Concentration Camps - The Limits of Representing History

“It was clear to each and every one of us that the things we had seen needed to be told,” wrote the Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi. But how should historians tell the story of Auschwitz and other Nazi camps? How should they write about crimes that seem to defy explanation and defeat language? In this lecture, Dr. Nikolaus Wachsmann reflects on these questions, discussing the challenges of capturing the voices of Nazi victims, perpetrators, and onlookers.

Dr. Nikolaus Wachsmann is professor of modern European history at Birkbeck College (University of London). He has written extensively on Nazi terror and repression, and serves on the advisory boards of the memorials in Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück, Bergen-Belsen, and Mauthausen. He recently devised an educational website on the Nazi camps (www.camps.bbk.ac.uk), supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. His latest book is KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (2015), which has been widely translated and was awarded the Wolfson History Prize and the Mark Lynton History Prize. He is a member of the Royal Historical Society.

Speakers
Dr. Nikolaus Wachsmann, Professor of Modern European History, Birkbeck College, University of London