Lisa Tetzner Lectures

Founder & Organization: Dr. Ada Bieber, Institut für deutsche Literatur, ada.bieber@hu-berlin.de

The Lisa Tetzner Lectures host international scholars in the field of children’s and youth literature studies, who give a talk and discuss their research with students and colleagues (in English or German). The Lisa Tetzner Lectures contribute to an intercultural academic culture, and pursue relevant social and academic questions within children’s and youth literature scholarship.

Zu den Lectures werden internationale Wissenschaftler*in aus der Kinder- und Jugendliteraturforschung eingeladen, die aus ihrem jeweiligen Forschungsprojekt einen Vortrag für Studierende und Forschende halten und im Anschluss daran diskutierten (in Englisch oder Deutsch). Die Lectures sind einem interkulturellen Wissenschaftsaustausch verpflichtet, der sich im besonderen Maße gesellschaftlich relevanten Fragestellungen und aktuellen Forschungsfragen der Kinder- und Jugendliteraturforschung zuwendet. 

July 3, 2023, 10-12 am, Fritz-Reuter-Saal, Dorotheenstraße 24

Daniel Feldman, Bar-Ilan University, Israel
Time for Reading in Youth Novels about the Warsaw Ghetto

Holocaust literature stages a descent into traumatic history that transforms time into text. This talk reads youth novels about the Warsaw Ghetto to illustrate how the Holocaust functions as a special chronotope of difficult memory in contemporary children’s literature. Novels such as 28 Tage lang (28 Days, 2014), depict books and stories as fictional markers of temporality in juvenile narratives of the Holocaust. The talk argues that reading time is a persistent topos in making the Holocaust relevant to young readers.

 

July 4, 2023, 10-12 am, Fritz-Reuter-Saal, Dorotheenstraße 24

Larissa Rudova, Pomona College, USA
Landscapes of Trauma: Narratives of Deportation and Evacuation in Soviet Children’s Literature about WWII

It was not until the late 1980s under Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost’ that the official memory of the Great Patriotic War began to crumble. Along with prominent writers, journalists, historians, and dissidents, ordinary people whose voices were not heard before began to recall their war experiences. While stressing heroism and sacrifice for the Victory, official Soviet culture filtered out from the representation of the Great Patriotic War many uncomfortable and messy aspects, its dreary day-to-day routine, individual trauma, hunger, disease, death, Stalinist repressions, extreme deprivation, poverty, massive and senseless loss of human lives, and many other disturbing facts. While the official culture continued to strongly elevate “extraordinariness” of war events, the Thaw of the late 1950s and early 1960s created an opportunity for authors to move away from the collective to individual experience of war. Literature for children and young adults was particularly effective in this endeavor. It was through children’s books that children gained a different, personal, understanding of war. This presentation will focus on significant literary examples of wartime childhood experiences that undermined official heroic war narratives and thus challenged the myth of a protected Soviet childhood during World War II. The talk will also discuss how, over the past two decades, the Russian leadership has been gradually recreating ideological models of the past, emphasizing patriotic education, collective commemoration of WWII, and militarization of youth.