Public Round Table: Holocaust Distortion. Contested memory in Europe – day 2 study tour in memory politics
Jewish Museum Vienna – 5 June 2023 –
Experts from the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies address the issues of Holocaust Distortion, Contested Memory in Europe. Experts with a focus on Austria, Hungary, the post-Yugoslav space and Poland
Jochen Böhler (addressing case of Poland): Director, Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies
Since 2022, Jochen Böhler has been director of the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies. He has taught Eastern European History, Holocaust, War and Nationalism Studies as Invited Professor at Sorbonne University, Paris, and was acting Chair for Eastern European History at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena. Also established research areas on war and violence at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw and the Imre Kertesz Kolleg in Jena.
Helga Embacher (addressing case of Austria): Historian at University of Salzburg; Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Salzburg. Has been a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis; University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia; University of Innsbruck; and at the University of Haifa. Dr. Embacher is also member of the Historians Commission of the Republic of Austria, focusing Restitution negotiations and the role of Jewish organizations. Her main fields of research are national socialism, Jewish history, migration, Israel, antisemitism.
Éva Kovács (addressing case of Hungary): Sociologist, Deputy Director for Academic Affairs at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies; Prof. Dr. is Deputy Director (academic affairs) at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies. She is also a Research Professor at the Centre for Social Sciences and he Hungarian Academy of Sciences Centre of Excellence in Budapest. Her research fields are the history of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe; memory and remembrance; and Jewish identity in Hungary and Slovakia. In addition to many scholarly publications, she has also co-curated exhibitions in several European cities and is the founder of the audio-visual archive, “Voices of the Twentieth Century,” in Budapest.
Ljiljana Radonić (addressing post-Yugoslav case): Political Scientist, Vice Director of the Institute of Culture Studies and Theatre History at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. She also has been teaching at the Department of Political Science at the University of Vienna since 2004. And she has been a visiting professor at Gießen University and the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Graz. She is a member of the Austrian Delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance; and an advisory board member at several Austrian ministries: 1) Defense Ministry’s Museum of Military History; 2) Education, Science and Research; 3) Chancellor’s National Strategy against Antisemitism.
Matt James (moderator): Political Scientist at the University of Victoria. He studies the politics of reparation and transitional justice and also has expertise in the fields of Canadian politics, constitutionalism, and social movement studies. Author of Misrecognized Materialists: Social Movements in Canadian Constitutional Politics (University of British Columbia Press).
This Round Table is organised by the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI), the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research, the Jewish Museum Vienna and the Jean Monnet Network “European Memory Politics” at the University of Victoria, Canada.
