How do diaries, letters, memoirs, autobiographies capture the lived experiences of migration, exile, multilingualism, & cultural transition?

Crossing Borders brings together researchers exploring how life-writing and ego-documents (diaries, letters, memoirs, autobiographies) capture the lived experiences of migration, exile, multilingualism, and cultural transition. The conference highlights how personal narratives illuminate transnational movement, identity formation, and encounters across borders, languages, and empires.

Topics addressed across the programme…

One man’s vision. A nation’s reality. David Baddiel examines Theodor Herzl’s legacy, exploring how the father of Zionism’s vision of a Jewish state shaped modern Israel and the enduring conflicts that followed.

Despite being one of the key protagonists in Israel’s story, Theodor Herzl is far from being a household name, and yet it is his vision of a Jewish State that has come to define one of the key areas in modern international relations.

Born in 1860, Herzl was a lawyer, journalist, playwright, and political activist. He witnessed the rise in antisemitism in 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.