On April 6, 4 pm, Professor Mark Roseman of Indiana University Bloomington will give a lecture on his book, Lives Reclaimed: A Story of Rescue and Resistance in Nazi Germany. The talk will seek both to understand the wartime experience of helping Jews and to explore the postwar remembrance of resistance and rescue by examining The League for Socialist Life.
The League, a small group of idealists who met through adult education classes in Weimar, Germany in the 1920s, was originally united by its members’ shared focus on self-improvement and hoped to serve as a model of the ideal community. However, with the ascent of the Nazis, they were forced to reevaluate and instead decided to concentrate their efforts on offering assistance to the persecuted, despite the great risk. Their activities included visiting Jewish families after Kristallnacht, sending letters, food, and clothes to deportees in ghettos, and sheltering political dissidents and Jews on the run.
Roseman’s initial motivation in researching his book was to find what enabled the League to persist as a unified group and to remain undetected while working to accomplish their goals. As he was reading the texts written by the group, describing their activities after the war, he realized that the accounts no longer reflected central elements of their wartime experience, and thus offered an opportunity to study the relationship between experience and memory. “The unique paper trail left behind by the League helps us understand something we didn’t really know,” he stated. “That remembering opposition to Nazi Germany was very different from experiencing it.”
He commented that the greatest challenge in writing the book was attempting to understand what it was like for the League living under Nazi rule. “That involved trying to get the balance of ‘normality’ and terror right, but also the degree to which the challenges to them came from the regime or from the rigors of total war.”
“It took a great deal of effort and courage to make even small gestures of opposition in Nazi Germany,” noted Roseman. “The way rescuers have been defined and celebrated, both in public commemoration and in much of the existing scholarship, has created myths and stereotypes that can make it harder to understand how and when Jews were given aid against the Nazis. We’ve focused above all on the personality of the individual ‘righteous.’ The reality is more complex and often involved informal networks of support as much as any ‘righteous’ individual.”
Registration for the event is open now: https://myumi.ch/Axyly
