Mail: daniel.schuch(at)uni-jena(dot)de
Daniel Schuch studied history, political science, and sociology at Dresden University of Technology from 2008-2012. He completed his master’s degree in History and Politics of the 20th Century at Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena in summer 2015. Since 2014, he has been a student assistant at the Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena, and the Chair for History in Media and the Public. In his master’s thesis, he analyzed the conflicting historical and political interpretations of the Kosovo war in the journal “konkret”. Since January 2016, he has been a research associate and doctoral candidate at the Europäisches Kolleg Jena.
The Transformation of Testimony. From David Boders Interviews with Displaced Persons to the institutionalised Holocaust Testimonies (working title)
How are the complex experiences and memories of the persecution and destruction of the Jews transformed into tellable stories? What does it mean to be a witness of the Holocaust at different times?
The Phd project examines the influence of socio-cultural factors on the presentation and reinterpretation of the stories of survival based on interviews with survivors of the Holocaust. The starting point are the 130 interviews conducted by the psychologist David P. Boder in summer 1946 with the so-called Displaced Persons (DPs) in Western Europe. I will be comparing the retelling of these stories on the basis of a selection of audio-interviews of the Boder-Archive, video-interviews with the same persons conducted in the 1990s of the Visual History Archive and of the Oral History Department of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum from 2003-2006. The analysis takes place over a period of 60 years and examines the consistency and the changes in the biographical narratives.
The aim of the comparative, diachronic analysis is to identify the impact on the individual stories of the institutionalisation and the professionalization of the Holocaust Testimonies since the 1970s. The transformation of the narrated life-stories is interpreted in the framework of changing cultures of history and the discourse on testimony and survival.
This dissertation also aims to make clear the extent to which these oral accounts affected the so called Holocaust Education since the dictum of the “death” of the contemporary witnesses.
(with Dorothea Warneck/ Tobias Haberkorn/ Saskia Pörtig/ Paul Schütrumpf) (Post-) jugoslawische Geschichtskultur: Ein Blick durch das Schlüsselloch, in: Lehrstuhl für Geschichte in Medien und Öffentlichkeit