“Are the Germans coming back?”

THE WAR OF MEMORY:
GREECE – GERMANY, 1941–2014

On the occasion of the most significant event of the past century—World War II, which affected the entire planet as well as the personal fate of every individual— Hagen Fleischer, Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Athens, spoke on Friday, January 24, 2014, at 9:00 p.m., at the Conference & Cultural Center of the University of Patras and discussed the “wars of memory” that have unfolded in public history and the often awkward way in which the present deals with the “skeletons” of the past. In various ways, especially following the momentous changes of 1989–1990, the memory of war continues to be painful and to provoke passionate debates.

At the same time, an exhibition featuring original artifacts from the period of the German Occupation was held in the foyer of the SPC, with the theme“Propaganda Documents.”

The event took place as part of the two-day endocrinology conference ENDORAMA ’13, which is accompanied each year by a parallel cultural program, in an effort by the organizers to step beyond the boundaries of medical science and “engage” with society in a different way.

In 2014, the CULTURAL ENDORAMA —convinced that the country was at a turning point in its history and in the midst of a profound crisis of values, not merely an economic one— took a bold step and dedicated its theme to MEMORY. Given that the wars of history continue even today, it sought to engage in dialogue with Greece in 2014, a country where the Memorandum and the nation’s position vis-à-vis the European Union, German Chancellor A. Merkel, and the rise of Golden Dawn…

The CULTURAL ENDORAMA is curated by historian Androniki P. Chrysafi.

The event was “open” to anyone in the city and the university community who wished to attend.

Hagen Fleischer (Hagen Fleischer)

The “German-Greek” historian, as Varnalis called him, was born in Vienna and lives in Kapandriti, Attica. He has lived permanently in Greece since 1977 and has been a Greek citizen since 1985. He grew up in postwar Germany and, as he himself has stated, faced with collective silence and awkwardness, decided to study history in order to examine the war. He began working on his doctoral dissertation on the German occupation of Denmark, but when he found himself in Greece during the military junta, he decided to shift the focus of his research to “The Occupation of Greece.” Although it was (and still is) difficult to find a faculty member at a German university to supervise such “exotic” study, after seven years of painstaking and persistent research, he managed to complete his doctoral dissertation, the first comprehensive study of the Occupation in Greece, which also served as the basis for his seminal two-volume work *Crown and Swastika. Greece under the Occupation and the Resistance, 1941–44” (published by Papazisis). Since 1979, he has been teaching at Greek universities. First at the University of Athens, then in Crete, and subsequently back at the University of Athens (full professor since 1996, and currently a Professor Emeritus), he teaches modern and contemporary Greek and European history. “At first, many students looked at me as if I were some kind of exotic creature,” he says. He was the first to teach taboo subjects at a Greek university (the War, the Occupation, the Resistance)—and a German, no less! In 1984, he was the principal organizer of the first academic conference in Greece on the period 1936–1944; he was also the principal organizer of the first conference on the Civil War (1995), and has represented Greece in international programs and on international advisory and investigative committees: regarding the past of the Austrian president Kurt Waldheim, on the crimes of the Wehrmacht and the issue of war reparations. He has authored more than 100 scholarly studies, with an emphasis on the period of World War II and its postwar legacy; he contributes articles to foreign and Greek publications, and has actively participated (as a speaker or co-organizer) in approximately 80 international conferences. In addition to his aforementioned work, his book *The Wars of Memory: World War II in Public History* (Nefeli, 2012, 4th edition). In 2010, he organized, together with students and doctoral candidates from the University of Athens, a fifteen-day memorial tour of sites of Nazi atrocities, starting in Berlin, during which a documentary film was shot (ERT, “Paraskinio”). In 2012, he organized, with great success in terms of participation, an open “graduate seminar” with Holocaust survivors, with the aim of exposing the systematic attempts by “Golden Dawn” to rewrite the history of World War II by denying Nazi crimes against humanity.