Prof Dan Diner (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Dr Daniel Wildmann (Acting Director Leo Baeck Institute London) and Prof Elizabeth Harvey (Chair German History Society) are delighted to invite you to a lecture by Prof Dan Diner (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) as part of the German History Society Annual Conference.
Rites of Reserve: The German-Israeli Encounter in Luxemburg 1952
The lecture presents, using historical-anthropological 'thick description', the diplomatic scene in Luxemburg on 10 September 1952, at the point when the treaty on restitution was signed between Germany and Israel. It interprets this short scene as an originating act of German-Jewish rapprochement after 1945. At the same time, this public act crystallized a collective transformation of Jews after the Holocaust, involving the exorcising of everything that was German.
Dan Diner is Professor of Modern History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he is Principal Investigator of the ERC-Advanced Grant Project Judging Histories – Experience, Representation, and Judgment of World War II in an Age of Globalization. From 1999 to 2014 he served as well as the Director of the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture at Leipzig University. He has published numerous books on the history of the twentieth century, the Middle East and German History, especially the history of National Socialism and the Holocaust, as well as Jewish History. Among his numerous publications are Beyond the Conceivable. Studies on Germany, Nazism and the Holocaust (University of California Press, 2000) and Cataclysms. A History of the Twentieth Century from Europe’s Edge (The University of Wisconsin Press, 2008 [1999]). Professor Diner also co-founded and co-edited from 1988-1998 the journal History & Memory: Studies in Representation of the Past. His most recent publication is Rituelle Distanz. Israels deutsche Frage (DVA, 2015).
Thursday, 3 September 2015, 6:00 – 7:00 pm, German Historical Institute
