Lecture | French and German forced laborers remember

Telling what cannot be told.

On November 28, 2024, a lecture will take place at the Centre Culturel Français as part of the research project "Emergent Remembrance II: Telling the Unspeakable". This research project examines how German and French concentration camp inmates and forced laborers remember the 1940s in filmed interviews. In collaboration with the Center Culturel Français in Freiburg, the research team at the University campus Freiburg is presenting analyses of eyewitness interviews in video and audio formats. The data - almost 2000 hours of recording material with almost 600 contemporary witnesses from 26 countries - comes from the Forced Labor Archive (https://www.zwangsarbeit-archiv.de/) and the Visual History Archive (https://vha.usc.edu/home).

The presentation is aimed at all interested parties and in particular at people working in the field of education, especially teachers. The results of our study should help students gain a concrete insight into current research and better understand the experiences of contemporary witnesses from the Nazi era. In times of resurgent anti-Semitism, it seems particularly important to us to take an in-depth look at this historical topic.

Our aim is to familiarize all participants - but especially teachers and students - with the experiences of the Nazi era, to arouse their interest and encourage them to reflect. By analyzing the interviews, and here primarily the verbal and physical forms of expression, the project will contribute to this:

- better grasp the unspeakable nature of the living conditions of forced laborers and the associated long-term consequences;
- incorporate testimonies into educational work in an appropriate manner;
- understand the significance of oral history for the here and now.

Contributors to the research team: Dr. Marie Klatt, Dr. Daniel Mandel, Prof. Dr. Stefan Pfänder, Prof. Dr. Elisabeth Gülich.

Thursday, November 28 | 7 p.m.
CCFF
Admission: free
Language: D/F
Registration: kultur@ccf-fr.de
In cooperation with: Romance Department of the University campus Freiburg
With the participation of the Frankreichzentrum and the Romance Department of the University of Zurich
As part of the thematic series: (Invisible) Work / Travail (invisible)