Event Series Lecture: German Jews and Jewish Displaced Persons in Post-War Germany
Press Release No. 71/2025
26 June 2025
In the Ruperto Carola Lecture Series Atina Grossmann is to speak on the survivors
Under the heading “The Survivors”, Prof. Dr Atina Grossmann will speak about German Jews and Jewish displaced persons in post-war Germany. A historian from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York (United States), she is the next speaker in the Ruperto Carola Lecture Series “1945: Epochal Threshold and Experiential Space”, with which Heidelberg University wants to remember the end of the war in Europe 80 years ago – the historical turning point being on 8 May 1945. The event with Prof. Grossmann will take place in the Great Hall of the Old University on Monday 30 June 2025, starting at 6.15 p.m.
Three years after the National Socialists had declared Germany “free of Jews”, a surviving remnant of approximately 250,000 Jews were present in Germany in 1946/1947. Only around 15,000 of them were German Jews. Most of them, says Prof. Grossmann, were displaced persons from Eastern Europe, who had first been repatriated to Poland from the Soviet Union and had then fled to the American occupation zone. In her lecture the speaker will focus on a topic that has so far received little attention: how did the very different experiences of displaced persons shape their memory of persecution and survival? She will explore the way in which these survivors rebuilt their lives and their families, also delving into the many – albeit mostly temporary – encounters between Jews and Germans. Atina Grossmann teaches Modern German and European History, and Gender Studies at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. She specializes in the field of Gender Studies as well as German-Jewish history of the 20th century.
The Ruperto Carola Lecture Series is part of an approach to focal themes. With it, Heidelberg University seeks to take socially relevant research questions to a broad public twice a year in differing formats. Under the heading “1945: Epochal Threshold and Experiential Space” the present series on the focal theme BACK & FORTH opens up two complementary perspectives – “a retrospective interpretation, which situates the Second World War in the fractures and continuities of 20th century history, and a reconstruction of direct human experience and suffering,” explains historian Prof. Dr Manfred Berg, who designed the current lecture series.
Prof. Grossmann’s lecture “The Survivors: German Jews and Jewish Displaced Persons in Post-War Germany” will be followed by a final event with Prof. Dr Kerstin von Lingen. A historian at the University of Vienna (Austria), her topic on 7 July 2025 will be “Securing Cultural Assets in the ‘Alpine Fortress’ at the End of the War in 1945”. Recordings of the presentations will be made accessible step-by-step on heiONLINE, the central portal of Heidelberg University with lectures, panels and events in digital formats.