Invitation to the lecture “Solidarity Helps to Free the World”? Spatial Histories of Resistance and Exile, 1938-1945 held by S.E. Eisterer (Assistant Professor, Princeton University, Alexander von Humboldt Fellow, ns-doku Munich and Karlsruher Institute of Technology).
Introduction by Mirjam Zadoff, Director ns-doku, Munich; Benedikt Boucsein, Professor, Urban Design, Technical University, Munich
Moderated discussion with Anna-Maria Meister, Chair, Architectural Theory, Karlsruher Institute of Technology.
In 1987, Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky was invited to speak as contemporary witness at the international symposium Vertriebene Vernunft in Vienna. In her remarks at the symposium Schütte-Lihotzky did not convey her own experience as activist in the Austrian Communist resistance. Rather, she foregrounded the lives of friends and colleagues, who were forced to flee Austria or who were killed by the Nazi regime. Because a culture of memory was only just emerging in Austria in the 1980s, Schütte-Lihotzky’s participation in the conference was important because many of those who were close to her, had received little or no recognition in the post-war years. Yet in Schütte-Lihotzky’s remarks there were also omissions that reveal complex questions about belonging––national, religious, and diasporic–– after the Holocaust.
In the lecture “Solidarity Helps to Free the World”? Spatial Histories of Resistance and Exile, 1938-1945 S.E. Eisterer illuminates four stories of resistance and exile connected to Schütte-Lihotzky’s life through primary documents from family archives. Focusing on discrete archival documents, the lecture focuses on spaces and practices of resistance and exile that Schütte-Lihotzky did not consider in her remarks. In part, these silences stemmed from the fact that some colleagues’ lives and stories neither lent themselves to the project of national reclamation at the symposium nor heroic Communist narratives about anti-fascist resistance.
The lecture will be attended by family members who have made new archival documents for this lecture available.
When:
Monday, June 24
12.30-13.45
Where:
Immatrikulationshalle
Technische Universität München (TUM)
Arcisstraße 21
80333 München