The two-day international conference seeks to examine literature and the arts (painting, cinema, music) produced immediately after the rise of Nazism, during World War II, and following the Holocaust in order to challenge the urban topographical dynamics of Nazi anti-semitism.

Presentation

The two-day international conference in Amsterdam and Brussels seeks to examine literature and the arts (painting, cinema, music) produced immediately after the rise of Nazism, during World War II, and following the Holocaust in order to challenge the urban topographical dynamics of Nazi anti-Semitism. A more thorough understanding will be possible by comparing perspectives from various cities in occupied Europe and the Third Reich (Brussels, Amsterdam, The Hague, Paris, Luxembourg, Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Vienna), taking into account the exiled state that the writers and artists experienced after being forced to leave Nazi Germany and seek refuge in neighboring nations, frequently relocating their exile locations. Many of them traveled from one location to another, and these cities were significant in the works and lives of the exiles and refugees who lived there. The primary goal of this conference is to examine how Nazi persecution in major European cities is depicted in literature and the arts. Specifically, how is the figure of the Jew (as an exile, refugee, etc.) positioned as a persecuted or excluded person in the urban environment subject to the new Nazi urban distribution that affects both public and private space? Although the conference is primarily focused on the backdrop of Nazi spatial policy, it also sheds new light on other environments of war and tyranny.

The main research topics include but are not limited to:

• Visibility / invisibility of Jews in urban/public spaces
• Visibility / invisibility of the body of the one whose life is reduced to clandestinity
• Body in the marginalized space
• Spaces of exclusion
• Closed spaces, open spaces
• (Co)inhabiting common spaces
• Other forms of exclusion/marginalization (racial, social) and their manifestation in urban spaces

Participation

 The conference is held onsite and online. For further information, please contact the organisers:

•  Arvi Sepp (ULB, CLIC/BCUS) arvi.sepp@vub.be
•  Atinati Mamatsashvili (ILIAUNI/NIAS) tina_mamatsashvili@iliauni.edu.ge

Programme

19 June 2023, Amsterdam

NIAS – Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Korte Spinhuissteeg 3, 1012 CG Amsterdam

10:00 – 10:30  Opening

• Jan Willem Duyvendak (Director of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences– NIAS)
• Bela Tsipuria (Director of the Institute of Comparative Literature, Ilia State University)
• Atinati Mamatsashvili (Ilia State University / NIAS) & Arvi Sepp (VUB)

10:30 – 12:00 Session 1 –  Spaces of Persecution

Moderator – David Duindam

• Bart Wallet (UvA) – Paradoxes of Jewish Urban Spaces in War-Time Amsterdam
• Annelies Schulte Nordholt (Leiden University) – Being a German Clandestine in Occupied Amsterdam. Grete Weil’s Last trolley from Beethovenstraat
• Hinke Piersma (NIOD, Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies) – Between The Hague and Jerusalem: David Simons’ Life and Loyalties

12:00 – 13:30 Lunch

13:30 – 15:00 Session 2 – Jewish Figures in Modern and Contemporary Urban Areas

Moderator: Bart Wallet

•  Serhiy Hirik (State Research Institution "Encyclopedia Press" [Kyiv]/National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy) – Jewish Names on the Maps of Ukrainian Cities: How and Why the Situation Changes
•  David Duindam (UvA) – Unveiling, concealing, removing: the figure of the Jew in Taring Padi’s “People’s Justice” at Documenta 15 (2022)
•  Jacqueline Bel (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) – Spaces in Diary written in Vught by David Koker (Amsterdam 1921-Dachau 1945)

15:00 – 15:30 Coffee Break

15:30 – 17:00 Session 3 – Urban Fictional Encounters

Moderator – Arvi Sepp

• Ewoud Sanders (Independent Historian, Amsterdam) – The Depiction of Jews in Dutch Youth Stories: Urban Encounters, Hostile Environments
• Sven Vitse (Utrecht University / NIAS) – Urban Wartime Masculinities in Dutch 20th-century fiction
• Atinati Mamatsashvili (Ilia State University / NIAS) – Illegal Spaces, Invisible Spaces in French-Language French and Belgian Fictional Works

 17:00 – 17:15 Concluding Remarks

14 September 2023, Brussels

CegeSoma - Studiecentrum Oorlog en Maatschappij / Centre d'Étude Guerre et Société 29, Square de l’Aviation / Luchtvaartsquare 29, 1070 Bruxelles/Brussel

9:00 – 9:15 Opening

• Nico Wouters (Director of CegeSoma, The Centre for Historical Research and Documentation on War and Contemporary Society)
• Bas Van Heur (Co-Director of BCUS, Brussels Centre for Urban Studies, VUB)
• Arvi Sepp (VUB) & Atinati Mamatsashvili (Ilia State University / NIAS)

9:15 – 10:45 Session 1 – Nazi Urban Arrangement: Between Visibility and Invisibility of Jewish Victims

Moderator: Bela Tsipuria

• Elisabeth Pönisch (University of Jena) – Enclosed in the “Judenhaus” and Excluded from the City. Urban Spaces and Their Perceptions between 1939 and 1945
• Renée Wagener (Independent Historian, Luxembourg) – The Spatial / Urban Dimension of the German Occupants’ “Judenpolitik” in Luxembourg During the Second World War
• Arvi Sepp (VUB) – The Nazi City and Antisemitism: Imagined Spaces of Urban Mobility in German-Jewish Autobiographical Writing in the “Third Reich”

10:45 – 11:15  Coffee Break

11:15 – 12:45 Session 2 – Spaces of Liminality in Urban Contexts: Jewish Artists within “Judenfrei” Cities

Moderator: Elisabeth Pönisch

• Louise O. Vasvári (Stony Brook University) – Jewish “TimeSpace” and Identity: Actress Lili Fehér's Performance in Interwar and in “Judenrein” Budapest
• Iwona Kurz (University of Warsaw) – Looking at Jews: From the Jewish Perspective. Inside and Outside the Ghetto Walls in Warsaw (1940–1943)
• Blandine Landau (C2DH – University of Luxembourg / EHESS) – Existing in a “Judenfrei” State?  The Cases of Guido Oppenheim and the Grossvogel Family

12:45 – 14:00 Lunch

14:00 – 15:30 Session 3 – Poetic and Fictional Urban Space

Moderator: Arvi Sepp

• Stéphane Cermakian (Aix-Marseille Université) – Urban trajectories of a Clandestine Passenger from Armenia. Armen Lubin in the Poetic Space of the City
• Helga Mitterbauer (ULB) – Elfriede Gerstl: Small Forms as a Continuation of the Imposed Silence During Childhood in the Viennese Hideout
• Daniela Lieb (Centre national de littérature, Luxembourg) – Shylock in Luxembourg. Economic Antisemitism in Luxembourgish Literature from WWI to the Eve of WWII

15:30 – 16:00 Coffee Break

16:00 – 17:30 Session 4 – Post-WWII Representations of Jews in Diverse Urban Contexts

Moderator: Atinati Mamatsashvili

• Bela Tsipuria (Ilia State University) – The Representation of the Jewish Community in Tbilisi in Temur Babluani's and Guram Batiashvili's Novels
• Jeanne E. Glesener (University of Luxembourg) – Liminal Locations: Narrative and Spatial Marginalisation of Jews in Postwar Luxembourgish Literature 
• Tsira Kilanava (Ilia State University) – Mapped Routes and Social Networks of Jewish Characters in Contemporary Georgian War Literature

17:30 – 17:45 Concluding Remarks

Organizers

• Arvi Sepp (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, CLIC/BCUS) 
• Atinati Mamatsashvili (Ilia State University / NIAS)

Scientific committee

• Vivian Liska (Universiteit Antwerpen)
• Atinati Mamatsashvili (Ilia State University / NIAS)
• Helga Mitterbauer (Université libre de Bruxelles)
• Annelies Schulte Nordholt (University of Leiden)
• Arvi Sepp (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, CLIC/BCUS) 
• Bela Tsipuria (Ilia State University)  
• Bart Wallet (University of Amsterdam)