WWII Archives - Public Seminar

The Fate of the Artist Under Totalitarianism

A conversation with German novelist Daniel Kehlmann

June 17, 2025 • by Mitchell Abidor and Daniel Kehlmann

Mitchell Abidor interviews Daniel Kehlmann about examining the curious saga of Austrian filmmaker G. W. Pabst in his new novel, THE DIRECTOR....

The Fate of the Artist Under Totalitarianism

Reviews

Burning Cities

The Natural History of Destruction examines the European bombing campaigns of WWII with provocative disregard for convention

July 27, 2022 • by Altair Brandon-Salmon

Part of the film’s thrill is its boldness in posing these ethical questions through sound and imagery. He makes them come alive through his fictionalizing interventions into the archival material, with the extensive foley work and the assemblage of disparate material. It is, dare I say it, entertaining. Destruction is ...

The Arts

How We Remember Leads Us to What We Remember

A review of the Noguchi Museum’s “No Monument” exhibit

May 10, 2022 • by Miko Yoshida

No Monument, contained within one and a half rooms on the first floor of the Noguchi Museum complex, challenges institutional accounts of Japanese Americans detention—often illustrated using photographs of disconsolate families surrounded by a few remaining possessions—by celebrating personal expression in a time of hardship. ...

How We Remember Leads Us to What We Remember

Migration

Historical Analogies and Separated Families

November 2, 2020 • by Daniella Doron

The history of Jewish familial separation is not only a story of Nazi occupied Europe, but also one of the United States. American efforts to facilitate the exit of Jewish children out of Nazi Germany were set in motion soon after the Nazi’s ascension to power in April 1933 and ...

Historical Analogies and Separated Families

Migration

Universalizing Racism in Public Schools in 2020

October 23, 2020 • by A middle school teacher in Baltimore

I wonder if the fact that we are completely virtual (at least for now) helps students to listen to each other respectfully and to open to each other as they broadcast into the classroom from a familiar, private space. Of course, e-learning is not the same as in-person learning and has enormous ...

Universalizing Racism in Public Schools in 2020

Migration

Empathy

The only avenue in which humans can understand tragedy

October 21, 2020 • by Sebastian Ward

No human can have the exact same experience as another, but we can experience similar emotions. It is through emotions that we are able to display empathy; an understanding of feeling. Of course, I have always been able to feel empathy for people in Nazi concentration camps, but one particular ...

Migration

The Last Time I Saw Them- New Democracy Seminar Forum

On the uses and disadvantages of historical comparisons for life

October 19, 2020 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, Marci Shore and Stephen Naron

Can understanding distant parts of the world inspire deeper ways of thinking about our own? Can understanding moments in the past help us to think more creatively about the present? The Nietzschean “on the uses and disadvantages” is intended to suggest that thinking across time and space is not a ...

Migration

On the Uses and Disadvantages of Historical Comparisons for Life

(Vom Nutzen und Nachteil historischer Vergleiche für das Leben)

October 19, 2020 • by Marci Shore

In the ghetto there was only black and white. Seventy years later, Krystyna remembered looking down from the bridge and seeing brightly-colored flowers at a market on the Aryan Side. She remembered, too, the day that she and her mother escaped from the ghetto, and her stepfather’s aunt on the ...

Migration

‘The Uses and Disadvantages of Historical Comparisons for Life’

Tyrone Chambers, Krzysztof Czyżewski, Vera Grant, Jeffrey Goldfarb, Dan Shore, Marci Shore

October 19, 2020 • by Marci Shore, Krzysztof Czyżewski, Vera I. Grant, Dan H. Shore, Tyrone Chambers, II and Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

Edited and abridged by Marci Shore KRZYSZTOF CZYZEWSKI: I’m here in Krasnogruda. It means at the border between Poland, Lithuania, and Belarus, in the northeastern corner of Poland. In my Borderland Centre, which, with my friends, I established 30 years ago, thinking of being more engaged in art, for solidarity with ...

‘The Uses and Disadvantages of Historical Comparisons for Life’

Migration

Creating Linkages

Witnessing the trauma of child separation

October 19, 2020 • by Arielle Rubenstein

In his three-volume work on the child’s tie to his mother, Bowlby includes this passage from a colleague’s description of the young child who has been separated from his mother. At the time, parent-child separation happened in routine circumstances, like the hospitalization of the mother or the child. Before it ...

Migration

The Universal within the Particular

October 19, 2020 • by Eneken Laanes

But the nagging question that has accompanied academic work on cultural memories of violence, apart from the historical knowledge it produces and helps to keep alive, is its relevance for our contemporary world, its ability to contribute to change. As much as the collage of Holocaust testimonies makes us painfully ...

Migration

The Counter

October 19, 2020 • by Erica Johnson Debeljak

Around the same time, I was watching the Netflix series Immigration Nation about the activities of the American Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency ICE, and also the short documentary film The Last Time I Saw Them featuring interviews of Holocaust survivors who had been separated from their families. Several things ...