27 May, 2025
4pm, Campus Westend, IG 1.414

This FMSP Conversation addresses Holocaust memory in Poland and Denkmark. We will compare forms of remembrance, mnemonic constellations, and challenges. The conversation will be moderated by Astrid Erll.

Katarzyna Anzorge is a PhD candidate in a joint doctoral program between the University of Lodz and Justus Liebig University Giessen. She holds an MA in Cultural and Critical Theory from the University of Brighton (2020). In 2023, she was awarded first place in the international “Cotutelle” competition at the University of Lodz, through which she joined the international doctoral track. In 2024, she was awarded an Incentive Scholarship for outstanding academic performance by the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange. She is preparing a PhD thesis entitled ‘Polish Holocaust Memory in the Era of Transformation: A Post-Dependence Perspective’, which examines how Polish memory of the Holocaust evolved after the fall of the Iron Curtain, shaped by the dynamics of political and economic transformation in Poland and by global memory regimes related to the Shoah. Her research interests include memory studies, Holocaust memory, postcolonial theory, and post-dependence studies.

Marianne Kirk is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies at the University of Copenhagen. She holds a BA and an MA in Comparative Literature and a BA in German Studies, with a particular emphasis on memory studies and post-Soviet immigrant literature. In her Ph.D. project, she turns toward Danish memory culture, investigating the action plan against antisemitism from 2022, in which the Danish government decided to make Holocaust education mandatory in Danish schools. Despite the Europeanization of Holocaust memory, the dominant historical discourses about World War II in Denmark center on the resistance movement and the extraordinary rescue of Danish Jews in October 1943. Considering this, the project examines, through ethnographic research in Danish history classrooms, the administrative efforts to incorporate the Holocaust into a national Danish memory culture and how the Holocaust is perceived and engaged with by teachers and young adults in schools.