The horrific violence and mass murder committed across Europe under Nazi domination posed significant challenges to any attempt to achieve justice after the war. Ways of dealing with culpability and complicity in the courtrooms, in families and wider society, as well as in public controversies, memorials and exhibitions, left unresolved tensions that still linger today. Surveying the broad landscape of reckonings with the Nazi past across Europe, this lecture raises questions about historical representations and the complex patterns of transmission of a traumatic past.
Professor Mary Fulbrook, FBA, is Professor of German History at University College London (UCL). She is currently working on rescue and survival in Europe during the Holocaust. Her many books include Bystander Society: Conformity and Complicity in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust (OUP, 2023); the 2019 Wolfson History Prize-winner Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice (OUP, 2018); the Fraenkel Prize-winning A Small Town near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust (OUP, 2012); and the forthcoming Cambridge History of the Holocaust, vol, 2, co-edited with Jürgen Matthäus. Among many other commitments, Mary Fulbrook has served as Dean of the UCL Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences, and Chair of the Modern History Section of the British Academy. She is currently, inter alia, a member of the Editorial Board of Yad Vashem Studies; the Academic Advisory Board of the Memorial Foundation for the former concentration camps of Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora; and the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM).
