Ursula von Kardorff »Berliner Aufzeichnungen 1942–1945« und Melvyn J. Lasky »Und alles war still. Deutsches Tagebuch 1945«. Doppelporträts und exemplarische Texte

In the organizer's words:

➡️ The event originally planned for 25 March 2025 had to be postponed to this date for organizational reasons.

The Berlin-born journalist Ursula von Kardorff (1911-1988) came from an old Mecklenburg noble family and was involved in conservative aristocratic circles. After 1933, she worked primarily for the right-wing conservative "Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung", whose editor-in-chief Karl Silex (1896-1982) tried to maintain a minimum of freedom of movement vis-à-vis the Nazi regime. Kardorff wrote in particular about "non-political" topics, such as fashion. Although her father, the impressionist painter Konrad von Kardorff (1877-1945), was a staunch opponent of the Nazis from the outset, she later admitted that she herself had been a "follower" at least until the beginning of the war. Due to her family background, she had private contacts with those involved in the assassination attempt on Hitler on July 20, 1944, without being involved in their planning.

Melvyn J. Lasky (1920-2004), born in New York as the child of Polish-Jewish immigrants, studied history and became involved in left-wing intellectual but decidedly anti-Stalinist circles early on. Initially working as a journalist, he served as a military historian in the US army from 1944 and thus came to Germany. He was deployed as a cultural officer in the American sector in Berlin and played a key role in shaping the new cultural beginning there, not least through the magazine "Der Monat", which he founded in 1947. His notes from the end of the war and the first period of occupation were only published in 2014.

As part of the event series "80 years since the end of the war in Europe"

UNEQUAL WORDS. Victors and vanquished, liberators and liberated in Germany in 1945 - double portraits and exemplary texts

With Dr. Katja Schlenker and Prof. Dr. Winfrid Halder

When in the first months of 1945 the forces of the anti-Hitler coalition, led by the United States of America, Great Britain and the Soviet Union, completely conquered the territory of the then German Reich, finally defeated the German Wehrmacht and crushed the criminal Nazi regime, their soldiers and war correspondents encountered members of a nation at the political and moral low point of its entire history. Conversely, the Germans were confronted with the victors and liberators, most of whom seemed alien to them after twelve years of dictatorship and widespread isolation. Initial impressions were recorded from both sides, the unfiltered directness of which is still impressive today. They also show that the subsequent path of "Western integration" of at least part of Germany, which was embarked upon with significant help from the USA and which opened the way to democracy and self-determination, was neither self-evident nor easy.

The series presents two people who met each other indirectly, less often directly, and recorded their experiences of the supposed "zero hour".