Ilse Nusbaum

Denial Ilse Nusbaum

Ilse Nusbaum was four years old in 1938 when Hitler's soldiers marched into her hometown. Her family was stripped of all that it owned, and her father, Karl Lowy, was denied the right to defend his dissertation. Ten years of academic studies were stolen from him. In 2009, she discovered that the dissertation had survived the war and the Holocaust in his university's library and learned that he was one of the two Jewish students expelled without receiving his doctorate degree. She set forth on a mission of justice on her father's behalf, a posthumous doctorate. Her efforts resulted in a monument on the campus of his university, honoring all 120 Jewish students at the university in 1938, but she failed in her quest for a degree for her father. Denial tells the story in the form of a labyrinth, with bypaths that include the pandemic and protests of 2020-2021.