The first testimonies of the Holocaust written by Jewish victims Analysis, inventory, mapping

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Andrea Löw
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 548613086

The project brings together historians from Germany and France, to study diaries written by Jews during the Holocaust. These writings are the most immediate traces of the victims' experience. They give us access to the plurality of lived experiences, and bring us face to face with subjectivities grappling with unparalleled violence. Based on these diaries we contribute to a transnational history of the Shoah, by studying them from a variety of viewpoints (knowledge and information, space, materiality, biographies of writers and writings), and by using different methods (inventory, mapping, textual analysis, micro-history), in a comparative and global perspective. Despite the spectacular publishing careers of some famous diaries (A. Frank, E. Hillesum, V. Klemperer, H. Berr), most personal diaries of the Shoah are until today not well known: they are often poorly catalogued and described in archives (and thus are often confused with other ego-documents, correspondence, memoirs), and their analysis requires multiple linguistic and methodological skills that only a team of several researchers can provide. Despite recent works that give a central place to the analysis of diary corpora (Alexandra Garbarini, Amos Goldberg), little is known about the majorities of diaries in central Shoah archives, whether international (Yad Vashem, USHMM) or national. The first task of our collective project will therefore be to draw up an inventory of the diaries held at Yad Vashem and the USHMM, as well as in French, German and Polish archives. This inventory itself is already a challenge: given the material and generic variety of the documents, it involves developing a set of operational descriptive criteria, and brings together history, material studies, archival and textual studies. We focus on the trajectories of the authors and their writings, during and after the Holocaust, by placing them in a spatial perspective. Cartography (mapping) and the spatial approach constitute the second axis of our project: we will map the places of writing and the places designated in writing during the events, as well as the trajectories of the writings after the Shoah. The aim here is not only to create a working tool, but to contribute to research on the geographies of the Shoah through a micro-study of the spaces of writing and the trajectories of writing. We are furthermore studying the materiality, the forms as well as the writing practices of the authors from a transnational and comparative perspective. Finally, we will pay particular attention to questions of knowledge and information, since diaries offer an incomparable source for understanding what individuals confronted with the processes of persecution and extermination knew, understood about what they knew, and how and if they exchanged the acquired knowledge.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: France
• Partner Organisation: Agence Nationale de la Recherche / The French National Research Agency
• Cooperation Partner: Professorin Dr. Judith Lyon-Caen