Bartash

In this seminar, students will learn about key 20th-century events that shaped contemporary identities in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia—such as Soviet and Nazi occupations, the Holocaust, and Soviet-era deportations. We will explore:

• Official historical narratives, and
• How different groups and communities remember and commemorate these events, which often spark historical controversy.

To gain in-depth insight into memory work in the Baltics, the seminar will include remote visits to museum exhibitions, discussions of artistic objects, memorials, and sites of memory, as well as grassroots activism.

The course also highlights the narratives of underrepresented communities, such as the Baltic Roma—whose genocide during World War II has only recently begun to enter public discourse—and forgotten groups like German expellees from the Kaliningrad/East Prussia region. By bringing these perspectives to light, the course challenges mainstream memory cultures.

Alongside developing regional knowledge, students will learn theories and approaches from memory studies—how processes of remembering and forgetting operate, and how historical traumas activate and shape current political decisions. We will consider, for example, why the Holocaust was long overlooked in Baltic discourse and how the war in Ukraine has reawakened Soviet-era traumas.

This proseminar offers an overview of the ways in which different Roma communities across Eastern Europe experienced the Nazi genocide and German occupation. This includes forced labor, deportations to concentration camps and the Holocaust by bullets. We will not only address the question “How did people die?” but look at the strategies initiated by individuals and groups to survive the Nazi persecution, such as going into hiding and joining resistance movements. In the second part of the course, we will focus on the issues of memory and recognition, exploring the variety of forms that the (non-)commemoration of Romani genocide has taken since the communist era. For these purposes, we will follow the transformation of the sites of memory of Roma in Poland and the former Soviet Union. The course will include a visit to the Memorium Nuremberg Trials.

In East and Southeast Europe, the persecution of Jews and Roma often took the form of the so-called Holocaust by bullets - the victims were killed in the local woods, fields and cemeteries. Yet, these natural environments often provided them with escape roots and shelters. In their memoirs and oral histories, Holocaust survivors often associate their survival with forests, marshes and natural resources, such as water and wild foods. Moreover, Jewish and Romani survivors often joined the resistance groups that were based in the woods.

How did geographies and environments determine human destinies? In this class, you will learn about the relationship between humans and the environment in the context of Holocaust history. You will work with first-person accounts of the Holocaust, as well as interactive maps and digital resources created recently. In addition, this class will introduce you into the ongoing discussion of difficult heritage sites from the environmental perspective and related ethical issues.

The course will include a visit to the Flossenbürg Concentration Camp Memorial.

Until today, Holocaust researchers have been preoccupied with the question “Why did the Holocaust happen?” To answer this question, they often take a micro-historical perspective, looking at the patterns of interethnic relations in the interwar period. Community sources from this time – diaries, letters, memoirs and photographs – reveal the richness of Jewish and Romani experiences in Eastern Europe. They not only provide insights about cultural, spiritual and economic life of these minorities but shed light on their relations with their neighbors. This includes local interethnic tensions and daily anti-Semitism. In this class, we will zoom in on everyday experiences of Roma and Jews in Eastern Europe. In many places of interwar Eastern Europe, Roma used to travel, while Jews lived in small towns (shtetl). Yet viewing their lives through the prism of tradition would be a methodological limitation. Younger generations of East European Jews learnt about Zionism and took part in Jewish youth organizations. In the Soviet Union, both minorities experienced a significant transformation of their traditional lifestyles. In this class, you will learn how to use ego-documents and photographs in historical research and get a better understanding of interethnic relations in Eastern Europe on the eve of World War II.

Would you like to know more about personal experiences of the Holocaust and how to use oral histories in your research and teaching? This course will introduce you into the methodology of oral history by means of a detailed analysis of Holocaust survivor testimonies. After a brief methodological overview, we will watch and discuss the video testimonies of Jewish and Roma survivors from major oral history collections. Drawing on these personal accounts, we will elucidate the peculiarities of the Holocaust in East and Southeast Europe. Thus, you will gain a more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of this historical phenomenon. This class is planned as a block seminar. Each 4-hour session will include literature discussion and a practical part (work with video testimonies). The course will also include a visit to the Flossenbürg Concentration Camp Memorial.

Block Seminar for Doctoral Researchers and Advanced Master Students

The Soviet Union
declared itself an atheist and internationalist state. Religion was absent from
public spaces and new Soviet rituals gradually replaced religious holidays.
Many young people deliberately abandoned family traditions to pursue educational
and professional opportunities offered by the communist party.

Yet some groups
managed to maintain their ethnic and religious identities through the Soviet
time, thus resisting to official policies. But what are the limits and
possibilities for cultural and religious resistance in an authoritarian state?
We tackle this question with a number of case studies.

In this class we explore complex histories of the sites where the Holocaust happened. You will learn not only “what happened” but “how it has been remembered.” Among the addressed questions are: What stories do Holocaust sites embody? What documentary evidence have they left behind? How have they been memorized in ritual and stone? How different actors and groups have appropriated and instrumentalized their memory under changing political regimes? For these purposes, we follow the transformation of the mass killing sites and concentration camps whose history is less known “in the West.” Our case studies include (but are not limited to) Babyn Yar, Paneriai, Maly Trascianiec, Daugavpils and Jasenovac. To reconstruct their histories, we explore a variety of visual sources, maps, survivor testimonies and ego-documents.