Hitler's Victims: Jewish and non-Jewish Refugee Memoirs for British Readers, 1933–1945
- Event type
- Seminar
- Series
- Exile Research Seminars
- Address
- Room 261, Second Floor, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU
- Event dates
- Contact
- jane.lewin@sas.ac.uk 020 7862 8966
Speaker: Ellen Pilsworth (University of Reading)
The popularity of Holocaust memoirs in the Anglophone world since roughly the 1980s has helped to place the Holocaust at the centre of British narratives about WW2. At the time though, the Jewish plight was not a central issue for most observers in Britain. This is not because of a dearth of information about Jewish persecution, but rather, a lack of interest in the perspectives and experiences of Jews meant that few Jewish memoirs were published at the time, and Jewishness was often erased from those accounts that were published.
This talk showcases new research exploring how accounts by Jewish and non-Jewish victims of Nazi persecution in Germany and Austria were shaped for and received by British readers between the years 1933 and 1945. During the course of the War, the focus of interest in refugee memoirs shifted as different victim groups took centre stage in the British public imagination: during appeasement, Communist and Socialist victims attracted the interest of British observers whilst in wartime, German and Austrian Christians, not Jews, came to represent ‘what Britain was fighting for’. Overall, this study highlights the centrality of tropes of victimhood in public discourse, and how a reliance on such tropes can be misleading.
Ellen Pilsworth is a cultural historian and Lecturer in German and Translation Studies at the University of Reading and, this year, she is a visiting researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. She has published articles on German literature and culture from 1800 to the present. Her forthcoming monograph (which informs this talk) is to be published by Berghahn Books.
All are welcome to attend this seminar, organised by the Research Centre for German & Austrian Exile Studies at the ILCS, in person or online (via Zoom).
Attendance is free, but advance online registration is essential for both in person attendance and online.
Image: Detail from the cover of Men Crucified by Bruno Heilig (Eyre & Spottiswood, 1941). 
