Precarious Survival – Everyday Life of «Mixed Families» During the Nazi Regime in Vienna

22 February 2022, 5:00 pm CET

About Location / Accom.

Michaela Raggam-Blesch (University of Vienna)

This lecture will focus on the everyday life and persecution of «mixed families» during the Nazi regime in Vienna. In the context of National Socialist race ideology, marriages between Jews and Gentiles as well as the presence of their «half-Jewish» descendants, represented a threat to the integrity of the Nazi regime. In the context of the so-called «Final Solution», this «unsolved problem» played an important role at the Wannsee conference and its follow-up meetings in March and October of 1942. For hardliners, no «solution» could be «final» without «solving» the «Mischling problem». Internal differences within the Nazi party and concerns that Aryan family members would cause or spur public unrest ultimately spared this group from the full force of the radical measures applied to the general Jewish population, even if plans for the ultimate inclusion of «half-Jews» and Jewish partners of «mixed marriages» in the Final Solution were never abandoned.

This project with its microhistorical setting positions itself within international theoretical debates of Holocaust studies. It follows Saul Friedländer and his concept of an integrated history, where the persecuted are taken seriously as individuals and where their perspective is taken into account as much as the actions of the perpetrators.

Considering the massive scale of the Nazi genocidal program, the fact that the Holocaust was also an intimate history shaping the relationships between individuals easily gets lost from sight. Research on «mixed families», who by definition navigated between Jewish and non-Jewish worlds, thereby also enhances our understanding of the intricacies of interpersonal relations during the Holocaust.

Modern Jewish History Seminar in Prague – Spring 2022

Masaryk Institute and Archives, Czech Academy of Sciences
Institute of Contemporary History, Czech Academy of Sciences
Prague Center for Jewish Studies, Charles University

All seminars will be held online.
We will use the videoconferencing software Zoom. You can connect by following this link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82961863362

Please accept our invitation to the Modern Jewish History Seminar in spring 2022.

All sessions are in English.

Contact: Daniela Bartáková, bartakova@mua.cas.cz

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