This month offers another rich selection of events on themes relating both directly and indirectly to Insiders/Outsiders. Some were mentioned in our April newsletter, but there are several exciting additions too. Read on…
Sunday 2 May at 4pm, the London Library, in partnership with Insiders/Outsiders, will be hosting Zweig in London, with Daria Santini, Philippe Sands and George Prochnik. When novelist, playwright, journalist and biographer Stefan Zweig arrived in London in 1934, exiled from his native Vienna by the rising tide of Nazism, he was at the height of his literary career. Woven through with readings of some of the letters Zweig wrote from London, they will discuss his life and work, his years of displacement in the city and the particular condition of what it means to be a writer in exile.
Another relevant event at 6pm on the same day, and also part of the London Library’s Lit Fest, is After Vienna: Edmund de Waal and Tom Stoppard, in which the two writers will discuss the themes and concerns they share in Leopoldstadt and The Hare with Amber Eyes: European Jewish identity and diaspora, the particularity of pre-war Vienna, the legacy of the Holocaust and art and culture as a means of assimilation and escape. They will also consider libraries as safe spaces which challenge oppression and censorship.
On Tuesday 4 May at 7.30pm, Monica Bohm-Duchen will chair an event with Jeffrey H.Jackson and Aviva Dautch about the pioneering and courageous couple Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore (born Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe), partners in both art and life. The event is prompted by Jackson’s recent publication Paper Bullets: Two Artists who Risked their Lives to Defy the Nazis and is hosted by Jewish Renaissance magazine.
On Wednesday 5 May at 6pm, to mark the seventieth anniversary of The Festival of Britain (which ran from May to September 1951), design historian Harriet Atkinson, author of The Festival of Britain: A Land and Its People (2012) and contributor to Insiders/Outsiders; Refugees from Nazi Europe and their Contribution to British Visual Culture (2019), will give a talk about the surprisingly large contribution made by former refugees from Nazi Europe to that landmark cultural event. Other events relating to this interesting topic will follow later in the summer.
To watch a recording of the event, click here.
Image: Siegfried Charoux, The Islanders, Festival of Britain, 1951
On Thursday 6 May at 7.30pm, there will be online screening of the moving 2018 documentary film Seeing Daylight: The Photography of Dorothy Bohm, followed by a Q&A with Monica Bohm-Duchen, the photographer’s daughter and initiator of Insiders/Outsiders, hosted by JW3 in association with YIVO.
To watch a recording of the event, click here.
On Friday 7 May, a free one-day online symposium entitled Migration, Memory and the Visual Arts: Second Generation (Jewish) Artists, organised by the University of Leicester, will explore how the children of Jewish refugees and survivors have engaged creatively with the Holocaust, with the first generation experience and the related issues of migration, memory and identity.
To watch a recording of the event, click here.
Image: Monica Petzal, from Dissent and Displacement, 2019.
On Sunday 9 May at 6pm, accredited guide Marilyn Greene will present a virtual walking tour of Highgate entitled ‘Experiments in Urban Living’, which includes a number of buildings by émigré architects, among them Berthold Lubetkin’s iconic High Point flats and Walter Segal’s St.Anne’s Close.
On Monday 17 May at 6pm, T.S.Eliot Prize-shortlisted poet Annie Freud, daughter of Lucian Freud and Kitty Garman (daughter of Jacob Epstein) will discuss her latest volume of poetry, entitled Hiddensee, with fellow poet Jacqueline Saphra. Hiddensee is named for the Baltic island where Annie Freud’s grandmother spent her summers before the war, and represents the poet’s exploration of her German Jewish inheritance, her teachers, the remarkable minds of the exiled individuals who raised her – and the exiles she herself then pursued.
To watch a recording of the event, click here.
Image: Detail of bookcover (painting by Annie Freud)
On Tuesday 18 May at 5pm, Timothy Wilcox will be giving an online talk about influential German-born studio potter Hans Coper, to coincide with the centenary display of his work at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, which has just been extended until 26 September.
To watch a recording of the event, click here.
Image: © Jane Coper and Estate of the Artist
On Sunday, 23 May at 7pm UK time, Alan Morgenroth will give a presentation called ‘Understanding WW2 Internment Through Postal History: ‘Who, When, Where, and Why?’, which will provide an introduction to the interpretation of WW2 internment postal history to help explain and understand the stories of the people behind the letters.
This talk is being hosted by a US-based Isle of Man Internment Group, but is open to all.
To watch a recording of the event, click here.
On Monday 24 May at 6pm, as part of our ongoing series of intimate, family-focussed events, London-based visual artist Lydia Bauman will talk about her mother Janina Bauman, author of two autobiographical volumes, both published by Virago – Winter in the Morning: A Young Girl’s Life in the Warsaw Ghetto and Beyond (1986), based on diaries she kept during the war, and A Dream Of Belonging: My Years in Postwar Poland (1988) – which in 2009 were republished in one volume as Beyond These Walls.
To watch a recording of the event, click here.
On Thursday 27 May at 6pm, artist Evy Cohen, a direct descendent of the eminent Greek-Jewish Haimaki Cohen family sheltered during World War Two by Princess Alice, mother of the late Prince Philip, has agreed for the very first time to talk not only about this remarkable story but also about the poignant and allusive artworks she has created in response to her family history.
This event is held in partnership with the AJR.
To watch a recording of the event, click here.
Image: Evy Cohen, Livre du Souvenir
Looking Ahead
To coincide with this year’s Refugee Week, Insiders/Outsiders will be hosting an exciting new programme of online events in mid-June. Full details and booking links will follow in our next newsletter.
On Sunday 6 June at 6pm, to mark the publication of the English translation of The Passenger by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, David Herman will lead a discussion with Eva Hoffman, Jonathan Freedland (tbc) and Adam Freudenheim about this powerful and prescient novel, its unusual publication history and the tragic story of its author.
On Monday 7 June, at 6pm, Baroness Rabbi Julia Neuberger DBE will be in conversation with Julia Weiner and Joachim Schloer, author of a new bookabout her redoubtable mother Alice (Liesel) Schwab.
On Tuesday 8 June, at 8pm, Holocaust educator and researcher Mike Levy will talk about the important but too often overlooked role played by the Quakers in the Kindertransport. We hope that a representative of the Quakers will also be present to talk about their efforts to help refugees then and now.
Image: Liverpool Street Station Kindertransport memorial
On Wednesday 9 June at 6pm, Sybil Oldfield will be in conversation with Caroline Moorehead about The Black Book, her fascinating and disturbing new publication about those blacklisted by the Nazis in anticipation of their invasion of the UK.
On Thursday 10 June at 6pm, tribute will be paid by Berlin-based artist Judith Raum and design historianTanya Harrod to Otti Berger, the talented Yugoslav-Jewish, Bauhaus-trained textile designer who tried to make a new life in England, but ultimately perished in Auschwitz.
On Sunday 13 June at 6pm, Amanda Hopkinson (daughter of Gerti Deutsch), Julia Crockatt (daughter of Alexander Goehr, and granddaughter of Walter and Laelia Goehr) and Leon Meyer, expert on photographer Erich Auerbach, will talk about the close relationship between the émigré photographers and the music world. They will be joined by Nobert Meyn, founder of Ensemble Émigré and the Music, Migration and Mobilityproject.
Image: Jacqueline du Pré by Laelia Goehr
On 14 June at 6pm, as part of our series of family-focussed events, Mary-Clare Adam will talk about her Berlin-born father Leonhard Adam, ‘Dunera Boy’, Tatura Camp internee, lawyer, anthropologist and artist, who ultimately made a life for himself in Australia.
Image: Leonhard Adam, A performance of Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata at Tatura Camp, Australia on 8 March 1942. Jewish Museum of Australia collection 4024
And at 8pm on the same day, poet Maia Elsner will talk about her grandfather, Polish-Jewish Holocaust survivor artist Dante Elsner, who settled in England in 1958, and about her own creative responses to his complex life story. Maia’s debut poetry collection, overrun by wild boars, will be published by flipped eye in July.
On Tuesday 15 June at 8pm, Dr.Tessa Murdoch will consider the rich cultural contribution to this country of the Huguenots, who in the seventeenth century fled religious persecution in France and made England their home. The event will be chaired by Robert Winder, author of Bloody Foreigners: The Story of Immigration to Britain.
Image: William Hogarth, Noon, 1738
On Wednesday 16 June, a ground-breaking one-day conference entitled A Jewish Jesus: Art and Faith in the Shadow of World War II will look at the Jewish émigré artists who produced work for the Church and/or employed Christian iconography during the 1930s-50s.
To book, click here
Image: Hans Feibusch, Crucifixion, 1951
On Thursday 17 June at 6pm (time tbc), artist and writer Rachel Lichtenstein will talk about the Polish-born Yiddish poet Avrom Stencl, who settled in the UK in 1936. This event will be chaired by David Herman, whose father Josef Herman was a close friend of Stencl.
Image: Josef Herman, Portrait of Avrom Stencl, 1946, Ben Uri Collection
The full playlist, plus recordings of past events on other topics, can be accessed here on the Insiders/Outsiders YouTube channel
Enemy Aliens on the Isle of Man
In partnership with Jewish Renaissance magazine and the AJR, Insiders/Outsiders is offering what promises to be a fascinating four-day trip to the Isle of Man between 17 and 20 October. The trip, which will include lectures, guided tours and a concert, marks the eightieth anniversary of the British government’s internment of so-called ‘enemy aliens’ – most of them Jewish refugees from Nazism – and will coincide with the unveiling of an AJR blue plaque to commemorate this morally murky wartime episode.
Spaces are limited, so register your interest here.
Image: Ernst Eisenmeyer Iinternment Camp, Douglas, 1940
Lastly, a recording of the recent talk by Dr.Rachel Pistol about ‘Early Second World War Internment Camps in the United Kingdom, 1939-40’ is now available on the Insiders/Outsiders YouTube channel, as are other talks on the thorny but fascinating topic of internment.
Image: Seaton holiday camp, Devon