In establishing itself as the successor to National Socialism, West Germany faced a paradigmatic dilemma of political transition: how to situate itself in relation to the state-sponsored crimes of the immediate past. Over the course of several decades, and in the face of conflict and controversy, apublic embrace of responsibility for the Holocaust came to play a key role in the definition of German national identity, even as private discourses continued to focus more on the fate of non-Jewish Germans than on the Shoah. Although it has only recently been remarked, the period in which this public consensus about the Nazi genocide evolved corresponds exactly to the years in which transnational labor migration transformed national demographics.

In our lecture we pursue the entanglement of post-National Socialist and post-migrant histories in the Federal Republic and attempt to think through its significance for the politics of memory and citizenship. Building on our concept of “memory citizenship,” we make visible forms of exclusion and discipline as well as counter-hegemonic interventions at the intersection of memory and migration. We argue that transcultural migrant memories of genocide can help remake the German model of working through the past and move German, Turkish, and European memory cultures in a more radically democratic direction.

Introduction by: William Hirst (The New School)
Featured Speakers: Yasemin Yildiz (University of Illinois), Michael Rothberg (University of Illinois)

Yasemin Yildiz is associate professor of German and Conrad Humanities Scholar at the University of Illinois. Her book Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition won the MLA’s Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures. She is currently working on a co-authored study of immigrants and Holocaust remembrance in contemporary Germany together with Michael Rothberg.

Michael Rothberg is professor and Head of the Department of English at the University of Illinois, where he also directs the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies. Together with Yasemin Yildiz and Andrés Nader he won a 2011-2012 ACLS Collaborative Research Fellowship for a project exploring migration and coming to terms with the past in contemporary Germany.

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