“Jetzt judenfrei (Now Free of Jews)”: Being a Tourist in Nazi-Occupied Poland
Fifteenth Annual Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Lecture
Room G17
Claudia Cohen Hall
249 S 36th St
Philadelphia, PA 19104
In 1943 Karl Baedeker, publisher of the well known and long established series of European tourist guides, issued a new volume on the General Government region of Nazi-occupied Poland. Indistinguishable in format from the rest of the series, the guide was sponsored and introduced by the Governor General Hans Frank (later hanged at Nuremberg). It was intended not only to provide German visitors to the region with the usual tourist information on accommodation, sight-seeing etc., but also to fulfill Frank’s political agenda: to showcase his semi-autonomous fiefdom as an outpost of age-old German culture and a harbinger of the Nazi new order in the east. This lecture will discuss how the surface normality of a tourist handbook was related to the project of racial imperialism pursued by Frank and the Nazi regime in this region.
Featuring
Jane Caplan
Jane Caplan is Professor of Modern European History at St. Antony's College, University of Oxford. She has worked mainly on the history of Nazi Germany and is currently researching the proof and policing of identity in the Third Reich. She is equally interested in the documentation of individual identity in 19th-century Europe, especially the written and visual marks of identity on and off the body and their status in political and legal discourse.
Cosponsors
Department of History, Penn Political Theory Workshop, Germanic Languages & Literatures, Jewish Studies Program Kutchin Seminar Series
