The Pogrom

Chair: Stefanie Schüler-Springorum (Center for Research on Anti-Semitism, Technical University Berlin, History)

• Mary Fulbrook (University College, London, German History)
  “Bystanders to Violence”

• Maximilian Strnad (Town Archive, City of Munich, History)
  “A Question of Gender! Spaces of Violence and Reactions to Kristallnacht in Jewish-Gentile Families”

• Wolf Gruner (University of Southern California, Los Angeles, Jewish Studies and History)
  “Mass Attack on Jewish Homes and Jewish Responses”

Originally from Germany, Wolf Gruner is a specialist for the research of the Holocaust and Central European Jewish history, topics on which he published ten books and around 70 articles and book chapters by now. Most recently, he published a prizewinning book on the Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia. He just finished an exciting decade-long research project on forgotten acts of individual defiance and protest of German and Austrian Jews in Nazi Germany. The soon to be published book will fundamentally revise our understanding of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust. Additional areas of research include the comparative history of mass violence and its resistance on a global scale, as well as racial and state discrimination against Indigenous and other minority populations, especially in Latin America. Since 2008, he is the Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies and Professor of History at the University of Southern California. In 2014, Professor Gruner became the founding director of the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research (previously the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research). He is a member of the Academic Committee of the Unites States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, and co-founder of the National Consortium of Higher Education Centers for Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Studies. More information about Professor Gruner at USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts & Sciences

Maximilian Strnad is a historian at the Munich City Archive, and recently received his Ph.D. in Contemporary History from the Ludwig-Maximilians University (LMU) in Munich, Germany. Strnad has been involved in many university- and community-based research undertakings, coordinating, among others, the “Deportation of Munich Jews” project (with Peter Longerich) at the NS-Documentation Center and working as a researcher in the “Jews in Germany Since 1945” project at LMU’s Department of Jewish History and Culture (with Michael Brenner). He has been awarded a Sosland Family Fellowship at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and a scholarship from the Leo Baeck Fellowship Program and the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes. In addition to a series of articles and book chapters, he is the author of Zwischenstation “Judensiedlung.” Verfolgung und Deportation der jüdischen Münchner 1941-1945 (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2011) and Flachs für das Reich. Das jüdische Zwangsarbeitslager “Flachsröste” bei München (Munich: Volk Verlag, 2013). He also co-edited (with Michael Brenner) Der Holocaust in der deutschsprachigen Geschichtswissenschaft (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2012).

Mary Fulbrook, FBA, is Professor of German History at UCL and a graduate of Cambridge and Harvard. Previous professional roles include Chair of the Modern History Section of the British Academy, Chair of the German History Society, and Founding Joint Editor of German History, as well as serving on the Academic Advisory Board of the Foundation for the former Nazi Concentration Camps at Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora, and the International Advisory Board of the Chancellor Willy Brandt Foundation. Her latest book, Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice, is published by OUP in October 2018. Recent publications include the Fraenkel Prize-winning A Small Town near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust (OUP 2012) and Dissonant Lives: Generations and Violence through the German Dictatorships (OUP 2011; two volume paperback, 2017).  Fulbrook has been awarded a number of major research grants from the Leverhulme Trust and the AHRC, and is the author or editor of 25 books, including Anatomy of a Dictatorship: Inside the GDR, 1949-89 (OUP 1995) and The People’s State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker (Yale UP, 2005). Her current research is on complicity and perpetration, with a focus on the role of bystanders.