Oberbrechen: A German Village Confronts Its Nazi Past is a graphic history that chronicles the events of the Holocaust and its aftermath in a small village in rural Germany. The panel discusses how Germany dealt with its history of violence by conceiving of it as a communal undertaking, with non-Jewish Germans in the Federal Republic and refugee German Jews taking part in this social process loaded with ambiguities. It focuses on the period before the so-called “memory boom” of the 1980s transformed the ways in which Germany commemorated and “worked through” its Nazi Past. Different forms of witnessing, remembrance, and forgetting are analyzed to shed light on generational changes, gender dynamics and reevaluations of complicit behaviors.

Stefanie Fischer (Berlin) analyzes how German public historians, schoolteachers, and local politicians fantasized about Wiedergutmachung with Jews in the 1970s.

Kim Wünschmann (Hamburg) reflects on the authors’ positionality and the ways in which research in the graphic medium impacts historiographical practices.

Commentaries will be provided by sociologist Irit Dekel (Bloomington) and historian Christina Morina (New York/Bielefeld).

Moderation: Jonathan Bach (New York).

SPEAKER BIOS

Jonathan Bach is interim dean of the School of Undergraduate Studies, professor of Global Studies, and faculty affiliate in Anthropology at The New School. His work explores the politics of memory, material culture, and urban space in Germany and China. His books include What Remains: Everyday Encounters with the Socialist Past in Germany (Columbia University Press) (German edition: Die Spuren der DDR: Von Ostprodukten bis zu den Resten der Berliner Mauer) and the co-edited volumes Learning from Shenzhen: China’s Post-Mao Experiment from Special Zone to Model City (University of Chicago Press) and Re-Centering the City: Global Mutations of Socialist Modernity (UCL Press) and. His articles have appeared in, among others, Cultural Anthropology, Cultural Politics, Public Culture, and Theory, Culture and Society.

Irit Dekel is Assistant Professor in the Department of Germanic Studies and the Borns Jewish Studies Program at Indiana University, Bloomington. She graduated from the NSSR in Sociology in 2008. Her research areas include cultural memory in contemporary Germany; migration, sociology of media, ethnic and racial inequality and museums. Dekel co-edited the Routledge Handbook of Memory Activism, published 2023. She recently finished her second monograph Witnessing Positions: Jews, Memories and Minorities in Contemporary Germany.

Stefanie Fischer is a Senior Lecturer at the Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Technical University Berlin. She is the author of Jewish Cattle Traders in the German Countryside, 1919-1939: Economic Trust and Antisemitic Violence (Indiana University Press, 2024), and co-author of Oberbrechen: A German Village Confronts its Nazi Past (Oxford University Press, 2024). She is also co-editor of the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book. Her book on economic trust and antisemitic violence was awarded the Fraenkel Prize from the Wiener Library in London (2012) and also received the Irma-Rosenberg Prize (2014).

Christina Morina is the 2024/25 Theodor Heuss Professor in History at The New School for Social Research and professor of Contemporary History at the University of Bielefeld. Her research focuses on major themes in German and European history from the in 19th to the 21st century, including Nazism and the history of bystanding during the Holocaust and the history of democracy. She is co-editor of Probing the Limits of Categorization. The Bystander in Holocaust History (with Krijn Thijs, 2018) and recently published Tausend Aufbrüche. Die Deutschen und ihre Demokratie seit den 1980er Jahren (2023), which was awarded the German Nonfiction Prize 2024.

Kim Wünschmann is Director of the Institute for the History of the German Jews in Hamburg. She obtained her Ph.D. from Birkbeck, University of London. Her research centers on German Jewish history, Holocaust Studies, and legal history. She is the author of Before Auschwitz: Jewish Prisoners in the Prewar Concentration Camps (2015), co-editor of Living the German Revolution 1918–19: Expectations, Experiences, Responses (2023), and co-author of Oberbrechen: A German Village Confronts its Nazi Past. A Graphic History (2024).