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Virtual PhD and a Cup of Tea: Contested Spaces: The National Holocaust Monument in Amsterdam
September 14, 2021 @ 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
A photograph of Weesperstraat 31-29, Amsterdam in 1932. Weesperstraat is the location of the soon-to-be-unveiled National Holocaust Monument featuring the names of 102,000 Jews murdered during the Holocaust. Of that number, 175 Jews in the Weesperplantsoen neighbourhood did not return.
Part of The Wiener Holocaust Library’s PhD and a Cup of Tea doctoral seminar series.
This presentation examines the Netherlands Auschwitz Committee’s fifteen-year-long battle to bring the country’s first national Holocaust monument to Amsterdam. Protests over location, design, funding and its environmental impact led to lawsuits and delayed construction for years. Despite this, the monument, designed by Daniel Libeskind, is set to be unveiled on 19 September 2021. Drawing on interviews, newspaper articles, and city archives, this talk delves into the complexity of the debate and demonstrates how responses to the monument are emblematic of Dutch attitudes towards Holocaust commemoration.
About the speaker:
Jazmine Contreras is an Assistant Professor of European History at Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland. She completed her doctorate in European History at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities in summer 2020. Her dissertation, “‘We were all in the resistance’: Historical Memory of the Holocaust and Second World War,” examines contested cultural memories of the Second World War and the Holocaust through an analysis of the monuments, museums, educational programs, and commemoration ceremonies that shape memorial culture in the Netherlands.
Event guidelines:
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2. Please try and join 5 minutes before the event start time and we will let you into the room (do try and bear with us if this takes a few minutes).
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