Editorial


S:I.M.O.N. is an e-journal of the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI). It appears twice a year in English and German language. S:I.M.O.N. aims at both a transnational and comparative history of the Holocaust and Jewish Studies in Central and Eastern Europe within the broader contexts of the European history of the 20th and 21st century, including its prehistory, consequences and legacies as well as the history of memory.

S:I.M.O.N. serves as a forum for discussion of various methodological approaches. The journal especially wishes to strengthen the exchange between researchers from different scientific communities and to integrate both the Jewish history and the history of the Holocaust into the different “national” narratives. It also lays a special emphasis on memory studies and the analysis of politics of memory.  S:I.M.O.N. uses a double-blind review system, which means that both the reviewer’s and the author’s identities are concealed from each other hroughout the review process.

Shoah: The journal deals with the history of the Shoah from multidisciplinary, transnational and comparative perspectives. It seeks to integrate studies on Jews as well as on other groups of victims of the Holocaust, especially on Roma, and of so far less researched regions of (East) Central and (South) Eastern Europe.

Intervention. The journal reports on research projects and their transmission into public events. It also informs about current educational and remembrance programs.

Methods. The journal serves as a forum for the discussion of methodological approaches as, for instance, the everyday history, oral history, gender history, the history of violence, anti-Semitism and racism and the theory of memory and memory politics.

DocumentatiON. The journal contributes to critical approaches on using and interpreting archival materials in the 21st century. 

Download the current issue S:I.M.O.N. 2017/2.

Articles

Patrice G. Poutrus

Die antisemitischen Ausschreitungen im Berliner Scheunenviertel 1923. Zur Berichterstattung der Wiener Tagespresse

Download PDFThis contribution uses a case study in order to establish the fundamental theses for a research project on the mass media representation of migration in Vienna and Berlin during the interwar period. What knowledge about migratory movement and experiences was spread in the public spheres of both metropolises via the daily press? The institutionalised production and distribution of knowledge made the press a decisive contributor to what was socially accepted to express and visible, to the definition of topics and therefore the collective perception of social contrasts: the media did no merely reflect, but also produced social realities. The case study refers to strongly antisemitic excesses in the Scheunenviertel in Berlin, a district that was largely inhabited by migrants, in early November 1923. It investigates the depiction and interpretation of these events in the Viennese press against a two-fold backdrop and context: the Danubian city's role as the destiny of a massive migration movement that had developed since the collapse of the Habsburg empire and partly even before, as well as Vienna's predominant antisemitism.

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SWL-Reader

Paul A. Shapiro

Opening the Archives of the International Tracing Service (ITS). How did it happen? What does it mean?

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Until the end of 2007, the International Tracing Service (ITS) was the largest collection of inaccessible records anywhere in the world that shed light on the fates of people from across Europe – Jews as well as members of virtually every other nation or nationality – who were arrested, deported, sent to concentration camps, and even murdered by the Nazis; who were put to forced labour, calculated in many places to result in death; and who were displaced from their homes and families, and unable to return home at the war’s end. These were documents that Allied forces collected as they liberated camps and forced labour sites across Europe in the last months of the war and during their post-war occupation and administration of Germany and Austria. 

The archives of the ITS in Bad Arolsen, Germany, contains over fifty million documents produced in the Second World War era relating to the fates and destinies of over 17.5 million people. Using samples and case studies, the author, who led the campaign to open the archives, provides a view of the effort to open the collections for research and discuss the importance of this recent event for Holocaust survivors, victims of National Socialism, and scholars.

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Events

Zoltán Halasi

Duschehubka

Download PDFThis text is the penultimate chapter of Zoltán Halasi's book Út az üres éghez (Road to an Empty Sky). With this work, which was first published in Hungarian, the author created a singular memorial to Polish-Jewish culture and its destruction. Setting out from the Yiddish Holocaust poem Dos lid funm ojsgehargetn jidischen folk by Itzhak Katzenelson, Halasi records what was lost in the Shoah in the course of nineteen compelling chapters. He takes on the grab of an art historian, a literary critic and a travel guide when he reports about a wooden synagogue and the Jewish quarter in Warsaw. In the role of a German banker, he illuminates the aims of the Nazi monetary policies, as a writer of SS brochures he highlights the absurdity of racism. Depicting a Selektion in the Warsaw ghetto, he shows the grim logic of compulsive acts in catastrophic situations, draws an image of the running of the extermination camp Treblinka. The cynical words of two German policemen provide an insight into the rituals of mass executions and introduce us to the craft of murder. The final chapter is an interplay of slithers of narrative by Jewish children on the run and by those who helped and hid them that borders on the unbearable.
The chapter reproduced on the following pages has three parts: Part one is a Treblinka railway station master's report to the Polish Home Army. In the second part, a former Jewish detainee who managed to escape from the extermination camp Treblinka gives a literary treatment of his arrival at the camp. The final part consists of an inner monologue by the Treblinka extermination camp's director of administration.

The book will shortly be published in Polish at the Nisza publishing company in Warsaw. The German-speaking public was first presented with the work on December 1, 2015 at the Simon Wiesenthal Conference 2015. The German translation by Éva Zádor and Heinrich Eisterer is in progress.

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S:I.M.O.N.: Bewegt Erinnern

Die ungarische Zwangsarbeit in Wien, in den Jahren 1944/45, deren Spuren wir im Rahmen des Projekts „BEWEGT ERINNERN“ am 27. Mai 2014 freilegen wollten, ist eine Erinnerungsgeschichte, die innerhalb der Wiener Stadtgeschichte einen „blinden Fleck“ darstellt. Die Spuren dieser wichtigen Erinnerung offenbaren sich weder in der Stadtarchitektur noch im Stadtmobiliar auf eine lesbare Art und Weise, es existieren auch keine Erinnerungsorte, die unsere Aufmerksamkeit auf diesen Inhalt oder auf diese Identität lenken würden. Für die Wienerinnen und Wiener sind es womöglich Räume, welche in anderen Stadtgeschichten eine Rolle spielen, mit der betrachteten Epoche aber nicht mehr in Verbindung gebracht werden, da sie ja auch keine erkennbaren oder deutlichen „Zeichen“ oder „Spuren“ dieser Geschichte auf der Haut tragen. Aus diesem Grund ist es wichtig, eine Geschichte, eine Erinnerung, die sehr wohl noch besteht und präsent ist, auch wenn sie in der Textur der Stadt kaum mehr zu erkennen ist, wieder in die Erinnerung zu rufen, indem man an gewissen Orten dieser Geschichte gedenkt. Durch die Gedenkfahrt wurde also eine Veränderung des Stadtbildes angestrebt, indem Erinnerungsorte hinzugefügt wurden, um ein tieferes Verständnis von Räumen zu erlangen.

Die Idee einer Bustour durch Wien im Gedenken an ungarische Zwangsarbeiterinnen und Zwangsarbeiter 1944/45 bot die Gelegenheit, unsere, im Rahmen des Lehrgangs Social Design – Arts as Urban Innovation an der Universität für Angewandte Kunst theoretisch erarbeiteten Konzepte auch praktisch umzusetzen. Die Gedenktour wurde so zu einem Versuch, durch ein tieferes Verständnis von mental und real verschütteten und vergessenen Identitäten von Räumen, die individuelle Rekonstruktion eines Stadtbildes zu bewirken, indem wir diesem neue Erinnerungsorte hinzufügten. Es ging um einen Prozess, der eine persönliche Aneignung der Stadt und ihrer Identität anregt, aber auch umsetzt.

 

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