Revealing suppressed culture – Lost histories in the archives of the WHL

Online talk for B'nai B'rith World Jewish Heritage Days: 'Revealing suppressed culture – Lost histories in the archives of the Wiener Holocaust Library'.

In this talk, Dr Barbara Warnock, Senior Curator and Head of Education at The Wiener Holocaust Library, will explore some of the traces and records of culture suppressed during the Nazi era that are contained in the Library’s extensive archives.

Founded in 1934 in Amsterdam as an anti-Nazi organisation and based in London since 1939, The Wiener Holocaust Library is the world’s oldest and Britain’s largest archive of document on the Nazi era and the Holocaust. The Library’s archives include precious collections relating to art, photography and culture labelled as ‘degenerate’ by the Nazis including Peter Kien’s original libretto for Der Kaiser von Atlantis oder der Tod dankt ab (The Emperor of Atlantis, or Death Abdicates), written in Theresienstadt camp and ghetto, an anti-Nazi opera composed by Victor Ullmann; artworks by Fred (Fritz) Kormis, a Jewish sculptor and printmaker ordered to stop working by the Nazi regime in 1933, and the powerful portrait photography of Gerty Simon, who was forced into exile early in the Nazi era.

The Wiener Library’s archives also contain vital records of Jewish cultural life in ghettos, such as Philipp Manes’ diaries and journals from Theresienstadt. The talk will reveal the stories of these artworks and records, and examine the vital role of archives in preserving suppressed culture.

About the speaker

Dr Barbara Warnock is the Senior Curator and Head of Education at The Wiener Holocaust Library, where she has curated the exhibitions Jewish Resistance to the Holocaust, Berlin-London; The Lost Photographs of Gerty Simon; Fighting Antisemitism from Dreyfus to Today, and Forgotten Victims: The Nazi Genocide of the Roma and Sinti, amongst others. She is the author (with John March) of Berlin-London: The Lost Photographs of Gerty Simon (2019), a Spectator Book of the Year, and the editor of Anti-Antisemitism: Countering Anti-Jewish Racism in Western Europe, 1890-2022 (2022). She has written a number of articles on refugee history, the Nazi persecution of Roma and the history of The Wiener Holocaust Library. She obtained her Doctorate in Austrian history from Birkbeck College, University of London, in 2016. She was for many years a history teacher and examiner.