3. 11. 2019 Lecture with prof. Jakob Lothe - Tidsvitner

Students of Norwegian at Faculty of Arts had an opportunity to welcome professor Jakob Lothe at Masaryk university. The lecture was held in Brno on Tuesday 3rd of December 2019.

Jakob Lothe teaches English literature at the University of Oslo and wrote several books. The lecture was about two books that he wrote. The books are called Tidsvitner in Norwegian and Time’s Witnesses in English. The first book consists of narratives of men who survived Holocaust and the second one focuses on women survivors. Jakob Lothe talked about individual stories. Between the survivors could be found people who came from different countries including Czechoslovakia. Jakob Lothe met all the witnesses in person. He let them tell him their stories. Stories about their lives before and after the war and how they ended up in concentration camps. 

In the second part of his speech has been also discussed how to approach to the people one gets to interview. Jakob Lothe emphasized how important it is to ask the right questions and how there needs to be pauses in speech. Therefore, it is not at all easy to interview someone in written form. Talking to someone in person helps to ger nearer to them, to better understand them and it gives the interviewer an opportunity to make them open up. There was also room for questions at the end of the lecture and Jakob Lothe explained more profoundly how it went with the interviews. The lecture was very interesting.

It is useful for the students that they will know how to interview someone in the future. 

(Zuzana Bláhová, 10. 12. 2019)