History@Portsmouth

University of Portsmouth's History Blog

Tag Archives | Nazi Germany

Certificate of Nationalisation cropped

Name and shame: how I reclaimed a lost identity

The history blog is very pleased to host this guest blog.  In it Jeremy Schultz explains the reasons behind his grandfather’s decision to change his Jewish surname at the outset of World War II, and his own recent decision to change his name back again.  Jeremy is a psychotherapist, and the brother of Deborah Shaw, Professor of Film and Screen Studies at the University of Portsmouth.  Jeremy’s family history illustrates many of the historical issues encountered by our history students in their study of twentieth-century history: the pogroms in Tsarist Russia that drove many Jews to emigrate; racial prejudice during the 1930s against Jews in both Germany and Britain; the […]

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Peter Misch 5

Peter Misch (1909-1987): a holocaust survivor in wartime China

  On 8 December 2021 our own Dr Rudolph Ng, Lecturer in Global History, presented a fascinating paper tracing the extraordinary journey of a young geologist who fled Nazi Germany in 1936 and then taught for a decade in wartime China, before making a successful postwar academic career in the United States. If you missed the paper, we have a recording available, so do get in touch with one of us (rudolph.ng@port.ac.uk, robert.james@port.ac.uk, fiona.mccall@port.ac.u) Misch’s narrow escapes from the Holocaust and the Japanese invasion of China (1937), his capture by the Chinese Nationalists (1942), and the impending Communist takeover in China (1946) highlight the tumultuous reality of academic pursuits in […]

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Using Visual Sources: “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer!”

Nia Picton-Phillips, a second year History student at the University of Portsmouth, wrote the following blog entry on a Nazi propaganda poster featuring Adolf Hitler for the Introduction to Historical Research Unit. Nia discusses the ways in which the image was used to promote various aspects of Nazi ideology. The unit is co-ordinated by Dr Maria Cannon, Lecturer in Early Modern History at Portsmouth.  The use of visual sources as a means of understanding the past has transformed historical knowledge. The ‘pictorial turn,’ as suggested by W. J. T. Mitchell, was “declared a new cultural phenomenon: a transition from a culture dominated by the book to one dominated by images.” [1] […]

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