Bestselling novels such as Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated (2002, film adaptation 2005), Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes (2006, The Kindly Ones, 2009) and Katja Petrowskaja’s Vielleicht Esther (2014, Maybe Esther, 2018) have increased public and scholarly discussion of Holocaust mass shootings and their remembrance, however, literary, cinematic and artistic depictions of mass shootings have been for the most part belated, schematic and at the margins of works dealing with other themes or other facets of the Holocaust.

In recent years, popular histories such as Father Patrick Desbois’s The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest's Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews (2008) and Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe Between Stalin and Hitler (2010), have provided a language for speaking about mass shootings that has been taken up by artists and scholars alike. Nevertheless, the idea that mediations of mass shootings may form a category of representation that benefits from separate consideration is only gradually taking hold, and theorisation of the specific ethical issues associated with the representation of the so-called ‘Holocaust by bullets’ is likewise only beginning (Sue Vice, 2019).

This conference brings together scholars interested in the literary, cinematic and artistic representation of these events and their legacy in the broadest terms and will showcase research from different disciplines, fostering exchange between scholars working in a variety of national and linguistic contexts whilst also foregrounding the transnational circulation of memory and representation. Discussions will illuminate shared and divergent tendencies in the representation of Holocaust mass shootings, and interrogate the extent to which works dealing with this history benefit from consideration as a discrete corpus.

All welcome to attend. Fees cover refreshments as stated in the programme: Standard rate £40; Friends of Germanic Studies at the ILCS £35; Speakers £20; Students £20.

Advance online registration is essential.

The workshop on pedagogy on Thursday, 19 September is free to attend and a limited number of modest bursaries towards travel costs for teachers are available.

Keynote lecture abstracts:

McKenna Marko: ’Spectral Landscapes: Retracing the Holocaust by Bullets in East/Central European Literature, Film, and Visual Culture
While the memorial complex at Babi Yar is a central site of the Holocaust by bullets in Ukraine due to continuous engagement by artists and other mnemonic actors, this presentation explores the remediation of lesser-known sites in literature and film to explain how mass shootings became part of transnationally and locally embedded Holocaust remembrance practices among different ethnic groups in Northern Yugoslavia. The Hungarian director András Kovács’s Cold Days (1966) depicts the events of the January 1942 raids during which the occupying Hungarian army massacred thousands of Jewish, Serbian, and Roma civilians on the banks of the Danube in Novi Sad from the point of view of the perpetrators, while the works of Yugoslav Jewish writers from the city such as Danilo Kiš (Early Sorrows) and Aleksandar Tišma (The Book of Blam, The Use of Man) remember the mass shootings as the violent culmination of ethnic mediations in Central Europe’s multicultural borderland spaces. Reconsidering Giorgio Agamben’s statement that the concentration camps are society’s dominant spatial arrangement, I discuss how these works reevaluate the centrality of mass shootings within an extended matrix of extreme violence linking future instances of violence in the region such as the 1990s Yugoslav dissolution wars and present-day war in Ukraine.

Dr McKenna Marko is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Leeds, UK. She earned her PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of Michigan where she specialized in (post)Yugoslav and Hungarian literature. Her dissertation Spatial Mediations of the Holocaust in Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav Art examined the relationship between different media of memory and memorial spaces in the former Yugoslavia in creating diverse sites of Holocaust remembrance. Her current work covers transnational Holocaust memory, translation, and women’s experiences of the Holocaust and state-sanctioned terror in Central and Southeastern Europe. Together with Erin McGlothlin and Christin Zühlke, she is the editor of the forthcoming volume New Approaches to Teaching Holocaust Literature.

Roma Sendyka: Between lieux de mémoire and non-sites of memory. New approaches to sites of Holocaust by bullets
The clandestine, uncommemorated post-genocide sites that abound in Central and Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the events of the Second World War, raise challenging questions about the practices and politics of memory, the status of victims, the role of bystanders and post-bystanders, the ontology of human remains, and the sites themselves. Contemporary memory studies have primarily developed tools for exploring cultural memory based on the act of symbolization (textual, iconic). Since abandoned sites typically lack the readily available cultural scripts that allow visitors to respond to the violent past, it is the newer mnemonic methodologies (post-anthropocentric, ecological, forensic, material, etc.) that allow us to successfully engage with such "non-sites of memory" (C. Lanzmann) from new perspectives. The predicament of post-violence sites calls for new strategies for dealing with the past, especially in cases where violence has permanently affected social relations and the potential for open articulation of the past. Increased attention to the 'Holocaust by bullets' or 'dispersed Holocaust', as well as other forms of historical micro-violence, calls for new research techniques. This keynote summarises the results of the interdisciplinary project: "Uncommemorated Genocide Sites and Their Impact on Collective Memory, Cultural Identity, Ethical Attitudes and Intercultural Relations in Contemporary Poland"; (Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education, the National Programme for the Development of Humanities, 2016-2020), which brought together researchers, artists and practitioners to construct an operational tool for scholars and practitioners of memory studies confronting the abandoned post-genocide geographies of Central and Eastern Europe and beyond.

Professor Roma Sendyka is the head of a research team at the Department of Anthropology of Literature and Cultural Research at the Jagiellonian University. She is co-founder and head of the Research Centre for Memory Cultures. She specializes in cultural theory, visual culture studies, and memory studies. Her current work focuses on “non-sites of memory” and visual approaches to genocide representation. She is the author of The Modern Essay: Studies in Historical Awareness of a Genre (2006), From “I” Culture to the Culture of the “Self” (2015), and co-editor of six volumes on memory studies. Her most recent publications are Beyond Camps. Non-Sites of Memory (2021) and (co-authored) Terribly Close. Polish Vernacular Artists Face the Holocaust (2023).

Steven Samols: The History of the Holocaust in Jewish Photo Books
In the immediate postwar years, Holocaust survivors produced comprehensive visual histories of their persecution under Nazi occupation. Publishing photobooks that for the first time put together gruesome perpetrator photographs, clandestine victim-made snapshots, and photojournalistic reports, survivors reconstructed the entirety of the Holocaust in pictures. These rare books were made in DP camps through the efforts of underfunded historical commissions, and initially circulated among Jews. But due to their permanence and transportability, they rapidly spread and transformed how people worldwide understood the Holocaust. While most books and reports published at the time treated Jewish persecution as a byproduct of the larger war, survivor-authored photobook centered victims’ experiences and attempted to offer historical interpretations. This talk details how survivor-authored photobooks provided an enduring, ready-made visual repertoire that shaped how other media portrayed the tragedy.

Dr Steven Samols is a Rothschild Hanadiv Europe Postdoctoral Fellow at UCL's Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies. His research explores the connections between European history, Jewish studies, and visual cultures across the twentieth century. His work focuses on vernacular media forms such as photobooks, analyzing how they shaped understandings of Jewish history for both Jews and wider publics. Samols holds a PhD in History from the University of Southern California (2023), an MSc in European studies from the London School of Economics (2016) and a BA in history from New York University (2012). He has received grants and fellowships from the German Historical Institute, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Association for Jewish Studies, the Leo Baeck Institute, and the Israeli Council for Higher Education. His dissertation Photobooks as Jewish History: German-Speaking Jews, Images, and the Transatlantic Construction of a Common Past was awarded the 2024 Fritz Stern Dissertation Prize at the German Historical Institute.