NIOD Rewind Podcast on War & Violence

Laurien Vastenhout and Anne van Mourik speak with historian Anna Hájková about her landmark work The Last Ghetto: An Everyday History of Theresienstadt (Oxford University Press). What was life in the Theresienstadt ghetto like, and what does this case study tell us more generally about human behaviour under extreme conditions? How should we (re)define the concept of agency in the context of Holocaust and Genocide Studies (and beyond)? And what is the meaning of kinship and family ties in times of crisis?

Wat kun je lezen in de dagboekcollectie van het NIOD? Aan de hand van dagboekbeschrijvingen vertelt collectiespecialist Michiel Wilmink over de levens van mensen in de Tweede Wereldoorlog. We horen over de date-ervaringen van dwangarbeider, over een politieman die Jodenarresteert en over hoe het dagelijks leven voor sommigen doorging – terwijl het voor anderen drastisch veranderde. Wil je een dagboek schenken of komen inzien? Neem dan contact op het NIOD. 

Why does the Jewish Council phenomenon remain such a controversial topic? Anne van Mourik speaks with Laurien Vastenhout on her new book ‘Between Community and Collaboration: “Jewish Councils” in Western Europe under Nazi Occupation’ (Cambridge University Press). What were differences and similarities between the ‘Jewish Councils’ across occupied Western Europe? What room for manoeuvre did the Jewish leaders have, and what impact did local factors have on the form and function of these Councils? We talk about the importance of comparative analyses, socio-historical conditions in Western Europe during the war, and many other themes. Photograph by Johan de Haas, reproduced by kind permission of the De Haas family and the NIOD

How does the current Russo-Ukrainian war impact the memory of the Holodomor – the man-made famine in 1932-33? How do the recent Spanish memory laws impact present-day discussions of the Años del Hambre, the years of hunger during the Francoist dictatorship? And how are memories of the Scottish Highland Clearances (1750-1880) evoked in connection to Black Lives Matter demonstrations? In this episode Marta Baziuk (Holodomor Research and Education Consortium), Laurence Gourievidis (Université Clermont Auverne) and Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco (Universidad de Granada) speak about the functioning of famine pasts in the present. The episode is made by Anne van Mourik (NIOD) and Lindsay Janssen (Radboud University) in the context of the research project Heritages of Hunger. Photo: Replica of the 'Bitter Memories of childhood' sculpture, located in the Holodomor Memorial Parkette (2018), Toronto. This photo was taken on 6 March 2022 – after the Russian invasion of Ukraine (24 February 2022). Someone has placed flowers of Ukraine's national colours (yellow and blue) in the arms of the statue. Photographer: Charley Boerman

Why do humans fight? Anne van Mourik speaks with Sinisa Malešević (University College Dublin) on his new book (published by Cambridge University Press). Drawing on interviews with former combatants, Sinisa explores how violence operates in the context of face-to-face actions. What motivates human beings to fight? To what extent do people fight for reasons of self-interest? And in which contexts is fighting more likely to happen?

In this episode Anne van Mourik and Dat Nguyen talk with Tam Ngo and Sarah Wagner on the remains of the war dead of the Vietnam-American War (1957-1975). Following the end of the war, the commemoration and identification of the fallen and missing-in-action soldiers from both the Vietnamese (North and South) and American sides remains a contentious issue. With Tam and Dat researching respectively the North- and South Vietnamese perspectives and Sarah the U.S. perspective, this episode approaches the topic from three different angles of the war. What is the contention about? How are the bones used for necro-political and necro-governmental agendas over time?

Ever since its founding an important theme within NIOD research has been 'violence': the perpetration of violence, the legacies of violence, and the multilayered experience of violence and its effects on individuals, communities and nations. To renew thinking on the core question of what constitutes violence and how to study it, in June 2022 the NIOD organised, together with the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS) a workshop on the question ‘What is violence? Debates and Directions’. In this episode, scholars Sinisa Malesevic, Tatjana Tönsmeyer, Avi Sharma and Ton Zwaan discuss how they use the concept of violence in their work. How to address less visible kinds of violence, such as long-term pollution or climate change, which have the potential to kill entire populations and destroy entire regions of the world? How can research on violence draw attention to institutionalised inequalities and exploitation? And who actually decides what counts as violence – in the past but also in the present and future?

Why was music key to anticolonial and antiracist cultural politics in interwar Paris? Anne van Mourik interviews Rachel Gillet on her new book At Home in Our Sounds: Music, Race, and Cultural Politics in Interwar Paris. In the aftermath of World War I, Black men and women participated in the Parisian cultural and political life via music. How could music function to build community and assert belonging? And how was it deployed to combat fascism and racism in the early 1930s?

What is the value and meaning of political apologies across cultures? In this episode Anne van Mourik speaks with historian Marieke Zoodsma, who researches how apologies are expressed and received across the world. How do political authorities across the world address or redress past wrongdoings in these accounts? How can we understand the large number of political apologies in the recent past? And can political excuses effectively help processing suffering or lead to reconciliation? https://www.politicalapologies.com/ Photo: visitors paying their respects at the 2019 commemoration of the Jeju 4.3 Uprising, Jeju, Republic of Korea. By Marieke Zoodsma. Audio fragment: NOS Koningspaar in Indonesië (2020)

How did the First World War transform the lives of ordinary people all over the world? In the latest episode of NIOD Rewind, Anne van Mourik interviews Maartje Abbenhuis and Ismee Tames about their new book Global War, Global Catastrophe: Neutrals, Belligerents and the Transformations of the First World War. Conventionally, the history of The First World War is predominantly one of Western belligerents and battlefields. Maartje and Ismee, however, turn this traditional history inside out and focus on the histories of those who are often marginalised in the narratives on the war. What did the war mean for people and societies in colonies and neutral states? How did this innovative idea for the book came about? And what is it that we can learn from the book for our present-day society?

What did it mean to live in Europe under German occupation? In this episode Anne van Mourik and Thijs Bouwknegt talk with professor Tatjana Tönsmeyer on the new Source Edition Fighting Hunger, Dealing with Shortage. Everyday Life under Occupation in World War II Europe. How did these two volumes come about, and what sources does it cover? And in what way did food shortages affect the lives of ordinary people as well as specific groups such as Jews, Sinti and Roma, and women — and how did they cope with it? (Image: Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe Marburg, Image Archive)

In deze speciale editie van Niod Rewind zitten Anne van Mourik en Thijs Bouwknegt aan de directeurstafel van het Niod. Ze spreken met Martijn Eickhoff en Frank van Vree. Martijn volgde op 1 september 2021 Frank op als directeur. Wat dreef hen om de Tweede Wereldoorlog, de Holocaust en wereldwijd massaal geweld te gaan onderzoeken? Hoe reflecteert Frank op zijn voorbije directeurschap? En hoe ziet Martijn de toekomst van het instituut voor zich? Muziek intro: Roy van Rosendaal Muziek: Rosemary and Garlic

Anne van Mourik and Thijs Bouwknegt interview historian Kylie Thomas and journalist Michael Schmidt, discussing forced disappearances under Apartheid South Africa. Michael is the author of Death Flight: Apartheid's secret doctrine of disappearance, which investigates and tells the history of Apartheid’s chilling tactic of throwing people, dead or alive, from airplanes so that their remains cannot be found. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission on human rights violations during the Apartheid years was established in 1995. Kylie Thomas researches and writes about the 2017 reopening of the Apartheid cases. Who exactly were the people who were targeted for ‘disappearance’? And how come cases of activists who were imprisoned, tortured and murdered, are only now being reinvestigated and reopened? Websites mentioned in the episode: Foundation for Human Rights Unfinished Business of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission: https://unfinishedtrc.co.za Images courtesy of the Ahmed Timol Family Trust: https://www.ahmedtimol.co.za/ ​ Music: Alastair Douglas

What are the problems of genocide and how to rethink mass death? In this episode Anne van Mourik and Thijs Bouwknegt interview historian Dirk Moses, whose book The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression just came out. How does the legal concept of genocide distort our thinking about civilian destruction? What does genocide, as the ‘crime of crimes’ still mean for other types of humanly caused civilian death, like bombing cities and drone strikes? Cover book by Murad Subay: https://muradsubay.com/ Music: Rosemary and Garlic

War, mass violence and its consequences are not a thing of the past. They are very much present in the world of today and tomorrow. In collaboration with the NIAS, researchers of the NIOD Institute are teaming up with a group of international scholars, in order to develop an innovative and multidisciplinary research agenda in the field of the multiple connections between the topic of ‘war and society’ in the recent past - and in the world of today. In this episode of the podcast Niod Rewind, Anne van Mourik speaks with several of these researchers about this new fellowship program. Why is it so important to investigate the past in light of the present? And how can we connect histories of mass violence with present-day societies? ​ *** The people in this episode: Ismee Tames Sophie de Schaepdrijver Siniša Malešević Avi Sharma Ville Kivimäki ​ This podcast was made with the help of: Bethany Warner and Alex Strete

What kind of knowledge can we gain from WWII games? In episode 12 of Niod Rewind, Anne van Mourik interviews Pieter van den Heede about his dissertation 'Engaging with the Second World War through Digital Gaming', which he defended last February (2021). Pieter studied how digital entertainment games such as Call of Duty represent the war and the Holocaust in particular, and how players reflect on playing these games. To what extent do studios make WWII games according to the last historical insights about how people actually dealt with this mass violence? How is it that some games become political and thereby seem to align with right-wing ideologies?

In this episode of NIOD Rewind, Anne van Mourik speaks  with Ismee Tames and Robert Gildea about their new book Fighters across  Frontiers. Transnational resistance in Europe, 1936-1948. The book is  the product of years of research by a team of two dozen historians, and  it reveals that resistance against Fascism was not narrowly delineated  by country but startlingly transnational. What did Ismee and  Robert learn from this collaborative scholarship? How did the book come about? Where do the experiences of the transnational fighters take us?  And what does it tell us?

Anne van Mourik talks with Roel Frakking on the term 'extreme violence'  and the importance of local dynamics in researching decolonisation  conflict. Roel is a postdoc researcher at the Royal Netherlands  Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (KITLV, Leiden) where he is  researching the regional dynamics of the Indonesian war against Dutch  recolonisation (1945-1950). His latest publication, co-authored with  Professor Martin Thomas (Exeter), deals with the micro-dynamics of  violence during decolonization conflicts in Southeast Asia and Africa  after 1945 in the Low Countries Historical Review 135, 2 (2020).

In episode 9 of NIOD REWIND, Anne van Mourik and Thijs Bouwknegt interview historian Kerstin von Lingen. Prof. Dr. Kerstin von Lingen is a historian and researcher, Professor at the Institute for Contemporary History at the University of Vienna. From 2013-2017, she led an independent research group at Heidelberg University in the Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context” entitled “Transcultural Justice: Legal Flows and the Emergence of International Justice within the East Asian War Crimes Trials, 1946-1954,” supervising four doctoral dissertations on the Soviet, Chinese, Dutch, and French war crimes trial policies in Asia, respectively. Her publications include two monographs in English, Kesselring’s Last Battle: War Crimes Trials and Cold War Politics, 1945-1960 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2009) and Allen Dulles, the OSS and Nazi War Criminals: The Dynamics of Selective Prosecution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Her edited volumes include: Transcultural Justice at the Tokyo Tribunal: The Allied Struggle for Justice, 1946-48 (Brill 2018); Justice in times of turmoil: War Crimes trials in the Wake of Decolonization and Cold War in Asia(Palgrave 2016); Debating Collaboration and Complicity in War Crimes Trials in Asia (Palgrave 2017). In German, she published the multi-authored volumes Kriegserfahrung und nationale Identität in Europa [War experience and national identity in Europe after 1945], Paderborn: Schoeningh, 2009, and co-edited with Klaus Gestwa, Zwangsarbeit als Kriegsressource in Europa und Asien [Forced labor as a resource of War: European and Asian perspectives), Schoening 2014. CREDITS Music, intro/ outro: Roy van Rosendaal Logo: Jesper Buursink Advice: Ismee Tames Montage/Editing: Anne van Mourik

In episode 8 of NIOD REWIND, Anne van Mourik and Thijs Bouwknegt interview historian Iva Vukušić. Iva is a lecturer at Utrecht University and a Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London. She recently defended her PhD — online (!) — which focuses on Serbian paramilitaries and irregular armed forces during the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Iva worked for the Sense News Agency in The Hague, analyzing evidence from trials at the United Nations’ International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and before that, she was an analyst and researcher at the Special War Crimes Department of the State Prosecutor’s office in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Follow her on Twitter: @VukusicIva CREDITS Music, intro/ outro: Roy van Rosendaal Logo: Jesper Buursink Advice: Ismee Tames Montage/Editing: Anne van Mourik