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Center for Research on Antisemitism
Tasks and Fields of Research
Founded in 1982, the Center for Research on Antisemitism at the Technical University of Berlin is the only central institution of its kind in Europe. The interdisciplinary research on antisemitism is supplemented by research on related areas such as German-Jewish history and the Holocaust. The Center for Research on Antisemitism, a scholarly institute, is perceived largely as a public institution which - through the services and educational work it provides to the public - goes well beyond the work of a university institute.Antisemitism, as a result of its long history and many-faceted manifestations, serves as a paradigm for research on social prejudice and group conflict. The current worldwide migration movements and the formation of societies in Europe with large ethnic minorities have created conflicts and problems that are reminiscent structurally of the history of co-existence between Jews and non-Jews. This is precisely why the Center for Research on Antisemitism does not limit its scope to one narrow topic. It is better understood as a central site for general and far-reaching research on prejudice and discrimination, on all forms of violent persecution of ethnic groups up to and including genocide, on migration processes and minority conflicts, on the history of discriminated minorities, and on ethnocentric-political extremism. Applying the term antisemitism to the above-mentioned phenomena must be understood, therefore, as a research strategy.
Conferences
Current problems such as xenophobia and racism demand answers grounded in research. The opening of the borders of Europe facilitated and demanded that we turn our attention to the east, where older structures of prejudice have found fertile ground, manifesting themselves in newly developing crises. The Center has organized a series of conferences focusing on the problems and hostilities that Jews encounter in specific countries: Latvia (1991), Lithuania (1996), Slovakia (1997), Poland (1998), Rumania (1999). A conference in September 2000 went for the first time beyond Europe to address the emergence of hostile enemy-images in the Middle East conflict.A central component of the work of the Center entails using social scientific, empirical methods to observe how antisemitism, xenophobia, and extremism find expression in current trends in the consciousness and political actions of Germans. A new staff position on "youth violence and right-wing extremism" was established at the Center in 1999 to mediate between scholarly analysis, practical experience and political implementation by making stronger use of scholarly findings in developing strategies to prevent xenophobic youth violence. A conference on rightwing extremism and youth violence in Berlin and Brandenburg took place in November 1999. Other Conferences where focussing on "Antisemitism in the NPD(National Democratic Party of Germany)" (April 2005) or "Islamistic Hostility towards Jews" (December 2005). In cooperation with the Berliner Arbeitskreis für Beziehungsanalyse (Berlin workgroup for relationship analysis), a conference was organized in July 1999 on socialization and prejudice, and in July 2001 on adolescent conflicts. A congress under the main focus of "The Past in the Presence" was held in 2006.
Projects
Holocaust research will continue to play a central role in the work of the Center for Research on Antisemitism. The results, for example, of the research project on "Solidarity and Help for Jews,1933-1945” which deals with the rescue efforts made by non-Jews in Europe under National Socialist rule, will be published in a series of collected essays. In a new series "The History of the Concentration Camps," the findings of the large-scale project on concentration camp historiography are being compiled and will be published in seven volumes by the Metropol Verlag. The first volume on the early concentration camps appeared in December 2001. Another Series "Der Ort des Terrors" (The Place of Terror) was created in cooperation with C. H. Beck Publishing.Since 1997 the Center has overseen a research project initiated by the association "Gegen Vergessen- Für Demokratie" (against forgetting - for democracy) focusing on the "Rescue of Jews in National Socialist Germany." It is supported by the Robert Bosch Foundation and the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen and Halbach Foundation as well as by the Stifterband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft (association for the support of German scholarship). As part of the project, a specialized database was created to facilitate the analysis and documentation of examples of help and rescue of Jews by non-Jewish Germans, primarily in Berlin and its environs. In the future, the project staff will continue to research cases of rescue in Berlin, but will also turn its attention to other cities with large Jewish communities. An important aim of the project is to establish a basis upon which rescue efforts by Germans can be integrated into the broader debate on resistance during the Third Reich. The staff of the research project invited participants to attend an international conference on "Rescue and Survival in Germany, 1933-1945", which took place in Bad Homburg in May 2001.
One of the projects funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Community) examines the function and effect of "gypsy" stereotypes. The project focuses on the historical impact of criminal-biological theories on the Sinti and Roma minority. Another project also supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in cooperation with the Institute for Musicology at the TU Berlin and the sponsor association “musica reanimata" addressed the topic of "German-speaking Musicians in Exile in Australia." The study focused on all German-speaking composers, musicians, and musicology scholars who arrived in Australia as refugees or who were deported between 1933-1945. A conference in December 2001 discussed "Exile and Emigration in the Fifth Continent."
The desecration of Jewish cemeteries is also a part of the tradition of antisemitic violence in the 19th and 20th centuries. Using a quantitative databank to document individual cases of cemetery desecration, the project will examine the various historical epochs in which this phenomena has emerged; Imperial Germany, Weimar Republic, National Socialism, both postwar states and, finally, reunified Germany. The project will also research the motives of the perpetrators and their connection to right-wing movements and will investigate prototypical cases in their political and ideological contexts to see how vandalism and graffiti at Jewish cemeteries is dealt with socially, politically and legally.
In February 2002, a project supported by the Gerda-Henkel-Foundation will begin a comparative investigation of antisemitism in Germany and Italy between 1870 and 1914. It will analyze in particular the most important supporters of antisemitism: the Church, students and employees.
Scholars from all over the world come to the Center for Research on Antisemitism as guest lecturers and researchers. Our visiting professors have Included the historians Jürgen Matthäus and Brewster S. Chamberlin from the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington; Feliks Tych, head of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw; Yehuda B auer, director of the International Institute for Holocaust Research of the Yad Vashem Memorial in Jerusalem; Hagen Fleischer from the University of Athens; and Konrad Kwiet from Macquarie University and Sydney University. The visits of respected foreign scholars at the center for Research on Antisemitism was made possible through the financial support of a three year program titled "From Prejudice to Genocide" by the Deutsche Bank, the Dresdner Bank and the Hypo-Vereinsbank.