A two-day conference focusing on Berlin's unique cultural identity in Weimer Germany and sponsored by the Jewish Studies program will begin this afternoon.
The conference -- titled "Nazi Berlin, Jewish Urbanity: Culture, Religion, Architecure and Politics" -- will feature 11 lectures, mostly related to the "Natzification" of the city after World War I.
"Berlin had a big Jewish population and was a very special city in Jewish history," conference organizer and Jewish studies chair Susannah Heschel said. "We'll look at what happened to the Jewishness of the city and the image of the Jew."
Presenters will include faculty from a variety of universities in multiple departments, including geography, history, German studies and art history, Heschel said.
She highlighted one lecture on anti-Jewish laws by Wolf Gruner as particularly important from a historical standpoint.
"Everyone has always assumed that Hitler gave certain orders about excluding Jews from the public sphere," Heschel said. "Gruner discovered that it was the municipalities that actually came up with those regulations first before they became national."
Such a finding calls into question the notion that Hitler aggressively forced anti-Jewish legislation on many German towns, according to Heschel.
Not all lectures will deal with primarily Jewish issues. Manfred Gailus, a professor at the Technical University of Berlin, will discuss the reaction of Protestant churches to Nazism.
Gailus will focus on "how the Protestant churches responded to the Nazis and how they changed in support or lack of support of the Nazis," Heschel said.
David Bathrick, a German studies professor at Cornell University, will give a presentation on renowned German boxer Max Schmeling and his complicated relationship with Nazism. Schmeling, heavyweight champion of the world in the early '30s, fought Joe Louis twice in the course of his career.
The presentation will investigate Schmeling's status in Berlin and examine how the growth of Nazism "gets expressed through the athletic realm," Heschel said.
Dartmouth undergraduates have demonstrated great interest in the history of Nazi Germany the past, according to Heschel, and conference planners expect strong student attendance.
"There has been a lot of interest among students in the Holocaust and the ways Nazi Germany expressed itself in architecture, religion and politics," Heschel said.
Other featured speakers include Jeffrey Herf of the University of Maryland, Francis Nicosia of St. Michael's College, and Leslie Morris of the University of Minnesota.
