Interdisciplinary Workshop
For the last thirty years Holocaust Studies has grappled with “the limits of Holocaust representation” (Friedländer 1992). Yet despite new approaches to forms of representing genocide, and the expansion of categories of Holocaust witnesses (Morina, Krijn 2018), the realm of Holocaust testimony is still not fully democratic. While some forms of witnessing have drawn substantial attention and been celebrated as valuable sources of knowledge, others have been marginalized or actively discarded as unreliable, unworthy, incidental, bizarre, or—even where they existed in full public view—have been overlooked as potential domains of systematic scholarly scrutiny. Representations of the Holocaust created in the folk art genre, hand-drawn maps, three-dimensional dioramas, sketches accompanying oral testimony, graffiti, wall-markings, or vernacular camp verse and labourers’ chants infused with coarse language, are examples of such “awkward” (Lehrer, Sendyka, Wilczyk, Zych 2017; see also: Tinius 2018) documents that appeared during the war or were produced in its aftermath but have been disregarded by scholars as curiosa or varia and thus relegated outside of mainstream Holocaust debate. (Lehrer, Sendyka 2019; Sendyka, Lehrer, Wilczyk, Zych 2020, 2022)
The present workshop aims to reconsider the boundaries of the accepted Holocaust archive by exploring sources that occupy its fuzzy frontiers. While the development of Holocaust Studies has been characterized by the progressive inclusion of a widening array of testimonial forms (Langer 1991) and categories of witnesses (Lanzmann 1985; Rittner, Roth 1993; Drane 1989, Kouba 2008), the landscape of potential source materials has yet to be fully exhausted. Unacknowledged “Holocaust curiosa” provide a vantage point to further re-evaluate what we accept as a legitimate historical document or Holocaust representation, and they can also serve as vehicles to critically reassess the ethics of how we approach writing the history of the Holocaust, by fostering truly complex, plural perspectives.
Recent calls to reassess undisclosed power relations and partialities in Western epistemology and parallel efforts to reclaim marginalized knowledges inspires our approach. By retrieving omitted voices, genres, and objects, which have remained invisible “either because they are not produced according to accepted or even intelligible methodologies or because they are produced by absent subjects, subjects deemed incapable of producing valid knowledge” (Santos 2018, 2), we aim to expand and further democratize the Holocaust archive.
We invite scholars who engage with silenced or overlooked categories of Holocaust witnesses and disregarded/awkward/strange/marginal documents or testimonial forms to join with us to reflect on the new epistemological approaches and novel methodologies these sources require to reveal their testimonial value and permit their integration into mainstream debate. We extend this invitation to a wide range of disciplinary experts, including historians, anthropologists, geographers, memory scholars, art historians, literature and media scholars, and museum experts, to help us map the broadest possible spectrum of documentary materials, and investigate the uncharted periphery of the Holocaust archive.
The workshop, co-organised by the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH, Humboldt University, Berlin) and the Research Centre for Memory Cultures (Faculty of Polish Studies, Jagiellonian University, Kraków), will take place in at the CARMAH in Berlin. We envision a hybrid format, with participants joining in person (if possible) or via Zoom. Limited funds will be available to support travel to Berlin for invited participants. Date: September 20th, 2022.
Please send an abstract (300 words) and a short biography (100 words) by May 15th, 2022 to Magdalena Waligórska (magdalena.waligorska-huhle@hu-berlin.de) and Roma Sendyka (roma.sendyka@uj.edu.pl). Invited presenters will be asked to submit a draft contribution of at least five pages one week before the workshop. A special issue of a relevant, high-ranking journal devoted to the topic of the workshop is planned. Deadline for submission of full-length articles will be December 30th, 2022.
Organizers:
Erica Lehrer, Concordia University, Montreal
Roma Sendyka, Jagiellonian Univ./2022 DAAD Humboldt University
Magdalena Waligórska, Humboldt University Berlin
Magdalena Zych, curator, Kraków Ethnographic Museum
Wojciech Wilczyk, independent artist