Hugo Valentin-föreläsningen 2026: Professor Andrea Löw

The 23rd Hugo Valentin Lecture, titled Writing as Resistance: Documentation during the Holocaust, will be delivered by Professor Andrea Löw, Director of the Centre for Holocaust Studies at the Institute for Contemporary History, Munich-Berlin. The lecture will take place on 15 September.

During the Holocaust, numerous Jews attempted to document what was happening to them and to their communities. Many wrote diaries, though their motivations varied greatly. Others were active in archives in the ghettos and undertook large-scale efforts to document Nazi crimes, as well as the memories, experiences, and lives of themselves and their loved ones. In this lecture, Professor Löw will discuss different forms of writing and documentation during the Holocaust. She explores the relationship between these activities and Jewish resistance movements, asking to what extent acts of documenting, recording, preserving, and bearing witness can be understood as forms of resistance.

Andrea Löw is one of Europe’s leading historians of the Holocaust. She is Director of the Centre for Holocaust Studies at the Institute for Contemporary History, Munich-Berlin, and Honorary Professor of History at the University of Mannheim. Her research focuses on Jewish life and responses under Nazi persecution, ghettos, documentation, memory, and the history of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. Her long list of publications includes studies of the Łódź/Litzmannstadt, Warsaw, Kraków, Riga, and Minsk ghettos; Jewish Councils; deportations; and Holocaust documentation. Her recent publications include the book Deportiert: “Immer mit einem Fuß im Grab.” Erfahrungen deutscher Juden, the article “Resistance by Documentation: The Ringelblum and Łódź Ghetto Archives of the Holocaust in Occupied Poland.” and the forthcoming co-edited volume Liberation Reconsidered: New Approaches to the End of the Holocaust in Europe.

Tuesday 15 September, 17:15–18:30,
University Main Building, Lecture Hall IV