*CFP* "EXHIBITING THE HOLOCAUST IN THE IMMEDIATE POSTWAR PERIOD: HISTORIES, PRACTICES AND POLITICS", SPECIAL ISSUE, THE JOURNAL OF HOLOCAUST RESEARCH

Exhibitions were a crucial medium of Holocaust memory in the immediate postwar period. Between 1944-1950, hundreds of exhibitions were mounted across war torn Europe and the United States that sought to tell the story of World War II, Nazi Crimes, and the Holocaust. Already on the day after liberation, the process of “museumification” was initiated. Political prisoners and Allied soldiers organized impromptu site-specific exhibits in the concentration and extermination camps. Small, low-tech, DIY exhibitions were mounted in the Displaced Persons camps and Historical Commissions by Jewish survivors. Impressive blockbusters sponsored by governmental ministries and international organizations, such as the United Nations War Crimes Commission, opened in museums across Europe. Varying in their budgets, resources, tone, media, and function, these exhibitions were intended to convince and convict but also to inform, educate, and commemorate. Whether meticulously planned and generously funded or makeshift and improvised, they offered their visitors a different “way of seeing” and interpreting the violence, atrocity, and human rights abuses of the recent past.

Exhibitions not only illustrate history, they also shape it. Despite their central role in shaping our understanding and representation of Nazi crimes and victim experiences, these early postwar exhibitions have received little scholarly attention to date. Yet their impact rivals the media of monuments, photography, and film, cutting across national and political lines and belying the “Myth of Silence” regarding the postwar period that David Cesarani so persuasively debunked. Reconstructing these exhibition histories can tell us a great deal about how different nations, communities, and individuals chose to remember, and what they privileged and understood about the war. It can help us construct a historiography of Holocaust representation, tracing the canonization of certain practices and images, as well as certain modes of presentation. This special issue hopes to offer a more nuanced understanding of exhibitions as a neglected but important medium of early Holocaust memory.

*CFP* "AMERICANS IN VIENNA: 1945-1955", THE CENTER FOR AUSTRIAN AND GERMAN STUDIES 2021 ONLINE CONFERENCE

Americans in Vienna: 1945-1955 Conference

27th-28th April, 2021

Online (Zoom)

 

The Center for Austrian and German Studies (CAGS) at Ben Gurion University of the Negev and the Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies are inviting submissions for an April 27-28 2021 (online) conference, focusing on the varied presence of Americans in Vienna during the first decade after the Second World War. Papers from the conference will be published in a special issue of the Journal of Austrian-American History. The occupation and administration of Austria after the Second World War by the armies of the Allied victors and the division of Vienna into four zones of occupation paralleled arrangements in Germany. But although we know a lot about Cold-War espionage, monetary reforms or the workings of military administration in postwar Berlin, accounts centered on Vienna seem invariably drawn to Orson Welles and The Third Man, while the approaches of older scholarship, such as the edited volume Österreich unter alliierter Besatzung 1945-1955 (Böhlau, 1998), deserve a fresh look. Arguably, Vienna not only fueled foreign imagination more than Berlin at the time, but its quadripartite division and Austria’s successful financial reforms informed the Allied practices that followed on foot in Germany.

*CFP* “THE VISUAL COMMUNICATION OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR”, SPECIAL ISSUE, THE POSTER

For this issue, The Poster seeks contributions in the form of papers, visual essays and reviews that interrogate the visual culture of the Second World War. Given the multiplicity of potential themes represented, we are open to an equally rich variety of approaches that contemplate the visual forms of communication in this period: images of war, propaganda, activism, authoritarianism, manifestos and manifestations, conflicts, dissident images, national and international cooperativism. The journal is not restricting the call to combatant nations; we welcome research that reflects neutral and non-aligned nation’s responses to the global conflict.

While this issue welcomes research into the formal mass media of the conflict (movies, posters, artworks, publishing and the like), we also welcome research into less overt propaganda. Uniforms, caricature, badges, architecture, unit signs, pornographic black propaganda, fake currency and stamps, movies and more were all pressed into service. At times, even the media of neutral states was conscripted to promote partial positions in their home nations. The Poster wants to see your research in these subjects.