Post-Workshops

Prof. Björn Krondorfer, Björn Krondorfer is Professor of Religious Studies, St. Mary's College of Maryland USA. He lives in Germany and the US. He addresses the impact of the Holocaust on German families and on relationships between Jews and Germans after 1945. Born after the war and raised in Germany, he has spent the last 20 years confronting the genocidal past of his nation, silences in his own family, and the lingering between anti-Jewish legacy in German churches and society in the wake of Nazi-perpetrated genocide. Krondorfer has worked on mending broken relaltionships between Jews and Germans among the generations in victimized communities and perpetrator societies. He will interweave his personal story with interpersonal encounters, as they shed light on larger culutral and historical themes, including the role of the arts in enabling dialogue between people divided by a genocidal past

Adresse
www.thefoundationtrust.org/smcvall.htm; Email: bhkrondorfer@smcm.edu
www.smcm.edu/users/bhkrondorfer

Contribution

post-workshop 6 hours together with Dr. Samon Munn

Beginning to know Ourselves and the Other
Collective Wisdom will be engendered in this day through the process of joint story-telling, story-listening and highly personal and internpersonal exploration. The wisdom will relate to commonalities of identity as human, and recognition and observation of responsibility for the "Other", philosophically and in deed/action. The experience in that workshop will be intensely personal and private, but shared in this rare and private session. Participants introduce themselves - to each other and to "themselves" - in honestly personal terms, exploring biographies and identities fo each other ( and in so doing themselves). Questions and themes may arise in this private setting, which may not be posed or supported in routine life. Sometimes a comment needs no reply; at other times, a reply may be respectfully given or declined.We shall have intensive personal and interpersonal dialogues. The simplicity is stunning: non religious, not deliberately therapeutic and political. A secure group of individuals whose life experiences stem, directly or indirectly from varied sides of genocide and conflict. Individuals who agree on historical fundamentals serious and somtimes hard-nosed engagement all day (well beyond merely polite) in the country or city of the genocidal event(s), only occasionally, for the facilitators to inject poignant perspective and constructive analysis. Meeting in Germany, where the original events occurred, tkaes due advandage of the effects of heard language, of tone, interpersonal styles and sometimes even of landscape and of aromas, which can engender highly personal respones.

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