POSTPONED
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.
Sandra Lipner is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in History at University College London, working on the AHRC / DFG project ‘Good Citizens, Terrible Times: Notions of Individuality, Community and Responsibility in the Holocaust’. She completed her AHRC- funded PhD in History and German Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her work explores the use of ego-documents as sources for a history of mentalities of the Third Reich and the early postwar period. In 2023, she co-curated the exhibition ‘Holocaust Letters’ at the Wiener Holocaust Library, London.
