WE! ARE! HERE! - an artistic “Despite it All!”
An artistic commemoration project is currently being prepared together with survivors. It opened on the 80th anniversary of the Wannsee Conference.
On January 20, 1942, fifteen men met in a villa on Berlin's Wannsee Lake for a working breakfast. They were members of the NSDAP or belonged to various ministries and governmental divisions. The aim of the meeting was to enable participants to coordinate the Nazi regime’s decision to murder eleven million Jews in Europe. The goal was the perfect organization of the greatest crime in human history. The organizational plans agreed upon at the Wannsee Conference ultimately led to the murder of six million Jews. Some, however survived plans for their extermination. These survivors and their descendants are here among us.
The visual images of the fifteen perpetrators have now faded from public consciousness. Nonetheless, if you search for them, you will find their biographies, with their lives described in books and on the internet. Their victims, however, including the survivors, are mostly depersonalized in the public consciousness. They are known as "the victims" or "the victims and their descendants."
This lack of personal identity is now being countered by an artistic commemorative concept entitled: "WE! ARE! HERE!" Using a special camera, survivors are portrayed together with a grandchild or great-grandchild for the commemorative installation. Each photograph in this series of portraits unites the past, the present and the future. These pictures are not only meant to focus on the survival and unimaginable suffering of the survivors, but to point to the future - a photographic “Despite it All!”
The exhibition first opened 80 years after the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 2022, in the Parliament Building in Berlin and has since been exhibited at various locations, for example in Washington, D.C. www.wsh2022.de
Ideologies in National Socialism – Handbook and Conferences
For the most part, English language research on the Third Reich has focused on its political, economic and military structures. Comparatively little attention has been paid to the ideological underpinnings of National Socialism, however; to the ideas and discourses that informed the beliefs and actions of both major and minor actors in Hitler’s Germany.
In the sense proposed here, ideology is not to be understood in opposition to rationality, but rather as a precondition for rational thinking. Ideology, in other words, is a prism through which individuals, groups, and state authorities see the world, whilst also providing justification for their actions.
This project is based on the assumption that, if we want to understand the relationship between politics and people’s lived realities, or between the period’s inhuman atrocities and the worldview that informed them, then a deep understanding of National Socialist ideologies is required.
The core of our project is a three-volume reference resource entitled ‘’Ideologies in National Socialism,’’ designed to be unprecedented in its detail and encylopaedic in its coverage.
2024 Handbook Ideologies in National Socialism. Volume 1: Individuals and Ideologies. ISBN: 978-3-11-071254-4
2025 Handbook Ideologies in National Socialism. Volume 2: Institutions and Ideologies.
2026 Handbook Ideologies in National Socialism. Volume 3: History of Ideas.
Edition - The Service Diaries of Wolfram Sievers
Wolfram Sievers was the Reich director of the SS research institution "Ahnenerbe." His now largely reconstructed service diaries are a unique source for understanding the SS, the history of science in Germany and Europe from 1935 to 1945, and the ethnic and racist ideologies that shaped the SS.
The three-volume edition consists of an introductory volume with a Sievers biography and an introduction to the structure and origins of the diaries. With the exception of a few weeks, the main volume shows Sievers' daily appointments and telephone calls, as well as the numerous projects of the Ahnenerbe. It mentions thousands of people who played a role in the SS or in the other branches of the NSDAP, as well as key figures in the military (including the Waffen-SS), and, above all, in German and European institutions of science. The last volume gives an encyclopaedic overview of many of these persons and projects.
The work will also be published as online versions, with an extensive search function for actors and projects, as well as links to links in the Ahnenerbe network.
Volume I:
The Science Policy of the "SS-Ahnenerbe”
Wolfram Sievers - A science manager in the service of the SS
Volume II:
The Science Policy of the "SS-Ahnenerbe”
The SS research network in the service diaries of Wolfram Sievers
Documents 1941-45 (in two extensive volumes, ISBN 978-3-11-069996-8)
Volume III: The Science Policy of the "SS-Ahnenerbe”
Selected actors and their projects in European science. The Ancestral Heritage Network. (ISBN 978-3-11-071221-6)
Politics, Ideology and Democracy
Volume 1: Völkisches Denken 1848 bis 1948. Von der Paulskirche über Weimar zum Petersberg. ISBN: 978-3-11-069745-2
Part 1: The Paulskirche Parliament between a National Awakening and Democratic Decision-Making.
Part 2: From a National Awakening to Murderous Politics. The National Socialist Ideology's Ethnic Origins.
Part 3: How Do You Get the Völkisch out of Your Head? The Re-education and Re-orientation in Occupied Germany.
The rise of parliamentary democracy and political public opinion in the 19th century created the conditions for the emergence of group-bound ideological vocabularies in Germany. This volume spans the arc from Paulskirche in Frankfurt/Main through the interwar period to the era of re-education after the zero hour – an elementary component of the creation of today's parliamentary democracy in Germany.
At the center of the present volume is the great theme of the relationship between ethnic thinking and German democratic aspirations over nearly one hundred years.
It thus offers an exemplary overview of ideologies that have long preoccupied German politics and are currently preoccupying it again.
The contributions featured in the anthology are largely based on conference results. The CfP/conference programs can be found here.
The anthology was published by De Gruyter Publishers (ISBN 978-3-11-069734-6)
Volume 2: Lisa Gottschall: Völkische Forschung am Krakauer "Institut für Deutsche Ostarbeit". Die Wiener "Völkerkunde" und Anthropologie – Biographien und Netzwerke. The Monograph was published by De Gruyter Publishers (ISBN: 978-3-11-079595-0)
Volume 3: Merchant of Ideologies – Erich Ludendorff.
The Monograph will be published by De Gruyter Publishers in 2025
Teams
We assemble ad-hoc teams for each project. As an example we may introduce the team of Volume 1 of Handbook Ideologies in National Socialism:
Volume 1 Editorial Office (Volume 2 and 3 will have different teams):
Darren O’Byrne and Julien Reitzenstein (Editors)
Barbara Nowak, Orli Vogt-Vincent, Bastian Tonk (Administration, Organisation and Copyediting)
Area Editors:
Contributors (selection):
of SS Ideology