Registrar and Deputy President of NUI Galway, Professor Pól Ó Dochartaigh, will give a public lecture on Germans and Jews Today: Living with the Holocaust? on Wednesday, 27 January to coincide with Holocaust Memorial Day.
The talk will examine how Germany has taught its children the lessons learned from the Holocaust and ask how it will continue to do so as German society becomes ever more culturally diverse.
Since unification, the German-Jewish relationship has faced new challenges, rooted in increased immigration to Germany, changing Middle Eastern politics, and an evolving German political dynamic.
Professor Ó Dochartaigh’s new book Germans and Jews since the Holocaust was published by Palgrave Macmilllan in December 2015, and his lecture is rooted in the research for the book.
Professor Ó Dochartaigh is a German scholar whose work in literature and history is interdisciplinary in a German-Jewish-Irish triangle. He has worked on the legacy of the Holocaust, the German involvement in Celtic Studies and, more recently, on Jews in Irish literature and history. He is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and a former President of the Association for German Studies in Great Britain and Ireland.
Speaking about the lecture, Professor Ó Dochartaigh said that Germans and Jews should engage with each other after the Holocaust, the most systematic attempt in history to wipe out an entire people, was by no means inevitable.
“Yet engage they did, such that by 1989, when the Wall came down and many feared German unification, the Jerusalem Post described West Germany as ‘Israel’s most important ally after the USA’.
“Since unification, Germany’s relationship with Jews both in Germany and overseas has become more nuanced.”
The public lecture will take place on Wednesday, 27 January in the Máirtín Ó Tnúthail Lecture Theatre, Arts Millennium Building, AM150, NUI Galway at 6.30pm.
