Student to Scholar: Coming of Age at the GSA

Abstract

Student to Scholar:Coming of Age at the GSA1 Suzanne Brown-Fleming (bio) In October 2001, for the German Studies Association’s twenty-fifth annual conference held in Washington, DC, I delivered my first professional paper on what would become my first book. I remember feeling extremely nervous as I gave my paper on “Cardinal Aloisius Muench and the Guilt Question in Germany,” for, as is often the case at the GSA, one of the most respected senior scholars in the field of the Roman Catholic Church and the Holocaust, Michael Phayer, would deliver the response to my paper in front of a full and engaged audience. Still a PhD candidate in Modern German History at the University of Maryland-College Park at that time, very green, and in the midst of what is still a fractious scholarly debate on the role the church played in the Nazi and postwar era, I could not imagine that over the next dozen years, I would finish my dissertation, find employment, write a book, write another, and become completely comfortable in the network of scholars serious about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. The German Studies Association annual meetings were integral to these developments. Over the next decade, each year at the German Studies Association, in wonderful cities like San Diego, New Orleans, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, Oakland, and Kansas City, I participated in panels and roundtables with scholars whose work I had read in graduate school and whom I never dreamed would be accessible to me. But accessible they were, and it became a typical pattern to deliver papers with other younger scholars trying to establish themselves and always benefitting from the graciousness of more seasoned figures in the field to chair the panel or deliver the comment. In 2002, Doris Bergen commented on my panel and it is through that relationship that I became connected with the press that published my first book. In 2003, Gerhard Besier and Robert Ericksen invited me to be part of a panel, and through those relationships I became part of the editorial board of the Contemporary Church History Quarterly. So many other meaningful professional relationships with scholars of Nazi Germany grew and were cultivated at the German Studies Association annual meeting, and I could always count on Gerhard Weinberg’s postbanquet gathering to be sure I engaged with them all. [End Page 679] Over the last fifteen years, I have looked forward to those amazing four days during which I could connect with colleagues, hear about fresh new work on the Holocaust, the Nazi era, and the churches, and, as the years roll by, provide to younger scholars some of the important mentoring that was so freely given to me. The German Studies Association annual meeting has always been a sort of oasis and crucible to test new ideas. Most recently, I have been a participant on panels and roundtables related to the International Tracing Service (ITS) in Bad Arolsen, Germany, which was, until November 2007, the largest closed Holocaust-related archival collection in the world. Recently inscribed into the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Memory of the World Register, the size and scope of the collection staggers the imagination. The ITS holdings contain information about millions of people subject to incarceration, forced labor, displacement, or death as a result of World War II; their persecutors; witnesses and accomplices; and the countries and agencies who addressed their needs at war’s end. The German Studies Association itself played a role in opening this critical archive, calling for access to scholars in an official brief issued by the GSA archives committee. As I look forward to the next fifteen years and many more new cities and fresh faces at the German Studies Association annual meeting, I know I will have a receptive audience with which to explore this new trove of documents, numbering in the millions of pages, and will be able to entice others to do the same. I hope that I can offer future generations what was offered to me at each annual meeting: friendship, collegiality, intellectual generosity, curiosity, and fresh ideas for our field going forward into the twenty-first century...