How to understand and decode humor in the Terezin ghetto: A Sunday afternoon talk by Dr. Lisa Peschel following matinee stage performance of WHY WE LAUGH

Dr. Lisa Peschel, University of York
"Translating Terezín"
A talk to follow Sunday matinee performance of Why We Laugh
(to conclude long before sundown)

WHY WE LAUGH 

Sunday Matinee Performance

September 13

2:00 PM

Open Eye Figure Theatre

506 East 24th Street, Minneapolis MN 55404

Admission is $20general; $15 for students, seniors, and MN Fringe button holders.

Tickets are available through Open Eye Figure Theatre or through Brown Paper Tickets.

WHY WE LAUGH is a new adaptation of Laugh with Us!, an original cabaret by Felix Porges, Vítězslav Horpatzky, Pavel Weisskopf and Pavel Stránský, written and performed in 1944 in the World War II Jewish Ghetto at Terezín, just 40 miles northwest of Prague (English translation & dramaturgy by Lisa Peschel).

Dr. Lisa Peschel, the scholar who discovered the cabaret texts and translated them into English (they are collected in the book Performing Captivity, Performing Escape) will deliver a brief talk after the performance on Sunday, September 13. Entitled Translating Terezin, it will be the story of Peschel’s search for the meaning of the text—how, with the aid of survivors she cracked the code of the slang and inside jokes to capture the prisoners’ unique, resilient sense of humor. A question and answer period will follow.

Courses of interest for the Fall 2015 semester

GER 1905 -- Freshman Seminar: Remediating the Holocaust (Leslie Morris, Th 4:40-7:10pm, Kolthoff Hall 139)
HIST 3727 -- History of the Holocaust (Adam Blackler, M/W 9:45-11:00am, Nicholson 110)
Study of 1933-1945 extermination of six million Jews and others by Nazi Germany on basis of race. European anti-Semitism. Implications of social Darwinism and race theory. Perpetrators, victims, onlookers, resistance. Theological responses of Jews and Christians. 
GCC 3002 -- Grand Challenges: Beyond War and Atrocity (Alejandro Baer, Catherine Guisan, Tu/Th 11:15-12:30pm, Anderson Hall 330)
SOC 4104 -- Crime and Human Rights (Joachim Savelsberg, Tu/Th 2:30-3:45pm, Blegen 225)
AMIN 1001 -- American Indian Peoples in the United States (Tu/Th 1:00-2:15, Elliott N647)
Introduction to how voices/visions of indigenous peoples have contributed to history of cultural expression in North America. Historic contexts/varieties of this expression by region, tribal cultures. Emphasizes contributions in literature, philosophy, politics, fine arts.
AMIN 1003 -- American Indians in Minnesota (multiple listings)
History, culture, and lived experience of American Indian people in Minnesota. Self-representation and histories of Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) and Dakota peoples through film, music, oral traditions, and written texts. Work by non-Indian scholars focuses on cultural, philosophical, and linguistic perspectives of Anishinaabe and Dakota peoples.
HIST 3872 -- American Indian History since 1830 (W 6:20-8:30, Blegen 110)
Focus on the impact of federal Indian policy on American Indian cultures and societies, and on American Indian culture change.
HIST 5940 -- Topics in Asian History: Cultures of Modernity and Memories of the Past in East Asia (Liping Wang, W 3:35-5:30, Carlson 1-122)
PubH 6801 / 3802 -- Health and Human Rights (Kirk Allison, W 5:40-8:30pm)
POL 8260 -- Topics in Political Theory: Colonialism (Th 3:35-5:20pm, Soc Sci 1383)
POL 8660 -- Topics in Comparative Politics: Authoritarian Regimes (David Samuels, Tu 1:25-3:20pm, Blegen 330)
SPAN 3221 -- Interpreting Colonial Latin America: Empire and Early Modernity (Raul Marrero-Fente, Tu/Thu 1:00-2:15pm, Nicholson 120)
Conquest, colonization, and forms of resistance in Latin America.

2015 IAGS Conference Review by JOE EGGERS

In July, I had the privilege of presenting at the International Association of Genocide Scholars' twelfth meeting in Yerevan, Armenia. The conference’s theme of comparative analysis of twentieth century genocides brought experts from around the world to Armenia’s capital city for five days of presentations, learning, and networking. More than 180 attendees, representing more than two dozen countries, shared their research and insight into many of the twentieth century’s most infamous atrocities.

The conference began on Wednesday, July 8^th with a welcome from Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan to attendees. In his address, President Sargsyan discussed the legacy of the Armenian Genocide, not only for the Armenian people, but all of humanity. He also spoke about moving forward, highlighted by his announcement of the creation of a new biannual conference sponsored by the Armenian Republic that will discuss the lasting effects of genocide and how the global community can overcome episodes of violence. A full transcript of President Sargsyan’s address can be found on the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute’s website.

The conference kicked off Thursday morning with more than 20 breakout sessions exploring themes like prevention, intergenerational trauma, perpetrator justice, and gender and sexuality. I presented research I did this past spring, comparing themes of nationalism in pre-genocide late Ottoman and early American politics. University of Minnesota alumna and current Ohio State sociology professor Dr. Hollie Brehm presented her research analyzing rates of violence at a community level during the Rwandan Genocide.

My favorite session was the cultural genocide breakout. The presentations primarily focused on the continuing destruction and appropriation of Khachkars, ornate stone crosses, and Armenian churches that are scattered across modern Turkey. The presenters brought different and insightful perspectives to the session; an art historian talked about the effect the destruction from an artistic perspective and an Armenian PhD student shared her research from the viewpoint of the Armenian people. There was a great conversation that followed, discussing the limits of the legal definition of genocide versus Raphael Lemkin’s original ideas. The session was moderated by Dr. Adam Muller of the University of Manitoba. Dr. Muller will be visiting the University this fall to discuss his virtual museum project which sheds light on the residential schools for Canada’s First Nations people.

Srebrenica: What Remains 20 Years Later, by ERMA NEZIREVIC

Recently I laid over at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, at which the Delta Airlines security agent checked my U.S. passport prior to boarding the plane to Minneapolis. Upon seeing my name and place of birth (Bosnia and Herzegovina), he asked in Serbian if I spoke "our language." I responded with a "yes, of course," and he completed the rest of the security procedure in ‘our language,’ revealing that he is a Serb who escaped to the Netherlands in 1991 because he did not want to have to fight the Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) or the Croats, as they are all "my people, our people."

Coincidentally, this random interaction occurred only two days after the 20th anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide, which took place on July 11, 1995. It made me ponder the use of the word ‘our’ in this brief conversation. We all clearly still have a lot in common: the primary, and perhaps strongest, connection being the language. ‘Our’ language, as the security agent used it, refers to Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian. However, in ‘our’ language, there is still a contention over what happened in Srebrenica. Recently, Russia, Serbia’s ally, had vetoed the UN Security Council measure that labeled Srebrenica a genocide. Killing people based on their identity is a very basic definition of genocide, and denying that is to politicize it once again, and take away from the core of what this event should represent 20 years later, which is healing and hope for the future. 

Interview with Professor JOACHIM SAVELSBERG, Professor of Sociology, on his recent book, "Representing Mass Violence" by WAHUTU SIGURU

Wahutu: What was the main motivation behind this current book, Representing Mass Violence: Conflicting Responses to Human Rights Violations in Darfur?

Prof. Savelsberg: You know that I have a longstanding interest in the way in which institutions of justice, and currently transitional justice, affect collective representations or collective memories of events, especially mass atrocities. And so, the motivation for this book on Darfur was to understand how interventions by the UN Security Council and the International Criminal Court (ICC) affect how global civil society thinks about such events, the way people imagine such events. And, part of the original design was to do a comparative study of eight countries. Even though the ICC is a global institution, the kinds of messages that it sends out, the kinds of representation of events that it offers are filtered by national institutions, they are reinforced by carrier groups in one country, but less so in another country. They find more receptive audiences in a country that has maybe dealt with mass atrocities in the past than in another country that hasn’t. So that was the main motivation, to understand how interventions, in this case by the UN Security Council and the ICC, affect the representation of Darfur in the public sphere. Initially I only thought of news media, that’s why we did a comparative analysis of newspapers in eight countries. And then, in the course of the research, I became aware that representations do not just differ by country but also by social fields. I was interested from the beginning in how human rights activists, and I selected Amnesty International as an example, talk about Darfur. How they reflect on the interventions by the ICC and the UN Security Council. But in my interviews I also ended up targeting a humanitarian aid NGO , for which I picked Doctors without Borders. I additionally interviewed diplomats from foreign ministries, or state departments if you want, and I saw that different fields talk in quite different terms about the violence in Darfur. Just as I was interested in the country-specific conditions that lead to a selective communication of ICC representations, so I became interested in the field-specific conditions that affect communication about Darfur.

Wahutu: Previous work has not done this much data collection or analysis.  From what you have said, the data collection and analysis seems like a really important part of how you wanted to do this project.  Why was it important for you to do the interviews, to do the content analysis of news reports and travel to all of these countries?

Prof. Savelsberg: It was important for a number of reasons. The first reason is that we know that global institutions of justice like the ICC are extremely modern. Human history hasn’t really known them. We’ve known ad hoc courts in the twentieth century, but not a permanent international criminal court. We have very little systematic knowledge about the effects of these institutions. It would be desirable of course to measure the effect of ICC interventions on the future likelihood of genocide and crimes against humanity and war crimes. That would be a very tall order, and we will have to tackle this at some point. I wasn’t able to go that far, but one interim step is to think about how these interventions affect the way the world thinks about mass atrocities. It is not at all for granted that people in different countries take note of what is going on. Even if institutions like the ICC intervene, there is a long history of denial, of closing one’s eyes, especially if atrocities occur in a far-away place in the world. So it was very important to me to begin to systematically measure the effects of these sorts of interventions in a cautious way, by first looking at the impact they have on the degree to which and the way in which mass atrocities are represented and perceived.

Wahutu: What would you say was one of the most surprising findings that jumped out at you?

Impressions after a semester of HISTORY OF THE HOLOCAUST and a visit by Holocaust survivor IRENE BERMAN

My name is Joshkin Sezer. I am a history major who is starting his third year at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities. In the Spring Semester of 2015, I enrolled in History of the Holocaust, instructed by Adam Blackler. Near the end of the semester, we got the chance to hear a talk from a Holocaust survivor, Irene Berman. She had just published a book detailing her experience as a child in Norway during the Holocaust and how her family managed to survive. 

After taking some time to think about Irene Berman’s talk to my class, I continue to be intrigued by what I learned about the Norwegian Jewish population and their struggles during the Holocaust. It is not a topic that comes up very often (if ever) in the United States. It was not until I enrolled in the History of the Holocaust at the University of Minnesota that I developed a better sense of what life was like for Jews who lived outside of Eastern and Central Europe.

Though the crimes of the Third Reich cast a long shadow, Irene’s story made that a reality for those of us who listened to her presentation. She gave a face to the victims of Holocaust. It is far too easy to become overcome by numbers and statistics when we think of the crimes committed by the Nazis. Is it possible to know the entire story? Certainly not, but learning a few of them will no doubt help to prevent a future Holocaust. 

And it was not just Irene’s talk that provided a face to those that were lost. Adam also did a great job in offering a human element to the story. He was helped in part by his refusal to create black-and-white narrative. Indeed, saying, “all Germans were Nazis” and that “all Jews helpless sheep” does a tremendous disservice to the complexity and tragedy of the events that comprise the Holocaust. Nothing was inevitable. Conscious actors made decisions to participate. “How” and “why” are more difficult questions to answer, and as such were the central focus of Adam’s course.

But what form might this take outside of the classroom? In my opinion, museums are among the best examples that can provide a human element to history. Unfortunately, however, the most important audience -- children and young adults -- often avoid them out of fear of boredom, or only go as part of a class fieldtrip or family vacation. In June 2015, I traveled to Washington, D.C. to visit a friend. While there, we went to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which Adam often referenced in class. When I got to the Museum, I saw the trouble with taking kids in 7th or 8th grade to the Museum. While there, I found out is that a lot of these kids do not actually care about the subject of the Museum. They are more interested taking selfies, talking loudly and laughing. 

I took this class hoping to answer a basic question: “What exactly is the point of studying history?” As a history major, I get asked this question all the time, and I do not always have an adequate answer to it. After this class, though, I can honestly say that the point of studying history is to better understand the human condition. History is not a mere collection of events and social movements that inevitably occurred, but a collection of actions and consequence made by individuals. People who had hopes, dreams, and desires all of their own. 

One day I hope to be a teacher, and everything I have learned in this class will be useful for teaching kids not only about the Holocaust, but also about how to consider history in a more nuanced way.

September 24: "If that's true then I'm a murderer!" film screening and discussion with director on Nazi perpetrator guilt, repression, and denial

Thursday, September 24, 2015
4:00 - 6:00 PM
Film screening and talk
1210 Heller Hall

WALTER MANOSCHEK (political science, University of Vienna)
"If that's True, then I'm a Murderer!" Adolf Storms and the Massacre of Hungarian Jews in Deutsch Schuetzen (2012, 70 mins, German with English subtitles)
Film screening and discussion on Nazi perpetrator guilt, repression, and denial