Alumni & Friends events
Date: Tuesday 26 January 2021
Time: 18:00 - 19:00
Venue: Zoom Webinar
Category: Public lectures
Speaker: Professor Volker Berghahn

On Tuesday 26 January 2021, the University of Glasgow welcomes Professor Volker Berghahn (Seth Low Emeritus Professor of History at Columbia University) to deliver a lecture titled “Researching the Nazi Dictatorship through the Lens of Primo Levi’s “Grey Zone”.  

For many years now research on the victims and also the perpetrators of the Holocaust has been extensive and has provided valuable insights into the dynamics of this catastrophe. And research like this must go on. This lecture aims to add an under-researched field to this scholarship and academic debate by using as its starting point the notion of the “grey zone”, first mentioned by the Italian chemist and Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi. He pointed to the awful dilemmas that many in Nazi occupied Europe faced when they were forced to cooperate with the regime in the camps while being vigorously anti-Nazi and trying to undermine the Hitler dictatorship.  

Accordingly, this presentation will begin with some recent research on Jewish prisoner-physicians who were forced to assist Nazi doctors in medical experiments, but also adhered to their Hippocratic Oath by helping inmates in camp hospitals to survive. It then extends the analysis to anti-Nazi Germans who did not leave the country after 1933 but protected and hid Jews while continuing in their civilian jobs, thus indirectly cooperating with the Nazi regime. The lecture thus examines the dilemmas of these men and women who, living in a “grey zone”, had to cope with a dictatorship that became increasingly lethal for all forms of dissent.      

Volker Berghahn is the Seth Low Emeritus Professor of History at Columbia University in the City of New York. For many years, he taught at the Universities of East Anglia and Warwick before moving to the United States in 1988 to teach at Brown University and at Columbia from 1998. After publishing a number of books on European-American cultural and business relations, he recently returned to his earlier interests in modern German history. His most recent book relevant to this lecture was published by Princeton University Press in 2019 under the title: Journalists between Hitler and Adenauer. From Inner Emigration to the Moral Reconstruction of West Germany.   

This is the 21st Holocaust Memorial Lecture and has been sponsored by The Association of Jewish Refugees.