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Taking its cue from Susan Neiman's controversial book Learning from the Germans: Confronting Race and the Memory of Evils (2019), excerpts of which we will discuss in the seminar, we will engage with the question of how societies can defining crimes of their past, whether the Holocaust in Germany or the mass-murder of Native Americans, slavery and racism in the U.S. To be sure, the seminar certainly does not seek to relativize through comparison, but rather asks, in comparative perspective, what adequate commemoration might meant and how commemoration impacts present-day politics, cultural production and education. Selections from Neiman's book will be complemented by selections from Andrew I. Port's Never Again: Germans and Genocide after the Holocaust (2023) and by selected essays from a collection of essays on the subject we are currently putting together.
All texts will be made available electronically from early March onwards. All intending participants are guaranteed a place in the seminar. |
