Citizens of Memory: Immigrants and Holocaust Remembrance in Contemporary Germany. A book co-authored with Yasemin Yildiz and Andrés Nader.
Remembrance of the Holocaust has been central to Germany’s national self-understanding in the decades since the genocide. Yet, in the last fifty years, the population of Germany has been significantly transformed by migrations of guestworkers and refugees, many from Muslim countries. Muslim immigrants in particular are often described as unwilling to “integrate” into German society and uninterested in Germany history and the Holocaust. However, much evidence exists to complicate this picture. Drawing on the complementary scholarly expertise of its three collaborators in Holocaust studies, migration studies, and memory studies, this project assembles and analyzes examples of immigrants grappling with the history of Nazism and the Holocaust in a variety of arenas, including community activism, novels, essays, performances, and songs. While the scholars have worked together before, this is their first major collaboration. It will result in a co-authored book that explores the effects of transnational migration on cultural memory, demonstrates the ways many immigrants take on the histories of their adopted societies, and interrogates the presumption of Muslim anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.
This project is being supported by an ACLS Collaborative Research Fellowship (2011-2012) from the American Council of Learned Societies.
Remembrance of the Holocaust has been central to Germany’s national self-understanding in the decades since the genocide. Yet, in the last fifty years, the population of Germany has been significantly transformed by migrations of guestworkers and refugees, many from Muslim countries. Muslim immigrants in particular are often described as unwilling to “integrate” into German society and uninterested in Germany history and the Holocaust. However, much evidence exists to complicate this picture. Drawing on the complementary scholarly expertise of its three collaborators in Holocaust studies, migration studies, and memory studies, this project assembles and analyzes examples of immigrants grappling with the history of Nazism and the Holocaust in a variety of arenas, including community activism, novels, essays, performances, and songs. While the scholars have worked together before, this is their first major collaboration. It will result in a co-authored book that explores the effects of transnational migration on cultural memory, demonstrates the ways many immigrants take on the histories of their adopted societies, and interrogates the presumption of Muslim anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.
This project is being supported by an ACLS Collaborative Research Fellowship (2011-2012) from the American Council of Learned Societies.
The Implicated Subject: Multidirectional Memory and the Politics of the Present.
A follow-up to Multidirectional Memory that examines the politics of memory in a variety of national and transnational settings, including post-Holocaust Germany, Israel/Palestine, and transitional South Africa. While the focus of Multidirectional Memory was primarily on the construction and interpretation of an archive of transnational militant and minority articulations of the past, here the focus moves to an "archive of implication"--a deliberately open-ended term that gathers together various modes of historical relation that do not necessarily (or simply) fall under the more direct forms of participation associated with traumatic events, such as victimization and perpetration. Such "implicated" modes of relation encompass bystanders, beneficiaries, latecomers of the postmemory generation, and others connected powerfully to pasts they did not directly experience and to contemporary contexts that might seem distant. A consideration of the issues associated with these subject positions moves us away from overt questions of guilt and innocence and into the more uncertain moral and ethical terrain of complicity--a terrain in which many of us live most of the time.
A follow-up to Multidirectional Memory that examines the politics of memory in a variety of national and transnational settings, including post-Holocaust Germany, Israel/Palestine, and transitional South Africa. While the focus of Multidirectional Memory was primarily on the construction and interpretation of an archive of transnational militant and minority articulations of the past, here the focus moves to an "archive of implication"--a deliberately open-ended term that gathers together various modes of historical relation that do not necessarily (or simply) fall under the more direct forms of participation associated with traumatic events, such as victimization and perpetration. Such "implicated" modes of relation encompass bystanders, beneficiaries, latecomers of the postmemory generation, and others connected powerfully to pasts they did not directly experience and to contemporary contexts that might seem distant. A consideration of the issues associated with these subject positions moves us away from overt questions of guilt and innocence and into the more uncertain moral and ethical terrain of complicity--a terrain in which many of us live most of the time.
