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Click here for a PDF of the Spring 2024 program overview

Farewell NCGS!
The academic year 2023-24 was after 17 years the last for the North Carolina German Studies Seminar and Workshop Series, but we will continue the he Konrad H. Jarausch Essay Prize for Advanced Graduate Students in Central European History.

Many thanks for all your support!

Winner of the Konrad H. Jarausch Essay Prize for Advanced Graduate Students in Central European History 2024:

AJ Solovy (Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Berkeley)

Sharing the Postwar World: Encounters between Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Former SS Members, 1945-1970s

Presentation by AJ Solovy

Laudation: Dr. Karen Auerbach (Associate Professor; Ambassador Stuart E. Eizenstat Scholar in Jewish History at the UNC History Department)

February 7, 2025, 12pm

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Fedex Building, 301 Pittsboro, 27599, Chapel Hill, Room GEC 3009

The North Carolina German Studies Seminar and Workshop Series (NCGS) is proud to award our annual Konrad H. Jarausch Essay Prize for Advanced Graduate Students in modern Central European history in 2024 to AJ SOLOVY, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. Her submission was entitled “Sharing the Postwar World: Encounters between Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Former SS Members, 1945-1970s,” and it stems from her forthcoming dissertation called Nazis After Hitler: A History of SS Members in the Postwar World.

Holocaust studies, including aftermath studies, is a well-established academic field with a steady stream of contributions. By the 2020s, it has become increasingly challenging to add genuinely new works that begin to question the scholarly understanding of key phenomena. AJ Solovy’s essay and her dissertation, however, do exactly that. Focusing on the myriad of encounters of SS veterans and Jewish survivors, Solovy challenges the widely-shared position that evasion and a sense of guilt were the “organizing motivations” of former Nazi perpetrators after 1945. In much of the Western world, perpetrators and victims hardly lived in strictly separate spaces, but led and had to lead lives that were often, albeit to different degrees “entangled” and, thus, “inflected by their knowledge of and confrontation with one another’s presence.” The essay traces and examines the evolving geography and stunningly broad array of spaces in which these encounters took place from workplaces to the streets and, eventually, even their homes in the span of three decades until the mid-1970s. For the former SS members, these encounters and entanglements profoundly shaped their views of the genocidal past and postwar present as they helped build memory cultures and counter-cultures, in which an ongoing sense of self-importance, superiority and renegotiated fascist ideologies still played pivotal roles.

The prize committee noted Solovy’s thorough grounding in the extensive historiography, her command of the relevant theoretical and methodological approaches, and the originality and strengths of her writing and argumentation. Members were impressed with the author’s extensive work and source base derived from dozens of archives on various continents and her ability to find and then skillfully analyze a broad array of encounters between perpetrators and victims in the evolving postwar worlds. We therefore believe that she deserves this year’s prize, which serves to celebrate outstanding new talent in the field of Central European history. It is to be awarded annually to an article or dissertation chapter by a current graduate student in recognition of the longstanding commitment to graduate education of Konrad H. Jarausch, the Lurcy Professor of European Civilization at the History Department of the University of North Carolina.

KHJ prize Website: https://ncgsws.web.unc.edu/konrad-h-jarausch-essay-prize/

The KHJ Prize Committee:

Dr. James Chappel (Duke University)
Dr. Jens-Uwe Guettel (Speaker, UNC-Chapel Hill, email: jguettel@unc.edu)
Dr. Karen Hagemann (Speaker, UNC-Chapel Hill)
Dr. Donna Harsch (Carnegie Mellon University),
Dr. Thomas Pegelow Kaplan (University of Colorado Boulder)
Dr. Adam Seipp (Texas A&M University)
Dr. Andrea Sinn (Elon University) and
Dr. Teresa Walch (UNC-Greensboro).

Call for Proposals for 2025: PDF

CONVENERS of the NCGS SERIES:
Carolina Seminars I Duke University: Department of German Studies I Department of History I The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages & Literatures I Department of History and