Alfred Landecker Memorial Lecture 2021 – On Auschwitz: reflecting on the meaning of absolute death
Marietta van der Tol
65.56
27 January 2021
15 February 2026
The Blavatnik School of Government hosts Dan Diner, Chair of the Alfred Landecker Foundation and its Governing Council and Professor Emeritus of Modern History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, for the 2021 Alfred Landecker Memorial Lecture.
The lecture tells the story of an awkward encounter between a Jewish woman prisoner and a female SS-guard in a slave-labour camp close to Dresden. The encounter takes place in the night of the infernal firestorm unleashed by Allied bomber squadrons on that city. An emerging short dialogue between the two women, between victim and victimizer, unravels a challenging question: can different deaths have different meanings and moral significance?
The lecture is followed by a panel discussion featuring Dan Diner, Jonathan Wolff (Alfred Landecker Professor of Values and Public Policy), Dapo Akande (Professor of Public International Law) and Marietta van der Tol (Alfred Landecker Postdoctoral Fellow). The discussion is moderated by Ngaire Woods, Dean of the Blavatnik School of Government.
Blavatnik School of Government,
University of Oxford
http://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/
