The Program in Jewish Studies, the William A. Wise Law Library at the University of Colorado Law Schooland cosponsors at the University of Colorado Boulder will honor International Holocaust Remembrance Day with a public lecture by visiting scholar Professor Nils Roemer and the highly acclaimed international exhibit Lawyers Without Rights: Jewish Lawyers in Germany Under the Third Reich.Both are free and open to the public.
Visiting Scholar Professor Nils Roemer
The lecture
Roemer’s public lecture, “The Holocaust: Then and Now, Spanning the Void,” will take place Jan. 26 atWittemyer Courtroomin the Wolf Law Buildingone day beforeInternational Holocaust Remembrance Day (Jan. 27). The lecture is the fifth annual event hosted by CU Boulder’s Program in Jewish Studies in honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
RSVPs are appreciated, as space is limited. Pleaseemail CUJewishStudies@colorado.edu or call 303-492-7143 to reserve a spot.
The"Memory Void" symbolic space at Jewish Museum Berlinevokes destruction and absence and recalls the Holocaust, as well as themany lives that might have been had the millions of people who died in the Holocaust lived to see another day.
In his lecture, Roemer will explore absenceandvoidsas important aspects ofremembrance, which areapparent incommunal and family remembrances but often obscured in public commemorations in museums and onHolocaust remembrance days. He willdevelop thetheme ofabsenceand advance models of remembrance that viewthe Holocaust as a past event within the context of an annihilated future.
Roemer is the Stan and Barbara Rabin professor in Holocaust studies and the director of the Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas. He received his PhD in history from Columbia University in 2000.
In addition to his numerous published articles, Roemer is the author of Jewish Scholarship and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Germany: Between History and Faith (2005) andGerman City, Jewish Memories:The Story of Worms(2010). He is currently finishing a book-length study on Central European Jewish travel writing in the 20th century.
Roemer serves as a board member for the Leo Baeck Institute in London and is an external reviewer for multiple scholarly journals. He has received numerous fellowships, including one from the Center for Advanced Jewish Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
The exhibit
The will be on display Jan. 5 through Jan. 30 atthe William A. Wise Law Library in the Wolf Law Building. The has been shown in nearly 100 cities across Germany, the United Statesand other parts of the world. Itis sponsoredin conjunction with the American Bar Association and the German Federal Bar.
Who: Professor Nils Roemer
What: "The Holocaust: Then and Now, Spanning the Void"
When: Thursday, Jan. 26, 7 to 8:30 p.m.
³:Wolf Law Building,Wittemyer Courtroom, room 101
RSVP: Email CUJewishStudies@colorado.edu
EXHIBIT
What:Lawyers Without Rights: Jewish Lawyers in Germany Under the Third Reich
When: Open Thursday, Jan. 5, through Monday, Jan. 30
Where: Wolf Law Building, William A. Wise Law Library
The idea for the exhibit was conceived in 1998 when an Israeli lawyer asked the regional bar of Berlin for a list of Jewish lawyers whose licenses had been revoked by the Nazi regime.The begins to provide a portrait of the fate of Jewish lawyers in Germany—stories that speak to how the Nazis purged Jewish lawyers as one of the early steps to attack the rule of law in their country.
“The regional bar decided not only to research a list of names, but also to try to find out more about the fates behind all those names,” said Axel Filges, past president of the German Federal Bar.
“Some were able to leave the country after the Nazis came into power, but very many of them were incarcerated or murdered," Filges said."The non-Jewish German lawyers of those days remained silent. They failed miserably, and so did the lawyers’ organizations. We do not know why.”
After the Berlin bar transformed its research into an exhibit, other regional bars began asking whether they could show it and add their own research.
“So, like a puzzle, a portrait of the fate of Jewish lawyers in Germany has emerged step by step,” Filges said.
For more information about the lecture or exhibit, please visit or call 303-492-7143.