The Leo Baeck Institute London is pleased to announce the programme for its 2026 Lecture Series, which explores how Germany’s turbulent past continues to influence its identity, politics, and collective memory today.
https://www.lbilondon.ac.uk/events/lecture-series-2026
This year’s talks bring together leading historians and researchers to examine how echoes of the 20th century still shape the modern world – from the everyday complicity of ordinary Germans under Nazi rule to the evolving ways Jewish communities remember the past in post-war Europe and beyond.
Events include:
- Dr Sandra Lipner, Bourgeois Germans and the Third Reich (21 May): Drawing on her own family archive, Dr Lipner looks at how the seemingly ‘non-Nazi’ middle class helped sustain the dictatorship.
- Dr Alexander Walther, Jewish Holocaust Memory and East German Antifascism (22 October): Exploring the uneasy relationship between official ideology and personal memory in the former East Germany.
- Dr Günther Jikeli, The German Case: What It Tells Us About Antisemitism Worldwide (19 November): Investigating how old prejudices are resurfacing in democratic societies.
- Pragya Kaul Guido, Europeans in the Raj: German Jews and the Government of India Act, 1935 (3 December): Charting the experiences of Jewish refugees navigating the networks of colonial India.
Lectures invite audiences to reflect on how the moral and political questions of the past continue to shape Europe’s conscience today. The in-person lectures will take place at Senate House in London’s Bloomsbury and will also be streamed live on Zoom. Entry is free, but booking is required via Eventbrite.
