Painting by Josef Nassy of the Tittmoning camp in Nazi Germany, where he was interned, 1943. US Holocaust Memorial Museum, gift of the Severin Wunderman family; Photography by Sarah Phillips Casteel
The Nazi party introduced antisemitic exclusionary laws shortly after Adolf Hitler was appointed German Chancellor in January 1933. While Jews were the primary target of persecution and murder, those who did not fit the “Aryan” ideal espoused by the Nazis were also persecuted under exclusionary regulations, including Black people, and Sinti and Roma in Germany, among others. This year’s Meyerhoff Annual Lecture will explore work produced by Jewish and Black artists interned during the Holocaust and World War II.
Speakers will pay special attention to Friedl Dicker-Brandeis’s work with children in the Theresienstadt ghetto and Josef Nassy’s visual diary of his life in the Laufen and Tittmoning internment camps for enemy aliens. They will discuss the importance of art in documenting persecution and murder, while bearing witness to the atrocities and preserving the stories of those who endured the Holocaust—including the stories of victim groups othered in society.
Speakers
Sarah Phillips Casteel, Professor, Department of English Language and Literature, Carleton University
Elizabeth Otto, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History, University at Buffalo
Moderator
Danielle Battisti, Department Chair, Associate Professor of History, University of Nebraska Omaha
This in-person or virtual discussion is free and open to the public. Registration is required to receive the link to watch.
For more information, contact Kierra Crago-Schneider at kcrago-schneider@ushmm.org.
Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff of Baltimore, Maryland, were active philanthropists in the United States and abroad, focusing especially on Jewish learning and scholarship, music, the arts, and humanitarian causes. Their children, Eleanor Katz and Harvey M. Meyerhoff, member and chairman emeritus of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, have endowed this lecture.
The mission of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center, part of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, is to ensure the long-term growth and vitality of Holocaust Studies. To do that, it is essential to provide opportunities for new generations of scholars. The vitality and the integrity of Holocaust Studies require openness, independence, and free inquiry, so that new ideas are generated and tested through peer review and public debate. The opinions of scholars expressed before, during, or after their activities with the Mandel Center do not represent and are not endorsed by the Mandel Center or the Museum.
