The Hour of the Archivists: Creating Southwest Germany’s Memory Culture

The Gerald D. Feldman Memorial Lecture was established by the Friends of the German Historical Institute in 2010 to honor the legacy and achievements of Gerald D. Feldman (1937–2007). The lecture is generously supported by the many individual donations to the Friends of the German Historical Institute.

When we think of postwar critical histories addressing Jewish persecution, we naturally think about the historians—and forget the archivists. Focusing on Heinz Keil of Ulm, and Maria Zelzer and Paul Sauer of Stuttgart, Helmut Walser Smith’s talk “The Hour of the Archivists: Creating Southwest Germany’s Memory Culture, c. 1960” will show that the creation of archival knowledge in the early 1960s laid the groundwork for southwest Germany’s subsequent robust “memory” culture. The archivists did not create this knowledge alone, however. They had considerable help from Jewish emigrants throughout the world.

Helmut Walser Smith is the Martha Rivers Ingram Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. His books, which have appeared in five languages, include German Nationalism and Religious Conflict, 1870-1914 (Princeton UP, 1995); The Butcher’s Tale: Murder and Antisemitism in a German Town (W.W. Norton, 2002); The Continuities of German History (Cambridge UP, 2008), and Germany: A Nation in its Time: Before, During, and After Nationalism, 1500-2000 (Liveright, 2020). He is also the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History (Oxford, 2011), among other works of collaboration. Currently, he is writing a book whose tentative title is "Hometowns: Local Truth and Jewish Return in postwar Germany."