Collaboration, Resistance, and the Holocaust.

Between 1940 and 1944, France was first partially and then entirely occupied by Germany. The Vichy regime collaborated with the Nazis and participated in the persecution of the local Jewish population.

Hardly anywhere else can the key conflicts of memory relating to World War II and the Holocaust be seen in such concentration as in France. This seminar therefore views France as a laboratory for European memory culture: Its key focus lies on competing interpretations of collaboration, resistance, and the Holocaust and their development after 1945.

Proceeding from the Jewish experience, it examines the state’s politics of memory, court proceedings, public debates, and cultural representations of the past. It moreover illuminates how these conflicts of memory were augmented by engagements with the colonial past and the effect this has had into the present day.

Literature: The reader will be made available at the beginning of the seminar.