UK University of Leicester Lecture – Expansionism in the Third Reich

24Dash.com | 7th May 2010

Expansionism of the Third Reich comes under scrutiny at the Fifth Aubrey Newman Annual Lecture at the University of Leicester’s Stanley Burton Centre for Holocaust Studies on Tuesday 11th May, 5.30-6.30pm, in the Ken Edwards Lecture Theatre 3, on the University’s main campus.

The lecture, which is open to the public and free of charge, will be followed on 12th May by an international colloquium entitled: 'Space, Identity and National Socialism' at Loughborough University.

In his lecture Professor Alon Confino from the University of Virginia will speak on Nazi spatial policy. The Third Reich was an empire devoted to expansion – from the Atlantic in the west to the Pacific shores of Siberia in the east – and to annihilation of whole groups of people. Professor Confino will address the questions: What was the revolutionary concept of time that accompanied this revolutionary policy of space? What was the imagination of time and history – of memory, that is – that gave meaning and legitimacy to this radical spatial policy? Alon Confino is Professor of history at the University of Virginia and one of the leading experts of the relationship between history and memory, particularly regarding 20th Century Germany.

He is the author of four books and numerous articles; his most recent books are Between Mass Death and Individual Loss: The Place of the Dead in Twentieth-Century Germany. Co-edited with Paul Betts and Dirk Schumann (New York: Berghahn Press, 2008) and Germany as a Culture of Remembrance: Promises and Limits of Writing History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

This year he is a visiting professor at the Department of History and Civilization at the European University Institute in Florence, where he is completing a book entitled A World Without Jews: Memory and the Holocaust in the Third Reich to be published by Cambridge University Press.

Dr Olaf Jensen, Director of the Stanley Burton Centre commented: ‘Alon Confino’s lecture and the international colloquium provide a platform and forum for the latest research on regional aspects of the ‘Third Reich’ and will deepen our understanding of how Nazi Germany was structured, how the concept of the ‘Volksgemeinschaft’ attracted support for the Nazi ideology, and how the ‘colonial space’ in Eastern Europe fits into this concept. ‘This will have major consequences for our understanding of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.’

Professor Aubrey Newman, founder of the Stanley Burton Centre, added: ‘I very much appreciate the Stanley Burton Centre’s continuing decision to maintain this series. The lectures and participants in the past have all been of very high quality in the field of Holocaust Studies and I am looking forward to hearing what will be said this year.’

The colloquium ‘Space, Identity and National Socialism’ will take place on Wednesday 12 May 2, 8.30-16.30, at Loughborough University. Further details are available from the website:

http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/eu/studying/History/SpaceIdentityAndNationalSocialism.html

http://www.24dash.com/news/Communities/2010-05-07-Expansionism-in-the-Third-Reich