Lecture by Maja Hultman (David Herzog Fonds-Guest-Professor/Centre for European Research, University of Gothenburg)
Dienstag, 6. Mai 2025 |16:00 Uhr
Bibliothek des CJS | Beethovenstraße 21 | 8010 Graz
or via Zoom: https://uni-graz.zoom.us/j/67903863552?pwd=zDOKIsxQhA8N76quBu5ePd2NOvxzb9.1
Meeting-ID: 679 0386 3552
Kenncode: 851057
Old paper. The cold environment of archives. The pillows and gloves historians and archivists use to protect documents. Researchers of the past are familiar with these smells and touches at archives. But what can our sensory experiences of historical objects tell us about Jewish history? To ponder this question, Maja Hultman reconstructs the morphology of the combined business and personal archive left by German-born Friedrich ‘Fritz’ Salomon Hollander (1915-2004), manager of a global fur company and lay leader of Stockholm’s Jewish community, at the Swedish National Archives. Tracing parts of the archival material to Fritz Hollander’s personal leather briefcases, she explores the moment the locks were pried open and the smell of the partly plastic content filled the room. Using tools from ethnography, business history, archival theory and the history of experience, Maja Hultman pays attention to the odour, quantity and (dis)order that characterized each briefcase and proposes that these material components provide a methodological access point to Hollander’s emotional experience of life in post-Holocaust Sweden.
Maja Hultman is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. She received her PhD from University of Southampton in 2019 and has held fellowships at the Centre for Business History in Stockholm and the Leibniz Institute of European History in Mainz. Her first monograph Jewish Feelings in the City: Emotional Topography and Power Relations in Modern Stockholm, forthcoming with Peter Lang, explores the intersection between urban studies, Digital Humanities, and the history of emotions through the case study of Stockholm’s Jewry.