Anna Hájková, PhD candidate in Modern European History at the University of Toronto and a 2010 Ben and Zelda Cohen Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, will offer a talk on Wednesday, March 9, in ChurchhillTower Room 207 at 8 pm. The lecture is free and open to the public.
The lecture is entitled “Speculations about German Jews – Elderly People from Germany in the Theresienstadt Ghetto.” Hájková summarizes her talk in the following way:
The Theresienstadt Ghetto represented the last chapter of the much-described history of the German-Jewish bourgeoisie. Yet we know little about their lives in Theresienstadt beyond one-sided, stereotyping, marginal observations of young, usually Czech Jews. My talk poses the question what can be learned by a retrospective reading of cultural and social patterns of those German Jews deported there: I examine the lives of those elderly German Jews in Theresienstadt, who belonged to the bourgeois, assimilated, urban generation of 1860 to 1890; among them Leo Baeck, Elsa Bernstein and Rolf Grabower.
The lecture is sponsored by the DAAD German Studies Fund at Canisius College. For further information, contact Peter Böhm at Ext. 2327 or boehmp@canisius.edu.
Submitted by: Peter Böhm, associate professor, modern languages, literatures and cultures
