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Dr Hilary Potter: Visualising Palimpsestic Memories of the Berlin Rosenstrasse Protest (1943) Through the Medium of Photography

Dr Hilary Potter: Visualising Palimpsestic Memories of the Berlin Rosenstrasse Protest (1943) through the Medium of Photography

  • Date 25 Feb 2021
  • Time 5.00pm-6.30pm
  • Category Lecture

A public lecture organised by the Centre for Visual Cultures

78th Anniversary Talk by Dr Hilary Potter, Teaching Fellow in German (School of Humanities) and author of Remembering Rosenstrasse: History, Memory and Identity in Contemporary Germany (2018)

On 27 February 1943 thousands of German Jews were arrested and detained across Berlin including at the makeshift detention centre on Rosenstrasse, in the heart of the German capital. The men, women and children detained there were either married to non-Jewish Germans or were the children of intermarried parents. Over the course of that week a protest developed in which the spouses, predominantly wives, gathered to be close to their loved ones, and to demonstrate against their arrest and feared deportation. The protest ebbed and flowed over the course of the week. Unlike the majority of German Jews arrested at this time, almost all of the individuals detained in Rosenstrasse were released within seven days, with a lesser number released over a period of up to six weeks. 

The events of that week have become known as the Rosenstrasse Protest and have been remembered, forgotten and re-remembered in Germany over the decades since. Memories of the protest continue to be shaped and this talk takes the 78th anniversary as an occasion to look back over the history of the street, the events, the multiple ways in which they have been remembered, together with aspects that have been forgotten.

This talk, followed by a Q&A, will draw on the idea of the urban palimpsest (Andreas Huyssen) by using a mixture of archive photographs together with Hilary's own photographs of the street and its memorials and those of professional photographer Mark Epstein (Edge Hill University).

The lecture will take place online via Microsoft Teams, and you can use this link to join the session:
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