Vera Kallenberg

Forschungsthemen

Léon Poliakov (1910-1997) – an intellectual history. My postdoctoral project analyses the life and work of Jewish-Russian French historian Léon Poliakov (1910-1997). I thereby focus on the production, development, presentation, and reflection of knowledge about the Shoah, anti-Semitism, and racism between 1945 and the 1990s. By doing so, I follow recent research approaches analyzing the beginnings of Holocaust research, and the relationship between historiography and the Shoah. My research project aims to provide a study combining the history of knowledge and the history of experience. Its main sources are the totality of Poliakov’s printed scientific and publicist work, his private papers which have not yet been analyzed, in addition to other archival sources. The goal of my research project is to write an intellectual history analyzing the interaction of practice, movement of thinking, and knowledge production, and to situate this interaction within the academy and society. Research areas and interests Jewish Intellectual History History of Jewish historiography (20th century) Early Holocaust Research History of anti-Semitism historiography European History from 1700 (especially Gender-, Cultural- and Everyday history) Legal History;

"JEWS IN FRANKFURT PENAL JUSTICE AROUND 1800"/ "EXTREM ALLTÄGLICH: JÜDINNEN UND JUDEN IN DER FRANKFURTER STRAFJUSTIZ UM 1800.” In my PhD project, I analyze the treatment of Jewish women and men in the Christian-governmental authorities’ dispensation of penal justice at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century. I thereby look at the differences between Jewish people in terms of their agency (courses of action). I am also interested in possible changes in the treatment of Jewish men and women and changes in their own procedures in this period of accelerated political, social and cultural progress between 1779 and 1814. My sources are records of criminal proceedings of the Peinliches Verhöramt which was the Christian-governmental authority for both prosecution and sentencing in minor cases in Frankfurt. My research project is based on 354 cases of criminal proceedings that involve Jews as delinquents, accused, victims, witnesses, relatives and investigators. By analyzing court records concerning Jews, I’d like to understand the significance of the category Jewish for the dispensation of penal justice. This implies the Christian perspective as well as the Jewish perspective. With regard to the perspective of the Christian authorities and the perspective of non-Jewish actors, this means to analyze Jewishness as a legal ‘label’ vs. social-cultural category. With regard to the perspective of Jewish actors, I consider Jewishness as basic condition and social-cultural form of existence for their treatment and agency in court. With this study I pursue a double objective. The first is reconstructing Jewish everyday life and life conditions around 1800. From a conceptual point of view, I am interested, secondly, in (Re-)writing German-Jewish history as both a history of entanglements (in terms of Christian-Jewish relations and inner-Jewish relations) and a decentered history that is narrated from divers perspectives and implies a greater focus on the world of ordinary people. Therefore, I focus on interactions and exchange processes on both the level of actors and institutions and the level of law. My project is located at the intersection of Cultural history, Everday history and Gender history as well as Social history, historical crime research and Criminal law history. This combination of different research perspectives and questions requires different levels of analysis. I therefore combine qualitative analysis, quantitative analysis and detailed micro-level analysis (that means case studies).