Radio, Propaganda, Terror: Austrian-Jewish Refugees and the Media
Nov 13, 2024 | 4:00 - 6:30 pm PT
Lecture at The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, Berkeley, CA | Speaker: Paul Lerner (USC Dornsife), Moderators: Jeroen Dewulf (UC Berkeley) and Viola Alianov-Rautenberg (German Historical Institute Washington | Pacific Office Berkeley)
IES-GHI Annual Feldman Lecture | Organized by the GHI’s Pacific Office and the Institute of European Studies at UC Berkeley, co-sponsored by Center for German and European Studies, Austrian Studies Program, Jewish Studies Program (all at UC Berkeley)
Drawing from his larger research project on how Central European émigrés reimagined American life in the wake of fascism, Paul Lerner examines radio as a site of intervention for émigré psychologists, psychoanalysts, and social scientists. He highlights Viennese émigré Herta Herzog and her research on responses to Orson Welles’s 1938 Martian invasion broadcast, situating her within a tradition of thought on media, terror, and violence among German-speaking, particularly Austrian Jewish, émigrés in the U.S. This cohort, having witnessed the terrifying use of radio for Nazi propaganda, remained especially attuned to the incitement of terror through mass media.
Paul Lerner is a Professor and Chair of History in the Van Hunnick History Department at USC where he directs the Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies. He is a historian of Modern Germany and Central Europe with particular research and teaching interests in the history of the human sciences, Jewish history, the history and theory of consumer culture, and theories of fascism. He has written two books: Hysterical Men: War, Psychiatry, and the Politics of Trauma in Germany (Cornell, 2003) and The Consuming Temple: The Jewish Department Store and the Consumer Revolution in Germany (Cornell 2015) and co-edited four books: Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age (Cambridge, 2001), Jewish Masculinities: German Jews, Gender, and History (Indiana, 2012), Feuchtwanger and Judaism: History, Imagination, Exile (Peter Lang, 2019), and Jewish Consumer Cultures in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Europe and North America (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Lerner is currently working on two book projects: “Exiles on Main Street: How Central European Émigrés Reimagined American Life, 1940-1970” and “The Psychoanalysis of Terror: Fred Hacker between Vienna and Hollywood.”
This is the first joint annual lecture, organized by the GHI’s Pacific Office and the Institute of European Studies at UC Berkeley, in memory of Gerald D. Feldman, the founding director of the Institute of European Studies.