In recent years, the microhistorical turn in Holocaust history has placed increasing importance on individual practices and experiences by exploring new, nominative mass sources and combining a prosopographical approach with quantitative analysis of individual trajectories.
As Claire Zalc and Tal Bruttmann state in the introduction to Microhistories of the Holocaust (2016): “Reducing the level of analysis increases knowledge, because smaller spaces can better elucidate the complexities of decision-making, help reestablish the “space of the possible”, show how reality was experienced at the individual level, and ultimately provide more compelling insights into the events that contemporaries faced in their day-to-day lives.”
The micro-level of the individual and the family is a scale of observation that sheds light in a new way on the relationships between Jewish migrants and representatives of state authorities and places individual behaviour in the context of its social and political environment. It enables us to observe migrants in their networks and groups of belonging, trace their biographical and migratory trajectories and identify their agency, the means at their disposal and the opportunities or obstacles that the policy framework allowed them, so that we can identify their spaces of possibility and constraint.
The conference begins with a keynote speech from Dalia Ofer, professor Emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem at the Centre culturel Abbaye de Neumunster.
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