A lecture on “German Women and the Long Shadow of National Socialism” will be held at Tusculum on Wednesday, April 5.
The lecture, presented by Christine Nugent, will begin at 12:30 p.m. in the Chalmers Conference Center in Niswonger Commons on the Greeneville campus. The event is sponsored by the Thomas J. Garland Library and the Tusculum Honors Program.
Nugent’s multimedia presentation presents insights from several interconnected research projects she recently conducted in Germany. The topic of the first portion of her lecture is her oral history interviews of non-Jewish German women who grew up in Nazi Germany, specifically her examination of their memories of the Hitler Youth and the war.
As part of her research, Nugent also interviewed women of the daughter generation, born in the 1950s and 60s, asking them about recollections their mothers had shared with them and the young women of the third generation. In contrast to her earlier interviews, Nugent concentrated this study on immigrant women from Africa, Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and the Middle East.
Excerpts from those interviews shed light on the young women’s perspectives on Germany’s approach to dealing with its National Socialist past.
Nugent will also share her own impressions of Germany’s present day welcoming culture, exemplified by the refugees and asylum seekers that have flocked to the country since 2015. The presentation will conclude with remarks about the anti-refugee, right-wing protest movement PEGIDA that Nugent studied in 2016.
In summary, Nugent’s presentation weaves the various strands of her research together for a multifaceted perspective on what she calls “the long shadow of National Socialism.”
Nugent, who grew up in Hamburg, West Germany, is the director of the Pew Learning Center and Ellison Library at Warren Wilson College. She holds degrees in library science and history from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and Western Carolina University.
Her research focuses on memory studies, concentrating on the transmission of memory from mothers to daughters, and on public memorial culture in Germany. Her research projects were supported by a fellowship from the Appalachian College Association and by Warren Wilson College.
This event is open to the public and free of charge. This lecture is an Arts and Lecture Series credit event for residential students.