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Event

Negotiating Reparations After the Holocaust: Insights from a Critical Jurist’s Personal Diary

Event information>

Dates
Time
5:30 pm to 7:00 pm
Location

IHR Seminar Room N304, Third Floor, IHR, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU

Institute

Institute of Historical Research

Event type

Seminar

Event series

Jewish History

Speakers

Lorena De Vita (Utrecht University)

Contact

Email only

It is widely assumed that the reparations that Germany paid to Holocaust survivors and the state of Israel ‘established a milestone in international morality’, as former Nuremberg prosecutor Benjamin Ferencz put it – that the 1952 Luxembourg Agreement was, as MIT political scientist Melissa Nobles wrote, an ‘exemplar of successful reparations’.  Indeed, in the aftermath of the Second World War and the Holocaust, the Federal Republic of Germany set up what is to date the most extensive reparations programme to deal with the consequences of mass human rights violations and genocide. 
 
But how did this programme take shape – and what did it feel like to witness and try to shape its successive metamorphoses? Drawing upon a series of handwritten diaries kept by a little-known German jurist analysed in the context of the Wording Repair research project hosted at Utrecht University, the talk will employ Küster’s writings to answer this question. 

His diaries have never been made available to historians until now. They reveal Otto Küster’s experiences as a ‘critical jurist’ – someone who was sacked from his position as a judge in 1932 and from the Ministry of Justice in 1954, because of the criticism he levelled at the political circles of his time(s) – and who kept working on reparations-related questions for much of his professional life. By unpacking Küster’s experiences and engagements in the Federal Republic of the early 1950s, the talk will reflect on the dilemmas and contradictions that characterised German-Jewish relations in the aftermath of the Holocaust.

Dr. Lorena De Vita is an Assistant Professor in the History of International Relations at the Department of History and Art History at Utrecht University. She is fascinated by the complexity - and possibility - of dialogue and cooperation in global politics. Her research, outreach and teaching activities are inspired by a multi-perspectivity and interdisciplinary approach.

She is currently leading the Wording Repair project, an international NWO-funded team effort to digitize, transcribe, and analyze recently unearthed historical sources relative to the history of reparations after the Second World War and the Holocaust. This research is embedded in her Holocaust Diplomacy: The Global Politics of Memory and Forgetting project, supported by the Alfred Landecker Foundation Lecturer Programme (2021-2026).


All welcome

- this event is free to attend but advance registration is required.

This page was last updated on 27 January 2025