Dr. Karina Urbach: “,Escape-Survival’: The Story of an Austrian Emigrant in England, 1938-1946”

Einladung zu einem Vortrag in englischer Sprache
Zoom-meeting Tuesday, 31st May 2022 at 7 p.m.

Veranstaltungsort: Zoom-meeting

In 1939 the unknown author Rudolf Rösch published a cookbook about Viennese cuisine. SO KOCHT MAN IN WIEN! was a bestseller and is still available today. But Rudolf Rösch had never written this book. Indeed, he may never have existed; a conveniently fictitious product of the Nazi era.

The real author was a Viennese Jewess named Alice Urbach. Before the Nazis took over Austria the book had been published under her own name.

Now, eighty years later, the historian Karina Urbach – Alice’s granddaughter – sets out to uncover the truth behind the stolen cookbook, and tells the story of a family torn apart by the Nazi regime, of a woman who, with her unwavering passion for cooking, survived the horror and losses of the Holocaust to begin a new life in England and America.

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Karina Urbach is a German historian who received her doctorate from the University of Cambridge, UK. From 2015 to 2021 she was a Longterm Visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.

Her most recent books are Go-Betweens for Hitler (2017) and the novel Cambridge 5 (written under the pseudonym Hannah Coler) which won the Crime Cologne Award in 2018.

Her new monograph Alice’s book has been translated into six languages and was made into a documentary for arte/ZDF/ORF in 2022.

It will be published in English on 12th May.