Research

Christina Morina, Project Director, Project 1: Bystanding (in) the Holocaust

To this day, “We knew nothing of it...” and “There was nothing we could do...” are iconoclastic representations of the self-perceptions of members of the non-Jewish majority populations in Germany and beyond. Historians have probed these claims for decades, largely refuting them by pointing to evidence for a wide-spread “knowledge” of and, however diffuse, involvement in the crimes committed in Nazi Germany and through-out Europe. This scholarship emerges from complex, still mostly national settings, in which historiographical issues, historical representation and memory politics are inextricably intertwined.
Taking the two cases of Nazi Germany and the Netherlands as points of departure, Christina Morina’s project analyzes and systematizes the role of bystanding in the persecution and murder of the Jews as reflected in Jewish and non-Jewish diaries from both countries. In Germany, in spite of plenty of perceptive studies on the mobilizing force of the Volksgemeinschaft and the ensuing dynamics of violence, the experiences, motives, actions and dynamics within the bystanding population, remain obscure. This is not least due to a focus on documents stemming from state, local and party branches, the propaganda apparatus and media as well as the Jewish communities and rarely from among the wider non-Jewish population itself. In the Netherlands, considered a “Germanic brother nation” (K. Happe) by the Nazis, a narrative of the hapless bystander, allegedly ignorant of the genocidal intentions of the regime and thus lacking a sufficient sense of urgency to act, indicates a palpable scholarly and public desire to narrow the realm of concern for societal responsibility.
In both cases, more conceptual and systematizing rigor are needed to fully understand bystanders’ roles and the overall relevance of bystanding. Aware of these enormous historiographical and public history challenges, Morina’s project systematically explores how perceptions of Jews were related to involvement in the persecution in Nazi Germany and the Netherlands, and how Jewish contemporaries viewed bystanding attitudes and (in)actions in a comparative perspective. What was the language of complicity in bystander diaries – and the language for bystanding in victim diaries? Situating her case study within the wider European context and drawing on the insights from the other team members’ projects, the project aims ultimately to provide a new conceptual and narrative framework for writing the history of bystanding in the Holocaust.

Roma Sendyka (Kraków), Project Researcher, Project 2: Eyewitnesses

Scopic performances play an important role in how victims, or later researchers, identify bystander behaviour.  However, the frequent usage of visual vocabulary is not associated with a deeper theoretical concern.  The post-1990 rapid growth of visual studies allows to understand the practices of looking in more nuanced ways and link the results with sociohistorical analysis.  The proposed project will theoretically anchor bystander studies by analyzing possible variants of bystanders’ scopic behaviour (as passive onlookers, Schaulustigen or voyeurs, or those who looked to remember and provide testimony). It will link conceptualizations with close reading of victims’ diaries and memoirs (1939-1948) where the survivors narrate visual contact with bystanders. Diaries and memoirs written by Polish bystanders will be compared for similar reports of eye-to-eye confrontations. The reasoning will be supported by the visual archive left behind by Holocaust bystanders.

Anna Strommenger, Project Researcher, Project 3: Traveling Bystanders: “Outsiders”, Nazism and the Holocaust

The project explores the way foreign observers from the United Kingdom, the Unites States, France and Switzerland travelling to Nazi Germany and the Nazi occupied territories perceived the systematic persecution and murder of the Jews in context of the rise, seizure of power, domination and aftermath of Nazism. These travelers and temporary residents with diverse political, cultural and professional backgrounds were often suddenly confronted with violent social dynamics within the National Socialist society that they had not experienced beforehand, thus holding a special observer status. They could become bystanders in two respects: 1) as citizens of different states involved in the international political context in which the Holocaust evolved, and 2) in a narrower sense, i. e. both temporally and spatially proximate to anti-Jewish measures, violence and mass murder. Against this backdrop the study examines travel reports, e. g. diaries and letters, written by prominent as well as by “ordinary” travelers and temporary residents, with the aim of approaching the following central questions: How did travelers try to describe what was happening? Did they oppose the regime, or admire at least some of its parts? How did they reflect on their own position and their possibilities, or impossibilities, to act? Did they try to intervene on behalf of the Jewish victims and to circulate the knowledge about the ongoing events in their countries of origin? Through these questions, the project aims at re-evaluating the global sphere in which Nazism echoed, thus contributing to a transnational history of the Holocaust.

Teresa Malice, Project Researcher, Project 4:

This project aims to explore the many ways so-called “ordinary women”, in their majority uninvolved or marginally involved in the state and administrative structures of three fascist societies, were describing bystanding towards racialized violence and exclusion, which eventually culminated in the systematic persecution of Jews and other minorities and in Holocaust. Through an in-depth analysis of ego-documents (diaries and letters), written by both Jewish and non-Jewish women, belonging to different generations, social positions, and territories, the aim is to look for clues of bystanding behavior in daily practices and routines, as narrated and represented in the writings of their female protagonists – be they bystanders themselves or victims of bystanding.

In the research, I will identify and analyze explicit and implicit references to encounters and interactions between the persecuted and members of the “majority populations”, as well as relevant (self-)reflections of/on bystanders in a comparative perspective – pairing three countries, Germany, Austria and Italy, in which fascism/National Socialism established a widely-supported political order between the early 1920s and 1945.

How did “ordinary” women write about the antisemitic propaganda campaigns and anti-Jewish measures imposed by their respective governments and the general social support for, or at least consent with, these measures? How did they reflect on anti-Jewish violence and their personal role in specific situations, and how did Jewish diarists, in turn, write about bystanders? Was there at all a specifically “female” way of writing about crimes against Jews? And how did such experiences affect women’s self-perceptions, societal visions and notions of day-to-day-microsociability?

Including gender as a variable in the dynamics and semantics of stigmatization, exclusion and violence within contexts of state-driven violence, and exploring the nexus between it and emotions, sensitivity and agency, provides a new perspective on the bystanding concept, not least because it also allows to reexamine the patriarchal structures and mentalities to which the repressive nature of such states was inextricably linked. Not least, the concept will also be enriched by the comparative perspective, which will take the specificities of the national contexts taken into account, while simultaneously looking for common elements and features in female descriptions of bystanding. 

Laura Niewöhner, Project Researcher, Project 5:

This PhD-project examines the role of bystanding in Postwar Germany. The denazification trials – first and foremost developed and introduced in the US-occupied zone – confronted Germans with their very own past during the National socialist era in a novel way. During the process of denazification, many individuals tried to influence the court by writing letters or CV’s and asking others to provide those as proof of their innocence. It seems evident that these written non-standardized ego-documents contain descriptions and narrations of excluded and persecuted Jewish people. These narrations are sometimes colored with emotions and feelings. Articulating emotions and feelings in a highly standardized setting of denazification needs to be questioned regarding its worth and function.

According to history of emotions scholar Ute Frevert, emotions and feelings have effects on individuals: First, emotions influence their perceptions of the past and present. Individuals use emotional phrases and categories to evaluate past events, behaviors and actions. Second, emotions can contribute to integrating individuals into social, cultural or political settings. She further argues that it is useful to examine the relationship between emotions and political changes during the 20^th century (Frevert; 2011, 2020) Taking this argument as a point of departure I understand the setting of denazification as an arena of transitioning in which different groups of actors used emotions as a feature of practices of (self-) positioning. The groups of actors are namely affected Germans as subjects of the trials, staff members of the Special Branch of the Office for Military Government for Germany, administrates from German courts, and witnesses as a fourth group. This praxeological approach enables me to focus on practices and actions of the four involved groups and to describe the denazification trials as a community of practice.

The project addresses to which extent denazification trials were shaped by practices of positioning as well as emotions and in what way these can be characterized as a new form of bystanding in Post-war Germany. I hypothesize that various groups of interest in this community of practice encountered each other not only with communicative tools itself but also with a repertoire of emotions and narratives as components of practices of positioning that led to a modified concept of bystanding.

I plan to gain access to this modified concept of bystanding by using digital tools as my methodological approach. The combination of computer-based, standardized, and classical hermeneutical analysis procedures opens up new perspectives on historical subjects. For example, the ‘blindness’ of computer algorithms possesses the potential for irritating the ´close reading´ of researchers. With a digitized sample of more than 300 court cases from Hessen and Bavaria, these tools enable me to access the material from a bird’s-eye view to look for semantic patterns of emotions and practices of positioning. Setting up a project-specific database will therefore not only allow structuring the specific samples, but also open up the topic to other research questions.

To be announced – PhD

Part of the funds will be used to support a prospective PhD thesis, preferably written by a student affiliated with a university in the US or Israel. It will comprise of €1500 per month for the duration of one year. The topic shall be situated well within the research objectives outlined above, and an at least partial focus on the political, social and cultural legacies of bystanding in the postwar era is required. A formal call for proposals will be published through the relevant academic outlets at a later point, and Saul Friedländer, Christina Morina and Norbert Frei will jointly form a selection committee to choose the project. Stay tuned!