AKADEMIE FORUM- Graphic History

No period of German history has been studied more thoroughly than the Third Reich, and no era has more frequently been the subject of scholarly, non-fiction, and fiction books as well as films and TV shows.

As the publication of Oberbrechen: A German Village Confronts Its Nazi Past impressively demonstrates, however, new approaches may lead to new perspectives on the Nazi era and its aftereffects.

Oberbrechen examines the complex relationships between Jewish and non-Jewish inhabitants of the eponymous Hessian village. The book is conceived as a graphic history, exploring the microcosm of a village and showing how “one’s own” history of violence was being negotiated during the Nazi era and how the local population dealt with the ubiquitous yet largely unspoken presence of the Shoah.

One question stands at the center, exemplified by the village of Oberbrechen, which is equally relevant for many other places in Germany: How did the different degrees of participation in anti-Jewish exclusion, and the individual local experiences of violence, affect subsequent encounters between those driven out and those who remained, as well as their family members, in the years after 1945?

Authors Stefanie Fischer and Kim Wünschmann will discuss these topics with Stefanie Schüler-Springorum and Jacob Eder.

Stefanie Fischer is a senior lecturer at the Technical University of Berlin’s Center for Research on Antisemitism. She has published numerous studies on German-Jewish history and the history of the Holocaust. Among her most recent publications are Jewish Cattle Traders in the German Countryside (2024) and “Jewish Mourning in the Aftermath of the Holocaust: Tending Individual Graves in Occupied Germany, 1945 – 1949” (in: Aya Elyada, Kerry Wallach, eds., German Jewish Studies: Next Generations, 2022). She is also co-editor of the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book.

Kim Wünschmann is director of the Hamburg Institute for the History of the German Jews. Her work is focused on German-Jewish history and Holocaust Studies, the history of law and diplomacy, as well as comics and graphic novels. Her publications include Before Auschwitz: Jewish Prisoners in the Prewar Concentration Camps (2015) and “Gezeichnete Erinnerung: Zeitzeugenschaft und Geschichte in Comics und Graphic Novels” (in: Matthias Bahr, Peter Poth, Mirjam Zadoff, eds., Aus der Erinnerung für die Gegenwart leben, 2022).

Stefanie Schüler-Springorum is an historian who has been director of the Technical University of Berlin’s Center for the Study of Antisemitism since 2011. From 2001 to 2011, she served as director of the Hamburg Institute for the History of the German Jews, and from 2009 to 2019, as chair of the Scholars’ Consortium at the Leo Baeck Institute. Since 2012 she has been co-director of the Selma Stern Center for Jewish Studies in Berlin-Brandenburg. Her areas of research include German-Jewish history, the history of National Socialism and the Holocaust, as well as Spanish history. 

Presented in German

Featuring a musical performance by Barenboim-Said Akademie student Ali Hayyan (piano)