Book Talk: Rupture, Reconciliation, & Visual Storytelling

Stefanie Fischer and Kim Wünschmann will join LBI to discuss their recent graphic history, Oberbrechen: A German Village Confronts Its Nazi Past. The talk will be moderated by acclaimed graphic memoirist Ari Richter. In addition, two members of the Lichtenstein family (featured in the book) will sit on the panel.

Oberbrechen (illustrated by Liz Clarke) chronicles the events of the Holocaust and its aftermath in a small village in rural Germany, through the eyes of historians Fischer and Wünschmann. Based on meticulous research and using powerful visual storytelling, the book provides a multilayered narrative that explores the experiences of both Jewish and non-Jewish villagers from the First World War to the present. Its focus on how "ordinary" people experienced this time offers a new and illuminating insight into everyday life and the processes of violence, rupture, and reconciliation that characterized the history of the twentieth century in Germany and beyond. The graphic narrative is accompanied by source documents published in English translation for the first time, an essay on the wider historical context, and an incisive reflection on the writing of this book--and of history more broadly. (Oxford University Press)

This event will be held in person at the Center for Jewish History. If you cannot attend the live event, it will be recorded and uploaded to YouTube.

Buy Oberbrechen: A German Village Confronts Its Nazi Past here.

Buy Never Again Will I Visit Auschwitz by Ari Richter here.

About the Speakers:

Stefanie Fischer holds a Ph.D. from the Technical University of Berlin. She is a faculty member at the Center for Antisemitism Research at TU Berlin. Her fields of scholarly research are German Jewish history and Holocaust Studies. Fischer is author of Jewish Cattle Traders in the German Countryside, 1919-1939. Economic Trust and Antisemitic Violence (2024) and has published numerous articles on German-Jewish history and culture.

Kim Wünschmann is Director of the Institute for the History of the German Jews in Hamburg. She obtained her Ph.D. from Birkbeck, University of London. Her research centers on German Jewish history, Holocaust Studies, and legal history. She is the author of Before Auschwitz: Jewish Prisoners in the Prewar Concentration Camps (2015) and co-editor of Living the German Revolution 1918–19: Expectations, Experiences, Responses (2023).

About the Moderator:

Ari Richter is a visual artist, cartoonist and Professor at LaGuardia Community College in the City University of New York. He is the author of Never Again Will I Visit Auschwitz: A Graphic Family Memoir of Trauma & Inheritance (Fantagraphics Books, 2024). Richter is the recipient of recent fellowships from the Mellon Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, as well as a fully public education from grade school to graduate school. The grandson of Holocaust survivors and son of therapists, he lives in New York with his wife and two daughters.