The CUNY Russian, Eastern European and Eurasia Studies Workshop hosts:

Thomas Ort, Associate Professor of History at Queens College, will present a chapter from his new book project, tentatively entitled “The Afterlife of a Death: Meaning, Memory, and the Assassination of Reinhard Heydrich.”

The project concerns the May 1942 assassination in Prague of Reinhard Heydrich, the second highest-ranking official of the Nazi SS, one of the principal architects of the Final Solution, and the governor of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, the statelet established by the Nazis after the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in 1939. Heydrich’s killing was one of the boldest acts of resistance in World War II, but also one of the most controversial in that it precipitated horrific mass reprisals and decimated the Czech resistance movement. 

“The Afterlife of a Death” explores the curious transformation in the Czech lands of the memory of the killing of Heydrich. Whereas in 1942 and for years thereafter the assassination was widely understood as a reckless and ill-conceived endeavor, by the 1990s it came to be celebrated as the single most important act of Czech resistance. The book traces the shifts in its interpretation under Nazi, Communist, and liberal democratic rule, suggesting that what is commonly termed “memory” is better understood as a social framework of meaning.

Thomas Ort is associate professor of modern European history at Queens College, The City University of New York. The main focus of his research has been modernist and avant-garde life in early twentieth-century Czechoslovakia, but his most recent work concerns the politics of memory in postwar Eastern Europe. He is the author of Art and Life in Modernist Prague: Karel Čapek and his Generation, 1911-1938 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). His new book project is entitled Meaning, Memory, and the Assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. 

Register for the Zoom link for the event, and the chapter will be sent to you.