This online roundtable brings together scholars and practitioners to examine the Kindertransport through archival research, personal testimony, and reflective practice. Exploring sources ranging from international archives to refugees’ own words, the discussion considers how the Kindertransport has been remembered, interpreted, and mobilised in British culture, and why it continues to matter today.

Speakers: 

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…

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.