Editor’s note: A copy of this editorial appeared on MinnPost on October 31st.

The Armenian genocide is an indisputable historical fact. The evidence that Ottoman officials set about on a systematic plan to annihilate its Armenian population is undeniable.

So too is the genocide of Native peoples in the United States, brought on by policies that varied from extermination to forced assimilation. The evidence of this points to “intent to destroy, in whole or in part” (U.N. Genocide Convention definition) the Native American populations in the United States.

On Tuesday, Congress voted to affirm its record on the Armenian genocide with formal recognition. Despite several congressional nonbinding resolutions, the House had never formally recognized the Armenian genocide. Until Tuesday. However, instead of addressing this historical injustice, Rep. Omar chose to vote “present,” essentially abstaining from the vote. She would later release a statement, in part stating: 

“A true acknowledgment of historical crimes against humanity must include both the heinous genocides of the 20th century, along with earlier mass slaughters like the transatlantic slave trade and the Native American genocide, which took the lives hundreds of millions of indigenous people in this country.”

The reality, though, is that recognition of one genocide does not diminish another. Drawing awareness of the Armenian genocide does not discount the historical and continued suffering experienced by Native or African peoples as a result of European colonialism. To that end, the recognition of one genocide has never been predicated on the continued denial of others. When the City Councils of Minneapolis and St. Paul declared that the 1862 U.S.-Dakota War paved the road to genocide, it didn’t mean that either city ignored other episodes of mass violence as a result.

Recognizing genocides does not lead to further ignorance of other genocides, as the representative suggests. The opposite is true. Recognition of genocide is an essential step in raising awareness of other episodes of mass violence.

Understanding painful aspects of history help build connections with other difficult parts of history and foster a greater awareness and empathy with the victims. Memory scholars Alejandro Baer and Natan Sznaider aptly describe this phenomenon, pointing to the fact that understanding episodes of genocide creates a “global memory constellation rather than a zero-sum game in which remembrance of history erases others from view.”

In fact, the concept of genocide was built on this very idea. Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin was shocked by the lack of legal recourse for the violence perpetrated against the Armenians when he coined the term genocide as a legal mechanism for understanding and prosecuting the crimes of the Holocaust. An understanding of episodes of genocide is fundamental to understanding others, and it is disheartening to see Omar ignore these interconnections.

Congressional recognition of the Armenian genocide comes at a particularly tense time in relations with Turkey and is seemingly caught up in contemporary turmoil. It is no small irony that the recognition of the Armenian genocides comes as the global community worries of another potential genocide in that region, that of the Kurdish people in Northern Syria. Nevertheless, recognition of the Armenian genocide was overdue and the continued absence of American recognition of the genocide allowed for the Turkish state rhetoric to grow into a century of denial.

It is time for Congress to acknowledge the genocide of Native peoples, too. Omar is right on that point. Her recognition of the Armenian Genocide would have been a step in that direction.

Joe Eggers is the research and outreach coordinator for the Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota.

Editor’s Note: This is an updated post from August 2018. The updated version appeared on MinnPost on October 23.

Today the Spanish government removed the corpse of General Francisco Franco from the Valley of the Fallen, a grandiose mausoleum and basilica near Madrid that the Dictator had designed to eternally enshrine his victory in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). After much criticism and legal battles, Franco’s remains were moved to a family tomb in a cemetery in the outskirts of the capital.

Why has it taken so long to remove the body of a dictator from a sanctuary that celebrates his rule? 

A Pact of Oblivion

 In contrast to the ways we currently understand democratization efforts, the success of Spain’s Transición (the period between the death of Franco in 1975 and the completion of the new Constitution in 1978) was predicated on the assumption that the past is the past, and that silence is the key to paving the way to peace. Spain rapidly transitioned from authoritarianism to democracy, integrated into Europe, and achieved unprecedented economic prosperity. All these changes took place with no attention paid to the crimes committed and suffering inflicted by the Franco regime.

As a result of this unwritten “Pact of Oblivion,” the public presence of Francoist symbols remained largely untouched. The city of Madrid, in which I grew up during the years of the nascent democracy, had numerous visible signs of the dictatorship. The Valley of the Fallen was not an exception. The entire country was decorated with monuments, statues of the Dictator in parks and squares, and plaques in memory of the ‘‘Fallen for God and for Spain’’, which honored only those who perished in the war on the Francoist side. The one and five Peseta coins that I received as part of my allowance had Franco’s likeness engraved with the words “Francisco Franco. Leader of Spain by the Grace of God.” This currency was slowly removed from circulation but continued to be accepted as legal tender until the arrival of the Euro in 2002.

Beyond those immediately scarred by the dictatorship’s terror, the context and meaning of these Francoist symbols and monuments were progressively forgotten, as was the socio-political reality to which they bore witness. But with the turn of the century and the rise of a generation that had come of age in a modern, European, Spain, those old rusty statues and plaques, and the Franco mausoleum itself, started being looked at again with fresh eyes. The Valley of the Fallen is also the final resting place of Falangist Party founder Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera and contains the remains of some 35,000 civilians and soldiers, many of them Republicans executed by Franco’s regime, and transferred to the site on his orders. Many were startled by this spectral anachronism: an active Fascist monument in Europe?

Memoria Histórica

 In the 2000s, grassroots efforts began to locate and exhume the mass graves of the Republican victims of the Civil War and the Franco regime. The emergence of a strong social movement led by the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH) opened up intense debates about the way Spain had dealt, or rather not dealt, with the dictatorship and its victims. Spaniards started to look at the country’s past as Europeans and global citizens, and this involved playing catch up with Western Europe’s direct engagement and openly public wrestling with the memory of their own compromised or authoritarian regimes.

The Holocaust’s increased centrality to European memory politics contributed significantly to raising awareness in a new generation of scholars, artists, journalists, and activists regarding Spain’s blood-soaked past. Becoming European meant critically revisiting this, so to speak, Spanish Sonderweg, regarding the transition to democracy. Part of this dramatic paradigm shift in thinking about the Spanish past ultimately reframed the discussion, adopting terms and ideas around transitional justice, victims’ rights, and memorialization consistent with other nations on the continent.

The exhumation of corpses provided explicit undeniable material evidence of the repressive policies put in place by Franco and sparked an ongoing and emotional public debate over the regime’s concretely identifiable remains, including the Valley of the Fallen.

Irreconcilable narratives

 In 2007 the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) challenged for the first time the status quo with regards to public (non)remembrance of the Civil War and Francoism and proposed a bill for a law commonly known as Ley de Memoria Histórica (Historical Memory). The law was approved by the Parliament and included among its provisions the removal of Francoist symbols from public buildings and spaces. The Memory Law also called for measures to democratize the Valley of the Fallen, but recommendations of a commission appointed in 2011, were ignored during the following years of conservative Popular Party rule (2011-2018). The switch in governments last year brought the question concerning Franco´s remains and the mausoleum back on the center stage of the political agenda.

My colleague Francisco Ferrándiz, whom we hosted on two occasions at CHGS, was one of the members of the 2011 commission. In an interview he stated that “what we advocate for in our report goes beyond the Franco exhumation itself. We underscore the need to resignify the monument (…) the Francoist hierarchy of the site needs to be dismantled”.

While scholars of genocide and transitional justice, and memory activists across the globe will see such recommendations as a matter of reparation and a basic requirement of democratic life, Spanish society seems to be afraid of confronting this difficult past.

At the core of the Spanish memory, conflict are two irreconcilable narratives. The center-right People’s Party –unsurprisingly, given its historical affinity with the pre-democratic regime – stubbornly sticks to the language of the Transición, as if the country was still on the brink of fratricide. For “reconciliation” to happen, they claim, one should not drudge up the pain of the past. The left, however, highlights the unaccounted for atrocities that were committed by the Franco regime both during the war and the forty-year dictatorship that followed. 

There is an insurmountable distance between those who advocate for remembrance as a way of reparative justice and democratic education vs. those who see in forgetting a political virtue. An op-ed in the main conservative newspaper ABC last year, commenting on the governmental decision to dig up Franco from his celebratory resting place, could not characterize the latter position more vividly. The author welcomed the fact that his eleven-year-old son had not the slightest notion of this dark chapter of Spanish history. When driving past the Valley of the Fallen, and to the question “Daddy, who was Franco?”, he decided not to respond and changed the subject. The liberal papers, however, are welcoming the news of the exhumation and relocation. The most repeated word in these circles is: “Finally”.

The Spanish case invites reflections that go beyond its borders, resonating more broadly, not the least in the US. Why maintain monuments, if their foundations cry out for total reevaluation? What if we always lived with the discomfort of their symbolism, the very idea of why this structure existed in the first place? What if when we walked by them, and instead of welcoming us to remember, it was imperious, imposing, and upholding an ideal that wounds us instead?

The exhumation and the challenging process of reclaiming the Valle de Los Caídos for all of Spain’s people will undoubtedly be a source of friction. But in the end, even those who oppose Memoria Histórica will have to recognize that demystifying the most divisive symbol of the dictatorship, does not open old wounds but may help to close them finally.

Alejandro Baer is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota and the Stephen C. Feinstein Chair in Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

Earlier this year, Cambodia marked the 40th anniversary of the collapse of the Khmer Rouge and the end of the genocide that left an estimated 1.5 to 2 million people dead and countless Cambodians displaced. It made sense then for the largest academic group dedicated to the study of genocide, the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), to host its biannual conference in Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh, this past July. The conference would provide an opportunity for the country to demonstrate its resiliency and give attendees (myself included) a chance to see the lingering effects of mass violence in a place where its impacts are still clearly visible and permeate nearly every aspect of society.

On its surface, Cambodia appears to be rapidly improving. I spent two days in Siem Reap, the gateway to the famed Angkor Wat complex, before heading to Phnom Penh for the conference. The city boasted a lively marketplace, plenty of Western-friendly shops and restaurants, and a seemingly booming construction business. Phnom Penh was largely the same. Neon lights illuminated the night skies, and KFC restaurants dotted the streets. Although fewer in number than in Siem Reap, college aged backpackers weren’t uncommon in the capital city. I had seen enough travel shows in preparation for my trip to expect this. Anthony Bourdain remarked that his first trip to Cambodia was a terrible experience, owing largely to the lack of basic infrastructure, but just ten years later, he found the country had improved dramatically. Given that the conference was ten years later still, I had come expecting to see even more economic growth.

To some extent, that investment has come. Cambodia is the recipient of significant international investment; millions of dollars have come pouring in from China, Vietnam, the U.S., and elsewhere, promising jobs and much-needed infrastructure improvements. In theory, it should be a great time to be in Cambodia: its economy is one of the fastest-growing in Southeast Asia, and its human development index score has nearly doubled since the fall of the Khmer Rouge. But scratch beneath the surface a little, and it’s not all that it appears to be. While life in Cambodia is comfortable if you’re an urban elite, the economic boom has mostly left the rural Cambodians behind. The foreign investment has come with serious strings attached. Rumors have spread that a Vietnamese company is now controlling Angkor Wat and sending profits out of Cambodia, an agreement that would give oversight of the country’s most precious cultural treasure to a foreign company. Many of the new hotels that promised foreign tourists to the country sit mostly empty, and the ones that are open limit the accessibility for Cambodian merchants to interact with tourists. The Cambodians I talked to see this boom as largely a bust for them.

To rural Cambodians, the blame can primarily be placed at the feet of the government. Although public dissent is met with swift retaliation from the government, privately, the Cambodians I encountered were more than willing to share their frustrations with the ruling Cambodian People’s Party. The political party has dominated the country’s political landscape for decades and has functionally ruled Cambodia as an authoritarian single-party state since elections in late 2017. Before the genocide, the Cambodian People’s Party had been a communist party, formed to combat French colonial authority. A split with Pol Pot in the 1970s led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge and ultimately, genocide. Today, many of the party’s leaders were formerly connected to the Khmer Rouge. Prime Minister Hun Sen was battalion commander under the Khmer Rouge who fled to Vietnam during one of the purges under the regime.

A standard critique of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (the tribunal system established to bring the leaders of the Khmer Rouge to justice) is its narrow scope. Only five trials were scheduled, and only four were held. It wasn’t until I traveled to Cambodia that I realized how valid this particular criticism is. Traveling through a country with the pains of genocide still so clear, led by an authoritarian Prime Minister with a direct connection to the perpetrators of genocide, I can help but wonder: is this what resiliency and progress are really meant to look like? 

Joe Eggers is the Research & Outreach Coordinator for the Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies.

Everybody has a family narrative or childhood story to tell. Elizabeth Warren’s is about her Native American ancestor; my mother’s about her German Jewish neighbor. And while Elizabeth Warren’s ancestor remains elusive, my mother’s neighbor and what I heard about him growing up has become more concrete over the years. It literally became concrete when in 2005 a Stolperstein (stumbling stone) bearing his name was installed in front of the house he had owned before he was deported and murdered in Theresienstadt.

Here is the story my mother told me. It was in late 1941 when she noted that Sally Cohen, an older gentleman and respected citizen (so she thought) had to wait in the corner of the neighborhood bakery store until everybody else was served. She also noted that he was now wearing a monstrous star-shaped yellow badge that said, “Jude.” My mother was 11 at the time and to this day hasn’t forgotten the sad and embarrassed look on Herr Cohen’s face. When she asked the adults why Herr Cohen was treated that way, she was told not to worry and that all of this was mandated by a new law.

The notion that everything in the Third Reich was done “according to the law” has always puzzled me. By voting for the Enabling Act in March 1933, the democratic parties had abdicated, more or less voluntarily, and transferred absolute power to the government. Hitler was free to write laws as he pleased and as perverse as he and his legal experts wanted them to be. Legal experts? Browsing through the “Who’s Who” of Hitler’s helpers it is astounding to see how many career-obsessed academics and law scholars were willing to sell their soul to the Nazis for the prospect of landing a prestigious job or professorship. In many cases, these positions opened up because they had been held by Jews who were forced to resign. One of the most notorious Nazi apologists was Carl Schmitt who called the Nuremberg Race Laws a “constitution of freedom” because “they freed Germany from the un-German concept of liberalism and equality.”

Find that outrageous? In an interview with the Financial Times, Russia’s strongman Vladimir Putin called liberalism “obsolete” the other day. Viktor Orbán proudly promotes his “illiberal democracy” model in Hungary and gets applause from fellow wannabe dictators in Italy and other European countries. And in the US, self-declared nationalist and Brexit fan Donald Trump has surrounded himself with people like Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo who don’t like liberalism either, at least not the 21st-century version that offers asylum to immigrants and marriage to same-sex couples. Well, they can’t recruit Carl Schmitt anymore to rewrite human rights law, but they can always copy and paste from the Bible. This is what Pompeo’s new Commission on Unalienable Rights seems to have in mind when they talk about reducing human rights to God-given or “natural rights.” I am guessing the human right to healthcare will be off the table too, since there is no mention of health insurance in the New Testament and resurrection from the dead is guaranteed anyway. God-given rights and natural law have been used to legally camouflage mankind’s most horrific actions including slavery, the crusades, and the Thirty Years’ War that left a third of central Europe’s population dead. Not to forget Gottesgnadentum (the divine right of kings) which would come in really handy for Pompeo’s boss if he wants to transition from a 4-year job to a life-time appointment.

Hitler also claimed that the “divinely ordained law of nature” was at the heart of Nazi ideology and jurisdiction and never got tired to enlist the support of the Almighty in his speeches. Alas, the law is only as good as the people who make or interpret it. I keep wondering if all the adults in that bakery store in 1941 really thought the Nuremberg Race Laws were “good” or if they were just rationalizing their guilty conscience away by pointing to the law. Children apparently sensed that something was fundamentally wrong. After Sally Cohen and his wife were deported in 1942, the official word was that they were “resettled to the East.” His textile and fabric store was confiscated by the Nazis and sold for very little money to his former competitors. For them, I assume, there was no question that it was a “good” law.

In the summer of 1943, my grandparents’ house and the bakery next to it burned to the ground during a bombing raid by the Allies. There were only a few things that survived the fire because they were stored behind a steel door in the basement. Among them is a table cloth that has never been used and still has the store’s label and handwritten price tag attached to it. It is from Sally Cohen’s store. Occasionally I take it out of the drawer, look at it and have a hard time trying to wrap my head around the past and the present.

Henning Schroeder is a former vice provost and dean of graduate education and currently a professor in the College of Pharmacy at the University of Minnesota. He’s at schro601@umn.edu. On Twitter: @HenningSchroed1.

Note: A longer story about Sally Cohen and his home can be found here (in German), produced by the Historical Society of Bergisches-Land

The following offers a recap, an update and another perspective to the Waldsee issue previously discussed in this blog 3/25/3019 by George Dalbo under the title “More than a name…” .  The current author discovered the history of the Waldsee name and has remained actively engaged in the Concordia Language Village response.

“We learned that our journey’s end was a place named Waldsee. When I was thirsty or hot, the promise contained in that name immediately invigorated me.”

Trains to Waldsee

This excerpt from Fatelessness by the Hungarian Jewish author Imre Kertesz, holocaust survivor and winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Literature, does not reveal the awful truth of where the train would take him.  “Waldsee”,  “Forest Lake” in English, was the name used by the German SS to ensure smooth transport of 440,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz – Birkenau between May 15 and July 9, 1944.  This was nearly half the total number of Jews murdered at the extermination camp. “Where are we going?” fearful passengers might have asked as they were pressed into train cars. “To Waldsee” came the soothing response. Once arrived, Hungarian Jews were forced to write postcards to their families back home, reassuring them of safe arrival.

Postcards from the edge

“My dearest ones, I feel fine. Hopefully you are all healthy. Please send an answer by postcard. When I’m healthy, I think of you a lot. “ So wrote Agnes Bamberger to her family in Budapest. Perpetuating the fiction, the card was stamped with a specially manufactured postmark, “Waldsee”.  Agnes Bamberger was murdered in a gas chamber at Auschwitz. Her family’s address was noted and passed along for the next transport.

At the other Waldsee, the German language camp in Bemidji that uses the immersion method of language teaching, the postcard rack stands empty. “Why don’t we sell postcards?” the sign reads, then explains the history of the Waldsee postcards from Auschwitz.

Happening upon history

I am not a scholar of the Shoah; I am not a trained historian of anything other than language. However, because of a recent connection with Concordia’s German Language Village in Bemidji, out of old habit, I put the search term “Waldsee + Nazi” in my Internet browser—what can I say, I’m Jewish.

Try it. All of the hits in some way reference the Nazi ruse (George Dalbo’s excellent blogpost is one of them).

With a sense of outrage, I wrote to Concordia Language Village’s (CLV) Executive Director Christine Schultze about my discovery.  “I can only assume that you knew of this and decided to keep the name anyway”, I wrote. Schultze wrote back immediately, “We were not aware…” More followed. I did not expect so comprehensive a response. There was an advisory group formed. I was put on it. There were meetings with alumni of CLV, current “villagers”, parents, teachers, staff, etc. Reactions were invited and then shared. A list of measures was decided on and the advisory group was kept in the loop.

I was hooked. Things were happening, but not fast enough. Months would go without an update. I felt a sense of ownership of this little controversy and so I would write reminders to my contact at CLV and cc: members of the Advisory Committee, “Dear…, I hope you are well. It has been … months since the last update on progress with the measures committed to by CLV…” Soon after, there would be another update to the group.

The Devil in the Detail

The Waldsee issue has become my private obsession. Is it really worth paying it so much attention? Of all the things to obsess about, it is after all, just a name. If my concern is about anti-Semitism past, present and future, surely there are larger and more relevant targets?

And yet, this is my target. The opportunity to offer hundreds of students from all over the US safe entry into what continues to be the most taboo topic in German history is priceless. That I can continue to be involved in this opportunity is not just a private obsession, it is also, a mission.

It is a just a name, but the devil is in the detail.

It’s Personal

I have a connection to the Shoah. My father was a refugee from Dortmund, Germany during the summer of 1938. According to the Yad Vashem list of Jews murdered in Auschwitz, three of my great-grandparents were among them.

Every Jew is touched in one way or another by the Shoah. For me, it is in my blood, my nightmares and my unbidden tears. Happening upon the history of the Waldsee name didn’t just affect me, it punched me in the gut.

I suppose every educator who delves into the horrors that humans visit upon each other struggles to balance outrage with cool academic rigor. I suppose what motivates any researcher of the Shoah is not morbid fascination, but a sense of the precious opportunity to change the future by carefully documenting and teaching about the past. That at least is my hope.

It is just a name, but the devil is in the detail. For me, my motivation to continue watching Waldsee is, to paraphrase Michael Corleone, “Keep your angels close and your devils closer”.
I do.

Alex Treitler has his BA and Masters from Columbia University. He has a second Masters from Uppsala University in Sweden. He is a translator and writer and runs his own business, www.yourstoryshared.com.

Thomas Schmidinger teaches at the University of Vienna in Austria and is both secretary-general of the Austrian Society for the Promotion of Kurdology and coeditor of the Vienna Kurdish Studies Yearbook.

He is an expert on Syria, Iraq, and Iran and the author of a number of books on migration, cultural integration, and the Middle East, several of which have been translated by U.S. publishers.

Dr. Schmidinger was invited by multiple U.S. Universities, institutions, and bookstores to give a series of lectures this September on his newest book, The Battle for the Mountain of the Kurds: Self-Determination and Ethnic Cleansing in the Afrin Region of Rojava (PM Press, 2019). The organizers and publishers worked for months on the book tour, and he had all travel plans and papers in order. Everything was set, or so it seemed.

When Dr. Schmidinger arrived at the boarding area on Thursday September 12th, 2019 for the connecting flight from Amsterdam to Minneapolis, where he previously spent a year as a research fellow at the University of Minnesota, he was detained and questioned by airline security about his research in Syria, Iraq, and Iran and his travels to these countries. The security personnel expressed their assurances that he would be allowed to board, but they needed to get the go-ahead from Washington, D.C. Then, the unexpected happened.

His travel was denied with absolutely no explanation by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Dr.Schmidinger could not fly despite the U.S. Embassy in Vienna stating that there is no formal travel ban from the U.S. State Department against him and despite having a valid Ten Year Multiple Entry Visa granted recently for a conference in Rhode Island just last year in the U.S.

This is clearly a politically motivated action by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security who have banned many scholars and activists, as well as PM Press authors, from entering the country. Along with the reprehensible travel ban of people from six Muslim-majority countries and growing crackdowns on immigrants and refugees, Homeland Security seems to be increasing their scrutiny of people who are critical of U.S. domestic and foreign policy. They are secretly placing them on the No-fly List without explanation. The problem is getting worse, and the political consequences are serious and disturbing.No-fly list. No-drive list. No-walk list. No-talk list. When will it end?

Dr. Schmidinger pondered these questions and more on his return trip to Vienna, “Does Homeland Security now prevent scholars on Iraq, Syria, Iran or Jihadism to enter the U.S.? Do they prevent other scholars on Kurdish Studies to enter the U.S.? Do they prevent people who work in deradicalisation and rehabilitation of Jihadis? Did they get some Turkish propaganda lies and follow instructions from Ankara? I really don’t know, but I would be curious to find out. Until now, I just know that after years of traveling to the U.S., after living and working in Minnesota for a whole year, after being invited to 4th of July parties in the residence of the American ambassador, it seems that I am seen as an enemy and security threat now.”
The Battle for the Mountain of the Kurds: Self-Determination and Ethnic Cleansing in the Afrin Region of Rojava appears to be the book Homeland Security does not want you to read – if you need another reason to buy it, read it, and share it.

– Statement by PM Press and Andrej Grubacic, editor of KAIROS book series and the Chair of the Anthropology and Social Change Department at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, CA
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Thomas Schmidinger is a political scientist and a cultural and social anthropologist. He teaches at the University of Vienna and is both secretary-general of the Austrian Society for the Promotion of Kurdology and coeditor of the Vienna Kurdish Studies Yearbook. He is the author of a number of books on migration, cultural integration, the Middle East, and other topics, several of which have been translated. His previously translated book is Rojava: Revolution, War and the Future of Syria’s Kurds was published by Pluto Press in 2018. His newest book is The Battle for the Mountain of the Kurds: Self-Determination and Ethnic Cleansing in the Afrin Region of Rojava (PM Press, 2019), part of the KAIROS series imprint of the Anthropology and Social Change Department at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, CA.
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Thomas Schmidinger’s book tour for The Battle for the Mountain of the Kurds was to be as follows:

Friday, September 13th at 12noon – Minneapolis, MN at the Institute for Global Studies at the University of Minnesota, Social Sciences Building 267 19th Avenue S, Room 710

Monday, September 16th at 7pm – Berkeley, CA at Books Inc., 1491 Shattuck Ave

Tuesday, September 17th at 7pm – San Francisco, CA at the California Institute of Integral Studies -First Floor Lobby, 1453 Mission St. Hosted by the Anthropology and Social Change Department and cosponsored by the Bay Area Mesopotamia Solidarity

Wednesday, September 18th at 7pm – Philadelphia, PA at The Wooden Shoe Books 704 South St. Cosponsored by Wooden Shoe Books and The Radical Education Department (RED)

Thursday, September 19th at 7pm – New York, NY at Bluestockings Books 172 Allen St, Sponsored by Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung—New York Office

More information at pmpress.org

More information about KAIROS at http://www.pmpress.org/content/article.php/Kairos

For press inquires, please contact:
Stephanie at PM Press – stephanie@pmpress.org
Steven at PM Press – steven@pmpress.org
Thomas Schmidinger – thomas.schmidinger@univie.ac.at

Kathryn Agnes Huether was born and raised in rural Montana. As the daughter of a music teacher and a school superintendent, music and education were always at the center of her life. At the age of 4, Kathryn’s mother, Renée, introduced the violin into her life, driving 100 miles one way for a half-hour violin lesson. Renée’s dedication to her daughter’s musical training dynamically shaped Kathryn’s worldview and studies, as did David, her father, who exemplified hard work and kindness. Kathryn graduated with a double BA in Violin Performance and Religious Studies from Montana State University in 2013. Following undergrad, Kathryn went on to attend the University of Colorado-Boulder, where she received a Master’s in Religious Studies, with an endorsement in Jewish Studies. Her first Master’s thesis was the catalyst for her PhD research, as she examined the soundtracks of two Holocaust film documentaries, Night and Fog (1956) and Auschwitz Death Camp: Oprah, Elie Wiesel (2006), arguing that the accompanying soundtracks subjectively influenced a viewer’s reception and understanding of the documentary material presented. 

In 2016, Kathryn began her second Master’s in Musicology at the University of Minnesota and is now in her fourth year as a PhD candidate in Musicology. Kathryn’s dissertation examines the affective influence of sonic media technology, and the philosophical nature of sounds in Holocaust museums and memorial representations. In other words, how does what a visitor hears in a museum exhibit or representation of the Holocaust impact their response and understanding of the Holocaust? Addressing a breadth of sonic variants—from the sonic influence of language in the Holocaust; to audio guides; and further, to pre-existing soundscapes at the historical sites, such as Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau, Kathryn highlights the role of sound in a field that has primarily focused on visuality. Kathryn just finished a 3-month research fellowship at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where she worked closely with the “First Person” survivor testimony program. This upcoming 2019-2020 academic year she will begin curating an audio guide for the Treblinka memorial site as an Interdisciplinary Doctoral Fellow under CHGS. She aspires to curate an audio guide that will bridge the gap between theory and practice, as she will investigate the implications and challenges of curating an audio guide about the Holocaust, and will make the audio guide live and accessible to the public via a phone application. Kathryn hopes that if her research makes any impact at all, it will at least encourage people to truly listen to their world and each other.

Germans also separated children from their parents. In a previously unknown collection at the National Archives of Namibia in Windhoek, I recently discovered documents that confirm colonial authorities used family separation as a means of domination in German Southwest Africa (present-day Namibia), Germany’s first and only settlement colony.

A dispatch to the Omaruru District Commander, for instance, details the separation of Emma, an 8-year-old Herero girl, from her parents as they departed from the capital city of Windhoek. It concludes that “she ran after her parents since she belongs with her Omaruru family.” Emma’s fate remains a mystery to the present day. 

Another collection exposes the bureaucratic extent of German settler-colonial practices in Namibia. In a folder of “native passports” (Paßmarken), I found several lists of all “employed prisoners-of-war.” These records include a person’s name, age, “tribal” affiliation, and the last-known location of their parents. In most cases, officials simply wrote “dead” (tot) with no additional information. Several colonial administrators remarked in documents that these efforts provided the imperial government an “effective means of controlling the local populations.”   

After the arrival of German settlers in Namibia in 1884, colonial officials moved quickly to displace Africans from their traditional lands, first through negotiations and the establishment of so-called “protection treaties,” and later through force of arms. The most destructive effort began in 1904 when soldiers under the command of General Lothar von Trotha initiated the first genocide of the twentieth century against the Herero and Nama, the largest and most powerful communities in the colony.

In what historians now refer to as his “Annihilation Order,” Trotha decreed in October 1904 that:

The Herero are no longer German subjects [and] must now leave the country. If it refuses, I shall compel it do so with the [great cannon]. Any Herero found inside the German frontier, with or without a gun or cattle, will be executed. I shall spare neither women nor children. Such are my words to the Herero people.

Trotha’s actions resulted in the murder of approximately 60-80% and 25-35% of the Herero and Nama’s pre-1904 populations, respectively. The German colonial government also rounded-up entire families and placed them in concentration camps (Konzentrationlager), where thousands more died from exposure and inhumane treatment. In 1908, German authorities relocated survivors to segregated “native reservations” (Eingeborenenwerften), required them carry “native passports,” and forced them to rely on the colonial government for basic commodities and supplies.

Descendants of Herero and Nama victims continue to lobby Namibian and German political leaders for reparations and the return of their traditional homelands. Their appeals and legal efforts, however, have thus far warranted them few victories.

Any serious historian recognizes the importance of historical context and the necessity for evaluating the past on its own terms. At a time when high-profile media personalities invoke a skewed or blatantly false historical narrative to justify policy on a seemingly daily basis, I am wary of arguments that clumsily rely on unnuanced comparisons.     

But professional responsibility does not abjure scholars the right to call attention to present-day human rights crises, from those fleeing systematic violence in Syria to the reported atrocious conditions and treatment of people in detention centers at the U.S. southern border. Academics in the humanities, in particular, dedicate their careers to the collection, examination, and comparison of diverse source materials in an effort to provide answers to complicated questions. Critical analysis, however, oftentimes leads to uncomfortable conclusions.

We can no longer comfort ourselves in a false logic that regards discriminatory practices against so-called “stateless” peoples as a unique aspect of German history or the distant past. It is incumbent for each of us to continue to learn about the plight of the rightless so as to identify the dangerous potentials of their condition. History does not repeat itself, but a critical evaluation of past events can at least provide us means to learn about the destructive capabilities of nationalism, racism, and collective fears of a so-called “Other.”

The tenets of liberal democracy necessitate that we contemplate the lessons of history. A failure to do so imperils the standing of everyone, but most especially those who have nothing left except for what Hannah Arendt pointedly identifies as their “abstract nakedness of being human.”

Dr. Adam A. Blackler is an assistant professor of history at the University of Wyoming. His current book project, entitled Heathens, “Hottentots,” and Heimat: Southwest Africa and the Boundaries of German Identity, 1842-1915, explores the transnational dimensions of German colonialism, race, and genocide in German Southwest Africa. He is presently co-editing After the Imperialist Imagination: A Quarter Century of Research on Global Germany and Its Legacies, an anthology on German interactions across the globe (Peter Lang, 2020). He will publish “Settler-Colonialism and Its Eliminatory Repercussions in the Nineteenth Century” in A Cultural History of Genocide: The Long Nineteenth Century (Bloomsbury, 2020).

Collection citation:
Archives:
National Archives of Namibia (NAN) – Windhoek, Namibia

Collections:
Kaislerliches Bizirksamt Windhoek (BWI)
Zentralbureau des Kaiserlichen Gouvernements (ZBU)

Genocide studies has always been characterized by its interdisciplinarity. The consolidation in the last few decades of visual studies (including film and media) as academic fields, has allowed for a far more rigorous analysis of images of genocides that rests upon formal and semantic expertise specific to audio-visual representation. Thus, it is no longer a matter of invoking images as illustrations, but rather of wondering in what ways they contribute both to the knowledge of events and to the transmission of memory, whether individual or collective.

To interpret images of genocide consequently involves a double competence, which puts genocide specialists (historians, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, among others) and image analysts (semiologists, film or photography historians, new media specialists) in a separately delicate situation. The task demands the command of theory and methods within multiple scholarly fields, including specific instruments for the analysis of visual texts. The question continues to be: what can the image contribute –as iconography and as a visual narrative– to the comprehension of genocide and mass violence that could not be gained from other available documents which were traditionally studied by the discipline of history. This is a far reaching and complex question, and therefore its answers must be both ambitious and open to discussion and contestation.

To probe this question my colleague Vicente Sánchez-Biosca, and I have curated a special issue of the International Association of Genocide Scholars’ journal dedicated to the exploration of images in genocide studies – with a special focus on memory – and its methodological considerations.

“You Could See Rage”: Visual Testimony in Post-genocide Guatemala by Lacey M. Schauwecker. The author analyses the link between narrative and audio-visual testimonies to study the Guatemalan genocide, using the notions of visuality and countervisuality. In this context, she examines how survivor Rigoberta Menchú and performance artist Regina José Galindo utilize the testimony to express rage. Thereby, Schauwecker associates this type of testimony with the witnesses’ right to testify on their own terms beyond institutional processes and imperatives.

Nineteen Minutes of Horror: Insights from the Scorpions Execution Video by Iva Vukušić is the third article. In there, the author notes that the video recorded by the Scorpion unit during the Srebrenica genocide in the summer of 1995, provides unique insights into the nature of the crime, as well as the behavior of the perpetrators, and it constitutes a significant contribution to our knowledge of the events.

Christophe Busch’s article focuses on photographs taken by Nazi perpetrators. In Bonding Images: Photography and Film as Acts of Perpetration the author analyses how photography is utilized to create an in-group, noting that, as images are performative, the imagery bound the in-group.

The figure of the perpetrator is also analyzed by Ana Laura Ros in her analysis of the documentary film El Mocito. In her article El Mocito:  A Study of Cruelty at the Intersection of Chile’s Military & Civil Society. The author argues that the film poses questions about responsibility for, and complicity with, the cruelty that took place during the military regime and beyond, which all members of Chilean society must consider.

In Vicente Sánchez-Biosca’s article, Challenging Old and New Images Representing the Cambodian Genocide: ‘The Missing Picture’, the author examines the film “L’image Manquante” by Rithy Panh to highlight the way in which the French-schooled Cambodian director approaches the classical question inherited from the Holocaust of the non-representability of a genocide.

In Cockroaches, Cows and “Canines of the Hebrew Faith”: Exploring Animal Imagery in Graphic Novels about Genocide, Deborah Mayersen suggests that graphic novels about genocide feature a surprisingly rich array of animal imagery. While there has been substantial analysis of the anthropomorphic animals in Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Mayersen argues that the roles and functions of non-anthropomorphized animals have received scant attention. In this vein, in her article she carries out a comparative analysis of ten graphic novels about genocide to identify and elucidate the archetypical functions of nonanthropomorphized animals.

Nora Nunn’s article, The Unbribable Witness: Image, Word, and Testimony of Crimes against Humanity in Mark Twain’s King Leopold’s Soliloquy (1905), studies the crimes committed in the Belgian Congo Free State through the work of Mark Twain. The author suggests that this text aimed to evoke its Euro-American audience’s empathy by activating their imaginations. In this way, Nunn considers how the visual imagery in Twain’s text engenders questions about fact, testimony, and witnessing in the realm of human rights and mass violence

The final article, Memory and Distance: On Nobuhiro Suwa’s A Letter from Hiroshima byJessica Fernanda Conejo Muñoz, examines the short film’s various memory strategies regarding the atomic bombing in the Japanese city referenced in the title. Conejo Muñoz argues that this film is a reflective game whose approach to the past is based on distancing effects.

I encourage you to view the special issue of the journal and continue to explore the significance and role of images in genocide and mass violence studies. Our edited volume of Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal was published last year, and is freely accessible through the International Association of Genocide Scholars website.

Lior Zylberman has a Ph.D. in Social Sciences (UBA), is a professor of Sociology (UBA) and a researcher at the CONICET (National Scientific and Technical Research Council) and at the Center for Genocide Studies (UNTREF). His research topic is the representation of genocides in documentary film and he has published numerous articles on the subject.

This past June, the Memory Studies Association held its Third Annual Memory Studies Conference at the historic Complutense University Madrid. Hundreds of memory scholars from all over the world flocked to the city for the four-day conference, which was co-sponsored by the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. The conference primarily took place at the Faculty of Philology buildings, which was a fitting location (considering its central role during the Spanish Civil War) to contemplate and reflect on the role of memory in our world today. 

The largest conference on memory studies to date, the program featured a keynote lecture from Aleida Assman (University of Konstanz) and Viet Thanh Nguyen (USC) and multiple roundtables and special sessions, like the one on “Memory Traditions around the World”, which included our colleague Iyekiyapiwin Darlene St. Clair (St. Cloud State University). Attendees also had the opportunity to hear from prominent scholars on topics such as publishing, careers in memory studies, institutional memory politics, and memory activism. These roundtables were especially helpful for graduate students and gave them the opportunity to interact with scholars like Jeffrey Olick, Barbie Zelizer, Astrid Erll, Daniel Levy, Marianne Hirsch, and Michael Rothberg. With over 200 panels, attendees were treated to a comprehensive look at the state of memory studies today.

In addition to scholars from around the globe, our very own graduate students and professors participated in this year’s conference. From second-year PhD students to established professors, the Minnesota contingent did a fantastic job showcasing their work and participating in discussions concerning the future of memory studies. The strong presence of UMN scholars from various departments across CLA demonstrates not only its interdisciplinary nature but the importance of the field. Through their own scholarly work and support of graduate students, professors such as Alejandro Baer (Director, Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies), Joachim Savelsberg (Sociology), and Ofelia Ferrán (Spanish and Portuguese) have ensured that students are constantly thinking about the critical role of memory in historical, socio-political and literary scholarship. 

List of Presenters and Papers:

Alejandro Baer: “De-colonizing Columbus? Spain’s resistance to a “Politics of Regret.”

Ofelia Ferrán: “Francesc Torres: The Performance of Trauma.”

Joachim Savelsberg: Roundtable, “American Exceptionalism in Memory Politics.” 

Darlene St. Clair (St. Cloud State University): Roundtable, “Connecting Memory Traditions around the World.” 

Michal Kobialka: “Of Awkward Objects and Collateral Memories.”

Christopher Levesque: ‘Denkmäler der Scand’ in Charlottesville and Berlin: Comparing Far-Right Populism and Collective Memory in the American and German Context.”

Taylor Nelson: “American before Anything Else: Race and Responsibility in the U.S. Peace Corps.”

Erma Nezirevic: “Pedir un café puede costarte la vida”: Phobias of Democracy in (Post-) Crisis Spain

Jazmine Contreras: “‘We do not commemorate perpetrators’: The Politics of Memory at the May 4th Remembrance Day Commemoration in the Netherlands.”

Jazmine Contreras is a sixth-year PhD candidate in the History Department at the University of Minnesota. Her dissertation examines contemporary historical memory of the Second World War and Holocaust in the Netherlands.