The Making of the Graphic History Oberbrechen: The Clashing Perspectives and Ethical Challenges of Writing Local History after the Holocaust

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Abstract

This roundtable gives insights into the making of the Graphic History project Oberbrechen: A German Village Confronts its Nazi Past. The Graphic History of an ordinary German town reveals how Jews and Catholics experienced the Holocaust and its aftermath in a rural setting. By narrating the different experiences of the two groups living under Nazi rule we analyze how lives, attitudes, and behaviors of Jews and Catholics intersected in the village microcosm. In the postwar decades, Jewish former Oberbrecheners warily reengaged with their hometown both from a distance and on visits, and these connections inevitably led to contacts with non-Jewish Oberbrecheners, who had their own perspective on the Nazi years and the Jewish presence and absence in the village.
The roundtable will discuss the ambiguous nature of the rapport between these two groups, and which role a shared childhood in the village, and a shared cultural background, i.e, being German, play in post genocidal encounters. Using heretofore unpublished sources, including a large corpus of private correspondence, this roundtable will address how such configurations sometimes led to the development of resilient and long-term relationships. The roundtable will also address reactions of former Oberbrecheners who openly refused to ever set foot on German soil again. We will also discuss how this collaborative history project made us realize how important it is to address the relationship between the personal and the professional, and its intellectual and emotional implications. We will ask, which blind spots did the authors, as two non-Jewish German women, fail to identify? With our study, we seek to strengthen one critical claim in particular: the personal in history writing is not a constraint, let alone an epistemological impediment. On the contrary, inserting the personal into history writing means being true to scholarly requirements of source-criticism, transparency, and (self-)reflexivity. The case studies brought to the roundtable introduce different perspectives on biographical engagement in history writing, thus contributing to discussions around “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” (coming to terms with the past).

Moderator: Jay H. Geller (Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland)
Discussants:
Stefanie Fischer (Technical University of Berlin) analyzes how German public historians, schoolteachers, and local politicians fantasized about Wiedergutmachung with Jews in the 1970s.
Deborah Pomeranz (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) discusses reactions of former Oberbrecheners who openly refused to ever set foot on German soil again
Kim Wünschmann (Institute of the History of the German Jews, Hamburg) reflects on the project’s choice of the graphic medium and its implication on history writing with images.

Sub Unit

• Holocaust Studies

Moderator

• Jay Geller, Case Western Reserve University

Discussants

• Kim Wuenschmann, Institute for the History of the German Jews

• Deborah Pomeranz, University of Michigan

• Stefanie Fischer, Technical University Berlin, Center for Research on Anti-Semitism

Zoom Host

• Zoom Host 06