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Department of History

Dr Anna Hájková

Anna Hájková, copyright Václav Jirásek  

Room: FAB351
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Office Hours: 

How to pronounce my name:

  

+44 (0)24 76523329

anna(dot)hajkova(at)warwick(dot)ac(dot)uk

on leave in autumn term 2024 and spring term 2025

 

Academic Profile

 
What is everyday life, and what does it consist of? And in what ways is everyday life affected by the life in extremis? These questions animate my work. My first book, The Last Ghetto: An Everyday History of Theresienstadt, which was awarded the Irma Rosenberg and Herbert Steiner Prizes, focused on the everyday history of the Holocaust, using the Terezín transit ghetto as a springboard to examine larger issues of human behavior under extreme stress. My work examines the society in the camps, Jewish social and political elites, issues of nationalism and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and also the Jewish Councils. In this context, I have been working on the last Elder of the Jews of Terezín, Benjamin Murmelstein. Here you can read an essay of mine on Claude Lanzmann's documentary.

I am interested in how people in 20th century Central and Eastern Europe arranged their lives, both during the state of exception and after, transitioning to a new kind of everyday life. I am also interested in questions of how groups emerge and interact and what roles gender, ethnicity, and culture played in these processes. Whether I focus on the transnational kaleidoscope of Terezín or the Central European Communist mid-functionaries, I wish to connect critical analysis of long-term developments with close attention to details. It is my strong sense that when we look at everyday life against the grain, we find many examples that both complicate and enhance our understanding.

I have been researching sexuality and the Holocaust. Why were certain stories connected to sexuality of the Holocaust victims, such as people who engaged in same sex conduct, never told? My work explores the intersection of sexuality and violence in the Holocaust, and the erasure of certain sexualities from what has become the Holocaust canon. I examine the narrative erasure of lesbians and gays who were deported as Jews, homophobia of the victim society, sex barter, Jewish functionaries often marked as sexually deviant, mothers who abandonded their children, and also Jewish informers. In examining cases of what I term “transgressive sexuality,” I contribute to our understanding of gender and sexual violence, consent, normative behavior during the Holocaust, and the politics of Holocaust archives. This work is political and linked to social justice, and so I present my work in English, German, and Czech media. If you are looking for a good primer into sexuality and Holocaust, check out this blog entry at OUP. Here you can find a bibliography on the topic. Currently, I am writing a trade book on a concentration camp guard Anneliese Kohlmann, who engaged in an enforced relationship with a woman prisoner. My work on queer Holocaust History has been awarded the Orpheus Iris Prize 2020.

Together with Andreas Kranebitter of the Austrian DÖW, we are working on a German translation of Michael Pollak's classical study of three women survivors in Auschwitz, L'Expérience Concentrationnaire. The book explores history of medicine, concentration camps, queer desire and sexuality, victims' agency, and habitus; it is an important early study of sociology exploring the world of the camps. Pollak, who was a student of Pierre Bourdieu, was a gay Austrian-French sociologist who died, aged 44, of AIDS.

My other next project, Dreamers of a New Day: Building Socialism in Central Europe, 1930-1970, is a long-durée study of a cohort of leftist intellectuals who built socialism in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and (East) Germany. I follow their lives from their university studies to the point of their politicization; to the war, and to their postwar quest to build a better, just society. I trace them further through their work in the Stalinist 1950s and into the next decade, culminating in their contribution to the notion of socialism with a human face. I am interested in two central questions: first, what is ideology and second, how is it lived.

I am interested in supervising postgraduate students working on the Holocaust, Nazi Germany, Jewish history, modern Europe, as well as on the history of genocides, history of gender and sexualities, and history of everyday life. I also welcome supervision in themes of history of socialism and communism. I ask for two things of prospective PhD students: that they speak the relevant languages at least at B2 level, and that they have engaged with my work on the topic of their research, if I have published on that topic.

I have served as a co-director of the Warwick Centre for Global Jewish Studies. I am also the Queering University contact for History. And yes, I am a FRHistS.

I also post on bluesky @ankahajkova.bsky.social

My portrait above is by Václav Jirásek and you need my permission to use it.

 
Academic Career

  • 2021-2024 Co-Director, Warwick Centre for Global Jewish Studies (with Stephen Shapiro and later Christine Achinger)
  • 2023- Reader of Modern Continental European History, University of Warwick
  • September 2018-2023 Associate Professor of Modern Continental European History, University of Warwick
  • Sept 2013-2018: Assistant Professor of Modern Continental European History, University of Warwick

  • 2007-2013: PhD, Modern European History, University of Toronto

  • 1998-2006: MA (Major in Modern History, Minor in English and Sociology), Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

 
Teaching

Membership and academic functions:

PhD Students:

Uta Rautenberg, "Homophobia in the Nazi Camps," (co-advising with Christoph Mick), 2015-2021

Leonie Bausch, "Gendered National Hierarchies: Sexual Encounters in the French Zone of Occupation in Post-War Germany,” M4C w Nottingham, 2021-23

Paula Medina Gonzales, "Queerness in the German Wehrmacht," 2021-

 
Publications

Books:

Menschen ohne Geschichte sind Staub: Homophobie und Holocaust (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2021), expanded second edition May 2024

expanded English translation forthcoming with University of Toronto Press as People without History are Dust: Queer Desire in the Holocaust, 2025

The Last Ghetto: An Everyday History of Theresienstadt (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020); Czech translation Poslední ghetto: Všední život v Terezíně, Chinese (Chongqing Yuangyang) and German (Transcript) editions forthcoming

Čekám až se vrátíš: Rodinné deníky z války [I am Waiting For You to Come Back: Wartime Family Diaries], edition of two family diaries (Prague: Nakladatelství Lidové Noviny, 2018).

Die letzten Berliner Veit Simons, with Maria von der Heydt (Berlin: Hentrich & Hentrich 2019), German and English edition

Plays:

The Amazing Life of Margot Heuman, co-written with Erika Hughes, who directed the play. Here you can read about the production in English, and here in German. Invite us, we are happy to show the play that exists as a digital recording!


Edited Volumes

Refereed Journal Articles

Review essays:

Articles and Book Chapters