Prof. Dr. Anika Walke
Geschichte
External Senior Fellow (Marie S. Curie FCFP)
Dezember 2023 - August 2024
CV
Anika Walke is the Georgie W. Lewis Career Development Professor and Associate Professor of History at Washington University in St. Louis. She earned an M.A. at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg (Germany) in 2004 and completed a binational doctoral degree at Oldenburg University (Social Sciences) and the University of California, Santa Cruz (History of Consciousness) in 2011. Following a postdoctoral fellowship in International and Area Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, she was appointed to a professorship in History at the same institution and is also affiliated with the departments of Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies; Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; and with the program in Global Studies. Walke’s research and teaching interests include Holocaust and genocide studies, migration, nationality policies, and oral history in the (former) Soviet Union and Europe, and she has published many articles and book chapters on related themes. From 2014 to 2022, Walke served as Co-PI of “The Holocaust Ghettos Project: Reintegrating Victims and Perpetrators through Places and Events,” a project of the Holocaust Geographies Collaborative to develop a Historical GIS of Nazi-era ghettos in Eastern Europe that was supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Advancement Grant. During her time at FRIAS, Walke plans to complete a monograph on the long aftermath of the Holocaust in Belarus.
Publikationen (Auswahl)
- Pioneers and Partisans: An Oral History of Nazi Genocide in Belorussia. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015; Paperback 2018.
- Migration and Mobility in the Modern Age: Refugees, Travelers, and Traffickers in Europe and Eurasia. Eds. Anika Walke, Jan Musekamp, Nicole Svobodny. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017.
- “Testimony in Place: Witnessing the Holocaust in Belarus,” East European Jewish Affairs 52, no. 1 (2023): 80-104.
- “’To Speak for Those Who Cannot’: Masha Rol’nikaite on Anti-Jewish and Sexual Violence during the German Occupation of Soviet Territories.” Jewish History 33, no. 1-2 (2020): 215-244.
- “Split Memory: The Geography of Holocaust Memory and Amnesia in Belarus.” Slavic Review 77, no.1 (2018): 174-197.
FRIAS Projekt
Bones, Dirt, and Ash: Holocaust Testimony Matters in Belarus
In Belarus, the legacy of the Holocaust and of World War II is literally and figuratively part of the landscape, in the form of marked and unmarked mass graves of Jews or others, or of large meadows that were once villages which were erased during the German occupation regime’s campaign to create so-called dead zones. What does it mean to live in and with this space of destruction? How do people relate to the visible and invisible traces of war and genocide? What does it mean to live on, near, and with mass graves? A critical task of Bones, Dirt, and Ash is to offer an inside view on important sites of history and memory in Belarus, and of how people have come to live with sites and material traces of violence and trauma.
The book brings to life a territory that formed major parts of the Pale of Jewish Settlement, was occupied by German forces between 1941 and 1944, and where between 1944 and 1991 Soviet policies provided a frame to both contain and be transgressed by distinct forms of memory, commemoration, and living with the past. The book is an opportunity for the reader to encounter a country that—in the aftermath of the wave of political repression since 2020 and the ongoing war in Ukraine—once more has become largely inaccessible to the foreign visitor.
