Remembering across the Iron Curtain

Honorary Research Fellow Dr Anna Koch is one of the organisers of the conference ‘Remembering across the Iron Curtain’, which will explore how the Holocaust and its aftereffects were remembered in both East and West during the Cold War.

Challenging previous perceptions of the West as the democratic "Free World" that embraced commemoration and the East as totalitarian and repressive, the papers in this conference will examine how political interests influenced commemoration in both East and West. 

At the same time, speakers will show how individual actors carved out space to remember the Holocaust in ways that stood at odds with the dominant narratives.  Examining communal, individuals and state efforts, from the Soviet Union to the US, from Hungary to France, this conference will provide opportunities to re-evaluate the commonalities, differences and entanglements between Eastern and Western memory of the Holocaust.

The conference is jointly organised by the Department’s Institute for the Public Understanding of the Past and the Institute of Contemporary History at the Czech Academy of Sciences in cooperation with the Aleksander Brückner Center for Polish Studies in Halle/Germany.

For more information and how to register, see the conference event.