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Date: March 29, 1999
Princeton to Host International Conference on the Holocaust
Conference to focus on the memory of the Holocaust and its current impact in Germany and the United States
PRINCETON, N.J. -- An internationally renowned group of scholars, authors, architects, cultural critics, museum curators, and public figures, representing a broad spectrum of opinions, will gather at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School April 15-18 for a conference entitled Jews, Germany and the Future of Memory. The public is cordially invited and no registration is needed.
The conference focuses, not on the historical aspects of the Holocaust itself, but on the memory of the event, which, more than half a century afterwards, remains an active force in shaping the cultural, emotional, and political perceptions of present generations, both in Germany and in the United States. The conference will consider the complex ways in which remembrance is conveyed through memorials, monuments, and museums. It also will assess the impact of films and other media on the public imagination.
"One has only to look at the recent Academy Awards and at the Berlin Film Festival, where films on the Holocaust walked off with top honors," says Froma Zeitlin, one of the chief organizers of the conference and the director of the Program in Jewish Studies at Princeton, "to realize how much the traumas of the past continue to attract broad public attention, in new and controversial ways."
The conference begins shortly after the Jewish memorial day called Yom Hashoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day. It also comes in the midst of new debates in Germany about how to remember the Holocaust. A Jewish Museum recently opened in Berlin and a memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe will be built in united Germany's new capital. These sites of memory have generated heated discussion on every aspect, from their architecture to the artifacts they display. A central question of those debates - how Germany can heal the wounds of its past without weakening its memory of the Holocaust - is one of the issues that will be addressed at the Princeton conference. Another and related topic is the actual status of Jewish life in Germany today in the light of an increase in the size and diversity of its Jewish population, and more generally, how to assess the evolving relations between Germany and Jews, now and for the future.
The conference will include some of the leading figures in these debates, including Andreas Nachama, head of the Jewish community in Berlin, Daniel Libeskind, the architect of the new Jewish Museum, and James Young, the only non-German appointed to the Holocaust memorial commission. The three keynote speakers will be Saul Friedlander, the noted Holocaust historian, Michael Blumenthal, director of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, and Michael Naumann, the German Minister of Culture, each of whom will address some aspect of negotiating the problems and politics of memory in Germany at the present time.
"Germans have contended with problems of guilt, responsibility, and memory ever since the end of the war," notes Anson Rabinbach, professor of history and another conference organizer. "But with the end of a divided Germany, the question of memory has taken on new meaning. Recent controversies there suggest that the vicissitudes of remembering inevitably take place in the context of a constantly shifting dialogue between the present and the past. This conference will address the future of that dialogue."
The conference has been organized by the Program in Jewish Studies (under the auspices of the Ronald O. Perelman Institute) at Princeton University, in co-sponsorship with the Federal Republic of Germany, the New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education, and the American Jewish Committee.
All panel and roundtable discussions will take place at Dodds Auditorium in the Woodrow Wilson School.
A series of German films on Jewish themes began March 9 and will continue every Tuesday evening until the conference. An accompanying exhibition of photographs by the noted artist, Edward Serotta, entitled GERMANY*JEWS*MEMORY, opened March 21 at the Bernstein Gallery in the Woodrow Wilson School and will run until April 19.
For more information about the conference, its program and further details about attending, please see the conference website at http://www.princeton.edu/~jwst/conf/. You may also contact Dr. Joan Rivitz, Conference Coordinator (drjoanr@aol.com) or Marcie Citron, Program Manager, Jewish Studies (mcitron@princeton.edu).
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
Ronald O. Perelman Institute for Jewish Studies
Program in Jewish Studiespresents
An International Conference
GERMANY, JEWS, AND THE FUTURE OF MEMORY
April 15-18, 1999, Princeton University