"The View from Washington Heights"
Vanderbilt Leipzig Lecture
The event marks the beginning of a lecture series in which scientists from Nashville and Leipzig alternately give insights into their latest research and the added value of the strategic partnership between Vanderbilt University and Leipzig University at mutual locations.
The lecture is aimed at scientists and students and is open to the interested public.
Introduction:
Prof. Dr. Eva Inés Obergfell, Rector of Leipzig University
Lecture:
Prof. Dr. Helmut Walser Smith
The View from Washington Heights: The Jews from Württemberg tell their Lives, c. 1980
This talk evaluates the range of attitudes that refugee Jews from Württemberg had toward their German pasts in the late 1970s and early 1980s, focusing on the autobiographies contained in Signs of Life: Jews from Württemberg (1982), one of the first collections of the life stories of ordinary German Jews forced to flee Nazi Germany, and on the remarkable collection of survey data from Washington Heights collected by Steven M. Lowenstein in the early 1980s. The talk also takes up the tribulations endured by a single Washington Heights couple with the German Reparations bureau. The main question of the lecture centers around what was sayable and what could be heard at the beginning of the transatlantic take off of Holocaust memory.
Helmut Walser Smith is a historian of Modern Germany, with particular interests in the history of nation-building and nationalism, the history of cartography, religious history, the history of anti-Semitism, and the history of the Holocaust and its memory. He holds the Martha Rivers Ingram-Chair at the History Department of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and he is the Director of the Max Kade Center for European and German Studies.
He is the author of German Nationalism and Religious Conflict, 1870-1914 (Princeton, 1995) and edited a number of important collections, including The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History (Oxford, 2011), Protestants, Catholics and Jews in Germany, 1800-1914 (Oxford, 2001), The Holocaust and other Genocides: History, Representation, Ethics (Nashville, 2002), and Exclusionary Violence: Antisemitic Riots in Modern German History (Ann Arbor, 2002).
His book, The Butcher's Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town (New York, 2002), received the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History and was an L.A. Times Non-Fiction Book of the Year. Smith has also authored The Continuities of German History: Nation, Religion, and Race across the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2008), and in 2020 he published Germany. A Nation in its Time. Before, During, and after Nationalism, 1500-2000 (New York: 2020).