He came to New Zealand with his wife Nikki in 2003, when they were both halfway through completing PhDs in the United Kingdom. The History programme at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington was looking for a history and film specialist, and Professor Lichtner jumped at the chance.
“Nikki and I had gone on holiday in a little village in Tuscany and we had no phone there. So, Professor Charlotte McDonald FRSNZ, the eminent historian, called my parents in Rome,” says Professor Lichtner.
“My mum didn't speak a word of English but eventually got the word out to somebody at the end of the street from where I was staying that New Zealand was calling.”
“I called Charlotte back from an old-fashioned payphone with cards.”
Now, in the milestone of his inaugural lecture, Professor Lichtner will explore his encounters with historical imagination and how it can simultaneously tether us to the past and free us from it.
Entitled Encounters with the historical imagination, his lecture considers how imagination plays a role when looking at history—whether that is to help us fill gaps in evidence, construct national narratives of the past, dream up new questions, or harness the evocative powers of artistic invention.
Professor Lichtner first became fascinated by historical imagination after he was asked to present the keynote address in a postgraduate historian’s conference centred on the topic of imagination.
“I had never really thought about how imagination fits into history,” he says, “but it was really interesting and typical of the ability students have to challenge where we’re at as a discipline and to make us think about things in different ways.
“It is a theme that allows me to connect a lot of different projects that I have done over the years, so it made sense to use it to connect my work on memory, film, and my most recent work on sites of memory.”
As an interdisciplinary cultural historian, Professor Lichtner specialises in the history, memory, and representation of the Holocaust and the Second World War, Italian history, and the history of modern political propaganda.
“I am interested in public narratives about the past,” he says, “in how both societies and people in general perceive their past, and I'm interested in the kinds of forces that shape those perceptions.
“When looking at perceptions of the past, you naturally find your way into memory studies, which is inherently an interdisciplinary area. I have always been curious about how other disciplines approach the same subjects as me.”
His inaugural lecture starts by looking at the place of imagination in Holocaust Studies—a subject close to Professor Lichtner’s heart, due to his own family history and his work with the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand, where he currently serves as the Deputy Chair.
“The entry point into imagination is a kind of fundamental philosophical question around Holocaust history and to what extent we are allowed, or compelled, to imagine what happened, given that it is so extreme that our imagination is bound to fall short,” he says.
“I’m going to propose that whatever we do, holding the survivor’s authentic voice at the centre is essential.”
Professor Lichtner has recently been working with the Holocaust Centre on a documentary about survivors who settled in New Zealand, for which they used artificial intelligence (AI) to animate some of the survivors’ stories. The decision to use AI was difficult, but they wanted to use the survivor’s voice as a guide and AI allowed them to make accessible stories that can be difficult to represent.
“The survivor’s voice remains absolutely crucial to all of this work—you will hear about that in the lecture.”
He will also draw on his experience working with Professor Sally Hill from the School of Languages and Cultures on an article on Italian monuments to fascism as lieu de mémoire (site of memory), places invested with symbolic meaning through the imagination of those visiting.
“We have to contend with the idea that history doesn’t exist in a bubble: it is always relevant, though even historians don’t always realise how.”
The link between present-day events and the past, and how imagination helps fill that gap, is the focus of Professor Lichtner’s lecture.
“I want to look at how film, media, statues, public places, street names, and all those sorts of things shape the ways we think about the past.”
“I'm interested in this because, although we may think that it's only a perception of the past, there are countless ways in which those perceptions then affect behaviours and beliefs in the present.”
Professor Lichtner’s inaugural lecture, Encounters with the historical imagination, is held on Thursday 25 June from 5.30–6.30 pm in the Hunter Council Chamber, Level 2, Hunter building, Kelburn campus. Register to attend.