Volker Benkert
Research project
More than Survival: Jewish Rescuers and Resistors in Vichy France.
Project summary
This project investigates practices and imaginaries of survival through the lens of the Loewy family, who saved 1500 Jews and non-Jews from Camp d’Agde and fought in the French resistance.
Practices of survival
Drawing on literatures of History, Memory, Sociology, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, the project explores practices of survival linking the family’s resilience with their ability to forge networks with different parts of French society.
These networks engendered a coalition of businessmen, clergy, ordinary citizens, and government officials to provide aid, funds, false papers and even smuggle across the Mediterranean some of those deemed undesirable by Nazi Germany and Vichy. Similar networks emerged in the Maquis where they fought alongside non-Jews.
Jewish belonging, renewal and repair in France
These practices were accompanied by imaginaries of survival centering on Jewish belonging, renewal and repair in France after the war. Yet the promise of a future in France was not fulfilled. In 1946, their application for citizenship was rejected for “not being assimilated enough” – a bitter irony considering their wartime service. In 1947, they emigrated to Phoenix, Arizona. Their story remained forgotten both in France and in the US.
Biography
Volker Benkert is an Associate Professor in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. He also serves as content expert for the Hilton Family Holocaust Education Center currently being built in Phoenix. His research focuses on the impact of sudden regime change on biographies after both totalitarian regimes in 20th century Germany.
He is the author of Glückskinder der Einheit. Lebenswege der um 1970 in der DDR Geborenen (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag 2017). [Communism’s last Children. Biography, Socialization and Generation in East Germany before and after 1989.] He is also the editor of three volumes, for example with Michael Mayer, Terrortimes, Terrorscapes. Temporal, Spatial, and Memory Continuities of War and Genocide in 20th Century Europe (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press 2022).
Currently, he pursues two new research projects on a family of Jewish rescuers and resistors in Vichy France and on apologetic and redemptive memory of the Nazi past in recent German public television miniseries.
