This event brings together scholars and individuals with personal connections to the Kindertransport to explore its legacy in British memory and culture. The discussion will examine historical narratives, cultural representations, and the continuing significance of the Kindertransport in shaping British identity.

Online (hosted by the Leo Baeck Institute London in collaboration with the British-German Association)

Photo: Wikipedia

Personal narratives such as diaries, letters, memoirs, and autobiographies often capture experiences of migration, exile, and cultural transition that are less visible in other forms of documentation. This conference seeks to explore how ego-documents function as records of transnational experience, linguistic negotiation, and cultural hybridity. Ego-documents allow for what Iriye and Saunier (2009) termed the ‘links and flows’ between states and the history of ‘people, ideas, products, processes and patterns’ to be elucidated. The study of the diary or the letter for example allows the…

During the Third Reich, German political, social, economic, and private life was transformed to such an extent that the Holocaust became thinkable and, ultimately, possible. Yet many Germans maintained a ‘not Nazi’ subjectivity, drawing a line between themselves and overly zealous ‘150%’ Nazis. This talk uses the extensive private collection of letters and documents of Annemarie and Heinrich Brenzinger, Sandra Lipner’s great-grandparents from south-west Germany, to discuss why bourgeois Germans who were not enthusiastic about Hitler still willingly embraced the Third Reich.