In current Germany, those who rescued Jews during the Holocaust are commonly depicted as a small minority that “proves” the moral failure of the majority population. The talk will trace the emergence of such simplistic depictions of the majority versus minority, which obscure the complex motivations that led people in Nazi Germany to help persecuted Jews. Against the common view that the rescuers were “forgotten” after the war, we will see that helping Jews appeared in various media in East, West, and unified Germany and were used to define and imagine the German “national collective.”

Kobi Kabalek (PhD in history from the University of Virginia, 2013) is Associate Professor of German and Jewish Studies, Penn State University, since 2019. His research focuses on historical perceptions, moral sentiments, emotions, and memory in the study of the Holocaust and its aftermath. He currently explores marginalized and extreme phenomena – with special attention to the role of disbelief, imagination, and horror – in our understanding and representation of the Holocaust and current cases of mass violence.