All welcome. Please email Anna Ross (A.Ross.2@warwick.ac.uk) for any questions.

Law became one of the most important vehicles to organize the German-German Cold War in everyday life. Both the governments in Bonn and East Berlin used legal sovereignty doctrines to make claims to represent post-war German statehood legitimately. Using law to infringe on the other state’s political legitimacy had far reaching consequences for German-German Cold War politics and ordinary Germans’ rights. This talk explores the dynamics at play when law became the object of ideological conflicts as well as a central tool by which the two German governments conducted these ideological skirmishes over domestic and international political legitimacy. This legal battle, fought as much within the corridors of the United Nations and other international organization as in German court rooms, legal scholarship, and by state-sponsored rights activists, forced both German states to open their legal systems to international law making. In doing so, new human rights languages and sovereignty frameworks made the German-German legal confrontation as much part of Cold War ideological conflicts as it inscribed conflicts over postcolonial sovereignty during and after decolonization into German law-making East and West of the Berlin Wall. 

The Amazing Life of Margot Heuman is a play about the first, and probably the last, lesbian Holocaust survivor to bear testimony. Born in 1928 in Germany, Margot Heuman is a survivor of Theresienstadt ghetto, Auschwitz, Neuengamme, and Bergen-Belsen.

The play, which takes its text from interviews conducted by Warwick University historian Anna Hájková, offers a poignant look on coming of age as a Jewish queer woman in the concentration camps. In the play, Margot Heuman reflects on love, choices, sexual violence and sexual barter, homophobia, and survival. Moving, funny, pragmatic, and original, she reminds us of humanity within the society of Holocaust victims, but also of the stories that have been erased by homophobia. Heuman, who passed away in May 2022 and was eulogized in New York Times and the Times of London, will probably remain the only lesbian voice to speak about her experience in the Holocaust. “I am amazing,” she tells her interviewer, and the audience.

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