About
Speaker: Dr. Anita Grossmann
Date: November 9, 2020
Location: Appalachian State University
Description: Dr. Anita Grossmann, Professor of History in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Cooper Union in New York City, presents “Remapping Survival: Jewish Refugees and Lost Memories of Displacement, Trauma, and Rescue in the Soviet Union, Iran, and India.” Her talk integrates the largely unexamined experiences and lost memories of displacement and trauma of European Jews who managed to flee to the Far East into our understanding of the Shoah, and to remap the landscape of persecution, survival, relief and rescue during and after World War. The event also marks and commemorates the 82nd anniversary of Kristallnacht, the nationwide programs in Hitler Germany that began on November 9, 1938, and marked the prewar turning point in the Nazi regime's persecution of the country's Jewish population.
Dr. Grossmann is a specialist in German-Jewish history, Holocaust Studies, and women's and gender history and the author and co-editor of many path-breaking studies that helped to reshape various academic fields. These works include Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (2007), Wege in der Fremde: Deutsch-jüdische Begegnungsgeschichte zwischen New York, Berlin und Teheran (2012), and Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920-1950 (1995) as well as the co-edited volumes on Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union (2017), After the Nazi Racial State: Difference and Democracy in Germany and Europe (2009), and When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany (1984). Prof. Grossmann is the daughter of German-Jewish Holocaust survivors.