Research Projects
PROJECT
Wording Repair: Digitally Unveiling the History of Reparative Justice in the Words of a Forgotten Diary
General Project Description
Wording Repair aims to contribute new insights and primary source materials to the history of reparative justice – namely, the history of the measures seeking to repair the harm done to victims as a result of human rights violations.
The project members will digitise, transcribe, and analyse personal diaries of German jurist Otto Küster (1907-1989), who dedicated much of his professional life to the quest for reparations for Holocaust survivors. He did so while taking notes, on an almost daily basis, which have never been made available to researchers until now.
While using handwritten-character recognition (HCR) technology (Transkribus), Wording Repair will provide bottom-up insights that will contribute to shaping the emerging field of historical reparations studies.
Role
Principal Investigator and Project Leader
Funding
NWO-SSH-XS Open Competition (2023)
Utrecht University (co-funding)
Alfred Landecker Foundation (co-funding)
This project is the recipient of a Transkribus scholarship
Project Members UU
- dr. Laura Fahnenbruck
- drs. Teresa Marx
- Naomi Hoogenraad
- Coen van der Stappen
External Project Members
Project Website
https://wording-repair.sites.uu.nl/
PROJECT
Holocaust Diplomacy: The Global Politics of Memory and Forgetting
General Project Description
After 1945, the memory of the Holocaust made its way into diplomatic exchanges. Mentions of the Holocaust were frequent, both in bilateral and multilateral diplomatic settings. But how and why did this happen, and with what consequences?
This project will blend an international historical approach with digital humanities methods to examine the involvement of national, transnational, and international actors in shaping the international politics of Holocaust memory at crucial historical junctures during the 1945-2025 period. Challenging the traditional emphasis of the scholarship on Holocaust memory on ‘methodological nationalism’; and pointing to the silence of works on International Relations regarding the Holocaust and its legacy; this project will focus on a variety of actors and specific international arenas to analyze the process of Holocaust memory transmission within bilateral and multilateral diplomatic settings.
Using newly-declassified sources, the project will demonstrate that diplomats, museum curators, international organization staff and national bureaucrats were key ‘memory makers’ in the formative decades of Holocaust commemoration within international forums. Beyond simply implementing policy, they shaped it.
Role
Project Leader
Funding
External Funding
Alfred Landecker Foundation (€500,000)
Project Website
Under construction!
PROJECT
Wassenaar 1952: Reinventing Reparations
General Project Description
In March 1952, German, Jewish and Israeli representatives met in the Netherlands, in secret, in Kasteel Oud Wassenaar to negotiate an unprecedented reparations agreement (Wiedergutmachung / shilumim). Until then, reparations had been something demanded and dictated by the victors at the end of a war, with the vanquished left with no choice but to pay them. But these categories did not make any sense in the aftermath of the Holocaust – crimes of that scope did not leave behind victors nor vanquished. Signed later that year in Luxembourg, the 1952 agreement was ground-breaking. And it made history.
In the uncharted territory after the Second World War and the Holocaust, a novel and controversial approach to reparations for addressing gross human rights violations and serious international crimes emerged. Launched thanks to an Early Career Partnership of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), the aim of this project is to re-examine the 1952 Wassenaar negotiations blending perspectives from history, law, and international relations. The KNAW funds supported the organisation of an international conference. Additional funds from the Alfred Landecker Foundation and the Utrecht Young Academy allowed for the organisation of an event open to the public at Kasteel Oud Wassenaar.
Wassenaar 1952 has often been studied, rightly, as a key turning point in the history of German-Jewish-Israeli relations and as an important milestone in the development of compensation legislation and practice in the early 1950s. But those difficult negotiations also took place in a fraught political context – one that was characterised, at local, transnational and international level by serious tensions and conflicting interpretations about how to deal with the recent past. By studying Wassenaar 1952 as a platform for the creation of a new international practice to address serious harm, the project participants will work to historicise the notion of reparations and reflect on the legacy of those talks, seventy years on.
Role
Project Leader
Funding
KNAW Early Career Partnership (2021-2022)
Alfred Landecker Foundation
Utrecht Young Academy small grant