This programme of knowledge exchange, co-production, and public outreach draws on the findings of the AHRC major research project 'From Perpetrators to Victims? Discourses of German Wartime Suffering' (2005-2008). In that project, Taberner and Cooke established a more nuanced narrative of the German experience of confronting the Holocaust since 1945 than had previously been available in the scholarly literature. We identified a dialectic between Germans' desire -- varying in intensity over the decades -- to repress the past and Germans' efforts to face up to the crimes that had been committed in their name, and we evidenced the way in which German debates on German wartime suffering (the bombing of German cities, the expulsion of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe, the mass rapes of German women, etc.) were never distinct from debates on the country's historical responsibility for the Holocaust but were always implicit within them, and vice versa. Further to this, we traced the way in which the German confrontation with the Holocaust has in recent years come to be seen as a model for how other nations, globally, can confront other dark pasts, for example, slavery, colonialism, apartheid, recent genocidal massacres such as Rwanda in 1994, and dictatorship in South America. We discovered that the German experience of confronting the Holocaust is 'usable' in these contexts precisely because it (often even ambivalently) provokes reflection on issues of 'owning up to the past', apology, reparation, restitution, and the difficult balance to be struck between understanding and condemnation. Our follow-on impact project aims to use stimulus materials drawn from the original research -- historical images of key moments when Germans were forced to confront the crimes committed in their name, and original films -- as the basis for a series of four workshops with a writer (Anthony Haddon, of the Theatre Company Blah Blah Blah), the director and dance tutor at RJC Dance (the leading Black dance organisation in the North of England), and RJC's young dancers, who mostly come from a Black background. Following this period of knowledge exchange in December 2015 and January 2016, we will work with the writer, director and dance tutor to co-produce a dance performance for the RJC's Youth Division. The performance will translate the historical images and films used as stimulus materials -- and the issues of confrontation with the past, silence and denial, acceptance and reparation that the images reveal -- into a dance performance. This dance performance will be rehearsed over three months from January 2015 to April 2016. It will then be staged at the University of Leeds in late April at two twilight performances for students and pupils from local schools, with a third performance at The UK National Holocaust Centre. Two student interns from the University of Leeds will also be involved in the workshops, creative process, and performances, and highlights of our engagement with partners and of the performances will be filmed. In May 2016, the final month of the project, a post-production workshop will take place and a short film will be edited and released as a record of the different interactions and engagements that have taken place. Our aims are: 1) to engage new audiences, and young Black people in particular, with the Holocaust and the German experience of confronting the Holocaust; 2) to produce an original piece of dance performance based on our research and our collaboration with a Black dance organisation; 3) to encourage Black audiences -- but also other diverse audiences at the University of Leeds performances and at the UK National Holocaust Centre -- to reflect on the relevance of the German experience of confronting the Holocaust for other forms of prejudice; 4) to record our work, to provide researchers, educationalists and teachers, and interested organisations with a model that can be developed further.

The manifold catastrophes of the 20th century have torn holes in the cultural fabric of Europe. This project's overarching objective is to re-knit certain threads across those gaps by bringing recently rediscovered musical, theatrical and literary works by Jewish artists back to the attention of scholars and the public. Scholarly outputs will include monographs, journal articles and critical editions, and the project will have wider impact through an interactive web resource, educational projects, and performances at five international cultural festivals. Our scholarly work and artistic practice will engage with three types of 'Jewish archives': a) the works themselves, often providing information on the complexities of the context in which they were created; b) traditional archival documentation; c) ethnographic archives (oral history and testimony) providing historical information and illuminating the meaning of events for past and present generations. Rather than privileging any type of archive as 'text' and others as 'context,' we consider all three as co-texts mutually illuminating each other. All are equally valuable aspects of our investigation. Some of these archives are at risk, giving our work special urgency. While new archives open or are discovered in some parts of the world, the fragile memories of elderly survivors are fast disappearing, and family archives are disposed of or deteriorate. Working alongside partner organisations (performers, educators, museums, libraries, archives and policy-makers) in the UK, US, Central Europe, South Africa and Australia, we will follow existing leads to seek out new archives, and help preserve those that have recently come to light. Our multi-disciplinary team brings research expertise allowing us to focus on the period c.1880-c.1950, the most intense period of Jewish displacement in the modern era. Our case studies include recently recovered theatrical manuscripts from the Terezin Ghetto near Prague, musical works from Eastern Europe uncovered in private collections in Australia, South Africa and England, and literary accounts of survivor experiences written immediately after the Holocaust. Via these case studies of Jewish artistic creation in diverse situations of internment, exile or migration, we will illuminate more broadly the role of art in one of the paradigmatic experiences of the modern age: displacement. When do artists use creative works to represent the rupture of displacement, and when do music, theatre and literature create continuity with their former lives, or a bridge between the old life and the new? Our co-textual performances create a relationship between past and present, not only by drawing upon on all three types of archives (for example, by interspersing scenes from a rediscovered play with narrated survivor testimony against a backdrop of projected archival images), but by engaging explicitly with the multiple possible meanings of these artefacts from the past, both for their original audiences and ourselves. The performances foreground ways in which that past may live on in our present and future - in a very real sense, 'thinking forward through the past'. Audience response testing, developed during the project, will help us determine how successful we are in generating audience engagement in the present. We will attract audiences from widely diverse constituencies by featuring world-leading practitioners such as the Nash Ensemble alongside amateur and student performers, and by staging performances in historically significant venues such as the Terezin Memorial (the site of the former WWII Jewish Ghetto) and Clifford's Tower in York (the site of a 12th-century pogrom). We will perpetuate engagement with these archives by encouraging arts practitioners, policy-makers and cultural event programmers to engage with them, and through educational projects in which participants create their own performances based on archival co-texts.