Virtual Book Talk: The Compromise of Return
Thu, 30 Sep 2021 19:00 - 20:00 British Summer Time (UTC+1)
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Virtual Book Talk: The Compromise of Return: Elizabeth Anthony in conversation with Jacqueline Vansant
About this event
As part of new academic books series, The Wiener Holocaust Library is delighted to host an in-conversation with Dr Elizabeth Anthony, led by Prof Jacqueline Vansant, on Dr Anthony’s new book, The Compromise of Return: Viennese Jews after the Holocaust.
The Compromise of Return: Viennese Jews after the Holocaust explores the motivations and expectations that inspired Viennese Jews to re-establish lives in their hometown after the devastation and trauma of the Holocaust. Elizabeth Anthony investigates their personal, political, and professional endeavours, revealing the contours of their experiences of returning to a post-Nazi society, with full awareness that most of their fellow Austrians had embraced the Nazi takeover and their country’s unification with Germany—clinging to a collective national identity myth as “first victim” of the Nazis. Anthony weaves together archival documentation with oral histories, interviews, memoirs, and personal correspondence to craft a multi-layered, multivoiced narrative of return focused on the immediate post-war years. The Compromise of Return is the first such social history to depict how survivors—individually and collectively—navigated post-war Vienna’s political and social setting.
About the speakers:
Elizabeth Anthony is a historian and serves as the director of Visiting Scholar Programs at the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. She received her PhD in history from Clark University and was co-editor of Freilegungen: Spiegelungen der NS-Verfolgung und ihrer Konsequenzen, Jahrbuch des International Tracing Service, Bd. 4 with Rebecca Boehling, Susanne Urban, and Suzanne Brown-Fleming.
Jacqueline Vansant is Professor Emerita of German at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. Her work has focused on the constructions of ethnicities, gender and national identities in post-World war II and contemporary Austrian literature, memoirs and films. She has published Austria Made in Hollywood (Boydell & Brewer, 2019); Reclaiming Heimat: Trauma and Mourning in Memoirs by Jewish Austrian Reemigres (Wayne State University Press, 2001), and a number of other books and articles. Among many other accolades, she was awarded the University of Michigan-Dearborn’s Distinguished Research Award in 2017.
Event guidelines:
- The Library will send you a Zoom link and joining instructions via email prior to the event. Please check your junk email folders.
- Please try and join 5 minutes before the event start time and we will let you into the room (do try and bear with us if this takes a few minutes).
- If you would like to ask a question during the event, please type your question into the chat function, and we will endeavour to answer as many questions as possible during the Q&A. Your webcam will not be seen during this event.
- The event will be recorded for the Library’s YouTube channel and will be shared at a later date.
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