The Europe Center announces the international conference, “History and Responsibility: Hebrew Literature and 1948” which will take place at Stanford University on June 13-14, 2011. The aim of this conference is to consider some six decades of literary reflection on the 1948 Middle Eastern war, an event that resulted with the establishment of Israel on the one hand, and with the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem, the Nakba on the other hand.

In recent decades there has been extensive discussion of 1948 in historiography. Many novels, films, journals, exhibitions, anthologies and political essays of recent years also display a keen interest in revisiting 1948. It is our wish to address this context from the perspective of literary studies, and to do so with a strong emphasis on maintaining a theoretical, comparative dimension, i.e. raise questions that result from recent theoretical debates on historical representation, postcolonial discourse, literature and philosophy, literature and ethics, and so forth.   

The conference thus wishes to discuss different forms of literary engagement with the past (poetry, drama and prose); the literary relation to ethical and political questions surrounding 1948; changes in the literary dealing with 1948 from the late 1940s to the present; as well as public debates surrounding the literary engagement with 1948.

This conference is sponsored by The Europe Center, with co-sponsors The Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the School of Humanities and Sciences, The Taube Center for Jewish Studies, the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, The Department of Comparative Literature at Stanford University, the Center for Ethics and Society, along with The Hebrew University, Jerusalem.

A full conference schedule can be found here.

Born in 1950, Professor Raulff studied philosophy and history (Doctorate from Marburg in 1877, Habilitation at Humboldt University, Berlin, in 1995. Since 1994, he has been an editor in the arts pages of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and culture editor since 1997. Since 2001, Professor Raulff has been Executive Editor in the arts section of the Süddeutsche Zeitung. In summer 1996, he was a fellow of the Getty Research Institute in Santa Monica (USA), and in the winter of 2003/2004 a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin. Since November 2004, he has been Director of the German Literature Archive Marbach and since November 2005 a Member of the Presidium of the Goethe-Institut. Professor Raulff is the winner of the Anna-Krüger prize of the academic staff in Berlin for scientific prose (1996), the Hans-Reimer Prize of the Aby-Warburg-Stiftung in Hamburg (1997) and the Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair 2010 (nonfiction).

Sponsored by The Europe Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the Department of German Studies, SULAIR, and the Stanford Humanities Center.

As exemplified by the recent election results from Sweden, immigration is one of the most important and heated topics of debate in contemporary Scandinavian society. Immigrants are accused of being unwilling to integrate and adopt Scandinavian cultural values and practices, while the countries themselves are often criticized for not realizing that they have, in fact, become multicultural. By comparison, Jewish immigration to Scandinavia is generally regarded as a success and a strategy for others to emulate. In her presentation, Vibeke Kieding Banik will highlight some key features of Scandinavian Jewish history (with a particular focus on Norway) and argue that the skepticism characterizing the current debate was also present when Jews were allowed to emigrate to Scandinavia, and especially during the arrival of Eastern European Jews in the early 1900s.

Vibeke Kieding Banik, a Norwegian national, received her PhD in history in 2009 from the University of Oslo, where she is currently affiliated as a part time lecturer. She teaches a course entitled "The Holocaust" and supervises and examines undergraduate and postgraduate students. Her research interests include gender studies, modern Jewish history and immigration, integration and identity in Scandinavia. During her Anna Lindh fellowship at The Europe Center, Vibeke will begin work on her new project, “Gendered integration? The Jewish Encounter with Scandinavia, 1900-1940."

Audio Synopsis:

Dr. Kieding Banik begins by outlining the historical context of the Jewish experience in Scandinavia. She describes how early Jewish immigrants faced a homogenous, largely Lutheran Scandinavian population with strong anti-Semitic prejudices, with Norway even banning Jewish immigration entirely until 1851, for fear Jews would "overflow" the country. Immigration in all parts of Scandinavia was greatly restricted between 1880 and the beginning of World War I, before and after which time Jews from Eastern Europe arrived in greater numbers, often en route to other destinations.

While by 1918 Jews had full legal rights in Scandinavia, the amount of assimilation of Jews into local society differed between countries. For example, Jews in Denmark demonstrated higher levels of cultural assimilation, and prominence in society, academia, politics and civil society than in Sweden or Norway.

Dr. Kieding Banik goes on to describe the challenges immigrants faced as they attempted to balance assimilation with their Jewish identity; the effects of the Holocaust on Jewish populations in Scandinavia; the response of established Jewish communities to new immigrants; and the differences of experience between present-day Jewish immigrants to Scandinavia and their predecessors.

A discussion session addresses issues such as: the reasons for variety in the Jewish experience between Scandinavian countries; how post-war attitudes changed to facilitate increased Jewish integration; the relationship ofJews to other immigrant groups in Scandinavia; and the level of assistance for immigrant groups in Scandinavia today.

Prince Hans-Adam II has dedicated his reign to bring Liechtenstein into the modern international community. Under his leadership Liechtenstein has joined the United Nations and the European Economic Area with the European Union.

In 2003 Prince Hans-Adam II was able to accomplish the monarchy’s constitutional reform, after the failure of parliamentary negociation, with a plebiscite outcome of a majority of voters in favor of the Princely House’s constitutional proposal.

Having appointed Hereditary Prince Alois his permanent deputy for exercising the duties of Head of State of the Principality of Liechtenstein, Prince Hans-Adam II has returned to devoting himself more to managing the assets of the Princely House.

Event Synopsis:

HRH Prince Hans-Adam II asserts that to survive, states must reflect a new model geared toward preventing wars, serving not only the privileged but the whole population, promoting democracy and the rule of law, and being globally competitive. To achieve this, the state must operate like a service company. It must avoid behaving like a monopoly, including with regards to its territory. The prince cites legislation he introduced to allow each of Liechtenstein's 11 communities to vote on whether to remain with or leave the principality and outlines other relevant examples from Europe. In the "service company" model of states, defense spending fueled by taxpayer money will be unnecessary. Many current government functions would be privatized or transferred to local communities, with the exception of foreign policy, law and order, education, and state finances. He details all four of these areas, discusses ways in which they intersect, and outlines suggested reforms to legislative systems to achieve these goals.

The prince makes a special case for private education funded by state vouchers to parents; for indirect taxation by the state and the opportunity for local communities to impose direct taxes; and for using tax surpluses and proceeds from selling unwanted state property to pay down the national debt. Above all, he emphasizes a "lean and transparent" state that can be financed by only a small fraction of GDP, with funds flowing directly to local communities. In conclusion, he predicts that the state - and even monarchies - will survive the millennium, but not in the traditional model or large, centralized states.

A discussion session raised such questions as: Who "owns" a state operating like a service company? What options exist to deal with the growing global imbalance of wealth? Should healthcare and waste disposal/natural resource management be provided by the state or privatized? Does Lichtenstein derive any direct benefits from its association with the European Economic Community? Is Liechtenstein large enough to have an impact on world politics with its foreign policy, or is foreign policy an area better handled at a higher level like that of the EU? What is the current situation of minorities in Europe?

A discussion of the missions, boundaries and pitfalls of nonfiction, to mark the publication of Timothy Garton Ash’s Facts are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade Without a Name. With Timothy Garton Ash, Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, and Tobias Wolff, Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor, Department of English; moderated by Amir Eshel, Charles Michael Professor in Jewish History and Culture.

Sponsored by The Europe Center. Co-sponsored by the Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, and the Stanford Humanities Center.

On December 2, 2009, Norman Naimark, Robert and Florence McDonnel Professor of Eastern European Studies and Professor of History at Stanford University, delivered the second lecture in a new event and publication series between Stanford University and Suhrkamp Verlag. The lecture was held at Suhrkamp Verlag's Berlin location, and was delivered in German. Professor Naimark presented an English version of his lecture on February 10, 2010.