Peter Hallama (France/Germany), doctoral student, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, “Die Familiengeschichte der Rosa Böhm, von Tábor nach Wien, London und New York. Zwischen Geschichte und Erinnerung, Anti- und Philosemitismus”.

Peter Hallama has just finished his PhD at the University of Munich (LMU), Germany. He studied History and Political Science at the Universities of Vienna, Austria, and Prague, Czech Republic. He co-organised a history workshop on “Counter-History” about the memory of World War II in the Samizdat of East Central Europe (edited volume to be published in 2014). At the History Department of the University of Freiburg, Germany, he was an assistant lecturer.

His PhD thesis, called “The Final Solution of the Czech or the Jewish Question? Czech Representations of the Holocaust between Heroism and Nationalism”, analyses the Czech memory of the Second World War and the Holocaust from 1945 until today. It challenges the idea of a taboo on the Holocaust, supposedly decreed by the Communist state, and explores the exclusive concept of the Czech nation and the heroic perception of history as significant factors of the Czech memory of World War II.

During his fellowship at the Jewish Museum in Prague in May 2014, Peter Hallama did complementary research for his PhD, especially about the early post-war period. He studied regional newspapers searching for representations of Theresienstadt/Terezín, worked with the newly accessible post-war collection of the Jewish Museum, used the Photo Archive at the Theresienstadt Memorial, and had a deeper look into the collection of Survivor testimonies at the Jewish Museum in Prague.

Peter Hallama may be contacted via e-mail at peter.hallama@gmx.at.