Lunch Hour Lecture: Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice
To mark Holocaust Memorial Day 2020, Professor Mary Fulbrook will explore the themes of her prize-winning book Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice. This lecture is presented in partnership with the Wolfson History Prize.
Lunch Hour Lecture: Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice
30 Jan 2020, 13:00 – 14:00
Watch via the live stream
About the lecture:
Seventy-five years after the end of the Second World War, the Holocaust continues to challenge us with complex questions and legacies that reach across generations and continents. Focussing on perpetrators as well as victims and survivors, Professor Mary Fulbrook will discuss approaches taken by post-war states, societies and individuals to the persecution of European Jews and other victim groups. The lecture explores the extent to which those responsible were able to evade justice, the reverberations at a personal level within families and communities, and the challenges of memorialisation today.
The lecture is based on her book Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice, which won the prestigious Wolfson History Prize in 2019.
Following the lecture, guests are invited to join us for an afternoon tea reception in the UCL Cloisters to provide an opportunity to explore the work of UCL’s Centre for Holocaust Education. The reception will also honour the work of Doreen Warriner, a member of staff at UCL who helped refugees to escape from Czechoslovakia after the Nazi invasion. After the reception, a small group will go to the School of Slavonic and East European Studies to unveil a plaque commemorating her. Guests are welcome to join the unveiling – find out more here.
About the Wolfson History Prize:
First awarded by the Wolfson Foundation in 1972, the Wolfson History Prize remains a beacon of the best historical writing being produced in the UK, reflecting qualities of both readability for a general audience and excellence in writing and research. The most valuable non-fiction writing prize in the UK, the Wolfson History Prize is awarded annually, with the winner receiving £40,000, and the shortlisted authors receiving £4,000 each. Over £1.1 million has been awarded to more than 100 historians in the prize’s 47-year history. Previous winners include Mary Beard, Simon Schama, Eric J. Hobsbawm, Amanda Vickery, Antony Beevor, Christopher Bayly, and Antonia Fraser.
Mary Fulbrook
Mary Fulbrook is Professor of German History in UCL’s School of European Languages, Culture and Society, and is one of the world’s leading scholars of twentieth-century German history. In addition to Reckonings, she is the author of numerous books including the Fraenkel Prize-winning A Small Town Near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust. She is a Fellow of the British Academy, a former Chair of the German History Society and the founding Joint Editor of its journal German History. Among other commitments, she serves on the Academic Advisory Board of the Memorial Foundation for the former concentration camps at Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora. She is currently directing an AHRC-funded research project entitled Compromised Identities? Reflections on Perpetration and Complicity under Nazism and writing a book on bystanders to genocide.
