World-renown Holocaust historian Saul Friedländer is visiting Aarhus University on October 23 2017. Friedländer, born in 1932 in Prague, is himself a survivor of the Shoah. He is perhaps best known for his path-breaking 2007 synthetic history of the Holocaust (Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews) for which he won the Pulitzer Prize and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. But Friedländer already made international headlines in 1964 when he published a book about Pius XII and the Third Reich based on hitherto unknown documents. He is also the author of numerous other books including an important critique of Nazi memory (Reflections of Nazism) and two important memoirs. In 1979, Friedländer published the acclaimed Holocaust memoir When Memory Comes which tells the story of his survival and his parents‘ murder in Auschwitz. Just last year, Friedländer published a second autobiographical book covering the years from 1945 to the present (Where Memory Leads). With the help of two distinguished guests, Cecilie Stokholm Banke and Christina Morina, we will take Friedländer’s memoirs as a point of departure for a wide ranging conversation about Friedländer’s innovative narrative strategies, the genres of Holocaust memoir and Holocaust historiography, and the politics of Holocaust memory - all the while reflecting on a most unusual life trajectory between different religions and many different homes in Europe, Israel, and the US.?

The distinguished lecture is co-sponsored by the Research Program in History, AU.