Navigating the Labyrinth of Personal Accounts in Holocaust Studies

Join us for the keynote lecture to close the one-day international conference 'Crossing Borders: Transnational Perspectives on Life-Writing and Ego-Documents (more information here). This event will take place in person and online - please select the relevant ticket type for your attendance.

We are excited to welcome Professor Eva Kovacs, acting Director of the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies.

Challenges, Traps and Dead Ends: Navigating the Labyrinth of Personal Accounts in Holocaust Studies

During the past seven decades, tens of thousands of Shoah survivors have told or written their personal experiences within the framework of various research and documentation projects. Many of the survivors who gave testimonies between 1945 and 1947 reappeared three or four decades later in the new interview projects. They retold their stories: in other words, they were able to take part in discussions about their testimonies and try to articulate their opinion and criticism. The memory communities of the catastrophe will soon cease to exist, turning the living testimonies into historical materials of the archives. The other fundamental change has been brought about by the archival turn and the digital revolution and especially the public accessibility of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s. Today, almost all prominent testimony archives offer online access.The technical conditions have thus changed radically, but have our research questions kept up with this change as well? What can personal accounts be used for in Holocaust research, and how? In this lecture, Professor Kovacs will attempt to address the questions that have preoccupied researchers working with personal sources for decades and remain difficult to answer even today.

Éva Kovács, Prof. Dr., sociologist, acting director of the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI) and a Research Professor at Eötvös Lóránt University, Centre for Social Sciences (ELTE-TK) in Budapest. Kovács studied sociology and economics at the Corvinus University in Budapest, PhD 1994, Habilitation 2009. Her research fields are the history of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe, research on memory politics and social remembrance, and Jewish identity in Hungary and Slovakia. She has been teaching qualitative research methodology for decades, with a particular focus on interview methods. She has authored six monographs, edited twelve volumes, published numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals, co-curated exhibitions in Budapest, Berlin, Bratislava, Krems, Prague, Vienna, and Warsaw. She is the founder of the audio-visual archive “Voices of the Twentieth Century” in Budapest and between 2012 and 2025, she led various European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) projects at the VWI.

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