Professional Development

So part of the great thing about teaching in London is that I also get to take advantage of all the other things the city has to offer in terms of my professional development. Being a professor means also being a professional student. There is always more to learn and more things to research. I started looking on the internet for information on how to use the Wiener Library for research yesterday. The Wiener Library was formed in 1933 and it is a library and archive dedicated to preserving information on the Holocaust and Nazi era in order to make it available to researchers. As I was looking around the webpage, I discovered that they were hosting a book launch and talk that night! Dr. Neil Gregor would be talking about his new book, Haunted City: Nuremberg and the Nazi Past.

The talk turned out to be a very interesting discussion of how the people of Nuremberg (the site of the Nazi Party rallies and home to the post-war trials of Nazis) have commemorated and remembered their participation in the war and the Holocaust. He argues that the people of Nuremberg preferred to remember themselves as victims of the war (especially as victims of Allied air raids on the city) than remembering their participation in exclusion, discrimination, and genocide. History isn't just about the events...it's about the way that those events are remembered and interpreted.

The talk was interesting and so was the location. We were seated on chairs in the aisles between bookshelves in a typical London building. Now I know where to go for my research and hopefully for more talks in the future.