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2019 Monna and Otto Weinmann Annual Lecture Post-Holocaust Trauma and the Creation of PTSD

Public Program
Banishment III by Samuel Bak. The artist and Holocaust survivor was born in Vilna, then part of Poland, in 1933. His work was first exhibited in the Vilna ghetto when he was nine years old. Courtesy of Pucker Gallery

Banishment III by Samuel Bak. The artist and Holocaust survivor was born in Vilna, then part of Poland, in 1933. His work was first exhibited in the Vilna ghetto when he was nine years old. Courtesy of Pucker Gallery

In this presentation, Dr. Dagmar Herzog will discuss the emotionally and politically charged conflicts among medical professionals in West Germany, the United States, and Israel from the 1950s to the 1970s over reparations for damages to mental health incurred by survivors of the Holocaust. She will emphasize the resurgence of antisemitism in the wake of Nazism’s defeat, the complex atmosphere of resentment against survivors, as well as prominent professionals’ hostility toward survivors as key factors prompting a handful of exceptional doctors sympathetic to the survivors to develop the concepts of “massive psychic trauma” and “post-traumatic stress disorder.” The work of these doctors had lasting consequences for international medical treatment models.

Speaker
Dagmar Herzog is Distinguished Professor of History and the Daniel Rose Faculty Scholar at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She writes on the histories of religion, the Holocaust and its aftermath, and gender and sexuality. Her most recent books are Unlearning Eugenics: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Disability in Post-Nazi Europe (2018) and Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes (2017).

The Monna and Otto Weinmann Annual Lecture honors Holocaust survivors and their fates, experiences, and accomplishments. Monna Steinbach Weinmann (1906–1991), born in Poland and raised in Austria, fled to England in autumn 1938. Otto Weinmann (1903–1993), born in Vienna and raised in Czechoslovakia, served in the Czechoslovak, French, and British armies; was wounded at Normandy; and received the Croix de Guerre for his valiant contributions during the war. Monna Steinbach and Otto Weinmann married in London in 1941 and emigrated to the United States in 1948.

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This program is free and open to the public but reservations are required.

For more information, please contact Dr. Kierra Crago-Schneider at 202.314.1779 or calendar@ushmm.org.

This annual lecture has been made possible by Janice Weinman Shorenstein.