The new EHRI online edition “The Sunflower. History and Reception of a Literary Holocaust Testimony” by the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies was launched with an online event on Tuesday 14^th January.

The edition presents archival sources on the birth and afterlife of Simon Wiesenthal’s book “The Sunflower” (1969/70) – a crucial text of Holocaust education for more than half a century. The selected documents – published here for the first time – are divided into four chapters: “Historical Sources on the Literary Narrative”, “Wiesenthal’s Correspondence”, “The Sunflower’s Reception”, and “School and Public Projects”. They contextualise Wiesenthal’s personal narrative about his experiences in the Janowska concentration camp, trace the making of the book within an international network of intellectuals and editors, draw connections to other memoirs and literary testimonies, and offer new insights into the afterlife of the book in Holocaust education, Holocaust literature as well as cultural memory since the 1960s.

This EHRI online edition makes available documents from three archives, the majority of the material comes from the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (Simon Wiesenthal Archive, on loan from BJVN), and the other few are chosen from the collections of the Ghetto Fighters’ House Archives in Israel and from the United States Holocaust Memorial.

The online lauch of the online edition featured a panel discussion on “What can we learn from The Sunflower? And how can we use it for education?”. Barbara Agnese (Université de Montréal), Gerald Steinacher (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) discussed the topic with Éva Kovács (VWI). The concept and technical possibilities of the edition were presented by Kinga Frojimovics, Marianne Windsperger and Fabio Rovigo (VWI).

The EHRI online editions  platform was initiated by EHRI as a new way of presenting  archival content online as freely accessible annotated digital documents.

Links:

EHRI Online Edition “The Sunflower”: https://the-sunflower.ehri-project.eu/

The complete EHRI Online Editions: https://www.ehri-project.eu/ehri-online-editions/

EHRI Podcast “A Sunflower for Simon”: https://www.ehri-project.eu/podcast-episode-sunflower-simon/