Date:

9 December 2024, 16:15-17:45 (in person)

Venue:

FU Berlin, FMI, Room A336, Koserstr. 20, 14195 Berlin

About:

Nikolaus Wachsmann is Professor of Modern European History at Birkbeck College, University of London. He has published widely on the history of National Socialism and the extermination camps. Among his publications are Hitler’s Prisons: Legal Terror in Nazi Germany (Yale University Press, 2004); KL: A history of the Nazi Concentration Camps (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), and the edited volume (together with Jan Rueger) Rewriting German History: New Perspectives on Modern Germany (Palgrave 2015). Currently, Wachsmann is a Fellow at Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin where he hopes to complete his new book Auschwitz: A New History that draws on a wide range of source materials and approaches, and aims to reconstruct essential elements of everyday life – including spaces, sights, sounds, and smells – as well as the daily routines that came to define the camp.

In his talk, Wachsmann will examine the history of the Auschwitz concentration camp by looking through a microscopic lens at a single day in its existence. The talk focuses on the lived experience of prisoners and perpetrators, exploring various spaces across the camp complex and beyond. It also examines the routines and infrastructure which shaped daily lives.

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