Viktor Ullmann’s Der Kaiser von Atlantis: Protest Music from within Theresienstadt

Description

JMOF-FIU and FIU Distinguished Professor Tudor Parfitt welcome Dr. Peter Bergamin of the University of Oxford, who will explore Viktor Ullmann’s 1943 opera Der Kaiser von Atlantis (“The Emperor of Atlantis”) as an example of protest music. Through analyses of the opera’s characters, narrative, and music, Bergamin will demonstrate how Ullmann and fellow composer Peter Kien managed to produce a work of resistance to Hitler and the Nazis right under their noses. This program is presented by the Jewish Museum of Florida-FIU & the Holocaust and Genocide Studies Program and is supported by the Global Jewish Studies Program and the Dorothea Green Lecture Series.

Peter Bergamin is Lecturer in Oriental Studies at Mansfield College, University of Oxford, and Research Fellow for the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. His research focuses on the period of the British Mandate for Palestine, with a particular interest in Maximalist-Revisionist Zionism. His first monograph, The Making of the Israeli Far-Right: Abba Ahimeir and Zionist Ideology (I.B. Tauris, 2020), focused on the ideological and political genesis of one of the major leaders of pro-Fascist, Far-Right Zionism in the 1920s and 30s. In 2020, he completed research that examined British archival sources, in order to suggest reasons for Britain’s premature withdrawal from its Palestine Mandate. He is currently researching the life and oeuvre of the British Zionist and historian Paul Goodman, in a project that looks at Anglo-Jewry in the first half of the twentieth century.