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The UVM Department of German and Russian proudly presents:

The 33rd annual Harry H. Kahn Memorial Lecture

Some had a farm in Africa: Holocaust refugees in colonial Kenya

Natalie Eppelsheimer Middlebury College

Natalie Eppelsheimer is Associate Professor of German at Middlebury College in Vermont. Her research and teaching focus on Holocaust Studies, Exile and Migration Studies, German Colonialism and its Legacies, and Methodologies of Teaching German Language, Literature and Culture. She is the author of Roads Less Traveled: German Jewish Exile Experiences in Kenya 1933-1947 (2019) and has recently published several articles on Holocaust refugees in colonial Kenya.

Dr. Eppelsheimer will speak about the persecution, flight and refugee-lives of German Jews who fled Nationalist Socialist Germany and found safe havens in Kenya. Using personal letters, official correspondences, photographs, diaries, interviews, memoirs, and autobiographical fiction, her talk will illustrate how vastly the lives of individual refugees differed and how their experiences in British East Africa were impacted by the time of emigration, socio-economic status, professional skills, language abilities, age, gender, and supporting networks. It will also address the complex positionality of German Jews within the colonial hierarchies in Kenya and discuss the role of settler farmers that some refugees adopted.

Thursday, April 27 5:00-6:00 PM 413 Waterman

The Harry H. Kahn Memorial Lecture is a very special annual event for the Department of German and Russian at the University of Vermont, given in honor and memory of its long- time professor and former chairperson, Harry H. Kahn, himself a refugee from Nazi Germany. Professor Kahn taught German and Hebrew in the Department of German and Russian at the University of Vermont from 1948 until his retirement in June 1977.