(PDF) (DOC) (JPG)March 4, 2008

(Mahwah) – Atina Grossmann, author of Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (Princeton, 2007), spoke at Ramapo College of New Jersey Tuesday, March 4, 2008.

Professor Grossmann described 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 chronicled 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 untangled the stories of Jewish survivors inside and outside the displaced-persons camps of the American Zone of Occupation as they built families and reconstructed identities while awaiting emigration to Palestine or the United States. She also examined how Jews and Germans sought to restore normalcy–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 was sponsored by Ramapo College’s Gross Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and the Women’s Studies Program with the support of the Office of Student Affairs Platinum Series. It took place in conjunction with Ramapo College’s celebration of Women’s Herstory Month.

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