EVENT DETAILS

The History Undergraduate Student Association Presents.... Berlin, 2005-1945: Back to the Future?

By Bob Moeller, UCI Professor of History

In May 2005, sixty years after the Second World War had ended, Germans seemed eager to fight it all over again—in TV documentaries, the illustrated press, glossy coffee table books, and endless ceremonies. While some called for the creation of a center for the study of ethnic Germans driven from their homes by the Red Army in 1944 and 1945, others raised money to create a “Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe,” dedicated on May 8. Competing memories abounded. Nowhere were the multiple meanings of the war’s end discussed more intensively than in the capital, Berlin.

This lecture will start in the present and move back to 1945 to consider the memories of the war that circulated in the capital of the Third Reich, leveled by the bombs and occupied by soldiers in French, British, and Russian, and American uniforms. After moving back to the future, I’ll progress through sixty years of history and memory in Berlin to describe the different wants in which Germans have remembered and commemorated the Holocaust and the defeat of National Socialism.

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Bob Moeller visited Berlin for the first time in September 1971, fully expecting to find a city perched on the border between East and West. In fact, the West Berlin to which he traveled was completely surrounded by East Germany, the German Democratic Republic. Bob’s been climbing a steep learning curve ever since. After working and living in Berlin for two years, Bob decided to study the history of the country whose language and customs he’d learned. First at Brandeis, then at the University of California, Berkeley, he focused on the study of that country in the middle of Europe. After Berkeley, he spent time at UC, Davis, Columbia University, then to the UC Santa Cruz. In 1988, he joined the faculty at UC Irvine. In the last decade or so, his re-search has focused on how Germans remembered WWII and found a place for that event in the history of the twentieth century.

There will be light refreshments!

For more information, please contact Lubabah Memon in the UCI Department of History at (949) 824-6521/ lmemon@uci.edu