KZ-Gedenkstätte Mauthausen, Mauthausen Memorial and WHISC: Women in the Holocaust – International Study Center (Web)

Time: 13.-15.09.2024
Ort: Mauthausen
Proposals by: 31.05.2024

The 2nd Women in the Holocaust conference will be held in Austria, a country which was already part of the German Reich at the beginning of World War II. It was the home of prominent perpetrators of the Holocaust such as Adolf Eichmann, Ernst Kaltenbrunner and Franz Stangl – all of them being born in Upper Austria, where, as Gauleiter August Eigruber happily announced, the Mauthausen concentration camp was installed in 1938. Having one of the toughest camp conditions in the Reich, Mauthausen, its branch camp Gusen and their over 40 subcamps became the mass grave of at least 90.000 prisoners. In total, around 190.000 persons were imprisoned in the camp complex from 1938 until 1945, approximately 10.000 being female.
WHISC is the only comprehensive study center that focuses on the study of the fate of women – Jewish and non-Jewish – in the Holocaust in a multidisciplinary manner. The study of women and gender relations in the Holocaust represents a challenge for historiographical research, which until the last third of the 20th century accepted gender-hegemonic concepts as a given and presented the past as the „history of great men“. The diverse roles that women played in history were thus excluded. The categories of „woman“ and „man“ were simultaneously essentialized and the binary gender order was accepted unquestioningly as a supposedly natural given.
The conference would therefore like to address questions of the historicity of such gender orders and explore the role of women during NS according to Gisela Bock as perpetrators, victims, followers, bystanders, members of the resistance and helpers. It confronts the question of how to fruitfully integrate the histories of occupation, antisemitism, and ethnic racism, as well as issues of competing victimhood in the various countries with a focus on a women-specific perspective. There also are scholarly challenges involved when one considers the intersectionality of race, class and gender as well as other categories of difference, and the impact, tensions, and traumas they have produced. The conference promotes scholarly discussion and debate on the various divides, connections, and intersections that can be found in Holocaust and Gender Studies about women during the National Socialist period. Read more … (Web)

Institut franco-allemand de sciences historiques et sociales (IFRA-SHS); Manon Raynal und Sita Steckel, Univ. de Lorraine/IFRA Frankfurt a.M. (Web)

Zeit: 14.-15.11.2024
Ort: Frankfurt a.M.
Einreichfrist: 08.03.2024

Nach Aussage des römischen Rechtsgelehrten Paulus dürfen Frauen keine öffentlichen Ämter bekleiden – freilich nicht wegen ihres mangelnden Urteilsvermögens, sondern einfach auf der Basis des mos maiorum. Dieser Ausschluss von der Macht ist nicht erst seit der römischen Zeit bekannt, und er bleibt auch heute noch sichtbar. Dies hat Frauen jedoch nicht daran gehindert, in verschiedenen Bereichen Autorität auszuüben, sei es in Begleitung eines Mannes oder allein. Wiewohl die Frauen- und Geschlechtergeschichte bereits verschiedene Formen weiblicher agency ans Licht gebracht hat, bedarf es weiterer Forschung, um das ganze Spektrum der Handlungsfähigkeit von Frauen innerhalb unterschiedlicher sozialer, politischer und religiöser Konfigurationen herauszuarbeiten. Die Tagung will sich vor diesem Hintergrund den Konfigurationen weiblicher Autorität im spätantiken und frühmittelalterlichen lateinischen Europa widmen. Sie strebt an, Forschende aus dem französischsprachigen und deutschsprachigen Raum sowie aus den Teildisziplinen der Alten und Mittelalterlichen Geschichte ins Gespräch zu bringen.
Um Formen der ‚Autorität‘ genauer zu konturieren, erscheint es hilfreich, sich mit möglichen relevanten Konnotationen des Begriffs auseinanderzusetzen – nicht zuletzt da sie, wie man hinzufügen muss, im Deutschen und im Französischen durchaus unterschiedlich gelagert sind. Das Rechtslexikon Vocabulaire juridique definiert Autorität zunächst einmal als ‚die Befehlsgewalt, die Regierenden und bestimmten öffentlichen Bediensteten zusteht‘. Autorität erscheint somit als Form von Macht, die einer spezifischen, individuellen Amtsausübung zu Grunde liegt. Diese Macht kann einer Person aufgrund ihrer individuellen Persönlichkeit oder durch Erbfolge zugekommen sein, also etwa von Verwandten übertragen worden sein. Machtpositionen können auch von anderen Mächtigen verliehen oder mit Gewalt erlangt werden. Dementsprechend kann Macht viele Formen annehmen. Sie kann mit einem politischen, administrativen oder religiösen Amt verbunden sein, das die Ausübung bestimmter Amtsgewalt ermöglicht. Auch der Besitz von Vermögen und anderem wirtschaftlichem Kapital schlägt aber meist auf die Sicherung unterschiedlicher Machtpositionen durch. Weiterlesen und Quelle … (Web)

Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC) Hamburg; Daniel Fliege and Jenny Körber (Univ. Hamburg), Annika Nickenig (Univ. Göttingen) (Web)

Time: 30.09.-02.10.2024
Venue: Hamburg
Proposals by: 31.03.2024

The transmission of love requires a materialisation in the form of a written artefact. Following Niklas Luhmann, love can be understood as a code of communication requiring a medium that he defines as informed material, e.g. an inscribed object. One obvious example is the love letter that might be seen as a handwritten artefact through which a lover expresses his or her affection. Since a letter serves to bridge a physical distance or substitute for an absence, the material quality of the letter is of particular importance. In addition to letters, numerous other forms of materialisation and inscription are used to convey emotions: one might think of love locks, testaments, farewell letters, carvings in bark, dedications, autographs, funerary spaces, poetry albums, friendship books or forms of ostentatious affective expression as in tattoos as inscriptions on the human body.
The workshop will hence focus on written artefacts that are supposed to express love for another person. The organizers deliberately leave the concept of love open, as it encompasses diverse meanings in different cultures and epochs; instead, they focus on practices that are intended to communicate love by inscribing a material object. The organizers want to explore if written artefacts, through their various forms of inscribed materiality, are historically, culturally or gender-specifically bound to certain practices, and represent closeness to a loved person. Rather than deciding whether an emotion expressed in an artefact corresponds to a “real” emotion, they want to analyse to what extent the expression of love is linked to certain practices of material authentication: this raises the question of the originality of the written artefact, which is particularly revealing when compared in a global perspective.
The workshop is organized within the framework of the Cluster of Excellence “Understanding Written Artefacts”, based at the Univ. of Hamburg, and is linked in particular to the two research fields of “Inscribing Spaces” and “Creating Originals” (Web).
Please send an abstract and a short CV until 31/3/24 to Jenny.Koerber@uni-hamburg.de

Source: HSozuKult