©National Archives Washington
The lecture is only available in German)
Reading and discussion with the author Alexandra Przyrembel, on 7 December, 7 p.m., at the Eckermann Bookshop Weimar, Literature Floor.
Moderation: Rikola-Gunnar Lüttgenau(
Dubbed the "witch of Buchenwald" and the "most hated woman in the world", Ilse Koch joined the NSDAP in 1932, married Karl Koch, who later became the Buchenwald commandant, in 1936, and after the end of the war she was tried in court, which resulted in life imprisonment. To this day, Ilse Koch is considered one of the most controversial personalities of National Socialism and has always fascinated in her media portrayal as a "special case" of German history. In her book, Alexandra Przyrembel breaks away from this construction and critically places the figure of Ilse Koch in the different phases of German history on the basis of archival material. The author interweaves individual case and social analysis, poses questions about the role of women in the National Socialist order, about processing strategies in post-war Germany and the United States, and shows how the scandalisation of a figure overlays the discourse about the murderous Nazi system and thus leads to an exoneration of German society.
(The historian Alexandra Przyrembel is professor of the history of European modernity at the Fernuniversität in Hagen. "Im Bann des Bösen" (Under the Spell of Evil) has been published by S. Fischer Verlag since spring this year. She teaches and researches the (transnational) history of Europe and has already published on National Socialist anti-Semitism.She is currently writing a (global) history of wealth around 1900).
An event of the Buchenwald Memorial and the State Agency for Civic Education Thuringia
