Simon Wiesenthal Lecture: Holly Case: The Holocaust and the System. Historical Trauma and the Writing of History

In 2019, historian of the Holocaust Christopher Browning called for a shift away from thinking in terms of "systematic genocide" towards a conception of "systemic genocide." The talk will consider how and why historical reflections around traumatic events – with special emphasis on the Holocaust and the Second World War – have given rise to thinking in terms of systems and the implications of this tendency for both understanding the past and imagining the future.

Holly Case teaches Modern European History at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. She is the author of two books, Between States: The Transylvanian Question and the European Idea during WWII (2009) and The Age of Questions: Or, A First Attempt at an Aggregate History of the Eastern, Social, Woman, American, Jewish, Polish, Bullion, Tuberculosis, and Many Other Questions over the Nineteenth Century, and Beyond (2018).

Please register at anmeldung@vwi.ac.at by 27 May 2026.

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