Understanding Past Realities of the Holocaust. Photography versus Art With Dr. Christoph Kreutzmüller (Berlin) and Dr. Rachel Perry (Boston)

To mark the November Pogrom of 1938 (euphemistically called “Kristallnacht”), a discussion, “Understanding Past Realities of the Holocaust: Photography versus Art” will take place on 4 November 2026. Historians Dr Christoph Kreutzmüller and Dr Rachel Perry examine how photography and art depicted the Nazi state-orchestrated campaign of terror perpetrated against Jewish men, women and children across Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland from 9 to 10 November 1938 (the November Pogrom). The historians ask what photography and art reveal about the lived realities of the victims of the Pogrom, the interactions surrounding the violence and the broader society in which the violence was perpetrated. The event will be live-streamed and recorded. Questions can be submitted through this form. The discussion is organized by the Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Programme together with the Fritz Ascher Society for Persecuted, Ostracized and Banned Art, and the Permanent Mission of Germany to the United Nations. Photo credit: Christoph Kreutzmüller REGISTRATION LINK OPENING REMARKS: Ms. Melissa Fleming, United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications His Excellency Mr. Ricklef Johannes Beutin, Permanent Representative of the Federal Republic of Germany to the United Nations Ms. Rachel Stern, Executive Director, The Fritz Ascher Society for Persecuted, Ostracized and Banned Art SPEAKERS: Dr. Christoph Kreutzmüller, Deputy Project Director, LastSeen: Pictures of Nazi-Deportations, Selma Stern Center for Jewish History, Berlin, Germany Dr. Rachel Perry, Art historian, curator and educator, Weiss Livnat Graduate Program in Holocaust Studies at the University of Haifa and Gratz College Dr. Christoph Kreutzmüller Dr. Rachel Perry Dr. Christoph Kreutzmüller, the Berlin based historian and educator, is the Deputy Director of the award-winning research project. LastSeen: Pictures of Nazi-Deportations. He studied History and English in Berlin and in the UK. After finishing his doctoral thesis on German banks in the Netherlands (1919-1945) he coordinated an extensive research project on the fate of Jewish owned businesses in Berlin 1930-1945 at the Humboldt University (Berlin) and worked as curator of the segment “Catastrophe” of the new permanent exhibition in the Jewish Museum Berlin. His numerous publications include the award winning “Final Sale in Berlin. The destruction of Jewish commercial activity. 1930-1945” (New York/Oxford 2015) and (with Tal Bruttmann and Stefan Hördler), Die fotografische Inszenierung des Verbrechens. A Photo Album from Auschwitz, Darmstadt 2019. In honorary office he is the chairman of the Aktive Museum, Faschismus und Widerstand – a NGO open for anyone interested in dealing with the history of Nazism, the social conditions which fostered it and the repercussions it continues to have. Dr. Rachel Perry is an art historian and curator specializing in the representation and remembrance of the Holocaust and Second World War in visual culture. She teaches in the Weiss-Livnat Graduate Program in Holocaust Studies at the University of Haifa, Israel as well as in the “Holocaust and Human Rights” programme at Gratz College, Pennsylvania, United States of America. Dr. Perry is a fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Getty Foundation, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Dedalus Foundation, the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah, the Yad Vashem Institute, EHRI, and CASVA. She is widely published. Her articles have appeared in several journals including Holocaust and Genocide Studies, History and Memory, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, French Cultural Studies, RIHA, Ars Judaica, and Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture. She is currently a visiting scholar at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute in Boston, United States of America, where she is working on a manuscript concerning early graphic narratives of the Holocaust.