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Microhistories from a Polish–Jewish town: 1918 – 1956

A lecture by Agnieszka Wierzcholska (Free University of Berlin) in the frame of the seminar on Modern Jewish History of the Institute of Contemporary History (AV ČR) and CEFRES in partnership with the Masaryk Institute (AV ČR).

Where: CEFRES library, Na Florenci 3, 110 00 Prague 1
When: from 5:30 pm to 7:00 pm
Language: English

Abstract

Tarnów in southern Poland has been a Polish-Jewish town for centuries. Prior to the Second World War almost 50% of the town’s inhabitants were Jewish and the remaining half were Catholics. Relations between Jews and non-Jews were a normal part of everyday life among neighbors, schoolmates, and in local politics. During the Shoah the murder of the town’s Jews took place on the streets of the town, right before the eyes of the non-Jewish neighbors. Of the 25,000 Jews who lived in Tarnów in 1939, only a mere thousand returned, and only a few hundred stayed.

What happens to a town where the German occupier destroyed the Polish-Jewish Lebenswelt? The social fabric changed dramatically since 1939 and the local community became an occupied society. The antisemitism that arose in the town in the late 1930s intertwined with German anti-Jewish policies in many ways. Due to the proximity of violence, non-Jewish Poles were implicated in the Shoah. On the other hand, we must also ask which local networks proved to be resilient, what friendships turned out to be lifesaving, and what contacts proved to be dangerous? Finally, what happened to the town when the German occupier left in January 1945 and half of its population – the Jewish part – was gone?

This talk retraces the everyday life of a Polish Jewish town, bridging the caesuras of World War Two in order to retrace the continuities within the upheavals and to reiterate individual life stories.

Michael Werner: Music as a Universal Form of Art?

Music as a Universal Form of Art ? Internationalization of Musical Life and Forming of National Identity in 19th Century Europe

A lecture by Michael Werner (CNRS-EHESS) on the occasion of the workshop When All Roads Led to Paris.

When & Where: from 6 pm to 7:30 pm, French Institute in Prague, Štěpánská 35, Prague 1, 5th floor
Language: French with simultaneous translation in Czech

Abstract (FR)
Dans la conférence, on reviendra sur les transformations de la vie musicale en Europe au 19e siècle, en particulier relatives au concert. On assiste en effet à un phénomène paradoxe : d’un côté une véritable internationalisation, fondée, entre autres, sur la mobilité des musiciens, la constitution d’un répertoire, l’émergence d’un marché et d’une presse spécialisée ou encore la professionnalisation des métiers de la musique. De l’autre une nationalisation progressive des schèmes interprétatifs de la musique et des phénomènes de réception, voire l’appropriation de la musique par les mouvements nationaux. On proposera quelques outils d’analyse permettant d’éclairer ces mutations et de les inscrire dans une histoire croisée des cultures en Europe.

Michael Werner is a research director at Centre national de la recherche scientifique, and a lecturer at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. His main focus is history of social and cultural relations between France and Germany between and 18th and 20th century. Along with Michel Espagne he introduced a theory of cultural transfers; with Bénédicte Zimmermann he then developed a similar concept of „histoire croisée“, i.e. entangled history. Besides cultural transfers between France and Germany, Michael Werner focuses also on the perspectives of entangled history in humanities, on literary science and social history of music. The latter will be the subject of his Prague lecture.

  • Begegnungen mit Heine. Berichte der Zeitgenossen, Hamburg, 1973, 2 vol.
  • avec Michel Espagne, La construction d’une référence culturelle allemande en France: genèse et histoire (1750-1914), Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 42, 1987, no 4, p. 969-992.
  • avec Bénédicte Zimmermann (éds.), De la comparaison à l’histoire croisée, Paris, 2004.
  • Musikgeschichte als « Histoire croisée ». Zu den Verflechtungen des Musiklebens, in : Anne-Madeleine Goulet, Gesa zur Nieden (éds), Europäische Musiker in Venedig, Rom und Neapel (1650-1750) / Les musiciens européens à Venise, Rome et Nâples (1650-1750), Kassel, Laaber, 2015 (Analecta musicologica 52), p. 49-67.

Illustration : The Piano Lesson, Edmund Blair Leighton (1896)

 

Memory, Narrative, and Conflict: At the Confluence of Perspectives

Date: September 15-16, 2025
Location: Berlin
Languages: English & French

Organizers
Centre d’études historiques de l’Académie polonaise des Sciences (CBH-PAN)
ISP (UMR 7220)
LincS (UMR 7069)
Université de Toulon
Université de Łódź
French Research Center in Humanities and Social Sciences – Prague

La « mémoire » comme objet d’études, objet politique, social et médiatique envahit le débat public à partir de la fin des années 80 en Europe. « Devoir de mémoire », « lieux de mémoire », « guerres de mémoires », « concurrence des victimes », « envahissement mémoriel », « chemins de la mémoire », « politique de la mémoire », « défense de la mémoire », « assassins de la mémoire » : autant d’expressions qui traduisent un nouveau rapport au monde, un nouveau régime d’historicité que François Hartog appelle présentisme. Cette nouvelle configuration du rapport au passé se traduit par des revendications identitaires variées notamment de la part de groupes jusqu’alors dominés mais aussi par des pratiques institutionnelles nouvelles. La mémoire devient ouvertement un outil mobilisateur et d’intervention médiatique, public, politique au sens large du terme, mais également littéraire et artistique. Elle nourrit une réflexion épistémologique au sein de la communauté des sciences humaines et sociales.

En effet, de nombreux travaux se sont attachés à analyser le « moment-mémoire » en sociologie, science politique, histoire, critique littéraire et en études culturelles. Pour autant, peu de recherches et d’événements scientifiques croisent, ensemble, différents points de vue disciplinaires. Le but de ce colloque est de le réexaminer à la lumière des travaux récents et inédits des phénomènes de mise en visibilité des mémoires au regard de la conflictualité et de l’antagonisme. L’objectif est par conséquent de souligner les convergences, existant entre différentes approches en sciences humaines et sociales et, partant, d’entamer une réflexion commune sur les méthodologies et les théories qui soutiennent aujourd’hui les memory studies, y compris dans leurs dimensions de pratiques effectives de recherche. Le caractère innovant réside également dans le retournement de la perspective à ne plus considérer les mémoires divergentes comme seulement conflictuelles mais également porteuses de potentialités pour des élaborations nouvelles de narrations, récits et pratiques sociales.

Program

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Memory of the Past and Politics of the Present

International conference

Date: 28 & 29 November 2022
Venue: Goethe-Institut, Masarykovo nábřeží 32, Prague 1
Organizer: Institute of Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences within the Strategy AV21
Partners: Centre français de recherche en sciences sociales, Deutsches Historisches Institut Warschau, European Network Remembrance and Solidarity, Stiftung Sächsische Gedenkstätten Continue reading Memory of the Past and Politics of the Present →

Medicine, Value, and Knowledge Across the Species Line:  Contemporary U.S. Veterinary Medicine as Cultural Practice

Gellner Seminar

Jane Desmond ( University of Illinois )  will give a lecture within the Gellner seminar organized by the Czech Association for Social Anthropology (CASA– Česká Asociace pro Sociální Antropologii), the Czech Society of Sociology, in cooperation with the Institute of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences and CEFRES.

When: 16 May 2019, 4:30 pm
Where: Institute of Ethnology, conference room, 5th floor (Na Florenci 3, Prague 1)
Language: English

Abstract

Although the anthropological study of human medicine is a well developed field, research by anthropologists and sociologists on the structures and practice of medicine for animals around the world is a nascent field of inquiry.  Yet, whether caring for cherished pets or working to contain the spread of zoonoses, or monitoring a nation’s food supply, veterinarians play a central role in most countries.  In this presentation, based on preliminary fieldwork in two U.S. colleges of veterinary medicine, I map the relationships between client, patient, doctor, and technology, and the intersections of affect, species, money, scientific knowledge and cultural value when the patient is a dog… or a horse, or a cow, or even a snake. I conclude by raising questions about how the medical humanities and social sciences will have to expand to accommodate new notions of subjectivity, agency, narrativity, and ethnography in analyzing a more-than-human medicine.

Jane Desmond is Professor of Anthropology and of Gender and Women’s Studies, and Co-founder and Executive Director of the International Forum for U.S. Studies: a Center for the Transnational Study of the United States, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, U.S.A.

Her primary areas of interest focus on issues of embodiment, display, and social identity, as well as transnational U.S. Studies. Her areas of expertise include performance studies, visual culture, the analysis of the U.S. in global perspectives, and the political economy of human/animal relations.  She is the Founding Resident Director of the international Summer Institute in Animal Studies at UIUC, and Founding Editor of the _Animal LIves_ Book Series at the University of Chicago Press.  In addition to academic publications, she has written about human-animal relations for a number of public venues such as CNN.com, The Washington Post.com, and the Huffington Post. The author or editor of five scholarly books,  she holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale, and most recently published the monograph _Displaying Death and Animating Life:  Human-Animal Relations in Art, Science, and Everyday Life_ (University of Chicago Press, 2016).  Her current book project is called Medicine Across the Species Line:  Cultural Dimensions of Veterinary Medicine.

May 68 Cycle Prague/Berlin – West Winds, East Winds

Venue & time: Marc Bloch Center (Germaine Tillion room, 7th floor, Friedrichstr. 191, Berlin), from 10 to 5:30 pm
Organizers: Catherine Gousseff (Marc Bloch Center – CMB), Sylvie Robic (Nanterre University), Clara Royer (CEFRES), Dominique Treilhou (French Institute in Berlin)
Partenaires : CMB, French Institute in Berlin, Paris-Nanterre University and CEFRES
Languages: French, German and English

This conference takes place within the May 68 Cycle taking place in Nanterre, Berlin and Prague, which centers around conferences, round tables, exhibitions and screenings dedicated to the year  1968.

From the Berlin February demonstration against US involvement in the Vietnam War, through the March student protests in Poland and the  student unrest in Italy, to Prague Spring or French May ’68, a insurgent spirit swept across the European continent in 1968. The chronicle of the events that shook in different ways European societies, suggests the existence of a rebellious impetus that ignored the Iron Curtain and defied the various political regimes in place. The 1968 new generation held a common ground as they dared asserting their aspirations, upsetting the established order. Still, the diversity of protest configurations, whether speaking of the actors engaged in them or of the political answers prompted by the events, calls for a confrontation of these historical moments which, caught between celebration and tragedy, have become engraved in collective memory.

On the 15th of May, witnesses of 1968 from various parts of Europe  will speak about the expectations they had then.
The next day, on the 16th of May, the conference will propose a reflection between East and West through the gathering of specialists on three major topics: violences in 1968, the emergence of women’s movements and the birth of alternative cultures.
What disparities, what common trends can be perceived in the rebellious spirit of 1968?
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