After Kristallnacht: The Routinization of German State Violence in the East

Part of the Fall 2018 Elie Wiesel Memorial Lectures: "Kristallnacht 1938: What happened? What have we learned?" Dr. Bartov, Professor of European History at Brown, will link the images we have of November 9 in Germany as the only moment in which there was open public violence against Jews, which supposedly demonstrated that many Germans preferred not to witness such events, to the kind of blatantly public violence displayed by the Germans and their helpers in Eastern Europe. What does this tell us about German self-perceptions, German and Jewish perceptions of "the East," and more generally about the nature of the Holocaust? Bio: Born in Israel and educated at Tel Aviv University and St. Antony's College, Oxford, Omer Bartov is the John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History at Brown University. His early research concerned the Nazi indoctrination of the Wehrmacht and the crimes it committed in World War II, analyzed in his books, The Eastern Front, 1941-1945 (1985) and Hitler’s Army (1991). He then turned to the links between total war and genocide, discussed in his books Murder in Our Midst (1996), Mirrors of Destruction (2000), and Germany’s War and the Holocaust (2003). Bartov's interest in representation also led to his study, The “Jew” in Cinema (2005), which examines the recycling of antisemitic stereotypes in film. Bartov’s growing interest in Eastern Europe is reflected in his study Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine (2007), which investigates the politics of memory in the borderlands of Eastern Europe. His most recent study is Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (2018), where he traces the transition of an interethnic community from long-term coexistence to genocidal violence. Bartov is currently engaged in researching a new book tentatively titled “Israel-Palestine: A Personal Political History.”