June 10-11, 2024 | Location: Utrecht University, The Netherlands

Deadline for submissions: 31 January 2024 

First international seminar of the NWO project The Holocaust in “the Provinces”: Local Dynamics in the Nazi-Occupied Netherlands (1925-1950)

The Holocaust is one of the best researched major episodes of mass destruction in modern Western history. Whereas the scholarship initially merely focused on German policy makers and decision takers, perceiving the Holocaust as a story of Nazi perpetrators and Jewish victims, today there is general agreement that the genocide should (also) be studied in its local, communal embedding.

The numerous small-scale studies of the recent ‘communal turn’, often of a single town, draw our attention to issues like the reverberation of the years of persecution in postwar local society, the impact of pre-existing structures and relations on the course of the genocide and the fate of local Jews, and the role of ‘native’ local elites. 

By nature, most local studies are idiosyncratic: hence, what is still lacking is a more comparative and comprehensive analysis of the way local history and the history of the Holocaust interacted. What are precisely those pre-existing structures in local society that impacted the course of the genocide? Which local dynamics were at play during the Holocaust and, in a wider time frame, how were they affected by the Holocaust? How did local political figures influence the course and pace of the genocide in their community, and why? How did local civil society react to the incessant stream of anti-Jewish measures? How did the targeting of one group of citizens change the local civil society, during and after the events?

This seminar seeks to explore these and similar questions. By taking the wider time frame of 1925-1950, the aim is to acquire a deeper understanding of the ways local histories and the transnational phenomenon of the Holocaust came into exchange and became entangled. The organisation is interested in connecting Eastern and Western European Holocaust-scholarship and invite researchers of towns in all parts of Nazi-occupied Europe.

The seminar will be organized around – but is not limited to – three broad central issues: 

–    The Holocaust and local stability in the longue durée
–    Collusion and alliance of local political actors and central authorities of genocide
–    Civil society and the Holocaust

Call for Papers

Participants will be asked to present their case study during a two-day seminar, which will be held in Utrecht June 10 and 11, 2024. An abstract (1–2 pages) of the paper and a short bio (200 words) are to be submitted before January 31, 2024, 5 p.m. CET, as a single attachment (PDF-format), by email to g.g.vonfrijtagdrabbekunzel@uu.nl. A more elaborate paper (10 pages) is expected before May 1, 2024, 5 p.m. CET.

The seminar will be the first in a series of conversations that will culminate in an edited volume, to be published in 2026/2027.