This profile is part of a series of interviews chronicling the experiences of researchers who use The New York Public Library's collections for the development of their work.

Thomas Ort is an Associate Professor of Modern European History at Queens College, The City University of New York. The main focus of his research has been modernist and avant-garde life in early twentieth-century Czechoslovakia, but his most recent work concerns the politics of memory in postwar Eastern Europe. His new book project, "The Afterlife of a Death: Meaning, Memory, and the Assassination of Reinhard Heydrich", explores the ever-evolving interpretations of the killing of Reinhard Heydrich, the SS general and architect of the Final Solution who was assassinated in Prague in 1942.

What research are you working on?

I am working on a new book project, tentatively entitled "The Afterlife of a Death: Meaning, Memory, and the Assassination of Reinhard Heydrich". The project concerns the May 1942 assassination in Prague of Reinhard Heydrich, the second highest-ranking official of the Nazi SS, one of the principal architects of the Final Solution, and the governor of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, the statelet established by the Nazis after the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in 1939. His killing was one of the boldest acts of resistance in World War II, but also one of the most controversial in that it precipitated horrific mass reprisals and decimated the Czech resistance movement. "The Afterlife of a Death" explores the curious transformation in the Czech lands of the memory of the killing of Heydrich. Whereas in 1942 and for years thereafter the assassination was widely understood as a reckless and ill-conceived endeavor, by the 1990s it came to be celebrated as the single most important act of Czech resistance. The book traces the shifts in its interpretation under Nazi, Communist, and liberal democratic rule, suggesting that what is commonly termed “memory” is better understood as a social framework of meaning. 

What brought you to the Library?

I received an NEH fellowship for the academic year 2021–22 to work on this project. While I do need to travel to Prague to access materials unavailable elsewhere, I’m incredibly fortunate to have the resources of NYPL at my disposal. As anyone who works on Russia or Eastern Europe knows, the Library has one of the most astonishing Slavic collections in the world. The resources available to the researcher here have only been improved through the creation of the Shared Collection with Princeton, Harvard, and Columbia. NYPL is now without question one of the premier institutions for research on the Slavic world.

When and how did you first get the idea for your research project?

This project has been very long in the making. I started working on it in the mid-1990s when I was a Ph.D. student in History at NYU. It began as a research paper for a class on the memory of the Second World War taught by the late Tony Judt while he was writing his magnum opus, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. I did most of the research for that paper at NYPL!

But the idea for the project goes back even further to a conversation I had with an uncle of mine in Prague in late 1990 or early 1991. We were talking about the assassination, and I was telling him what a great and remarkable event I thought it was. He responded with an almost diametrically opposed point of view, full of venom for Edvard Beneš, the president of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile in London, and the man who ordered Heydrich’s killing. I was absolutely floored by my uncle’s attitude. The sharp differences in our perceptions forced me to question my own assumptions and contemplate the ways in which time, lived experience, and context shape historical understanding. I began to wonder how it was that I had acquired my heroic view while he had come to his vastly more critical perspective. The project really originated in those questions, and I’ve been wanting to work through them for a very long time.

What research tools could you not live without?

I love NYPL’s new Research Catalog which allows me to search for items throughout the Recap Consortium and order them to my reading room with just a few clicks. But I admit that I’m also a sucker for WorldCat. That’s a truly remarkable research tool. I’m likewise a fan of the CUNY OneSearch library catalog, which allows me to simultaneously search the multitude of libraries in the CUNY system and order the books to my home library at Queens College.

What’s the most unexpected item you encountered in your research?

I’ve made a lot of great finds but the ones that stand out relate to the destruction of the village of Lidice in 1942. In retaliation for the assassination of Heydrich, the Nazis massacred the male population of the town, sent the women and children to concentration camps, and then leveled the town to the ground. The Library has in its collection a copy of the postwar Czechoslovak government investigation into the destruction of the village, published by the Ministry of Interior in 1947. Another remarkable find was a volume of unique photographs from the first postwar commemoration of Lidice in June 1945. I believe this item was produced for members of the diplomatic corps in Prague who attended the commemoration. It was gifted to Princeton in 1947, probably by the American diplomat to whom it was given in 1945. But now I’m looking at it from the comfort of the Shoichi Noma Reading Room!