January 28, 2008

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German Women and Jewish Refugees in Allied-Occupied Berlin
to be Topic of Talk at Ramapo College

(Mahwah) - Atina Grossmann, author of Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (Princeton, 2007), will speak at Ramapo College of New Jersey Tuesday, March 4, 7:30 p.m. in the York Room of the Birch Mansion.  The presentation is free and open to the public.  For more information or to reserve a seat, please call 201.684.7409.

Atina Grossmann will describe Berlin in the days following Germany's surrender--the mass rape of German women by the Red Army, the liberated slave laborers and homecoming soldiers, returning political exiles, Jews emerging from hiding and ethnic German refugees fleeing the East.  She will chronicle the hunger, disease and homelessness, the fraternization with Allied occupiers, and the complexities of navigating a world where the commonplace mingled with the horrific. Grossmann will untangle the stories of Jewish survivors inside and outside the displaced-persons camps of the American zone as they built families and reconstructed identities while awaiting emigration to Palestine or the United States. She also will examine how Jews and Germans sought to restore normality--in work, in their relationships, and in their daily encounters.

Atina Grossmann is professor of history at Cooper Union. She is the author of Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920-1950 (Oxford, 1995) and the coeditor, with Omer Bartov and Mary Nolan of Crimes of War: Guilt and Denial in the Twentieth Century (New Press, 2002). The talk will be sponsored by Ramapo College’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and the Women’s Studies Program with the support of the Office of Student Affairs Platinum Series. It will take place in conjunction with Ramapo College’s celebration of Women’s History Month.

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