In this interview with Yagmur Karakaya, Prof. Olick demystifies processes involved in collective memory, discusses the role of emotions and nostalgia in remembrance, and introduces the notion of regional constellations of memory. Olick also untangles the fruitful concept of “legitimation profiles”, which he applies in his latest book to the ways Germany confronts the specters of its Nazi past. 

Jeffrey Olick is a professor of sociology and history and chair of the sociology department at the University of Virginia. He is a cultural and historical sociologist whose work has focused on collective memory and commemoration, critical theory, transitional justice, postwar Germany, and sociological theory more generally. His books include “The Politics of Regret: On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility,” and “The Sins of Fathers: Germany, Memory, Method”.

(Editor’s note: This is a condensed version of our interview with Dr. Olick. Follow the link at the end to read the interview in its entirety.)

In your work, you introduce concepts that disentangle the often mystified term ¨collective memory.¨ Can you elaborate on those?

Collective memory tends to imply that there’s one collective memory that everyone shares or that collective memory is this mystical group mind. And I don’t think of it that way. So in my own work, I refer to what I call “mnemonic practices” practices and also “mnemonic products” and “mnemonic processes.” And there are wide numbers of different mnemonic practices, and products, and processes. So for instance, remembering your phone number is a particular kind of mnemonic practice. Remembering who the president is is another one. Remembering that time we went on a hike is yet a different one. Remembering that America had a civil war is yet a different one. So is giving a speech or painting a painting about the past, or telling a story, or recalling a set of numbers and facts. These are all different mnemonic practices. The question from memory studies is how they relate to each other or don’t. There’s also a variety of mnemonic products. You know, a statue is a mnemonic product. A historical movie is a mnemonic product. An essay is a mnemonic product; so is a story I might tell at a dinner table. These are different mnemonic products. The question is, how are they, in the words of media scholars, how are they intermedial? How does the telling of the story at the dinner table, affect people’s experiences and the way in which a museum is constructed? So the question is how do all of these different mnemonic products, practices, and processes relate to each other? Which is, I think, a more differentiated way of speaking about the many things that constitute what we label with the term collective memory.

So, I have a “personal interest” where do you see emotions in all this? Like where do you see and how do you think we can theorize in emotions into this interaction between individual and collective memory or mnemonic practices?

So I would say, first of all, that memories preserve emotions and can call up emotions in interesting and complex ways. So that, for instance, remembering something that angered you in the past, can make you angry again. Emotion also feeds into the ways in which we decide something is worth remembering. The notion of the trope in politics, particularly the politics of genocide, “Never Forget.” That implores us, it demands us, it demands something of us, it riles us up, it creates a strong sense of obligation. So emotions feed into both what we remember and memory feeds into and creates emotions when we do remember. One of the interesting things though is the ways in which both memory and emotion can be separate. So I can remember that I was really angry at my partner or my kid or something like that, but I’m not angry anymore about it. I can remember that I was, but it’s gone away. I remember what caused it, and isn’t it strange that I was so angry at the time, but I don’t feel that anger anymore. By the same token, I can remember the feeling of anger sometimes. I wake up (this is a terrible thing to say about myself), sometimes I wake up angry and I can’t put my finger on what it is I’m angry about… So these work in complex ways, but I should also point out that so much of the discussion in memory studies is about trauma, and negative memories, and outrage, and things like that. There’s also memories of joy and happiness. It’s very important in certain circumstances to hold onto positive memories; that something actually worked really well or was really nice. Of course, the one lesson of a long life is that it’s very hard, you can’t step in the same river twice, that even something you remember as great, may not have been all that great in fact. So this is one of the distortions of nostalgia, which is an emotional distortion. You venerate a past and you load extra emotions onto a past that may or may not have been actually a part of the process in the first place.

In your book “The Sins of the Fathers” you develop a new concept, legitimation profiles. Can you explain it for us, and talk about its applicability to different cases?

The Sins of the Fathers is organized on two analytical principles: profile and genre. Profile is meant to understand the relational structure of memories within cultures at particular moments or in a particular epoch; whereas genres are meant to understand the ways in which every version of the past is in dialogue, not only with the past itself but with previous memories or versions of the past. So the genres are the connective structure through time; profiles are the non-reductive structure or totality of a system of meanings in the present. So from French structuralism we know that there is a discursive structure where tall and short, fat and skinny, high and low, and lots of other kinds of concepts are in a paired relational structure at a particular moment. So a particular version of the past may fit with a particular legitimacy claim. So in the book, I argue for instance, that in the 1980s when German politicians are trying to legitimate Germany by saying it’s a normal nation, the idea of Germany as a normal nation entails a particular view of the past. And so they produce a particular form of public memory that relativizes the Nazi past; whereas, in contrast, in earlier periods, for instance, in the 1960s, in what I call the moral nation, which is the legitimate profile, Germany wants to appear to the world as a moral entity with authority. And a key part of being a moral nation is to have a deep acknowledgment of the guilt of the past, and this is captured, for instance, when the German Chancellor, Willy Brandt, goes to Warsaw and goes down on his knees in a gesture of repentance. This is something that the later Chancellor of Germany, Helmut Kohl, would never have done because he’s trying to claim that Germany is normal. In Sins of the Fathers, I talk about 3 legitimation profiles: the reliable nation of the 1950s and early 60s, the moral nation of the mid-1960s to early 1970s, and then the normal nation of the 1980s up through unification. To capture the ways in which images of the past fit within a wider political-cultural system of meanings; some of which concern the past, some of which concern the present. So in other words, not to treat memory as something separable, something that can be pried out of a deeper cultural nexus intact. Memory works together with other meanings and symbols in what I think of as an irreducible profile.

In recent talks, you have introduced the concept of “regions of memory”. How does it fit within the overall trend of transnationalization?

There’s been an argument about, with the mass media and the worldwide knowledge about certain historical events, there’s been a globalization or universalization of memory. So in a way, global memory has replaced national memory as the point of reference. What I want to show is also that there are entities or clusters between the level of the nation-state and the global, which I call regional. So there are regional constellations of memory like Central and East-Central Europe, where different nation-states, and different groups are remembering the past in complex ways which are not global, but nor are they constituted particularly by the nation-states that can be found on a map in this geographical arena. A good example of work in this field is the impact of Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands; where he shows that there is a territory and a broad period of destruction from the late 1920s through the 1950s, which cannot be delimited by the declaration of war in 1939 or 1941 and the declaration of the end of war in 1945, nor can it be defined solely by what happened in Germany or what happened in Poland, but these issues spread out and there are complicated geographical and cultural clusters; which I try to capture with the notion of regions of memory. There are ways in which, for instance… countries in the Southern continent of Latin America are dealing with similar kinds of issues. There are ways in which Canada and, to some extent, the United States, but also Australia and New Zealand are a region of memory, dealing with the treatment of indigenous peoples. There is a cluster of issues which define Northeast Asia as a region of memory; South Korea with the comfort women issue and Japanese imperialism and the Rape of Nanjing all form a sort of cluster of issues that come about from a century of Japanese imperialism resulting in the Pacific War, but what can’t be defined solely as Japanese memory or Chinese memory or South Korean memory.

Find the complete interview here.

Yagmur Karakaya is a PhD candidate at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She studies nostalgia as a collective force, highlighting its central place within both populist political discourse and popular culture. Her work has appeared at American Journal of Cultural Sociology and New Perspectives on Turkey. With Alejandro Baer, in an article, forthcoming in Sociological Forum, she compares Holocaust Remembrance Days (HRD) in Spain and Turkey to argue that even though memory travels transnationally, the nation-state still is the most powerful translator. 

The roots of today’s racial and religious structures can be found in late medieval Spain and its colonies. It was in the Iberian Peninsula, during the fifteenth century, that terms like raza (race) and linaje (lineage) went from being used to describe horse or dog breeding to being applied to Jews and “Moors.” This switch coincided with the appearance of anti-converso ideologies, which would turn theological categories (like Jew and Muslim), into biological ones (limpieza de sangre).

It is precisely this concept of “race,” one that associates issues of blood purity with relatively recent conversion to Christianity, which was later applied to the classification of peoples in the Spanish colonies. This ordering was crucial for the correct organization of a colonial enterprise whose stated mission was to impose Christianity upon a population of pagans and heretics. The consequences of these developments went far beyond the already vast Spanish Empire. Indeed, it was through the repudiation of its ethnic diversity and the subsequent establishment on the American continent of systems of production based on the exploitation of ethnically differentiated groups that Spain established, more than five hundred years ago, the fundaments of globalized modernity.

It is against this background that Jews and Muslims in Contemporary Spain: Redefining National Boundaries analyzes the place granted to Jews and Muslims in the construction of contemporary Spanish national identity. In the book, the focus is put on the transition from an exclusive, homogeneous sense of collective self toward a more pluralistic, open and tolerant one, in a European context. Given Spain’s crucial role at the genesis of the global hierarchization of the world population along “racial” lines that took place about five hundred years ago, the efforts undertaken by the end of the twentieth century to adopt the country’s structures to the increasing valorisation of diversity, borders permeability, and coexistence of minority cultures within the nation-state can be considered as paradigmatic of the reassessment of religious difference in late modernity. The book is the result of an original combination of quantitative and qualitative methodologies, approached from a rich trans-disciplinary analytical framework. In addition, the choice in favor of a comparative study of Muslims and Jews, uncommon in the context of studies of contemporary Spain, proves to be particularly fruitful and revealing.

The study approaches this process from different dimensions. At the national level, it analyzes the reflection of this process in nationalist historiography, the education system and the public debates on national identity. At the international level, it tackles the problem from the perspective of Spanish foreign policy towards Israel and the Arab-Muslim states in a changing global context. From the social-communicational point of view, the emphasis was put on the construction of the self–other (Jewish and Muslim) dichotomy as reflected in the three leading Spanish newspapers (El País, El Mundo and ABC). In addition, attention was paid to the changes undergone by the Jewish and Muslim local communities during the same period.

The work shows that since 1986, Spain experienced significant transformations at the social, cultural, and international levels. These changes affected the construction of Spanish contemporary identity directly, as the different national narratives were conveniently adapted to the circumstances. The images of Muslims and Jews generated in this context were often ambivalent, in correspondence with the intrinsically problematic attempt at avoiding any explicitly ethnocentric rhetoric while implicitly preserving it. Since then, this central contradiction permeated Spanish nationalist historiography, education system, and predominant national narratives.

There is an active line of continuity between the perceptions of Muslims prevalent at the birth of the Spanish empire, which according to Anibal Quijano laid the basis for the global structures of coloniality still commonplace in today’s world, and those widespread in today’s Spain. During the period under study, Muslim otherness had two main dimensions: the complementarity between their legal marginalization as immigrants and their incorporation into the economic system as underpaid laborers, on the one hand, and their construction as internal and external enemies, on the other.

In the case of Jews, the central role they have historically played in the construction of Spanish national identity and their small numeric presence in contemporary Spain make their difference more conceptual than practical. Unlike Muslims, Jews – even those coming from North Africa – are not “colored” in modern Spain. They are not assigned attributes of “racial” inferiority to justify economic exploitation and/or political paternalism. Instead, Jewish otherness is related to deeply rooted notions of extraordinary power and moral purity/impurity.

Martina L. Weisz is a Research Fellow at the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (SICSA). She studied Political Science and International Relations at the Universidad Nacional de Rosario in Argentina, holds an M.A. in International Relations from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and completed her Ph.D. there as well. Her publications focus on human rights, foreign policy, racism and religious difference. Her book Jews and Muslims in Contemporary Spain: Redefining National Boundaries was published by DeGruyter Oldenbourg in 2019.

Daniel Reynolds is the Seth Richards Professor in Modern Languages at Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa. His works examines the ways representation of the Holocaust has shifted in museums and memorial sites across the United States, Poland and Germany. His most recent book, Postcards from Auschwitz, was published last year.

In November, the Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies welcomed Dr. Reynolds for a lecture where he touched on the themes of his latest book and Holocaust tourism’s effect on how we remember.

Kathryn Huether: I wanted to start with Michael Rothberg’s text regarding migration and the Turkish immigrant in Germany, in your book you discuss the distinction between a Holocaust tourist and pilgrim, and it just reminded me of the “double paradox” that Michael Rothberg highlights. Could you speak more of your distinction between the pilgrim and tourist?

Daniel Reynolds: Yes, I guess I would be sure to say that it is a distinction but not an opposition, I would say that for me, when we think of pilgrimage, there are echoes of the sacred. There is also some echo of homage to one’s ancestors, one’s family background. I think that’s very much a part of many people’s purpose in going to Holocaust memory sites. In turn, it was also important to me to address the fact that not every visitor to sites of Holocaust remembrance can make a pilgrimage, and that I think many are there by accident. Maybe they happen to be on a city tour; many times it is school children who are often reluctant participants in a tour. But I also want to allow for the possibility that tourists—even if they don’t plan on it—can have experiences that are so deep and so meaningful that they can convert their experiences into a form of pilgrimage. Maybe it forces them to have a kind of reflective experience that we often associate with the Holocaust. I think we should use the word tourist without having to apologize for being a tourist at Holocaust sites.

Right. Yes. And do you think that perhaps certain sites are more conducive to that—because certainly, Auschwitz-Birkenau is where most people go…but sites such as Treblinka offers much more reflection, but it is harder to get to?

Yes, it is harder to get to. And I think that it is definitely a part of it. When I think of pilgrimage, it’s funny, when I think of sites of pilgrimage I think of Bethlehem and the Church of Nativity which gets packed with people. There are ways in which sites that we think of as typical destinations of pilgrimage actually highlight some of the more unpleasant attributes of tourism that we criticize, i.e. the crowds. But yea, I would agree that different sites lend themselves to more reflective experiences. I think Treblinka for me was very moving, and Belžec, of course is this massive installation, but it’s also very remote so you’re often alone there. And I would say at Auschwitz that Birkenau is by far the more reflective space.

That’s great. I wanted to bring it back to your book and much of your argument is based on this concept that you call phenomenology of tourism. Could you speak more of that?

So phenomenology of tourism, I’m not a trained ethnographer—I don’t have tons of interviews with tourists that I’ve conducted and I don’t have a method for quantifying anything experientially…I am not so interested in showing how some tourists feel one way versus how many think the other way. I am more interested in demonstrating the range of possibilities for responses. And I think phenomenology, which is how we come to know of the world, not just through logic and rational thought, but also through sensory perception and affect [, in relation] to tourism is always an embodied encountered in space. So you’re always experiencing the site sensorially, in ways that you are not necessarily consciously processing; affectively, responding to different behaviors in addition to the information you’re given—it’s never just about the information presented at the site. So I’m really interested in how all of those things kind of influence one another. I think it’s a way for me as a humanist, someone who is not trained as a social scientist who works with data, to ask questions about tourism and give as much knowledge as possible.

I agree—it’s very close to what I’m working on now. And I wanted to push this a bit further, you focus your phenomenological reading on the visual, and of course there are multiple senses that are impacted—last summer I was able to visit the preservationist department at Auschwitz-Birkenau with my fellowship group from the Auschwitz Jewish Center, and the preservationists dedicate a large part of their efforts to preserving objects such as shoes, suitcases, shoes, toothbrushes, etc.—but this act of preservation is strongly connected to the visual, and one of the preservationist said that within fifteen years “this toothbrush will be gone, this suitcase deteriorated.” And, I feel a bit dark saying this, but one of my colleagues asked, “what are you going to do with the human hair when that is gone as well?” Are you going to replace it with fake hair, for instance as the infamous gate that reads “Arbeit Macht Frei” is no longer the original, replaced after the original was stolen—so, is there something about the “authenticity” of the object that needs to be present, juxtaposed to sites such as Treblinka, when the materiality and object centered preservation is nonexistent? How is the visual of Treblinka, for instance, different from that of Auschwitz-Birkenau?

That’s great, yea, that touches on a lot of things…the ephemerality of these material traces is something problematic, but then also you can’t not talk about the hair as it’s human remains. I understand the impact of it…I wonder what they’ll do. I think, of course, the goal of these displays is to convey the enormity of the Holocaust, no one has ever seen that amount of human hair, or that many shoes before…

Yes, but even then, the presentation of the exhibits is very curated. The room with the shoes, the coloring is very specific, organized so that a pristine red heel sits on the top, you can see children’s shoes right up front…

Yes, yes that they are an assemblage—that is very important to acknowledge. And I know that the hair is treated with certain chemicals so that it is preserved longer…Yea, I think that probably, these sites are going to have to find another way to convey what they are trying to convey. The image that is largely associated with Holocaust sites is the thousands of shoes, and I sometimes think that maybe a single shoe, or a single pair of shoes, would be more powerful. I think we need to be aware that these displays are curated and assembled, that is very important, and that we need to think about a future when these objects are no longer there to display. That is a challenge that preservationists certainly need to take on […].Because John Urry, of course, is often faulted because of his preference for the visual dimension of tourism, and not all tourists are sighted, so what do you do when sight is not a category of perception? I remember when I was at Auschwitz and the sound of crunching of gravel beneath my feet, then trying to imagine how that sounded with thousands of prisoners on it…I don’t know if that answers your question.

No, no, that’s okay. Do you think that perhaps the emphasis placed on preserving these objects, I don’t want to say takes away from, I don’t want to say “better presentation,” but like at Auschwitz there are so many people there and everyone is walking around with headphones over their ears and it is so crowded.  It is the actual site itself, but perhaps there is a more effective way of presenting that without millions of people at the site?

Yea, I think maybe what this gets at, is that there are two impulses in this museum curation. First, what is an aesthetic choice, what makes the best arrangement of most impact on the audience—like the color to catch the eye? But the other, and what I think predates this, is that these sites were museum sites established to preserve the forensic evidence, originally to bring the Nazi perpetrators to trial. But we now live in an age where they still serve a forensic purpose to show Holocaust deniers the truth, so I think that is what’s keeping us grounded or rooted in this preservationist mode. But unfortunately, there will always be challenges despite all the material evidence.

Yes, so continuing off of that, with the graduate students we were talking about the Jewish Museum in Berlin and POLIN—Museum of Polish Jews in Warsaw, and you stated that you thought POLIN was more effective, but also I think it’s really interesting because Berlin has actual artifacts and POLIN does not, given the history of Polish Jewry and such, but could you speak more to that distinction and your preference for POLIN?

Okay, so it’s been a few years since I’d been to POLIN, and I was happy to hear your response to it, so I have a reason to go back. You know, I think that the building in Berlin is a really powerful space—the architecture is wonderful. Also the architecture in POLIN is really striking as well. I think, what for me, struck me about Berlin—and they are redoing the permanent exhibition, so I’m anxious to see—but there were always a lot of effects, and it just felt crowded to me. Just the way it was arranged, I found it hard to have the physical space to contemplate—whereas POLIN, it’s a more comfortable space in. So I don’t know if POLIN is more effective, but I found it a space that I could spend time and think in.

Did you use an audio guide by chance?

I did, and of course I didn’t follow it step by step, but I used it at both museums.

Yea, I don’t think most people follow it.

I wasn’t well versed in Polish Jewish history, so I think I learned something—but I was just really impressed by the space, and the reconstruction of the synagogue—that was is preserved beautiful, so I think appreciating the beauty of Polish Jewry is what POLIN offers. And, I talk about this in the book, I also think that the Jewish Museum in Berlin is kind of at the crossroads of its function, on the one hand it wants to celebrate Jewish life and Jewish culture, but it is also, built into its very bones, is that it is a Holocaust memorial, and the curators say, “we’re not a Holocaust museum, we’re a Jewish museum…”

Right, it was made to be one…in its mission, Daniel Libeskind designed it to reflect the Holocaust.

Right, it’s hard to be both. And some might say that perhaps that is how the museum is effective, because it is jarring.

That’s kind of what I argue, yes, that it is because you don’t really settle on either end…

Yes, I think I would just like the museum directors to be more direct about the fact that it is both.

Oh, I agree, they did actually change the audio guide, and I think this incorporates the narrative more. But back to POLIN, I also used the audio guide, and I did not have a contemplative experience, I thought the sound was overwhelming, but of course, that’s what I’m paying attention to specifically.

Yea, I need to go back. It’s not like the thumping heartbeat of Warsaw at the Warsaw Rising Museum.

Did you listen to it really closely? Because each strand is supposed to be a distinctive song from wartime Poland.

Fascinating, yet that museum is filled with points of inquiry.

But I wanted to bring it back once again to the sensorially aspect, and to Treblinka, which doesn’t have the materiality of Auschwitz-Birkenau. And presently, a visitor can download an audio guide from the app “AudioTrip,” which I think adds an acoustic architecture, a materiality of sorts.

[Listen to segments of the audio guide here]

Yea, I think that certainly takes away from the experience. I was not fond of the fake wind whistling through the barren landscape—that’s not what you experience, particularly if you go there in the summertime, which has lush trees and green grass. And the idea that you would have manufactured forest sounds, and block out the real forest sound, doesn’t make sense to me. I think that the space, even without its materiality, has a lot to offer. Under headphones you can’t listen to the reaction of other visitors, which can be really powerful, such as laughing when they shouldn’t be, or hearing someone say something really profound or insightful that you wouldn’t have thought of before necessarily. I think technology like that can certainly take away some of the agency of the tourist.

Kathryn Agnes Huether is a Ph.D. student in Historical Musicology with a Graduate Minor in Cultural Studies at the University of Minnesota. Her dissertation research is an extension of her work on Holocaust memory and sonic affect, assessing the usage of sound and music within Holocaust museums and memorials.

Situated adjacent the National Mall in Washington D.C., the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) dominates the landscape of American Holocaust consciousness, remembrance, and education. On an elevator ride to the sixth floor and the start of the permanent exhibit, visitors to the museum watch a 15-second-long video showing footage of American soldiers encountering one of the concentration camps in 1945. In a retrospective voiceover, one soldier reflects on his initial shock at seeing the horrors of the camp: “We had come across something and were not sure what it was – a big prison of some kind. There were people running all over: sick, dying, starved people. You can’t imagine it; things like that don’t happen.” This video foreshadows the incomprehensibility of the Holocaust that visitors are about to witness in the permanent exhibit. The video also serves to perpetuate an American Holocaust myth; the myth that Americans had little to no knowledge of the Holocaust until the reporting of the liberation of the camps in 1945. For, as the myth goes, had Americans known about the atrocities, surely, they would have done something to speak out, to collectively, publicly condemn the mass murder of European Jewry. Though it is entirely possible that this individual soldier may not have known about the Nazi camps, the opening of Dachau in 1933, the persecution and plight of Germany and Europe’s Jews, and the ultimate extermination of millions were widely reported in the New York Times and local papers across the country. A recently-opened exhibit at the USHMM, Americans and the Holocaust, seeks to examine what ordinary Americans knew about the Holocaust in the 1930s and 40s.

History Unfolded

In 2016, the USHMM launched its History Unfolded project, in an attempt to “uncover what ordinary people around the country could have known about the Holocaust from reading their local newspapers in the years 1933–1945.” The project engages high school and college students in identifying and cataloging articles from local and regional newspapers related to one of 37- events from the 1930s and 40s for a growing public archive maintained by the museum. While most events highlight Nazi persecution of Jews, others focus on America’s responses to the growing refugee crisis after 1938, as well as racial segregation, isolationism, and antisemitism within the United States. This archive currently consists of roughly 16,000 articles (including opinion pieces, editorials, letters to the editor, and political cartoons) from every U.S. state; though, few there are very few articles from African American-run newspapers. The pedagogical implications of the archive are twofold: First, the existing archive is fully searchable by city/state, topic, date, or name of the newspaper, allowing teachers and students to search and print individual articles to supplement lessons and projects. Second, the archiving project will enable students to conduct original research online, a local library or historical institution to submit additional articles. Thus, History Unfolded provides an opportunity for students to participate in research and the creation of an active, public archive, both engendering authentic disciplinary skills, as well as engaging in the recasting of a collective narrative around what ordinary American knew about the Holocaust.

Americans and the Holocaust

The USHMM’s Americans and the Holocaust exhibit opened in 2018. Visitors to the exhibit are asked to reflect upon two questions: (a) “What did Americans know?” and (b) “What more could have been done?” These questions are repeated throughout the exhibit as visitors examine various events (many mirroring the 37 events used in the History Unfolded archive) related to the persecution of European Jewry, the Holocaust, as well as issues of racism, and antisemitism in Europe and the United States. One of the first displays visitors encounter is a large touchscreen map of the United States, allowing users to search for newspaper articles from the History Unfolded archive. Newspapers from the archive are also used throughout the exhibit to illustrate what the American public could have known about the Holocaust.

In addition to newspaper and other media coverage of the Holocaust, the exhibit also uses public polling data, displayed on movable pedestals. Visitors first see the poll question, with the responses revealed by spinning the screen.

Reviews of the exhibit have been overwhelmingly positive; though, some scholars have voiced critiques over the omission of particular narratives, such as American corporations and universities’ collaboration with their German counterparts and the Nazi government. Further critiques have focused on the exhibit’s conclusion that the Roosevelt administration’s inaction around easing immigration restrictions or rescuing European Jews was largely the result of their inability to subvert public opinions, which were markedly isolationist. Such critiques trouble the supposed role of public opinion polling, a relatively new development in the 1930s, in influencing government policies and actions.

Teaching with the History Unfolded project and the Americans and the Holocaust exhibit helps to engage students in challenging an American Holocaust myth. Both seem intended to push students to consider their role, as well as that of the larger society, in addressing genocide. Indeed, each year, my students, despite having taken previous courses in American history, are shocked to learn that ordinary Americans had access to reliable, detailed information about the increasing persecution of Europe’s Jews. Inevitably they ask: If they knew about the Holocaust, why didn’t people do something to speak out about what was happening? For these students, History Unfolded and Americans and the Holocaust seem to make it clear that ordinary Americans shirked their moral responsibility to speak out against Nazism and aid Europe’s Jews. Rather than allow students to come away with a simplistic narrative of America’s moral failure during the 1930s and 40s and their assured commitment to “never again,” I push them to consider that the project and the exhibit only suggest what ordinary Americans could have known, not what they did know. Additionally, I ask, are we only able to draw such clear lessons from these events in hindsight, after they have been selectively culled from the millions of other pages of news articles that appeared in the 1930s and 1940s?

In recent years, my students and I have also discussed the ongoing genocide of Rohingya in Burma, of which students have little prior knowledge. We examine contemporary newspaper coverage of the atrocities, which though rarely appearing on the front-page and often absent from algorithm-controlled social media newsfeeds, are, nevertheless, easily accessible for these well-educated and highly-resourced students. Not lacking in opinions about the moral responsibility of the United States to influence the course of the genocide, these students often feel powerless to bridge the knowledge-to-action gap that, in this case, feels more like a chasm. It is at this point in our discussions that we use the History Unfolded project and the Americans and the Holocaust exhibit to examine the role of an unrestricted news media within the public sphere and discuss their roles and responsibilities in advancing civil discourse within democratic civil society.

George Dalbo is the Educational Outreach Coordinator for the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and a Ph.D. student in Social Studies Education at the University of Minnesota with research interests in Holocaust, genocide, and human rights education. Previously, he was a middle and high school social studies teacher, having taught every grade from 5th-12th in public, charter, and independent schools in Minnesota, as well as two years at an international school in Vienna, Austria.

In March 2019, the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad ran a four-part series examining antisemitism in the Netherlands and Europe. Published in the midst of global concerns regarding the rise of antisemitism and violent antisemitic attacks, the question of the resurgence of anti-Jewish sentiment is more pressing than ever. According to the Center for Information and Documentation Israel (CIDI), there was a 19% increase in cases of antisemitism in the Netherlands from 2017 to 2018. In a survey conducted by the NRC, 70% of Jewish respondents (163 out of 800 identified themselves as Jewish) stated that antisemitism is indeed on the rise and 80% stated that while they have not witnessed antisemitism themselves, they are worried about its growth. This survey is backed by a recent investigation of antisemitism in twelve EU-member states. 89% of European Jews stated they experienced an increase in antisemitism in their home country, with another 38% responding that they have considered emigrating because they feel unsafe.

The Netherlands has a long and complicated history with antisemitism. During the Nazi occupation, 107,000 Dutch Jews were deported East to concentration and extermination camps. Despite the high deportation numbers, most analyses of collaboration and wartime behavior forgo an examination of the Netherlands in favor of Eastern European countries. This is due in part to the development of a postwar resistance narrative and the association between Dutch identity and tolerance. The resistance narrative, which states that the entire country resisted the imposition of Nazi rule and fell victim to its cruelty, has prevented the country from facing international scrutiny for its role in the Holocaust. While the field of Holocaust studies has certainly expanded in the Netherlands since the 1980s, the public has yet to fully move away from the resistance narrative. In addition, once the Shoah became the focal point of the Dutch Second World War experience, critics began accusing Jews of exploiting their victim status. The late historian Evelien Gans explains this phenomenon as secondary antisemitism or, “the conviction that the legitimate desire to draw a line under the past and move on to normalization is heavily obstructed by the frantic attention to the Shoah.” In addition, Muslim immigrants are often blamed for antisemitism in order to sidestep uncomfortable truths about Dutch treatment of their Jewish neighbors.

In the first article published in the NRC-series, political scientist Nonna Mayer remarked, “antisemitism is not back, it was never gone.” While antisemitism never vanished from Dutch society, the rise of far-right and populist political parties has contributed to the increased visibility of antisemitism. Right-wing rhetoric has not only emboldened antisemites but popularized antisemitic sayings and actions. The growth of antisemitism poses a serious threat to Jewish communities and by extension Holocaust memory. While the Jewish community in the Netherlands is far from homogenous, many feel that Jewish wartime experience has been marginalized. For example, the Jewish community faced a backlash in 2012 for speaking out against the broadening of the National Commemoration to include Dutch SS-volunteers. More recently, the Netherlands Auschwitz Committee has encountered numerous roadblocks to the building of a new Holocaust monument. After years of fighting local residents over a location, the city is now postponing the construction because they refuse to cut down 24 trees. It is clear that preserving Holocaust memory and supporting the Jewish community has taken on new importance within our political atmosphere. The NRC’s investigation of Dutch and European antisemitism will hopefully increase awareness of new forms of anti-Jewish sentiment and encourage people to speak out when they see it. At the very least, these articles reveal that silence is no longer the default reaction to Jewish persecution.

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. She is currently instructing History of the Holocaust.

Twenty-five years have now passed since the Rwandan genocide. On the evening of April 6^th, 1994, the assassination of President Juvénal Habyarimana served as a final trigger for violence after decades of propaganda, animosity, and killing. Within 100 days, 800,000 Tutsis were dead, as were numerous Hutu political opponents of the genocidal state.

Many Rwandans and foreigners have sought to capture this moment through media coverage, memoirs, film, and documentaries. Images of the killings and of refugee processions, of machetes and of bullet holes, are familiar across the world. But for those who grew up in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide, the pain of this violence is far more immediate than these decades-old snapshots have the capacity to show.

For many young Rwandans, the genocide continues to have a regular presence in daily life. As a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, I study this generational trauma, or the social effects of conflict that are experienced by the descendants of those who experience violence. I speak with Rwandans in their early twenties about the effects of past violence on their lives. The genocide separated families, destroyed communities, and left young children to make sense of this loss. As one interviewee poignantly put it, “Parenting when you are 28, 29 – you were never a kid. And you never knew how to do this, because you had no parents to teach you.”

For Rwandans born after 1994, this trauma manifests differently for each individual. I’ve met with young men and women who lost most, or all, of their family members during the genocide. As one such woman succinctly reflected, “You feel that gap that you have, always.” These young adults have had to navigate the past twenty-five years while carrying their loss, depending on peers or remaining family members as they find their way. Many young adults who lost loved ones seek to remember through annual commemorations or visits to memorial spaces – for others, the pain is too much to participate.

Some have sought out those responsible for the death of family members, seeking answers or closure. One young man who did so shared, “I [had] to go there and know what was in his mind.” Many children of perpetrators have too struggled in the aftermath of the genocide, with incarceration sometimes leaving responsibility for the household on the shoulders of young boys and girls. The genocide was communally-based and wide-reaching; most Rwandans are personally affected in some way, and they must seek to make sense of this past while they move forward with their lives.

While this trauma has marred the trajectory of so many young adults, our conversations don’t solely dwell in tragedy. Interspersed in our conversations about memory are their goals, joys, and desires for the future. Many hope to be involved with tourism, showcasing Rwanda’s beauty to visitors. Some seek to thrive in the nation’s bustling business sectors, while others seek to create art that captures their journey. And more than anything else, interviewees express a hope for happy families and for peace. As one woman expressed, “What you’re looking is a better country, a better life, a better future.” As we remember the 1994 Rwandan genocide on its 25^th anniversary, those depictions of the genocide, snapshots of the violence and suffering, again come to the fore. And the memory of those lost is essential. But we should also reflect on these next generations of Rwandans, those who live with these scars as they strive for their futures. And we must also reflect that no country is wholly defined by violence. In the Global North, many know Rwanda solely for the 1994 genocide. But these young adults are among Rwandans who are advocating for a future shaped, but not defined, by the country’s past.

Brooke Chambers is a PhD student in the University of Minnesota’s Department of Sociology. Her research interests include collective memory, cultural trauma, political sociology, genocide, and mass violence. Her current work examines generational trauma in contemporary Rwanda, with a focus on the commemorative process. She is the 2019-2020 Badzin Fellow in Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

The 2019 Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival kicks off Thursday with more than two weeks of films from around the world spread across theaters in the Twin Cities and Rochester. Included in this year’s festival are a number of movies that have piqued the interested of several of us at the Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies.

Read on to get our picks for some of this year’s can’t miss films:

The Accountant of Auschwitz

Finally brought to trial more than seven decades after the Holocaust, this film follows the trial and sentencing of Oskar Gröning, a member of the SS responsible for sorting of personal possessions of those sent to Auschwitz. More than the following the trial of one individual, this documentary examines the extraordinary challenges of bringing those complicit in the Holocaust to justice decades after the fact.

Showtimes:

Friday, April 5, 2:20 PM – Saint Anthony Main Theater

Sunday, April 7, 9:15 AM – Saint Anthony Main Theater

Blood Memory

Filmmaker Drew Nicholas’ work focuses on the Stolen Generation, a generation of Native youth who were forcibly removed from their homes and put up for adoption in an effort to assimilate them. The film examines the generations’ attempts to overcome years of trauma and cultural genocide in order to reclaim their identities.

Showtimes:

Wednesday, April 10, 7:00 PM  – Saint Anthony Main Theater

Thursday, April 11, 4:15 Pm  – Saint Anthony Main Theater

Graves Without a Name

With his latest work, Rithy Panh’s film follows a young boy as his attempts to the find the graves of his relatives in the aftermath of the Cambodian genocide under the Khmer Rouge regime. The film is a graphic depiction the violence endured by the Cambodian people and its lasting legacy today.

Showtimes:

Friday, April 12, 1:40 PM – Saint Anthony Main Theater

Friday, April 19, 4:20 PM – Saint Anthony Main Theater

Afterward

Growing up in Jerusalem, Ofra Bloch was surrounded by memories of the Holocaust. Utilizing this experience, Bloch interviews survivors, activists, historians and others in Germany, Israel and Palestine to examine trauma in an effort to understand the fundamental questions of how do we overcome trauma, how do we heal and how do we forgive?

Showtimes:

Sunday, April 14, 7:10 PM – Saint Anthony Main Theater

Monday, April 15, 7:00 PM – Saint Anthony Main Theater

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

We’re at crossroads today: learning lessons from the Holocaust is fundamentally important. Understanding the dire consequences of hate and intolerance is more important today than just about any point in history. Unfortunately, it comes at a time when our memory of the Holocaust is fast fading. It seems as we continue to lose survivors and their critical connection to the past, we lose our willingness to apply their lessons to our own time. A year ago, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany brought this sobering reality to the forefront: Nearly half of millennials cannot name a single concentration camp. Nearly a third of Americans drastically underestimate the number of victims of the Holocaust. Most astounding, almost 70% of Americans say they don’t care about the Holocaust.

It’s a stunning revelation for an event only seventy years in our past. While it’s easy to be disheartened by the lack of awareness, there is hope. Teachers across the United States are willing and eager to bring lessons from the Holocaust into their classrooms (the success of the Center’s Genocide Education Outreach program and our annual teacher workshops are a testament to that), but teachers often face challenges in doing so. A lack of familiarity, access to resources and funding point to the barriers teachers face nationally.

To that end, CHGS is proud to be among more than seventy nationwide organizations calling on Congress for an expedited hearing for the Never Again Education Act.  The Act itself opens the door for public funds to be allocated for Holocaust education and pave the way for private organizational support for Holocaust education in the schools, ensuring educators and students have access to invaluable resources.

To view a copy of the letter, click here.

In the woods of northern Minnesota, tucked along the shores of Turtle River Lake, is a small German village called Waldsee. Waldsee, which translates to “forest lake,” is home to Concordia Language Villages’ (CLV) German-language isolation-immersion programs, one of fifteen such language villages sponsored by Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota. Each summer, hundreds of staff and students pass through the village’s main building, dubbed the “Bahnhof,” or “train station,” to spend two or four weeks fully immersed in German language and culture. Until recently, most were completely unaware that the Nazis once used the name Waldsee as a euphemism for Auschwitz.

Indeed, it wasn’t until 2017, when Alex Treitler stumbled upon references to the Nazi Waldsee while researching the CLV immersion program out of curiosity, that the issue was brought to the attention of the village’s leadership. In an article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Dan Hamilton, dean of CLV Waldsee, was quoted: “Frankly, we were just not aware […] I’m a professor of international relations, so we were a bit embarrassed.” Despite this initial embarrassment, CLV quickly convened a twenty-member advisory committee made up of academic and community experts to examine the issue and make recommendations.

In a recent presentation at the University of Minnesota’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, “A Tale of Two Cities: Concordia Language Village’s ‘Waldsee’ in the Crucible of History and Memory,”* Sonja Wentling, Professor of History and Global Studies at Concordia College and a member of the advisory committee, shared the story of the two Waldsees. Wentling presented alongside four of her undergraduate students, Allison Hennes, Samara Strootman, Jarret Mans, and Colleen Egan, who had taken part in Wentling’s fall 2018 “Introduction to Historical Thinking Class,” which specifically took up issues of historical memory around the name Waldsee. The class was part of Concordia College’s PEAK, or Pivotal Experience in Applied Learning, Program, in which students apply classroom learning to real-world issues. As a part of the class, students conducted historical and archival research, spoke with Treitler and advisory committee members, and interviewed staff and students at CLV Waldsee. During the presentation, these students shared their experiences of “doing history,” rather than merely learning about history.

During the presentation, Hennes shared how the iso-immersion camp program was the brainchild of Concordia College professors Gerald Haukebo and Erhard Friedrichsmeyer, who initially chose the name Lager Waldsee, or “Camp Forest Lake” (the term “Lager,” also evocative of Nazi Concentration Camps, which, in German, are termed Konzentrationslager, was later dropped from the name). The camp first opened to students in the summer of 1961, the same week that the construction of the Berlin Wall began and in the midst of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust. Though seemingly secluded in the Northwoods of Minnesota, Wentling said that she and her students soon discovered that Waldsee “was not isolated from the events that took place thousands of miles away in Germany and Israel.” While the division and reunification of Germany have loomed large at CLV Waldsee, the Holocaust has not been a regular aspect of the village’s programming.

Strootman discussed how the term Waldsee, used as a euphemism for Auschwitz by the Germans during the deportations of Hungarian Jews, was mostly unknown in the West due to Cold War-era divisions. Though, its use was undoubtedly known to many academics and survivors and started to emerge in more popular works by the mid-1990. Indeed, Imre Kertesz, the Hungarian writer and Holocaust survivor who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002, referenced Waldsee in the opening pages of his semi-autobiographical novel Fateless, which, though published in 1975, first appeared in English translation in 1992). Kertesz wrote: “I am completely ignorant how (but some adults did discover it) 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.” An exhibit created in 2004, “Waldsee 1944,” put the Nazi deception on display, showing postcards that Hungarian Jews who were deported to Auschwitz sent back to relatives postmarked “Waldsee.”

The lecture concluded with a discussion of CLV’s ongoing and future efforts to address the Waldsee name. Egan discussed how the “Waldsee 1944” exhibit was prominently displayed at Waldsee’s Biohaus during the summer of 2018, may become a permeant feature of the camp. Mans spoke about the possibility of including an empty postcard rack in Waldsee’s Laden (village store) with a sign that might read “ask us why we don’t sell postcards here.” It would seem, however, that there is some trepidation around changing the name of the village. “We have begun pulling at a loose thread—and that’s been good—but we don’t want to unravel the whole cloth,” says CLV Executive Director Christine Schulze. Though CLV Waldsee will retain its name, efforts will be made to ensure students and staff are aware of the history. Wentling praised CLV’s “commitment to address history rather than run away from it.” Indeed, in a second statement to the community of current and former staff and students, CLV outlined several steps that will be taken in the coming year to address the Waldsee name and Holocaust education at the village and within the programming.

I worked as a credit instructor at Waldsee in the summer of 2008. At the time, I remember being surprised by this authentic-seeming microcosm of German culture in northern Minnesota, including listening to the German-language radio station, using Euros at the camp’s bank and store, and eating European-style bread made by German apprentice bakers at each meal. In retrospect, however, Waldsee seemed to lack the notion of an Erinnerungskultur (Culture of Memory), which is often used synonymously with Holocaust remembrance in Germany and Austria. At CLV Waldsee, where simulations are often used to help students understand a divided Germany during the Cold War or the current refugee crisis facing Europe, no one seems to want to undertake simulations of the Holocaust, nor should they! Though Waldsee presents students with a rich academic experience, it is also a summer camp, which makes discussions of the Holocaust seem somewhat out of place, albeit necessary. Hopefully, what began as a discussion over a name will lead to a meaningful look at how to best integrate Holocaust education into the Waldsee experience.

Wentling and her students’ presentations brought together an audience of students, professors, and community members, many with ties to CLV Waldsee, at a moment when the University of Minnesota community is debating changing the names of several buildings on its Minneapolis campus. One hopes that such debates, while necessary, similarly extend into conversations around learning about and from the seemingly absent episodes of the United States, Minnesota and the University’s difficult history.

* The lecture was sponsored by Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies with support from the University of Minnesota’s Institute for Global Studies, Center for Jewish Studies, Center for German and European Studies, Center for Austrian Studies, Department of History, and Department of German, Nordic, Slavic, and Dutch, as well as the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas. 

George D. Dalbo is a Ph.D. student in Social Studies Education at the University of Minnesota with research interests in Holocaust, comparative genocide, and human rights education in secondary schools. Previously, he was a middle and high school social studies teacher, having taught every grade from 5th-12th in public, charter, and independent schools in Minnesota, as well as two years at an international school in Vienna, Austria.

Teaching about Genocide (Volume I), the first of a two-volume series edited by well-known Holocaust and genocide education scholar Samuel Totten, provides cogent, practical advice for those wishing to bring this difficult topic into their classrooms. The book builds on Totten’s previous work but is unique in its specific focus on combining insights from both secondary and post-secondary educators in each volume. Roughly half of the chapters were written by secondary educators, with the remaining composed by post-secondary professors and instructors. This combination helps to bridge the persistent gap between academic genocide studies research and secondary classroom teaching about genocide. Indeed, as a high school teacher of a semester-long comparative genocide studies course, I have often struggled to find ways to approach various aspects of genocide with my students. This volume both reaffirms the importance of genocide education while providing practical support for classroom teachers.

The necessity for such a work at this moment is clear. While the Holocaust, especially since the mid-1990s, has become a mainstay of American K-12 school curriculum, teaching about so-called “other” genocides or “genocides other than the Holocaust,” has become increasingly common across the country. Though, despite this trend, few resources exist for educators, who, are often left to teach such difficult topics with little content or pedagogical support.

Henry Friedlander, quoted in the introduction, writes: “The problem with too much being taught by too many without focus is that this poses the danger of destroying the subject matter through dilettantism. It is not enough for well-meaning teachers to feel a commitment to teach about [genocide] they also must know the subject.” This is particularly true of secondary educators who must be masters of, and adept at teaching, a huge breadth of content. Teaching about Genocide gives voice to those educators who have struggled to develop ways to teach about genocide in their classrooms to inspire their fellow educators.

The 22 chapters in the work are divided into two sections: “Insights and Advice from Secondary Level Teachers” and “Insights and Advice from College and University Professors.” Both sections begin with chapters providing general overviews and rationale for teaching about genocide before progressing to more-specific case studies. Minnesota high school teacher, and long-time collaborator with the CHGS, Nancy Ziemer’s, “Advice on Teaching About Genocide,” provides an overview and suggestions pulled from her 25 years of experience teaching about genocide, while my contribution, “Why Don’t We Talk About Rape?” offers rationale drawn from my classroom experience for teaching about sexualized violence in genocide. While the chapters don’t provide specific, structured lesson plans, authors pair descriptions of classroom experiences with resources, such as Gregory Stanton’s 10 Stages of Genocide, providing inspiration for teachers to create their own lessons suitable for their students and contexts. In short, both beginning and experienced teachers alike will find this book useful in their classroom practice.

The latter half of the book, devoted to advice from professors and university instructors, provides chapters from well know genocide scholars, such as Israel Charney, Ernesto Verdeja, and Kjell Anderson. Drawn from a number of academic fields and research/teaching contexts, these chapters extend and supplement earlier chapters, providing advice and insights that are equally appropriate and useful for secondary contexts. Indeed, Kimberley Ducey’s “Survivors of Sexual Violence in Rwanda Speak: A Letter-Writing Assignment to Combat Psychic Numbing” provides a lesson idea and classroom anecdotes that pairs with my chapter on teaching about sexual violence. This and many other chapters have already informed my own planning and found their way into my teaching. The book closes with an annotated bibliography, pulling together additional genocide education resources.

While the book’s focus on curricular and pedagogical insights for secondary and post-secondary educators seems a logical choice, as, in many cases, there is little intellectual or emotional divide between upper-level high school and college-level students, this work fails to address the growing need for resources at the elementary and middle school levels. While Totten and other scholars have written persuasively against teaching about the Holocaust and genocide to students in the elementary, A growing number of middle school students encounter such content each year, with states like New Jersey requiring Holocaust and genocide education for students in grades 5-8. Many of my colleagues have voiced the need for similar work addressing the specific pedagogical demands of teaching younger students.

Teaching about Genocide (Volume II) was also published in late 2018. The decision to publish a second volume in the series, thereby reducing the cost of both volumes, makes this an affordable book for educators.

George D. Dalbo is a Ph.D. student in Social Studies Education at the University of Minnesota with research interests in Holocaust, comparative genocide, and human rights education in secondary schools. Previously, he was a middle and high school social studies teacher, having taught every grade from 5^th-12^th in public, charter, and independent schools in Minnesota, as well as two years at an international school in Vienna, Austria.