The Milford / Mendel Jewish German family archives span nearly three centuries, nearly a dozen countries, and some 20,000 items: letters, photographs, diaries, documents, objects. During the spring of 2021 I planned with Gideon and Elias Mendel a series of Zoom seminars, which I organized, hosted, and convened, with family members, scholars, artists, writers, and museum curators to explore the Mendel archive. It was then that I learned of the Mühlfelder (later Milford) family archive, some 7,000 items that document the lives as well as the dislocation and murder of members of the Mühlfelder family, Jews from Thuringia (like their relatives, the Mendels) and Mannheim.

The Milford family archive came to Davidson in a dozen boxes in November 2021 with the support of grants from the German Embassy in the US and Davidson College, where, over the next semester, I worked with my students to teach them archival theory, ethics, and praxis so they could catalogue and digitize the artifacts in the archive. Guest scholars who visited that archive seminar were Dr. Teresa Walch, who studies Holocaust geographies and the ethics of photography, Dr. Sheer Ganor, who is a scholar of German-Jewish diaspora experiences, and Dr. Frank Mecklenburg, Senior Historian at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York (via Zoom).

My students produced a comprehensive finding aid with active links to images of the digitized artifacts. The matriarch and central figure of the archive, Toni Mühlfelder, who with her son Karl Hans, escaped Nazi Germany to the US, changed their names to Milford, kept and arranged the family’s records, including letters of her ex-husband Max who was deported from Mannheim to Gurs in October 1940, the first mass deportations of Jewish German citizens from Germany; Max was murdered in Auschwitz in August 1942. The letters of Max from Mannheim, then from Gurs, to his child Hans in New York from 1937 to 1942 trace the heartbreaking story of dislocation, internment, loss, until Toni and Hans (and we now as readers of this edited and translated correspondence) are met with the silence of Max’s death. My students traveled to Germany, Austria, and France during the summer of 2022, visiting the places in the archives and meeting with local archivists to seek further information about the Mendels, Mühlfelders, and other families. I arranged a symposium in Berlin in late July 2022 at which my students presented their findings; I co-curated an exhibition of artwork by Elias and Gideon Mendel based on their family archive at ARTCO Galerie Berlin; and produced a play “Humans in the Archive” by my former colleague Samer Al Saber (Stanford) about my students’ experiences as new archivists-in-training. The physical archive, catalogued by Davidson students, is now held at the Leo Baeck Institute in the Center for Jewish History in New York. Much of this story is documented on this site https://writingofmemory.scottdenham.net (no longer updated). Slides from my presentation to the Arolsen Group in June 2024 are here.

'Holocaust Literatures' - a third-year optional module at the University of Portsmouth

Holocaust Literatures is a module very close to my heart. I have been running it for the past ten years at the University of Portsmouth, usually attracting high student numbers mainly from the BA(hons) English Literature but also from the BA(hons) English Literature and Creative Writing or the BA(hons) Modern Languages. Increasingly over the past few years, the module is also attracting ever higher numbers of international exchange students whose contribution always add extra dimensions to the module. Holocaust education in the UK is very patchy - which is putting it mildly. Although the Holocaust is a named component on the National Curriculum and has been ever since the first National Curriculum in 1991, it is very much left up to teachers to decide in which subject they want to teach it (nominally of course in History but there are also options to include it in English Literature, in Religious Education, in Sociology...), how they are approaching the topic and how long they are spending on it. The result is that some pupils have detailed Holocaust education spanning subjects and weeks while others spend, maybe, one History lesson on it or others again are given The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas as a set text at Key Stage 3 without being given historical context or, importantly, historical facts to support their reading of this very problematic text. For this reason, my module spends the first two weeks on providing as much historical context as possible, starting with Nazi ideology, covering anti-Jewish legislation, persecution and moving on to the directed extermination of European Jewry in Nazi-occupied Europe. We also spend a lot of time discussing modes of commemoration, covering literature, film, museums and memorials before moving on to a study of five primary texts covering survivor accounts (Elie Wiesel's Night), moving to second-generation narratives (Art Spiegelman's Maus), Holocaust fiction and perpetrator accounts (Bernhard Schlink's The Reader and Rachel Seiffert's The Dark Room) before concluding with Patrick Modiano's The Search Warrant and questions of 'how to write' history. In addition, students work in small groups of 3 to 4 in order to present on an additional text. This presentation needs to cover some author background (was the author a survivor? a child of survivors? an author without personal connections) and assess whether or not students feel that the text might be a suitable addition to Holocaust education. Students then submit this presentation as part of a 'creative portfolio' where they produce some 'art work' inspired by the text they have been reading. This can be a poster, an illustrated timeline, a box containing their presentation etc. In the past, students have created some wonderful art work that I have then exhibited publicly at Portsmouth's annual Holocaust Memorial Day. Displaying their work to members of the public has helped the students feel part of a wider community of Holocaust 'educators' and the majority of them have really excelled in this module and taken its learning forward into their chosen careers. 

Dr. Gerhard Dirks' story consists of resilience and innovation. While escaping Nazi and Soviet forces during the final year of WWII and the few years thereafter, Dr. Dirks laid the groundwork for modern computing. His inventions, including magnetic data storage and rotating memories, were crucial in the development of early computers. His work and his collaboration with inventors such as Konrad Zuse would lead him to California in 1960 to work for IBM. Despite many setbacks, such as the failure to launch his personal computer prototype, Dirks' contributions have had a lasting impact on the digital world. His story highlights the intersection of war, technology, and the relentless pursuit of innovation.

On Monday, the first of December, Rosanne Mosely-Gore presented her memoir "Songs from the Suitcase: Inhabiting an Inheritance" to the Arolsen Group. The book retells her family's life-stories and heritage such as her German Jewish father's escape from Nazi Berlin on a Kindertransport, and the heritage of her Russian mother and grandmother as well as the family's life in London. Moseley-Gore discussed the genesis of this memoir and the family archive of letters and photographs that shaped it.