Stakhanovite Guests of the Fascist Menace: Soviet Visitors to Nazi Germany and Vice Versa, 1939 – 1941

The improvement of Nazi-Soviet relations following the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact on August 23, 1939, significantly increased the amount of interpersonal contact between citizens of the two countries, albeit in controlled and mostly choreographed settings. In 1940, the Soviet tourism bureau, Intourist, saw its largest annual number of German bookings (4,621 individuals) since the agency’s establishment a decade earlier. Some of these tourists visited attractions in Moscow, Leningrad, Kyiv and elsewhere; others traveled to Vladivostok in Trans-Siberian Railway carriages. For Soviet citizens, tourism to Nazi Germany for its own sake remained an impossibility, but vetted persons could partake in one of several industrial delegations invited to inspect German factories and processing plants. Working from German and Russian archival materials as well as published travelogues, the chapter will try to capture the jumble of curiosity, wariness, and furtive admiration that prevailed during this unexpected reunion of two suspicious peoples.

Barbed Wire Empirics: Knowledge Production in WWII Internment Camps and Ghettos

As the European Unity of Science movement tried to bring types of knowledge closer together, its members were pulled apart. Founded by a group of colleagues and friends in the late 1920s, the movement argued that useful knowledge could only be grounded in verifiable facts. Many of the unifiers were leftists of Jewish ancestry, and they worked at the margins of mainstream Germanophone academia. In 1938, Karel Reach and Martin Strauss lived in Prague. Both were members of the Unity of Science Movement. Both tried to flee. Only one succeeded. Their parallel lives, one in British internment and one in the Łódź Ghetto, show how the expectation of survival changed what it meant to do science. The boundary between "Holocaust victim" and "émigré scholar" was paper-thin and could only be constructed after the fact. That does not mean an individual's fate was the product of chance.

Pre-Circulated Papers and Registration

The pre-circulated papers will be available one-week prior to the workshop. The paper will be available to the Princeton University community via SharePoint. All others should request a copy of the paper by emailing Shachar Gannot at [email protected].