The Centre for Pictorial Holocaust Narratives is a newly established interdisciplinary and transnational center of excellence that brings together scholars, educators, and institutions dedicated to researching and teaching about visual Holocaust narratives. The focus is on graphic novels, picture books, illustrated books, and their hybrid forms. The Center is a collaboration between the University of Siegen, the Technical University of Braunschweig, and a group of national and international partners. It comprises a multilingual, multi-site core corpus as well as additional specialized research collections.
The Centre for Pictorial Holocaust Narratives is anchored in the departments of Literary Studies, Linguistics (English and German), (Multi-)Cultural Education, and Global Citizenship Education. Through its work with multimodal texts, the Center aims to open up new possibilities for education from the primary to the higher education level and to create research pathways that offer new perspectives on how we understand, convey, and receive pictorial Holocaust narratives across cultures and disciplines.
Societies and classrooms worldwide are undergoing change. Innovative approaches must be developed to adequately account for the existing cultural diversity of identities and experiences and to strengthen the culture of remembrance as well as the concept of postmemory. The current global rise in antisemitism and the dawn of the post-Holocaust-witness era call for new responses. This innovative Centre for Pictorial Holocaust Narratives will help address these challenges and find new ways to promote democratic and humanistic values, tolerance, and peace in order to counter anti-Semitism and all forms of hatred while simultaneously strengthening Jewish life.
The four founding members are doing pioneering work in the fields of pictorial Holocaust narratives and visual storytelling. Their shared vision and complementary expertise form the foundation for the Centre for Pictorial Holocaust Narratives—a unique and specialized interdisciplinary center of excellence.