The remote location of Beshankovichy’s mass grave for Jewish victims of the Nazi genocide reflects the exclusion of local Jews during the German occupation of Soviet territories and limits their memory to a few knowledgeable survivors and witnesses. In contrast, local commemorative practices focus on memorials for Soviet soldiers, partisans, and…[Read more]

How did Soviet Jews respond to the Holocaust and the devastating transformations that accompanied persecution? How was the Holocaust experienced, survived, and remembered by Jewish youth living in Soviet territory? Anika Walke, Assistant Professor of History at Washington University in St. Louis, examines these important questions in Pioneers and…[Read more]

The German Democratic Republic (GDR, East Germany) had an ambivalent relationship with homosexuality. Under the principles of socialism, everyone was welcome to contribute to the greater good. The situation for queer people, here lesbians and gay men, was different: one of illegality and invisibility. A difficulty in analyzing these experiences is…[Read more]

“This essay argues that German regional crime fiction is both a modern development and simultaneously a recollection of crime fiction’s journalistic and literary beginnings. …[R]egional crime fiction has connections to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Fallgeschichten (case stories) that fascinated a developing reading public and satisfied…[Read more]

How should we remember historical moments of violence and loss? What are the links between terrible events like the Holocaust, the mass casualties of World War I, the Armenian Genocide, and crises around the world today? What challenges do historians face as they examine and interpret death and war?

Anika Walke and Jay Winter both face such…[Read more]

Historical entry on the Finnish revolution of 1917-1918

Film critique of “Return to Go” (“Zurück auf los”), directed by Pierre Sanoussi-Bliss.