The Hugo Valentin Lecture 2009: Professor Omer Bartov

The seventh annual Hugo Valentin Lecture, titled Communal Genocide: Personal Accounts of the Destruction of Buczacz, Eastern Galicia, 1941-1944, was given by professor Omer Bartov, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.

With several innovative studies he has contributed to rewriting the history of the Wehr­macht’s role during the Holocaust, and deepened our understanding of the phenomena of genocide. In recent years he has been exploring the multiethnic province of Galicia, between Ukraine and Poland. For centuries Galicia was also a significant Jewish cultural habitat, un­til its eradication by the Nazis after the German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941. In this research, Bartov is investigating interethnic relations in Galicia over an ex­tended timespan with the aim of reconstructing the transformation from a society built on coexistence to the collapse into genocidal violence under external pres­sure. The focal point is the small city of Bučač between L’viv and Chernivtsi whose Jewish population was mur­dered by the Nazis and local collaborators. The cultural milieu of the city is illustrated by the fact that Bučač was the birthplace of luminaries such as the Nobel Prize laureate S. Y. Agnon, historian Emanuel Ringelblum, and the hunter of Nazi war criminals, Simon Wiesenthal.