Venue: Marietta Blau-Saal, Universität Wien,
Universitätsring 1, 1010 Wien

This keynote explores the intersection of queer and Holocaust history through the example of an enforced relationship between two women, guard and a prisoner in a small satellite camp of Gross Rosen in the final months of the Second World War. This story brings issues of sexual violence, sexual barter, homophobia, agency, and the limits of the narratable. Based on survivor testimonies, reparation files, trials, as well as a well known sociological study, the talk offers insights into to how to queer Holocaust history is an emancipatory but also an ambivalent past. Moreover, Hájková will offer a peak into the how to, in terms of archival research and granular analysis.

Dr Anna Hájková is associate professor at the University of Warwick. Her first book, The Last Ghetto: An Everyday History of Theresienstadt, came out in 2020 with Oxford University Press. Her article "Sexual Barter in Times of Genocide" was awarded the Catharine Stimpson Prize for Outstanding Feminist Scholarship in 2013. She is working on two projects: a study of transgressive sexuality in the Holocaust, for which is writing a trade book on the Neuengamme guard Anneliese Kohlmann and queer Holocaust history. Her work on queer history of the Holocaust was published in Czech, German, British, US American, and Israeli newspapers and was recognized with the Orfeo Iris Prize 2020. She guest edited a special issue of German History Holocaust, Sexuality, Stigma. Moreover, she is also working on a generational history of Communists in Central Europe, 1930-1970.

To register for the public lecture, contact: rasa.navickaite(at)univie.ac.at

This lecture is a part of the workshop "Queering Modernization in Eastern Europe: Deviant Sexualities, Gender Regimes, and the Limits of State Control" (University of Vienna, June 29-30, 2023).
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101025145, and the Research platform "Transformations and Eastern Europe," University of Vienna.