After Kristallnacht: The Routinization of German State Violence in the East (Elie Wiesel Memorial Lectures)

The Elie Wiesel Center at Boston University presents a lecture by Omer Bartov. 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?

The inaugural Fall 2018 Elie Wiesel Memorial Lectures will be devoted to the memory of Kristallnacht 1938, the government-sponsored act of German mass violence against the Jews that heralded the destruction of European Jewry. The lectures will provide an opportunity for us to consider not just what happened then, but also to think about what we ought to learn from the past and how to apply its lessons to our own time.