Hella Pick Lecture Series with the Weidenfeld Institute, University of Sussex
The Austrian Cultural Forum invites you to the second event in the Hella Pick Lecture series in cooperation with the Sussex Weidenfeld Institute of Jewish Studies.
This documentary film screening will be honouring Hella Pick and her remarkable life on the occasion of the anniversary of her death on 4 April 2024.
The UK premiere of the documentary film 'Unsichtbare Mauern' by Austrian filmmaker Robert Pöcksteiner will be followed by a short discussion. The screening will take place in German with English subtitles.
Hella Pick was born in Vienna, into a middle-class Jewish family. Following Germany's annexation of Austria in 1938, and a visit from the Gestapo, Hella’s mother managed to get her on a Kindertransport to Britain in March 1939. Her mother obtained a visa and joined her three months later.
She studied at the London School of Economics, and in 1960, she became the UN correspondent of The Guardian newspaper, where she worked under its chief US correspondent Alistair Cooke and went on to spend more than 30 years reporting on foreign affairs for The Guardian. Hella was a long-standing member of the Advisory Board of the Centre for German-Jewish Studies/Weidenfeld Institute based at the University of Sussex. Along with Lord George Weidenfeld she was instrumental in enabling Sussex to set up a Chair in Modern Israel Studies in 2013. She also secured support from the German and the Austrian governments to help the University establish the Weidenfeld Institute of Jewish Studies.
Hella was awarded honours by the UK, Austria and Germany. In 1988 she received the Goldenes Ehrenzeichen der Republik Österreich. She received an Honorary Doctorate from Sussex in 2018 in recognition of her outstanding contribution to the University.
In the year 2000 she received a CBE and was also awarded the Grosses Verdienstkreuz des Verdienstorden der Republik Deutschland. The Guardian News & Media Archive contains an oral history of her time working for the paper in the 1960s and 1970s and Hella’s memoir, Invisible Walls, an account of her life and career in journalism, was published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 2021. Hella was the Arts and Culture Programme Director at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, an independent think-tank based in London and continued as its Senior Advisor until her death. She had dual British and Austrian citizenship and regularly visited Austria, her ‘home away from home.’ Hella passed away on 4 April 2024.
The Sussex Weidenfeld Institute of Jewish Studies, launched in 2019, is an interdisciplinary research hub that places the Jewish experience in a broader context. Aimed to act as an agent of change, their work is focussed on the present and making past experiences relevant in a world increasingly divided by disinformation and prejudice.
The Institute is home to the Centre for German-Jewish Studies, which for over two decades has been at the forefront of academic enquiry into the history, culture and thought of Jewish refugees from German-speaking lands. The Institute also works with Digital Holocaust Memory and Education Projects and sponsors prestigious Fellowship programmes.
Robert Pöcksteiner is an Austrian filmmaker, producer and director with 30 years of experience in radio and TV. His projects include the four part docu series ‘Soundtrack Österreich’, ‘Snapshots in Time – Die Kinder von Zaatari’, which received a prize for adult education in Austria, 'The New Vienna Congress', ‘Meine ersten hundert Tage - Das erstaunliche Leben der Elsie Slonim‘ and ‘The Jews of Lackenbach’.
