Europe and the USSR. Literature in the face of the persecution and extermination of the Jews (Wien / Vienne)

Europe and the USSR. 

Literature in the face of the persecution and extermination of the Jews

 22 March 2024

Wiener Wiesenthal Institut für Holocaust-Studien

Rebensteig 3, Wien, Austria

The workshop’s purpose is to examine the literary, artistic, musical and cinematographic responses to the rise of anti-Semitism in the 1930s, which led to the systematic persecution and extermination of Europe’s Jews. It will focus on the period before as well as after the war. This will allow to consider, on the one hand, the capacity of literature (and other media) to project an aftermath as a consequence of ongoing events, and on the other hand the aftermath as it was felt in the years following the Shoah.
What was the response or capability of writers who were subjected to censorship during the Stalinist and post-Stalinist regimes? How did authors depict the re-emergence of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union and European countries in the decades before and after the Second World War in their literary (artistic) works? This workshop aims to raise initial questions on a vast subject that is still very under-explored in certain areas and from certain perspectives, such as minor literature and forgotten writers.

 Organisers

 Anke Bosse (Universität Klagenfurt/Musil-Institut/Kärntner Literaturarchiv)

Atinati Mamatsashvili (Ilia State University / Wiener Wiesenthal Institut für Holocaust-Studien)

Scientific commettee  

Anke Bosse (Universität Klagenfurt/Musil-Institut/Kärntner Literaturarchiv)

Mzaro Dokhtourishvili (Ilia State University)

Atinati Mamatsashvili (Ilia State University / Wiener Wiesenthal Institut für Holocaust-Studien)

Arvi Sepp (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)

Bela Tsipuria (Ilia State University)

Marianne Windsperger (Wiener Wiesenthal Institut für Holocaust-Studien)

The workshop will be held in a hybrid format. For more information, please contact organisers: atinati_mamatsashvili@iliauni.edu.ge

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Programme

9h00 – 9h15               Opening

 Marianne Windsperger (Wiener Wiesenthal Institut für Holocaust-Studien)

Anke Bosse (Universität Klagenfurt, Musil-Institut/Kärntner Literaturarchiv)

Atinati Mamatsashvili (Ilia State University / Wiener Wiesenthal Institut für Holocaust-Studien

9h15 – 10h15             Session 1 – Facing the Holocaust – facing the History 

                                   Moderator: Anke Bosse

Maxim D. Shrayer (Boston College) –  The 1943 Krasnodar Trial and the Trials of Ilya Selvinsky's Poetic Reportage

Olaf Terpitz (University of Graz) – Babi Yar as Prism

10h15 – 11h15           Session 2 – Denouncing through the language, through poetic writing

Moderator: Elana Shapira

Arvi Sepp (Vrije Universiteit Brussels) – Jewish Language Criticism in 1933: Victor Klemperer’s and Karl Kraus’ early discursive analysis of anti-Semitism in the Third Reich

 Anke Bosse (Universität Klagenfurt, Musil-Institut/Kärntner Literaturarchiv) – Paul Celan, survivor of the « bloodlands » : a poet and his poetry in transition

11h15 – 11h45           Coffee Break

11h45 – 12h45           Session 3 – Places, Spaces and Memory

Moderator: Olaf Terpitz

 Alexandra Birch (Wiener Wiesenthal Institut für Holocaust-Studien) –  Beregovsky, Weinberg, and Shostakovich: Negotiating Jewishness in the USSR

Rafi Tsirkin-Sadan (The Open University of Israel) – Place and Memory in Grigorii Kanovich’s Devil’s Spell

12h45 – 14h30           Pause

14h30 – 15h30           Session 4 – Literary representations of destruction and anti-Semitism

                                   Moderator: Marianne Windsperger

Elana Shapira (University of Vienna / University of Applied Arts Vienna) – Antisemitism and the “Shock of Bodily Intimacy” in Viennese Literature and Art of the Early 20th Century

 Atinati Mamatsashvili (Ilia State University / Wiener Wiesenthal Institut für Holocaust-Studien) – The Inhabited Space as an Altered Space (Jacob, Frenkel)  

15h30 – 16h               Coffee Break

16h – 17h30               Session 5 – ‘Alternative temporalities’ – the present, the past, the aftermath

Moderator: Bela Tsipuria

Enikő Darabos (Sigmund Freud Private University Vienna) – Body and Trauma in ‘Parallel Stories’ from Péter Nádas

Harriet Murav (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) – A Reprieve from Aftermaths: David Hofshteyn’s ‘And again a world’

 Marat Grinberg (Reed College) – Writing Science Fiction in the Aftermath of Babyn Iar and Auschwitz: from Stanislaw Lem to Ariadna Gromova