Alon Confino Memorial Lecture: Kobi Kabalek (Penn State), “Rescue and Remembrance: Imagining the German Collective After Nazism”

Content

How do Germans in the past and present remember those who rescued Jews during the Holocaust? In many European countries nowadays, the small number of known Holocaust rescuers are often held up as exemplars of broad pro-Jewish sentiment, to project an image of national moral virtue. In current Germany, by contrast, the rescuers are commonly used to show what most Germans could have done but did not do, and therefore to condemn the majority population during WWII. The talk will trace the emergence of such simplistic depictions of the majority versus minority, which obscure the complex motivations that led people in Nazi Germany to help persecuted Jews. Against the common view that the rescuers were “forgotten” after the war, the talk will show that helping Jews appeared in various media and social discourses in East, West, and unified Germany and were used to define and imagine the German “national collective.”

This event will begin with light refreshments at 5:30 PM, followed by the lecture at 6:00 PM.

About Kobi Kabalek

Kobi Kabalek (PhD in history from the University of Virginia, 2013) is Assistant Professor of German and Jewish Studies, Penn State University, since 2019. His research focuses on historical perceptions, moral sentiments, emotions, and memory in various media and genres of German, Israeli, and transnational Holocaust history. He currently explores marginalized and extreme phenomena in Holocaust testimonies, historical writing, and popular culture – with special attention to the role of disbelief, imagination, and horror – in our understanding and representation of the Holocaust and current cases of mass violence.