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VERSION:2.0
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
METHOD:PUBLISH
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTAMP:20150923T101027Z
DTSTART:20151118T173000Z
DTEND:20151118T183000Z
SUMMARY:Meet the Researchers Open Lecture Series (for schools and public)
 : "Modern Dictatorships? Museums and Heritage at National Socialist Site
 s in Eastern Germany"
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DESCRIPTION:A talk by Dr Matthew Philpotts (Department of German Studies)
  - part of the School of Arts\, Languages and Cultures open lecture seri
 es "Meet the Researchers".\n\nIn this lecture\, I will present my resear
 ch into the way museums select and present the German experience of dict
 atorship at three former National Socialist sites in eastern Germany:\n 
 1.Prora: the vast and now largely derelict holiday resort on the Baltic 
 island of Rügen that was built in the mid-to-late 1930s by the National 
 Socialist regime as part of its mass leisure programme\, ‘Strength throu
 gh Joy’ (Kraft durch Freude)\n 2.Peenemünde: the rocket-testing site and
  forced labour camp on the Baltic coast near the present-day Polish bord
 er where the V2 weapon was designed and a rocket first launched into spa
 ce in October 1942\n 3.Alt-Rehse: the small village and country estate n
 ear Neubrandenburg that housed the training facilities for the National 
 Socialist Medical Association and where instruction in theories of racia
 l hygiene was delivered from May 1935.\n \nAs well as their geographical
  location in the eastern German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern\, the si
 tes share three important features. Firstly\, in all three cases the ori
 ginal purpose of the site advanced not only the specific aims of the Naz
 i regime and its ideology\, but also an aspect of social or scientific m
 odernity: mass tourism (Prora)\; rocket technology and space travel (Pee
 nemünde)\; and medicine and applied genetics (Alt-Rehse). Secondly\, the
  surviving infrastructure at all three sites was re-used after 1945 in t
 he German Democratic Republic (GDR)\, the subsequent East German sociali
 st dictatorship. And\, finally\, at all three sites the original buildin
 gs and their remains are now being preserved or commemorated in some for
 m of museum and related heritage practices. These shared features make t
 hese sites an intriguing case study through which to examine how museums
  and heritage construct narratives about the German past. My research ex
 plores the construction of those narratives through a variety of media a
 nd on a variety of levels: the personal narratives of individual perpetr
 ators\, victims\, and witnesses\; the public narratives of German ‘colle
 ctive memory’\; and the conceptual narratives (e.g. totalitarianism\, re
 sistance\, modernisation) through which historians have sought to make s
 ense of the twentieth-century German dictatorships and their relationshi
 p to our modern\, democratic present.\n\nFree of charge\, but please boo
 k a place via our website:  http://man.ac.uk/9mTV30
STATUS:TENTATIVE
TRANSP:TRANSPARENT
CLASS:PUBLIC
LOCATION:Main Lecture Theatre\, Samuel Alexander Building\, Manchester
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