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Leo Baeck Institute London Lecture Series 2017-18

Lecture Series 2017-18A lecture series organised by the Leo Baeck Institute London in cooperation with the German Historical Institute London.

This season’s topic intends to discuss the challenges which arise when writing a European-Jewish family history set in the historically and politically charged period of the late 19th to the mid-20th century. What scholarly problems does a writer encounter, what emotional difficulties does an author face - especially in terms of allowing the public access to one's own personal history, and how can these challenges be dealt with?

For more information on the this season’s lecture series, please refer to the leaflet here.

Lisa Appignanesi 

Lisa Appignanesi teases out some of the hurdles she encountered researching her critically acclaimed family memoir, Losing the Dead. These extended post publication: memoir writing elicits the kinds of responses historical texts rarely do.

Please note: A short 15 minute film called: Ex Memoria, directed by Josh Appignanesi and starring Sarah Kestleman, will also be shown.

 

Lisa Appignanesi OBE is a writer and novelist. She is a Visiting Professor at King’s College, London, Chair of the Royal Society of Literature and…

Thomas Harding

In 2013, Thomas Harding visited his Jewish family’s old weekend house outside of Berlin. He found it shrouded in a jungle of bushes and trees, its windows broken, graffiti painted across its walls and that it was destined for demolition. When he told his family that he wanted to work with the locals to save the house they reacted with intense emotion, triggering a debate about memories, the value of history and the possibility of reconciliation.  

Atina Grossmann

The talk examines, through the intimate – yet also distant – lens of family history, the ambivalent and paradoxical experiences, sensibilities, and emotions of bourgeois Berlin Jews who found refuge and romance in the ‘Orient’ of Iran and India after 1933. Drawing on an extensive collection of family correspondence and memorabilia from Iran and India (1935-1947), Grossmann probes her own parents’ understanding of their unstable position as well as the perils and pleasures of writing a ‘hybrid’ border-crossing family story folded into a larger historical drama of war, Holocaust, and…

Martin Doerry

After the death of German politician Gerhard Jahn in 1998, his four sisters found hundreds of letters in his house, which they had written during the war to their Jewish mother Lilli, who had been detained in a labour camp and, finally, killed in Auschwitz in 1944. Fifty years of silence had followed but now, for the first time, the family was able to talk about Lilli once again. But should the letters be published? Lilli’s grandson Martin Doerry undertook the tasks of both convincing his family that they should and conducting the necessary research, thus finding himself in the dual role…

Philippe Sands, Katrin Himmler

East West Street: A Personal History of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity

In his short lecture and subsequent conversation with Katrin Himmler, Philippe Sands explores how personal lives and history are interwoven. Drawing from his prize-winning book East West Street – part historical detective story, part family history, part legal thriller – he connect his work on ‘crimes against humanity’ and ‘genocide’, the events that overwhelmed his family during the Second World War, and an untold story at the heart of the Nuremberg Trial that pits…