Prof. Christian Wiese's Professorial Lecture

Hannah Arendt's 1963 report from the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the chief bureaucrat of the genocide against European Jewry, and the subsequent debates about questions such as the "banality of evil", the absence of Jewish resistance during against the Nazi persecution and the alleged initial complicity of German Zionism with Nazi ideology mark a crucial episode in the European, American and Israeli post-Holocaust discourse. The lecture will revisit those debates, tracing Arendt's position back to the laboratory of her political thought and confronting Gershom Scholem's famous accusation that Arendt lacked a genuine "love for the Jewish people" with her own ambivalent Jewish self-understanding and critical attitude toward Zionism and the state of Israel. In an attempt to argue for a more nuanced assessment of Arendt's views, the lecture addresses a series of historical issues, including the role of German-Jewish émigré intellectuals in Holocaust historiography, the relationship between history and memory as well as the diversity of post-Holocaust Jewish identity.

All welcome, to book please contact Amy Stevens on T: 01273 877 488 or E: events@sussex.ac.uk.

By: Diana Franklin
Last updated: Thursday, 17 September 2009