Organised by The Central European University, Jewish Studies Project

Place: Gellner room, Monument Building (1051 Budapest, Nádor u. 9)

* * *

Recent years have seen a tendency to Europeanize the Holocaust. Holocaust commemoration has spread all over Europe and many countries have been confronted with their direct and indirect involvement with the Holocaust. So it may figure as a kind of (negative) founding myth for the new Europe. On the basis of survey data some empirically based arguments are developed about what this could mean for the attitudes toward Jews? The answer is twofold: It can be shown that the knowledge about the Holocaust and the willingness to remember it are fairly widespread in the European populations and that the attitude toward the Jews and the Holocaust is seen a kind of litmus-test for a democratic and open political culture. So in the long run the Europeanization of the Holocaust is expected to lead to a decrease in antisemitic attitudes. On the other hand, in all countries a part of the population, especially those with nationalistic leanings, rejects the material and moral consequences of the Holocaust and suspected the Jews to exploit it for their own purposes. So one can expect that, as in Germany and Austria, a 'secondary antisemitism' will develop in other European countries too, basing on the rejection of guilt and responsibility, which is seen as being forced upon the country by the Jews.

Dr. Werner Bergmann is Professor at the Center for Research on Antisemitism, Technical University of Berlin. His fields of research include: sociology and history of antisemitism, xenophobia and right-wing extremism; sociology of social movements and collective violence. Publications in English: Antisemitism in Germany. The Post-Nazi Epoch Since 1945, New Brunswick 1997; 'Antisemitism and Xenophobia among East and West Germans: a Comparative Perspective,' in Authoritarianism and Prejudice. Central European Perspectives, ed. by Zsolt Enyedi and Ferenc Erös, Osiris Kiadó, Budapest 1999. He is co-editor of: Exclusionary Violence. Antisemitic Riots in Modern German History, Ann Arbor 2002; 'Pogroms,' in: W. Heitmeyer and J. Kagan (eds.), The International Handbook of Violence Research, Dordrecht 2004.