About
Welcome to this special program which I created to examine critical issues concerning our relationship to history and its contemporary relevance. I wrote The Pendulum after several years' research and a lifetime of thinking about the subject matter in this program. The Pendulum highlights the responsibility we have to learn about the past, and to ask questions.
This learning program is useful for the study of totalitarianism, genocide, and society's reactions and responsibilities around them. It looks at the time period I have been concerned with - The Third Reich and WWII - but also raises substantial questions about why and how we study history in general, and how it relates to us personally. The overall goal is to create a heightened awareness of the complex past that we are the inheritors of and to provoke essential questions about our own perspectives of humanity. For this and other reasons, the program is a useful tool for addressing prejudice and intolerance. The program is useful for 9th Grade and upwards, including university level. It includes Basic and Advanced Modules, providing flexibility, depending on the competence level of the class. If you teach younger classes, a special webinar package can be arranged upon request. |
About The Book
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Backcover text:
Is it possible to draw a line under history, particularly when that history involves our families? If we accept that there are certain essential things about the past that cannot be spoken of, does that impact us and the generations that follow? If we choose to delve into that history, are we prepared to face the consequences? These are among the issues taken up by The Pendulum, an autobiographical account of a Brazilian-born granddaughter who faces each of these questions, and eventually finds that she has no choice but to look into her family’s past and the part it played in National Socialism and the SS. With this book, Lindahl demonstrates why, within the vast majority of families seventy years after the end of the Second World War, the painful work of facing the past has only just begun. |
About Julie Lindahl
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I am an author and social entrepreneur living in Sweden. I hold a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from Wellesley College, was a Fulbright scholar in Germany and hold a Master of Philosophy in International Relations from Oxford University.
In 2015-16 I was a recipient of the Stevens Traveling Fellowship from Wellesley College, which supported me to complete six years’ of research that took me to Germany, Latin America and Poland. In 2013 I was named Honorary Research Associate of University College London in connection with its ongoing work on reverberations of war in Germany and Europe since 1945. I continue to write and speak widely in schools and other institutions in Europe and the United States in order to generate a wider awareness of history, how its legacies bear themselves out in the present day and why discussing the past is essential to peace in our time. I am a 2016-17 recipient of a writer's grant from the Swedish Author's Fund. I am the founder of Stories for Society, a non-profit that works with storytelling for learning and communication. |