Helmut Walser Smith
Martha Rivers Ingram Professor of History
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn.
Born in 1962 in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany
B.A. in History, Cornell University, Ph.D. in History, Yale University
Project
Our Hometowns: Jewish Return and German Memory after the Holocaust
Colloquium
Our Hometowns: Jewish Return and German Memory, 1945–2000
In small-town Germany, when did memory of the Holocaust begin, who was involved in it, and how did it unfold?
These are central questions asked in “Our Hometowns: Jewish Return and German Memory, 1945–2000”—a transnational story of postwar conflict and cooperation between Jews and local non-Jewish Germans in establishing, marking, and preserving the local truth about the Holocaust. Focusing on the experience of a handful of small towns and villages in southwest Germany, the book considers how Germany built its memory culture from the ground up and with the extensive help of its former Jewish citizens.
This is a work of microhistory. It is also a work of transnational history. The epilogue, which is the focus of this talk, brings these microhistories—archivally based short stories—together and raises fundamental questions about the very categories we use to explain “German memory.”
Publications from the Fellow Library
Smith, Helmut Walser (München, 2021)
Deutschland : Geschichte einer Nation : von 1500 bis zur Gegenwart Germany. A nation in its time: before, during, and after nationalism, 1500-2000
Smith, Helmut Walser (Cambridge [u.a.], 2008)
The continuities of German history : nation, religion, and race across the long nineteenth century