"The Other Side of Persecution. Testimonies of the 19th and 20th Century Revisited" is an online platform of primary sources for personal accounts that report on persecution. The platform presents testimonies of persecuted people as historical sources and examines their potential for historical research and educational work. A broad concept of persecution includes political, racist, antisemitic, social darwinist and religious motives as well as persecution based on sexual orientation or gender. The primary sources that are presented on the website are correspondingly diverse. They range from written documents like diary entries, letters and memoirs to video interviews, photographs and musical compositions.
To this day, the history of persecutions of all kinds is reconstructed primarily from sources left by the perpetrators. These documents offer insight into the planning and execution of persecution. However, as the historiography on the Holocaust has demonstrated in the last decades, it is not sufficient to base the history of persecution solely on perpetrator sources. By focusing solely on the documents of the perpetrator, a reconstruction of the individual experiences of the persecuted is not possible. Furthermore, such a focus does not do justice to the complexity of the practices of persecution. This change of perspective is closely connected with the concept of an “integrated history” developed by the historian Saul Friedländer. According to Friedländer, the history of the Holocaust cannot be restricted to German decisions and actions, but must also take into account the initiatives and reactions of the affected individuals and groups themselves. Personal accounts of persecuted people are key to such an approach. Incorporating ego documents into the historical research of persecution offers an opportunity to better understand the individual experiences and actions of the victims. This includes, for example, their perceptions and emotions as well as their everyday lives, but also their agency and resistant behavior. By providing deep insights into the behavior of collaborators and so-called bystanders and by allowing history to be seen in a different light, this perspective, lastly, also helps to deepen an understanding of the processes of persecution as a whole.
The online platform focuses on the history of the 19th and 20th centuries. The history of extreme violence in the 20th century has often been emphasized. With its genocidal dynamics, it could also be described as the century of persecution. However, the institutional preconditions for this dynamic were already in place in the 19th century. Key ideologies such as modern racism and antisemitism were already prevalent, just as the development of modern bureaucratic apparatuses including their technical mechanisms of control. Thus, the 19th and 20th centuries constitute a period in which the fundamental dynamics of persecution can be analyzed and understood. In this context, continuities of persecution histories go beyond classic periodization such as changes of government or epochal periodization shifts, and in this way call them into question. .
We invite contributions with a length of 1.200 – 1.600 words, which include a testimony of a persecuted person as a primary source . These primary sources will be made available as a digital version on the website. The testimony should either have been created during the time of persecution or reflect on that experience retrospectively. As a primary historical source, the testimony should be the center of the article. The articles should include reflections on the potentials and limits of the presented source as well as historical contextualization. The following questions could be addressed:
- What new perspectives on the history of persecution does the testimony bring into view?
- What emotional- or experiential-historical approaches towards the history of persecution can be used? How did the individuals experience their persecution?
- What assumptions regarding the agency of the persecuted person can be made? What counter-strategies did they develop?
We are especially interested in articles,
- ...which reflect on the categorization of the primary source as a testimony. What characterizes a testimony, and why and under what set of questions could the respective primary source be labeled as one?
- ...which include non-written sources and discuss their potential as testimonies. These could be for example self-portraits, musical compositions, or film works.
- ...which examine dynamics of persecution in the 19th and early 20th century.
Proposals should be submitted with a short abstract and CV by May 15, 2024 to redaktion@selbstzeugnisse-revisited.de. The articles will be selected by the editorial team and published on the platform selbstzeugnisse-revisited.de. A scientific advisory board supports the editorial team in the selection process. We are looking forward to your proposals!
The project is one of the winners of the international workshop HistoryLab2022 of the IBB Dortmund and is financially supported by the German Federal Foreign Office.