Simon (1898–1988).


    This season’s lecture series Outsiders in German-Jewish History seeks to uncover the shared experiences of individuals and communities who found themselves on the margins of society. Transcending both time and geography, talks will offer different perspectives on the resilience and tenacity of those who have grappled with the challenges of being outsiders. How have they found identity and a sense of belonging in societies that have not understood or even accepted them?




    Organised by the Leo Baeck Institute London in cooperation with the German Historical Institute London.Lecture recorded at Senate House, University of London on Thursday, October 10, 2024 - 18:00


    Images from the lecture, and other streaming links, are available on the Leo Baeck Institute London website: https://www.leobaeck.co.uk/schiller-24

    1 hr 22 min
  • LBI London Summer Lecture: Psychologists in Auschwitz: Accounting for Survival

    Prof Dan Stone

    The writings of Dutch Auschwitz survivors Eddy de Wind, Elie Cohen and Louis Micheels merit analysis not only because they anticipated what later became known as PTSD and much of the underpinnings of trauma theory. They also advocated a theory of survival that offers a compelling contrast to well-known “self-help” theories put forward by Bruno Bettelheim and, especially, Viktor Frankl. This lecture traces the ways in which this theory of survival challenged these simplistic narratives, explains how their work informed the changing field of psychiatry after the war, and considers its relevance for the historiography of the Holocaust today.
    Dan Stone is Professor of Modern History and Director of the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he has taught since 1999. He is the author of numerous articles and books, including, most recently, The Holocaust: An Unfinished History (Penguin, 2023) and Fate Unknown: Tracing the Missing after World War II and the Holocaust (OUP, 2023). He is co-editor, with Mark Roseman, of volume 1 of The Cambridge History of the Holocaust (forthcoming with CUP) and, with Dieter Steinert, of Holocaust Memory in Britain in the 1960s (forthcoming with Bloomsbury). He is currently writing a book on the Holocaust in Romania. Dan chaired the academic advisory board for the Imperial War Museum's revamped Holocaust Galleries, and sits on the UK's Oversight Committee for the Arolsen Archives and the UK government's Spoliation Advisory Group.
    Recorded Thursday, July 11, 2024 at the German Historical Institute London
    http://leobaeck.co.uk/events/summer-lecture/lbi-london-summer-lecture-psychologists-auschwitz-accounting-survival

    1 hr 26 min
  • Regina Jonas – The First Woman Rabbi

    Rabbi Prof Dr Elisa Klapheck

    Wiener Holocaust Library
    Can women hold rabbinical office? This was one of the questions discussed at the Higher Institute for Jewish Studies, Berlin, in the 1920s and 1930s. And no one was better suited to provide an answer to this than Regina Jonas, a student at the Higher Institute who became the first female rabbi in the world in 1935. Prior to her ordination, Jonas answered the question about women’s access to the rabbinate in a halachic treatise that she submitted in 1930 as her final halachic project. Her biographer, Rabbi Prof Dr Elisa Klapheck, will share insights into a life that inspired a new kind of women’s participation in Jewish religious practice. This lecture explores the work of a determined woman who was passionate about Judaism and who was also beloved by the people whom she served in Nazi Germany and after her deportation to Theresienstadt camp in 1942. Regina Jonas was murdered in Auschwitz in 1944; her work still resonates today.
    Rabbi Prof Dr Elisa Klapheck is a Liberal rabbi in the Jewish community of Frankfurt am Main and a professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Paderborn. Her research engages with women and Judaism, early Jewish feminists like Margarete Susman, Regina Jonas, and Bertha Pappenheim, and religious practice in a political context.

    Event co-organised by the Wiener Holocaust Library
    Recorded Monday, July 1, 2024 - 18:00
    https://www.leobaeck.co.uk/events/library-lost-books/regina-jonas-first-woman-rabbi

    1 hr 14 min
  • Jewish Life In Contemporary Germany

    Prof Dani Kranz

    Germany is home to Europe’s third largest Jewish community. Yet surprisingly little is known about them. After the Shoah, about 15,000 German Jews returned to Germany or emerged from hiding. The growth of the Jewish population in Germany after 1945 was due entirely to immigration, which is somewhat counter intuitive. Who are the Jews who live in contemporary Germany? How do they live out their Jewishness? What Jewish cultures did they bring with them, and what kind of Jewish culture is forming in Germany? 

    Dani Kranz is the incumbent DAAD Humboldt chair at El Colegio de México, Mexico City, and an applied anthropologist and director of Two Foxes Consulting, Germany and Israel. Her expertise covers migration, integration, ethnicity, law, state/stateliness, political life, organisations, memory cultures and politics as well as cultural heritage.

    This season’s lecture series Outsiders in German-Jewish History seeks to uncover the shared experiences of individuals and communities who found themselves on the margins of society. Transcending both time and geography, talks will offer different perspectives on the resilience and tenacity of those who have grappled with the challenges of being outsiders. How have they found identity and a sense of belonging in societies that have not understood or even accepted them?


    Organised by the Leo Baeck Institute London in cooperation with the German Historical Institute London and the British-German Association (BGA).


    Lecture recorded at Senate House, University of London on June 13, 2024


    Images from the lecture, and other streaming links, are available on the Leo Baeck Institute London website: https://www.leobaeck.co.uk/kranz-24


    #JewishLife #ContemporaryGermany#LectureSeries2024 #JewishCommunity#ProfDaniKranz #JewishCulture #JewishHeritage#Migration #Integration #CulturalAnthropology#DAADHumboldtChair #ElColegiodeMéxico #GermanyIsrael#LeoBaeckInstitute #HistoricalLecture

    1 hr 29 min
  • Heinrich Zimmer, Nazi Racial Politics and The University of Heidelberg, 1933–1938

    Dr. Baijayanti Roy

    University of Frankfurt


    This talk examines the grey zones that exist between the established paradigms of persecution and exile in the ‘Third Reich’, as demonstrated by the trajectory of the Indologist Heinrich Zimmer (1890–1943). Zimmer, who taught at the University of Heidelberg, lost his teaching license in 1938 since his wife Christiane was classified as a Mischling (mixed race) by the Nazi regime. He tried to battle his fate by offering diverse political capital to the Nazi political establishment and by counting on some sympathetic colleagues. Zimmer was able to flee Germany with his family in 1939.


    Baijayanti Roy is a postdoctoral researcher affiliated to the University of Frankfurt. Her monograph, The Making of a Gentleman Nazi: Albert Speer’s Politics of History in the Federal Republic of Germany was published in 2016. Another monograph, The Nazi Study of India and Indian Anti-Colonialism: Knowledge Providers and Propagandists in the ‘Third Reich’, will be published by Oxford University Press. She has published and spoken on different subjects including Nazi Germany, German Indology and the historical relationship between Germany and India.


    This season’s lecture series "Outsiders in German-Jewish History" seeks to uncover the shared experiences of individuals and communities who found themselves on the margins of society. Transcending both time and geography, talks will offer different perspectives on the resilience and tenacity of those who have grappled with the challenges of being outsiders. How have they found identity and a sense of belonging in societies that have not understood or even accepted them?


    Organised by the Leo Baeck Institute London in cooperation with the German Historical Institute London.

    Lecture recorded at Senate House, University of London on Thursday, May 2, 2024

    1 hr 12 min
  • Writing The Lives of Those That Stayed Behind. Georg Hermann’s Long-Lost Exile Novel ‘Die Daheim Blieben’

    Godela Weiss-Sussex

    ILCS (University of London)

    In the winter of 1939–40, exiled in the Dutch city of Hilversum, Georg Hermann was working on a novel that he regarded as one of his most important. Entitled Die daheim blieben (Those that Stayed Behind), it was to be composed of four parts and tell the story of a large, diverse German-Jewish family in Berlin from March 1933 to November 1938. He was unable to complete the novel or see it published, and it was long thought to have been lost. Recently, however, the manuscripts of the first two parts were discovered among papers held by Hermann’s grandson, George Rothschild. After careful editing by Godela Weiss-Sussex, the text was finally published for the first time by Wallstein Verlag (Göttingen) in September 2023. 
    In her talk Godela Weiss-Sussex, Professor of Modern German Literature at the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies (University of London), considers the story of the manuscript and its journey to publication, and introduces the novel’s content, characters and contexts. The talk gives a flavour of an extraordinary text that the author himself judged to be the ‘very best Georg Hermann’.
    This event is jointly organised by the Leo Baeck Institute London, and the Research Centre for German & Austrian Exile Studies at the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies, University of London. 


    Lecture recorded on Thursday, March 21, 2024


    Images from the lecture, and other streaming links, are available on the Leo Baeck Institute London website: https://www.leobaeck.co.uk/weiss-sussex-2024

    1 hr 19 min
  • International Women's Day 2024: Pauline Paucker

    For International Women's Day 2024, LBI Director Joseph Cronin interviews Pauline Paucker at her home about her memories of the Institute, her work editing the Yearbook, and her husband Arno Paucker, former director of the Institute.


    Her testimony is a personal reminiscence, and the views expressed therein do not necessarily reflect those of the Institute.


    https://www.leobaeck.co.uk/events/interviews/international-womens-day-2024-pauline-paucker


    1 hr 3 min
  • Who was Fritz Kittel? A German Railway Worker Decides, 1933–2022

    Reading: Esther Dischereit together with Jonny Ball.

    In 2023, Esther Dischereit created an exhibition in cooperation with Deutsche Bahn to honour the railroad worker Fritz Kittel. In 1944 and 1945, he hid her mother Hella and sister Hannelore, who as Jews were persecuted by the Gestapo and threatened with death in Germany under National Socialism. They were liberated by U.S. troops in 1945. Dischereit began to search for the family of the rescuer and found them in 2019. Fritz Kittel had not told his own family about his courageous act throughout his life.

    Esther Dischereit's literary response in 17 text pieces includes other found objects from the lives of her mother, sister, and Fritz Kittel, and they offer a dialogue with those who are now the daughters and sons or grandchildren. False information given at a registration office, illegal names and addresses ... What do we read when we read these documents? What do we see when we look at these photos? 

    Esther Dischereit lives in Berlin, writes prose, poems, essays, and radio works. She is considered one of the most important voices of Jewish literature in Germany in the second generation after the Shoah. She was honoured with the prestigious Erich Fried Prize for her work in 2009. She was a professor at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna from 2012 to 2017 and held a chair in contemporary poetics at NYU in 2019. Among her most recent publications and projects Hab keine Angst! Erzähl alles. Das Attentat von Halle und die Stimmen der Überlebenden (Ed., 2020); Sometimes a Single Leaf (2020) and Flowers for Otello On the Crimes that Came out of Jena (2022) – both translated by Iain Galbraith, as well as Wer war Fritz Kittel, Exhibition 2023: Berlin / Frankfurt am Main / Chemnitz / Nürnberg.


    Lecture recorded at Senate House, London

    Tuesday, February 6, 2024 - 18:00

    Images from the lecture, and other streaming links, are available on the Leo Baeck Institute London website: https://www.leobaeck.co.uk/events/special-events/who-was-fritz-kittel-german-railway-worker-decides-1933-2022


    This lecture is a collaboration between the Leo Baeck Institute London and the Goethe-Institut London.




    Poster photo credits: ©Abraham Pissarek, ©Katrin Hammer / Deutsche Bahn AG, ©Katrin Hammer / Deutsche Bahn AG 

    1 hr 32 min
  • Dressing Eve: Re-drawing Biblical Women through Comics

    Dr Sarah Lightman


    Jewish women have been at the forefront of feminist autobiographical comics since the 1970’s as they challenged sexism in popular culture. But how have they revised misogynistic images and stories closer to home? Sarah Lightman will illustrate how Sharon Rudahl in her bildungsroman ‘The Star Sapphire’, Miriam Katin in her Holocaust memoir, We Are on Our Own, and her own graphic novel, The Book of Sarah, transform biblical narratives and images to reflect their own, lived, experiences.


    Sarah Lightman is an artist, writer and Faculty at The Royal Drawing School, London. She attended the Slade School of Art for her BA and MFA, University of Glasgow for her PhD and was an Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London (2018-21). She edited the multi-award-winning Graphic Details: Jewish Women’s Confessional Comics in Essays and Interviews (McFarland, 2014), published her autobiographical graphic novel, The Book of Sarah (Myriad Editions and Penn State UP, 2019) and co-edited Jewish Women in Comics: Bodies and Borders (Syracuse UP, 2023).


    This season’s lecture series seeks to explore the connection of visual narratives in the context of beauty, ugliness and morality with representations of Jews and Jewishness in the Western world from the Middle Ages to the present day. We aim to examine the subject from different historical, social and artistic perspectives ranging from medieval mythology to Orientalism, Zionism, Feminism or modern aesthetics, and through the lens of a selection of diverse media including painting, photography and comics.


    Lecture recorded at Senate House, Malet St, London WC1E 7HUThursday, November 30, 2023 - 18:30


    More information: https://www.leobaeck.co.uk/events/leo-baeck-institute-london-lecture-series-2023/dressing-eve-re-drawing-biblical-women


    #Comics #Comic #WomenInComics #WomenInArt #WomensArt #JewishArt #FemaleArtists #Artist #Illustrator#Judaism #JewishHistory #jewishculture #LondonEvent #LondonEvents #AuthorTalk #Author #OnlineLecture #LeoBaeckInstituteLondon #UniversityOfLondon #Bloomsbury #SenateHouse

    1 hr 14 min
  • The Shoah and the Tragedy of Assimilation: Lessons from one German-Jewish family

    Simon May

    Thursday, October 26, 2023 - 18:30

    Between 1933 and 1941, Simon May’s mother and her two sisters pushed the boundaries of assimilation among German Jews to their limits. They resorted to conversion, aristocratic marriages, and ‘Aryan’ certificates, which likely saved them from the death camps. However, this marked the defeat of the hope that such strategies would secure acceptance for Jews in German and European society. It led to a unique vulnerability, as these three women – and many others like them – distanced themselves from their cultural roots, leaving them emotionally defenceless when disaster struck. This self-inflicted psychic violence presents challenges for their descendants, grappling with questions of identity and belonging in a world in which millions of people continue to be forcibly displaced.

    Simon May is Visiting Professor of Philosophy at King’s College London. His interests lie in ethics, philosophy of the emotions, questions of identity and belonging, and German 19th and 20th Century thought. His books include Nietzsche’s Ethics and His War on ‘Morality’ (1999), Love: A History (2011), Love: A New Understanding of an Ancient Emotion(2019) and The Power of Cute (2019), alongside his widely praised family memoir How To Be A Refugee (2021). May’s work has been translated into ten languages and regularly features in major newspapers worldwide. 

     

    This lecture was organised by the Leo Baeck Institute London and was held at the Keynes Library, Birkbeck's School of Arts, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD.


    Images from the lecture, and podcast streaming links, are available on the Leo Baeck Institute London website at https://www.leobaeck.co.uk/biennial-lecture-2023

    1 hr 34 min

About LBI London

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LBI London is a research institute dedicated to the study of German-Jewish history and culture.