Rachel is a third-year PhD candidate in the department of German, Nordic, Slavic & Dutch. She received her BS in Commerce & Business Administration and her BA in Foreign Languages and Literature from the University of Alabama in May 2017. She then spent a year abroad in Augsburg, Germany before returning to the University of Alabama to earn her MA in Germanic Studies in May 2020. She moved to Minneapolis in August 2020 in pursuit of her PhD in Germanic Studies with a minor in Moving Image Studies.

Her dissertation research analyzes the remediation of documentary footage and photographs from the Holocaust in literary and media projects made in the United States, Germany, Austria, and Israel from the late 1980s to today. She analyzes these projects as interventions in contemporary conversations surrounding the Holocaust, specifically in terms of memorializing and reviving narratives from the past. She also explores how these remediations have the ability to negotiate questions of voice and witnessing in the 21st century both on an individual and global scale, allowing for transnational discourses that broaden the efforts to create an effective framework for discussing other political and historical issues in the past, present, and future.

In addition to her dissertation research, Rachel is interested in representations of minorities in German-language cinema, as well as the documentation (or lack thereof) of issues surrounding German colonialism, specifically in the context of present-day Namibia.

In the spring semester of 2023, she is working as an RA for the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and the Nathan and Theresa Berman Upper Midwest Jewish Archives on their ongoing project to highlight and present in-depth stories of Holocaust survivors settling in Minnesota.

The first month of the calendar year happens to include the first of many events to remember the victims of genocide perpetrated by the Nazis and their collaborators. Various events occur around the world, in numerous languages, and have their origins in different geographies, political ideologies, and cultural-linguistic milieus. 

But like every year—for personal and professional reasons—deciding what to say for International Holocaust Remembrance Day (January 27th) or the more Zionist-laden Yom Hashoah (April 18th), while avoiding what hasn’t already been said, is a challenge. Personally, and as a Jew, I certainly “remember” in a diverse set of ways, and I openly talk about these practices. From regular write-ups for the Center in my professional capacity, to the reading group I run with former students—as we read Yiddish literature in the original on a weekly basis—individual and collective memory acts take place. 

But every year, coterminous events and life experiences inevitably end up shaping the direction of these memory acts, too. This year was no exception. 

The Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies often receives requests to contextualize historical figures, events, etc. pertaining to episodes of genocide and mass violence. Although meaningful outreach work, I experience immense frustration (that I suspect will only increase over time)—at not only the ways that firsthand accounts of genocide survivors are confined to archival sources, but also at how a siloing of approaches to the subject matter erases meaningful connections—not only to the present but also to marginalized stories left untold. Without memory politics (and certainly without historiography—or, the study of the study of history), what are left are universalizing narratives we pretend are divorced from a particular moment in time and locale. 

Furthermore, this universalizing tendency often asserts overly moralistic stances (i.e., “we teach about X individual or X event, because it teaches us to do/not do Y [moral lesson]”), which rarely take into account the very real, complex, individualized, and human grappling with the past, which I argue is vital to pedagogy, research, and outreach.  

There is of course understandable hesitance from educators, community and religious leaders, etc. (and even academics) to address what are deemed the more difficult, perhaps “political” or controversial dimensions of a particular “subject” (i.e., a person, an event, etc), namely how certain actions or events in the past might not be confined to the past after all, and what are the moral complexities of human in/action. It is all too easy to cherry pick the details around particular people, places, and events, especially if we did not take part in someone’s actions, witness the events as they occurred, or take part in an event’s implementation. However, simply viewing events within a well-defined, well-confined historical vacuum (and with ingrained and unexamined biases) often leads to rigidly deciding whom (and what) gets highlighted about events half a world away. In turn, more inclusive, more nuanced, and more personal(ized) approaches are often shut out. 

To be clear, I am certainly not advocating for introducing the full breadth of a particular subject “too soon” in a student’s career; there are obvious reasons why such approaches would be unacceptable. I should also be clear here, that a “moralistic” element of history instruction is not what I solely take issue with. Of course, one of the reasons we study the past is to see how it directly implicates us in the present. There is much to glean from this rationale. At the same time, as well-intentioned as these approaches may be, teaching a particular subject that is full of morally complex actors, while also pretending we can “safely” confine the subject matter culturally, temporally, and geographically to another time and place, both advertently and inadvertently prevents a needed, individual(ized) response, and the needed responsibility to grapple with our own subjectivity. This is certainly why the study of historiography is so important, to ensure that we see how the “study of the study of history” has changed across time and space. Furthermore, we learn to understand what narratives might have been left out, and how those ellisions or changes have in turn been cemented structurally. 

The way we teach (and don’t teach) something, as it is directly linked to a lack of historical memory and historiography, has direct implications—certainly for the current political climate in the United States—and for what has unfortunately been coined the “culture wars.” The consequences of weak leadership in many of our country’s vital (but weakened) democratic institutions, a public distrust of experts, the decline of governmental regulation regarding civil rights and liberties, and longstanding bigotries have all merged to now threaten the bodily autonomy of millions when it comes to racial and gender justice, as well as sexual autonomy. We have seen this recently with current attempts nationwide to silence ethnic studies proponents, who are reframing the orthodoxies of US history to finally center marginalized voices—notably regarding slavery and the ongoing genocide of indigenous groups. 

Similarly frightening effects of our current moment also include the increasing restrictions to abortion access that have been passed on state levels at alarming rates, something that had been occurring for years even before the Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Association decision. The anti-trans and anti-drag bills entering legislative dockets across the United States are too numerous to count.  

It’s thus not only important that we as scholars/educators convey how these battles for equality have yet to be “won” outright (even with victories there have been setbacks in the fight for equality). We should also be getting students of all ages (and that includes members of the general public) to see what parallels (and what differences) exist in their own lived experiences, and in turn how this denial of human rights implicates them. 

Although I am not the first scholar to point out the problems educators, marginalized groups, and activists in the United States are facing when teaching histories of racial and gender justice, sexual autonomy, and LGBTQ+ rights, I am also concerned—as someone largely working outside American and Anglophone spheres—that the distorted study of our own past absolutely shapes the way Americans learn about the rest of the world (or don’t). As noted historian Dominique Kirchner Reill has recently written, it would be naive to think that the backlash against the teaching of various subjects, the banning of books, etc. in United States K12 schools in 2023 does (and will) not affect the ways students study and address global histories and cultures. 

A critical intervention of some kind against these measures will by no means be a cure-all for the ongoing structural and moral ills of the United States (i.e., voter disenfranchisement, structural racism, the stripping of bodily autonomy and individual rights, healthcare or lack thereof, etc). However, I argue that, it is for this very reason that we must highlight more personal experiences that push back against universalizing narratives, to instead map out the needed ethical frameworks we need right now, and in real time. I sadly fear these more personalized narratives are even more imperiled due to the very structural and moral issues I hint at. Without these narratives, however, we will individually and collectively fail to expand (much less retain) rights achieved through hard-won battles. 

How does this play out when discussing historical events of genocide and mass violence, particularly at the K12 level, but also at the university level? For the remainder of this essay, I will reflect on several examples that I hope will shed light on some of the paradigm shifts I am advocating for. 

“To Be Human in History”

It was both odd and fortuitous timing that I recently rediscovered a post by Angelika Bammer, Professor of Comparative Literature at Emory University. Prior to the COVID-19 Pandemic, Bammer visited the University of Minnesota to speak about her recent book, Born After: Reckoning with the German Past (Bloomsbury, 2019). Bammer writes, “to be a human in history” is to understand how the pasts we inherit (but do not directly experience) shape the self. Bammer, born to German parents in the immediate aftermath of World War II, saw how the Nazi years shaped her life (and her children’s), even if she had not been alive to witness them herself. Also significant, is how Bammer notes the central role of feminist theory in her work, not only in how lived experiences and “the personal” are central to her own scholarship, but how feminist theory itself provides analytical toolkits for “emotionally honest” scholarship — “a dimension of rigor that conventional scholarship all too seldom lacks.” 

This dimension of rigor that Bammer cites is in fact a central role of the humanities in academic scholarship—whether those in STEM and the social sciences find value in it, or not. This does not mean that the humanities have nothing to answer to, historically speaking. Many personal, lived experiences remain largely invisible in the majority of these fields, and are still structurally excluded from sites of power within higher education (including from the apparatuses governing tenure). I certainly implicate the humanities as a whole for these deficits. The concern that I have, however, stems from the continuing derision, dismissal, and underfunding of the arts and humanities. If humanities fields are not around to value the personal, what segment of academia actually will? 

The answers to this question have direct implications to the study of history, as well as the nature of our society as a whole. It is not only a “dimension of rigor” that we forfeit at all levels of education without key awareness of the personal; as educators we also relinquish the responsibility to reshape our professions, our fields, and our world with necessary critical voices and new approaches, and in turn: we forfeit the responsibility to reshape outdated, immoral, and unjust systems. If students are already entering college and are often unaware of the world(s) that they have inherited, and of their own political and ethical agency surrounding the past (especially when it comes to race, gender, and sexuality), where and when do we rectify this, and when teaching about instances of genocide and mass violence later on? 

“The Unethical and the Unspeakable” 

Before I continue, I must say that it is not simply my Jewishness that informs my own approaches to teaching, outreach, etc. regarding genocide and mass violence. It is also my queer identity as a gay man that profoundly shapes my own approaches to German Jewish and Yiddish literatures and cultures, and in turn minority language rights and visibility when discussing comparative topics within Holocaust and Genocide Studies. I am constantly at odds with the US public’s unspoken orthodoxies around these subjects, in the ways these orthodoxies erase pre-World-War-II Jewish cultures and politics beyond Zionism, as well as gender and sexuality in memory politics. It is indeed acknowledging “the personal,” which confronts these orthodoxies and transgressively subverts forms of scholarly and cultural (including racialized, gendered, and heteronormative) gatekeeping that are also in academia. 

We can all work outside given norms and buck any orthodoxies we so wish, but other, more sinister forms of gatekeeping at sites of power will often silence these attempts. It is at these moments, when gatekeeping is most pronounced, and in this historical epoch in which we find ourselves that we should be cognizant of the actual lessons we need to be teaching. 

These reflections came to a head when I attended a talk via Zoom at the Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research at the University of Southern California. Carli Snyder (PhD Candidate at CUNY Graduate Center and Visiting Research Fellow at the USS Shoah Foundation) gave a brilliant talk entitled, “Questions of Gender and Sexuality in Interviewer Trainings and Holocaust Survivor Testimonies.” What Snyder, through her groundbreaking and important intervention has made clear, is that histories of genocide are not universal, nor are they confined to set start and end dates, and the traumatic effects of such moments are not confined to one particular generation of eyewitnesses. Instead, it is up to scholars, educators, students, and activists to grapple with what histories emerge anew through greater contextualization of the objects in question, and namely with the ways gendered histories of violence are central to eyewitness testimony. 

For Snyder, the “objects” not only include oral history interviews that were conducted for the Visual History Archive, but how they were conducted for an archival repository such as the VHA, when they were conducted (i.e., the individual and collective moment between 1995 and 1998 when the bulk of the VHA interviews were recorded), who conducted them, and what the subjects discussed. These might seem like obvious research questions that have long been answered, but Snyder (and many others including myself) can assure you that they have not; universalizing narratives have a way of erasing particularities, and obscuring the very political nature of historical objects as they speak to us today. Furthermore, attempts to give voice to “the particular” (i.e., through civil rights, gender equality, and so forth) are, as I have argued, ongoing and not at all a given in our current moment. 

For example, Snyder is researching the work of Joan Ringelheim, who was and remains a pioneering figure in the collection of Holocaust testimony. Snyder demonstrated how Ringelheim was one of the first to point out in the 1980s that Holocaust histories were often “condensed” into a “universal” or “gender-neutral” framework, or a “universal human perspective,” and did not take into account the differences in experiences according to gender. First as an independent scholar and later at the Holocaust Memorial Museum as Director of the oral history division, Ringelheim coined what she called “the Unethical and the Unspeakable,” which she had presented on at a conference, “Women surviving the Holocaust” in 1983. Ringelheim conducted circa 20 interviews in the late 1970s and early 1980s with women survivors, who addressed issues such as sexual assault, strategic sexual relationships, pregnancy, abortion, menstruation, and sexuality. 

During her talk, Snyder showed how the format of Ringelheim’s interviews was one of collaboration and exploration—on the part of both the interviewer and the interviewee. Ringelheim’s groundbreaking approach to documenting the oral histories of women was, however, only one dimension of an intervention that is still continuing; Snyder sees this when some of Ringeheim’s interviewees later provided oral histories for the Shoah Foundation in the 1990s, and in turn how markedly different they were. Rarely do subjects interviewed by Ringelheim mention with the Shoah Foundation the experiences they had pertaining to gender and sexuality. Not to mention, if survivors ended up providing information about their gendered experiences, the sexual violence they were subject to, or anything about their sexuality in general, it often came through the interviewee volunteering the information — not on behalf of the interviewer conducting the oral history. 

This should immediately raise numerous questions for scholars, educators, and students. What do we make of an archival record of oral histories and testimonies that, though extensive, has left out, excised, deemed less valuable, etc. certain topics and human subjects according to gender and sexuality? The Visual History Archive, for example, contains over 50,000 interviews with survivors of genocide and mass violence, survivors who are the subject of not only their VHA interview, but likely other interviews, public talks, etc. Although an incredibly rich archive that generations of scholars will certainly be researching, it should be made apparent that these interviews are simply not static “objects;” they are the very real products of “the personal.”  Taking this into account, how then does gender and sexuality more broadly factor in (or not) to these 50,000+ interviews? And the ways histories of the Holocaust are taught more broadly? What might we glean if we take a deeper dive into the material? Can we discuss and teach with these materials differently? 

Queer Intergenerational Trauma

Also around the time Snyder’s talk took place, I stumbled upon an article on social media from The Advocate concerning the German Bundestag’s recognition of LGBTQ+ victims by the Nazis on International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Although this was not the first time a German government official acknowledged Queer and Trans victims of the Nazi regime, the President of the Bundestag acknowledged, publicly for the first time, that Germany’s collective memory culture has a responsibility in acknowledging the histories of all groups persecuted by the Nazi state. 

These are fairly recent developments within a larger, complicated (and contested) past. It was only in 2017 that the German government annulled the convictions of 50,000 homosexual men tried by the Nazis, as well as those tried and convicted in the postwar (West German) era under Paragraph 175. The annulment finally made victims of persecution under the law eligible for reparations. Unfortunately, many men who had been convicted had passed away by that time. Furthermore, accounts from individuals persecuted for their sexuality by the Nazis and in the postwar Germanies are sparse. According to this German-language documentary approximately 80% of men sent to concentration camps for homosexuality (5,000 – 15,000 men) did not survive the camps at all, having faced brutal treatment by guards and other inmates alike. 

The Nuremberg Trials had also refused to address crimes against homosexual men due to the Paragraph 175’s continued enforcement after 1945 (and those found guilty under the Nazis remained imprisoned). As a result, Holocaust and Genocide studies research took decades to give this topic its due. Although anti-sodomy laws largely targeted same-sex relations between men, lesbians in Imperial, Weimar, Nazi, and postwar Germanies (particularly in West Germany), also faced incredible oppression due to deeply sexist and patriarchal norms governing society. The experiences of lesbians who faced discrimination and erasure, and whose lives were also destroyed in various ways from the 19th century onward, remain understudied. Histories of those who today would identify as trans and non-binary, who were often the subjects of early sexology, hardly exist in the secondary literature at all. These norms also largely erased women’s sexuality from public discourse as a whole. Not to mention during the Nazi era, racial hierarchies and misogyny restricted women’s sexual autonomy completely. 

Even as homosexuality was partially decriminalized in both East and West Germany by the late 1960s, only political activism over multiple decades led to recognition of the persecution under the Nazis and in the postwar era. The Nazis further strengthening of Prussian-era Paragraph 175 in 1935, the flight of many queer and trans people from Germany after 1933 facing marginalization elsewhere, and West and East Germany’s further criminalization of homosexuals who remained imprisoned after the war, demonstrates how histories of persecution are fluid, and continue to affect subsequent generations. It should not be surprising that, like with gendered differences in experience of genocide survivors, the uneven (and often invisible or unavailable) archival record regarding (Queer) sexuality is structural in nature, also. 

So back to Snyder: in her talk, Snyder cited a profound example that illustrates many of these histories, which lie within oral testimonies just beneath the surface. Language politics and code switching (for those studying minority language politics), Jewish migration within Europe, the role of communal organizations for Jews living in poverty, etc. all appear in Rachel Goldman Miller’s testimony within the first segment of the oral history interview. These dimensions of the testimony could be discussed at length. However, Goldman Miller’s experiences, as they relate to Snyder’s talk on gender and sexuality, are (though graphic) also vital to her story. 

Goldman Miller was adopted by an American Jewish soldier, who sexually molested her. Goldman Miller was then kicked out of the house after the soldier’s wife discovered the abuse, and was sent into foster care. In her interview, conducted in 1994, Goldman Miller recounts these instances of sexual abuse and exploitation in her own words, and in turn how these episodes fit into a larger history of her trauma, both personal and collective regarding gendered experiences of genocide. 

Also striking are the ways that Goldman Miller threads other familial details into her oral history (e.g., details about her grandchildren) before suddenly interjecting to say: she “had a second Holocaust.” Viewers of the oral history will have noticed that Goldman Miller wears a ribbon from the AIDS Walk Los Angeles. It is here that Goldman Miller mentions her son, Mark, who had died of AIDS complications two years prior, and who becomes the subject of his mother’s interview for over 20 minutes. It is this traumatic episode that Goldman Miller goes on to say (again) that her son’s death was “her second Holocaust.” It is clear that Goldman Miller struggles to continue with her “testimony” without first going into further details about her son’s life, and how she and her husband cared for him up until the moment he passed away. 

It is incredibly important to recognize that, had the interviewer not allowed Goldman Miller to continue uninterrupted, this particular narrative would be absent from the archive today. 

It is profound for a Holocaust survivor to say in her oral testimony that, “[HIV/AIDS] is another Holocaust that we have to do something about; there are many kinds (Tape 4, 27:32).” We should sit with the uniqueness of this statement. This is not only an important dimension to the interviewee’s story pertaining to the Holocaust; the history of HIV/AIDS activism and familial support that comes to light is significant, considering that many who fell sick and died faced intense marginalization from their families, their employers, etc. Goldman Miller goes on to also mention the Rwandan Genocide, taking place coterminously with her interview, which is an important reminder to 2023 viewers that Holocaust survivors were not viewing their own histories in a vaccuum. 

If survivors of genocide are making these parallels, why aren’t we? Why are we siloing the narratives pertaining to the Holocaust from other genocides? What is our responsibility as listeners, researchers, instructors, and students? 

This interview is a horrific example of the difficult subject matter often left out of universalized histories of genocide, but it also uncovers the ways in which an interviewee such as Goldman Miller writes her son into her own narrative, into a history that he did not witness but perhaps felt to some extent as a child of a Holocaust survivor and a gay man (as others with those lived experiences did). And in turn: Goldman Miller writes herself into that of her son’s history of marginalization and mass death. This is apparent when Goldman Miller goes through photographs (a common and incredibly rich element to the Visual History Archive interviews) depicting her family (including of her children and grandchildren), relatives who were murdered during the Holocaust, gravestones in Paris with French and Yiddish inscriptions, etc. For those familiar with the Visual History Archive, material objects often enter into the interviews, and Goldman Miller includes her son’s panel from the AIDS Quilt into the recording, thereby entering into a larger historical narrative and dialogue regarding state violence and and public inaction toward marginalized groups. 

I have published past blog articles for CHGS related to Queer and Trans histories, and the politics of memory during the AIDS crisis. As activists in the 1980s and 1990s (many of whom happened to be related to Holocaust survivors) saw parallels to their own lived experience as they refashioned and reclaimed symbols, such as the rosa Winkel (pink triangle) for their own use, and pointing out that the past is not only in the past. If one thinks about how the majority of the VHA interviews were conducted in the mid-1990s, one can only surmise how other genocide survivors hint at and refer to other global conflicts and instances of genocide occurring around that time. How can we possibly, and ethically, confine the Holocaust to 1933-1945? And more importantly, how can we continue to separate out these events separate from one another when memory links them together? 

I am certainly not advocating for reductive, side-by-side comparisons when teaching about episodes of genocide and mass violence. But how can we better include topics around race, racism(s) and racialization, gender, and sexuality when we teach about historical events—as they connect us to our pasts, and especially as they circulate in survivor narratives we teach in our classrooms? What are survivors saying to, and about, us? 

What I propose as a simple starting point, is to always view our focus on specific historical events through the lens of our contemporary world and its politics—not as a depoliticized figment of a distant time or place. Students should then think about: what politically is taking place both in the United States and globally? Why should we (really) be studying this topic in 2023? What orthodoxies might need to be placated for more inclusive studies of such events—and not only of the events themselves, but also of ourselves, as we are responsible for grappling with this subject matter? Although historical narratives elsewhere might differ from what we encounter in the United States, race, (and, to echo Snyder) gender, and sexuality are embedded in survivor narratives about the Holocaust, and we are ethically responsible for making sure that that embeddedness is discussed and centered. 

Select Academic Resources: 

Hájková, Anna. ‘Den Holocaust queer erzählen,’ Sexualitäten Jahrbuch, 2018, pp. 86-110.

Huneke, Samuel Clowes. “Heterogeneous Persecution: Lesbianism and the Nazi State,” Central European History 54.2 (2021): 297-325

——. “Death Wish: Suicide and Stereotype in the Gay Discourses of Imperial and Weimar Germany” New German Critique 46.1 (1 February 2019): 127-166. 

——. States of Liberation: Gay Men between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022.

Marhoefer, Laurie. Sex and the Weimar Republic: German Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015.

——. Racism and the Making of Gay Rights: A Sexologist, his Student, and the Empire of Queer Love. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022. 

——. “Lesbianism, Transvestitism, and the Nazi State: A Microhistory of a Gestapo Investigation, 1939-1943.” The American Historical Review 121, no. 4 (2016): 1167–95.

Newsome, Jake. Pink Triangle Legacies: Coming Out in the Shadow of the Holocaust. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2022. 

Ringelheim, Joan. “The Unethical and the Unspeakable: Women and the Holocaust.” Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual. 1 (1984) 69-88. 

——. Women and the Holocaust: A Reconsideration of Research. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 10(4), 741-761.

Schenker, Noah. Reframing Holocaust Testimony. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015. 

USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive (VHA) Please note: public access to the entire archives is limited. To view the entire collection of oral testimonies, please contact the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies or (for Minnesota residents) the University of Minnesota Libraries for further information. 

Goldman-Miller, Rachel. Interview 40. Interview by Rose Shoshana Finkelstein. Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation, August 02, 1994. Accessed February 01, 2023. https://vha.usc.edu/testimony/40

Publicly-Available Digital Resources: 

Bibliography on LGBTQ+ Communities Before, During, and After the Holocaust (compiled by Dr. Jake Newsome)

Bibliography on Lesbian and Trans Women in Nazi Germany (compiled by Dr. Anna Hájková)

Lesbians under the Nazi Regime (published by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

Gay Men under the Nazi Regime (published by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum) 

Bibliography – Gays and Lesbians (published by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

Long Road to Legal Reform – from the Arolsen Archives

Subject Guide – German-Language Materials Held in the Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies (University of Minnesota Libraries – Archives and Special Collections) 

From Deutsche Welle: A History of Persecution in West and East Germany

Meyer Weinshel completed his PhD in Germanic Studies at the University of Minnesota. He is Head of Programming, Publications, and Research at the Center for Austrian Studies, and the Collections Curator for the Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies. From 2021-2022, he was a Co-PI (and later postdoctoral researcher) for the Minnesota Human Rights Archive project (MHRA). He also taught German studies coursework in the UMN Department of German, Nordic, Slavic & Dutch (GNSD) from 2015-2020, and served as a visiting lecturer of Yiddish studies in the Ohio State University’s Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures in 2021. From 2018 to 2020, he was also involved with various Yiddish pedagogy initiatives at the Yiddish Book Center (Amherst, MA)—including the piloting of their new textbook, In eynem, working for the Book Center’s Steiner Yiddish Summer Program, and designing and teaching Yiddish community-education courses with Jewish Community Action (Minneapolis, MN). In addition to subject specializations in genocide studies, German studies, Yiddish studies, and Jewish studies, he also researches LGBTQIA+ histories, memory, translation, and migration.

Today, we remember those who lost their lives 29 years ago during the 1994 Rwandan Genocide. 

Lasting only 100 days, April 7th, 1994, marked the beginning of the Rwandan Genocide in which over 800,000 ethnic Tutsi and moderate Hutu were killed as the international community and UN peacekeepers stood by. Emboldened by state-sponsored propaganda and armed with rudimentary weapons, ordinary Rwandans of Hutu ethnicity were mobilized into killing militias. Scholars have estimated that the rate of killing was four times that of Nazi Germany and carried out by 175,000 to 230,000 Hutus. Much has been written about the causes and courses of this tragic event, as well as commemoration practices in Rwanda. But today, in honor of the lives lost, I would like to share with you how some Rwandans work to prevent future genocide in the land of a thousand hills.

Twenty-nine years after the conclusion of the genocide, there is now a whole new generation of Rwandans born after 1994. Over the course of five months in 2022, I had the privilege to interview history teachers, education experts, and parents in Rwanda to learn how older generations who experienced the violence teach this newer generation about their nation’s history. The teachers I spoke with emphasized the importance of learning and teaching history to younger generations. Many teachers discussed the importance of learning about Rwanda’s history to create a better future, increase knowledge of Rwandan culture, and prevent future violence. For example, one teacher remarked,

 “[The] history of Rwanda was characterized by the evils and wrongly taught. So, we studied wrongly; they gave us information that is not true about the history of Rwanda. And for me, I said I must change [that] … and this is my contribution to my country, to change this bad history.” 

Before the genocide, schools had been sites of structural violence, where anti-Tutsi propaganda was disseminated and discrimination enforced. And during the genocide, many schools were actual sites of violence. Given this history, teachers understood how easily history may be used and manipulated to mobilize populations into violence. Thus, teachers expressed a commitment to teaching youth about the causes and consequences of genocide.

While in Rwanda, I met with local organizations and individuals dedicated to preventing genocide and promoting peace. I met with PeacEdu Initiative, a local organization that works with communities to foster reconciliation and prevent genocide through peace education. Here, survivors and those who committed genocide crimes come together to learn about genocide and gain new skills. 

I was also fortunate to attend trainings where teachers throughout the country volunteered their time to learn about peace and human rights education. Many of these teachers ran peace and human rights clubs during the weekends at their schools. Finally, I spoke with parents, many of whom placed their faith in education to prevent future violence. As one parent stated,

“…we need now to put reconciliation first and foremost. We shouldn’t be stuck in our zones of thinking [that] we are divided or different. But rather, we should learn about the history and get lessons from it which will help bring national unity.” 

This parent’s comment reflects the sentiments of many others. In fact, many parents who taught their children about the genocide emphasized the importance of reconciliation and national unity. Holistically, parents aimed to teach their children that national identity must be prioritized over all other identities.

I am encouraged by the commitment of teachers, parents, and local communities in Rwanda to ensure younger generations know about genocide. Today, on a day of sorrow and remembrance, I hope you, too, are inspired by their commitment to foster unity and reconciliation in the hope of a more peaceful future. 

Jillian LaBranche is a PhD student at the University of Minnesota in the Sociology Department. She currently holds the National Academy of Education/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship. Her doctoral research examines how parents and teachers in Sierra Leone and Rwanda who experienced mass violence educate younger generations about their nation’s sensitive history. She has broad interests in Genocide Studies, Comparative Methods, and Memory Studies.

Editor’s note: This is the second in our collected statements in response to SF 2442, a bill currently being debated in the Minnesota legislature. If passed, the bill would mandate Holocaust and genocide education in middle and high schools across the state. Please see the earlier post by CHGS Interim Director Joe Eggers for background and context on the bill and Joe’s statement in response. Below is a statement submitted by George D. Dalbo, UMN Ph.D. and High School Social Studies Teacher.

University of Minnesota

Twin Cities Campus

Department of Curriculum and Instruction

College of Education and Human Development

March 20, 2023

Chair Cheryl Youakim

Republican Lead Ron Kresha

Members of the Education Finance Committee;

“Why have we never learned about this before?” This question was asked by a high school junior in my Genocide and Human Rights course just last week as we began learning about the Cambodian Genocide. The student, a second-generation Hmong-American whose family members experienced mass violence and came to the United States as refugees, is often frustrated that, until my course, her education has excluded most of the genocides we are covering in the course. Quite frankly, as her teacher, I am also frustrated and disheartened that most of my students have little knowledge of these events and the broader patterns of genocide. Thus, I am writing to support HF 2685 and Holocaust and genocide education in the State of Minnesota. As both a middle and high school social studies teacher and a scholar in the field of Social Studies Education, I have seen firsthand through my teaching and research the power of Holocaust and genocide education. 

I am currently nearing the completion of my 17th year as a classroom teacher. I have taught social studies at every grade from 5th through 12th in public, charter, and private schools in urban, suburban, and rural communities in Minnesota and Wisconsin, as well as two years in Vienna, Austria. As a teacher, I have seen firsthand the unique power of Holocaust and genocide education to engender attitudes of tolerance, justice, and citizenship within a pluralistic democracy. While students often come into my class curious about the topics, they leave inspired to seek a better world both locally and globally. I have also seen how teaching about genocide and mass violence, especially cases that are often absent from middle and high school social studies classes, can affirm students’ (and their families’) identities and lived experiences, as is the case for so many of my students from communities that have experienced mass violence. This is so important for Minnesota, as new and existing refugee and migrant communities seek to see themselves reflected in education and the state more broadly. Importantly, learning about Indigenous genocide provides opportunities for Indigenous and non-Indigenous students to better understand the history of the state and begin to imagine and work towards a more just future. 

However, like most social studies teachers, I came to the profession with little awareness of other genocides and limited knowledge of the Holocaust. Early in my career, when a principal asked that I develop and teach a high school elective course on the Holocaust, I began to seek out professional development opportunities, largely through the University of Minnesota’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies (CHGS). Through CHGS’s summer institutes, I was exposed to other cases of genocide, such as those in Armenia, Ukraine, Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bosnia. Importantly, I also learned from scholars and community members about the genocide of the Dakota and Ho-Chunk and the violence perpetrated against the Ojibwe. Soon my Holocaust course expanded to include these and other cases of genocide. HF 2685 stands apart from Holocaust and genocide education in other states in its support of funding for professional development for teachers, who will seek out and use these opportunities to create meaningful learning experiences for their students. 

In 2022, I completed my Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction and Social Studies Education, with a minor in Human Rights, at the University of Minnesota. Broadly, my research examines genocide education in high school social studies classrooms and curricula. My dissertation joins a growing body of research that shows the benefits of Holocaust and genocide education. My research also shows the power of legislation in strengthening and advancing Holocaust and genocide education in states which have adopted mandates. In Wisconsin, a newly implemented Holocaust and genocide mandate has spurred tremendous growth in professional development opportunities for teachers, and I have received dozens of requests to share my syllabus and resources with middle and high school teachers who are developing and teaching their own courses or weaving genocide into their existing social studies courses. Specific legislation places importance on the topic. 

I drafted all of the language related to the Holocaust and genocide in the 2021 Minnesota K-12 Social Studies Standards. While I laud the work of the standards committee in securing and expanding genocide education in Minnesota for years to come, I also recognize the limitations of the state’s teaching and learning standards. HF 2685 provides additional, essential safeguards and opportunities to secure and expand genocide education. Naming specific genocides matters. It ensures genocide education about and, importantly, beyond the Holocaust, including Indigenous genocide. Likewise codifying this language in legislation expresses an enduring recognition of the importance and commitment to genocide education within the state. 

HF 2685 is an important piece of legislation for Minnesota’s teachers and, especially, students. For students, this legislation will advance attitudes of tolerance, justice, and citizenship within a pluralistic democracy, affirm their and their families’ identities and lived experiences, and provide a step towards truth-telling in terms of Indigenous genocide within the state. For teachers, this legislation supports professional development opportunities and resources to ensure appropriate and responsible education. The community support for this legislation speaks to the importance of genocide education for Minnesotans of many different backgrounds. Perhaps, the most powerful call for such legislation is from my students when they ask: “Why have we never learned about this before?” This question speaks to the pressing need for such legislation. 

Sincerely,

George D. Dalbo, Ph.D. 

High School Social Studies Teacher

Last week, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s Commissioner for Children’s Rights, for their role in the alleged forced transfer of Ukrainian children back to Russia. Putin is the latest in a series of sitting heads of state to be issued an arrest warrant by the ICC since the Rome Statute came into force in 2002, including Omar al-Bashir, who was charged with several crimes, including genocide, in 2008. 

Although the forced transfer of children is explicitly listed as one of the four examples of genocide in the Rome Statute and the UN Genocide Convention, neither Putin nor Lvova-Belova were indicted for genocide. What do the charges mean, and is there any likelihood that Putin or Lvova-Belova will face trial? We asked Dr. Joachim Savelsberg, Arsham and Charlotte Ohanessian Chair and Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota, what to make of the news. 

The ICC alleges both Putin and Lvova-Belova are responsible for the war crime of unlawful deportation of a population (children) and that of unlawful transfer of a population (children) from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation under the Rome Statute. The Rome Statute also refers to the forcible transfer of children under genocide. Why do you think the decision was made not to charge genocide?

Genocide is a very challenging charge for the prosecution. While the forcible transfer of children is one act that may constitute genocide (a condition that seems to be confirmed in this case), the prosecution needs to prove that it or other “acts [were] committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” To prove such intent is difficult. Generally, the ICC prosecutors have chosen the easiest way in this first step against Putin: the forcible transfer of children can be directly linked to him and his “Children’s Rights Commissioner.” Both have publically propagated this transfer and their intent. Command responsibility is most obvious here.

Several organizations and experts have indicated a high likelihood of genocide being committed by Russian forces in Ukraine. Do you envision a scenario in which Putin or another Russian agent is formally charged with genocide?

That is conceivable. In the case of Omar al-Bashir, then President of Sudan, the arrest warrant was first for war crimes and crimes against humanity. About one year later, he was also charged with the crime of genocide. The first charging decision was made against substantial resistance by various actors, including diplomats from influential countries. The genocide charge had to overcome even greater hurdles. In the case of Sudan, the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, in the works for many years and including a referendum of independence for South Sudan, with the intent to end a long civil war that had cost an estimated three million lives, seemed to be at stake, at least in the judgment of many diplomats (I wrote about this in detail in Representing Mass Violence: Conflicting Responses to Human Rights Violations in Darfur). In the current case as well, chances toward diplomatic negotiations with Putin to end the war seem diminished. They would be diminished even further if he was charged with genocide. Nonetheless, such charges might still be filed should Putin ever lose his grip on power and be ousted from the Presidency.

Like the United States, Russia is not a signatory to the Rome Statute after the investigation of Russian forces in Ukraine in 2016. What does this mean for the likelihood of an actual trial for Putin or Lvova-Belova?

Chances of a trial are currently slim. Should Putin travel to one of the 123 countries that have ratified the Rome Statute, they would be obliged to arrest him and extradite him to the ICC in The Hague. Other countries could do so. Yet, in the case of Sudan/Darfur, al-Bashir traveled to South Africa (a ratifying state), and the South African authorities did not arrest him. Parts of the S African state were close to doing so, but others allowed for his departure shortly before that arrest was supposed to occur. South Africa thereby offended against international law, a sign of its ambivalence vis-a-vis the ICC (shared with many African countries) and possibly of its desire to keep a-Bashir in the game for a potential peace process. Yet, should Putin be ousted, and should forces come to power in Russia that would benefit from Putin being tried, then such a trial might happen.

This spring, the Minnesota legislature is debating a proposed mandate requiring Holocaust and genocide education in middle and high schools across the state. The proposal comes on the heels of work done in 2021 to increase the presence of the Holocaust and genocide in the revised social studies standards. This bill codifies the language in the standards revision. It establishes a task force of educators, experts, and community members that would work closely with the Minnesota Department of Education to implement requirements. The bill is a joint effort between CHGS and the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota & the Dakotas. 

If passed, Minnesota would join twenty-two other states with similar policies, but with two significant differences. First, unlike most states, our proposed mandate would provide funding for educator training. This would ensure teachers from across the state have equitable access to training and resources regardless of where they live. Second, the language in Minnesota’s proposal is more inclusive than other states, listing Black and Indigenous genocides. Specifically, the language includes “Indigenous dispossession, removal, and genocide.” This legislation would be the first state in the country to include Indigenous genocide. 

The Senate has already introduced the bill, having its first hearing on Monday, March 6th in the Education Policy Committee. In addition to written statements from CHGS advisory board members Dr. Sheer Ganor and Dr. Gabriela Spears-Rico, I spoke briefly to the committee about the importance of this bill for Minnesota teachers. I was joined by Luda Anastazievsky of the Ukrainian American Community Center and Kristin Thompson, founder of the Humanus Network and former Education Program Coordinator at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. 

My statement is below:

When Dr. Stephen Feinstein created our Center in 1997, it was among the first Centers dedicated to studying the Holocaust and genocides in the country. Dr. Feinstein envisioned a research center that could nurture the needs of faculty and students at the University of Minnesota and respond to the growing number of educators across the state looking for resources for their classrooms. Since then, the Center has been at the forefront of preserving the memory of genocide and raising awareness through the development of teaching materials and workshops.

Throughout my near decade with the Center, I’ve had the privilege of working with numerous communities whose legacies are tainted by the legacies of genocide. A paramount concern for all of these communities is the desire to teach Minnesotans about their histories. As one community leader told me, “Genocide is woven into the fabric of Minnesota.” 

He’s right. Over the last five decades, tens of thousands of foreign-born people have found a safe home in Minnesota after fleeing their homelands in the wake of violence and even genocide. Since the 1970s, Khmer, Hmong, Somali, Bosniak, and most recently, Ukrainians have found sanctuary in our state. These numbers don’t factor in groups like the Armenians, Jews, or earlier waves of Ukrainians who came to Minnesota in the early twentieth century in the face of persecution and violence in their homelands. It also doesn’t include Minnesota’s Indigenous nations, who have routinely been subjected to genocidal policies in the state since the first treaty in 1805. 

Our teachers speak to this need. At one of our workshops, I was asked by an educator, “These students are in my classes. How can I possibly tell them their history?” This question is supported by surveys we’ve done with educators that point to the lack of resources as the primary reason teachers give for not including the Holocaust or other genocides in their curriculum. Nearly every respondent said including these topics was important to them, yet less than half spent time on the Holocaust. That number drops significantly for other genocides. 

Members of the committee, we cannot escape the legacies of genocide, but we can better equip teachers to address it in their classrooms. A policy that ensures Holocaust & genocide are incorporated in middle and high school is an important first step, but providing funding that supports the development of new resources is critical.

Note: SF 2442 is currently advancing through Senate committees. It is expected to be introduced in the House soon. 

Joe Eggers is the Interim Director of the Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies.

Recently, Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, has notoriously gone on antisemitic tirades on social and other forms of media. In early October, Ye tweeted that he was going to go “death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE.” Shortly thereafter, his Twitter account was removed and he has since gone on multiple podcasts to explain himself. During his interview with Piers Morgan, he argued that his tweets stemmed from signing unfair record deals with “Jewish businessmen.” Going on, he claimed that he cannot be antisemitic due to he himself being Jewish and one of the “12 Lost Tribes of Hebrew.” The notion Ye speaks of is that the 12 Lost Tribes of Hebrew are actually Black, an idea coined by Black preachers during the Jim Crow era to counter the notion that Black Americans were an inferior race. Although the belief is not necessarily antisemitic, the concept has been co-opted by known hate groups. Since Ye’s statements, there has been a large fallout, with Ye losing almost all of his brand deals and affiliations. The statements themselves and the people who still choose to support Ye demonstrate, at best, tolerance for casual antisemitism and, at worst, support for it, in the US. Supporters of Ye have used the First Amendment to argue that his viewpoints are protected by Freedom of Speech and that cancel culture is censoring viewpoints.What they refuse to understand is the breadth of what Ye is stating. People are too slow to realize that antisemitism is another form of racism, and that a man as influential as Ye saying these things is a call to action for some. Just recently, an antisemitic hate group hung a banner over a freeway in Los Angeles that stated “Kanye is right” and proceeded to make a Nazi salute gesture. 

The question still stands as to whether or not this rise in antisemitism will continue to worsen, as NBA player Kyrie Irving recently shared an antisemitic film that denies the Holocaust and affirms the idea that Black Americans are Jewish, echoing Ye’s earlier claims. Irving initially refused to explicitly deny that he was antisemitic, and, though he has since apologized, he remains suspended from the league. Once again though, throughout social media comment sections people rally to Irving’s side, arguing that people should be allowed to have their own opinions. These people fail to realize the difference between differing views and hurtful ones. Promoting a film that denies the Holocaust continues to promulgate false and antisemitic narratives. This not only perpetuates revisionist and debunked histories, but is profoundly insulting to and hurtful for Jewish communities, who are already the targets of increasing hate crimes today. 

Ye stated that the reasoning for his Twitter statement was that he wants the Jewish population to feel how he feels as a Black man facing racism. He directly stated during his interview with Piers Morgan “God forbid one comment could cause people to feel any of my pain I’ve felt for years.” In so doing, Ye creates a false dichotomy, leveling the racism experienced by Black communities as justification for antisemitic viewpoints. Continuing on his tangent, Ye also makes an analogy that another reason for his hateful comments was that when one Black person gets pulled over, every Black person in the car with him goes to jail too, but that doesn’t happen to Jewish people. Similarly, this completely disregards the broader notion that is about a police system created to benefit white people at the expense of Black people. Once again, he misses the mark and decides to further harm an already oppressed community instead of questioning the broader systems of inequality that have shaped his hardships.

Ye has had a history of mental health issues, with the cover for his album “Ye” stating: “I hate being Bi-Polar its awesome.” But mental health cannot be an excuse for his actions. Instead of using his platform as a major influence in popular culture to advocate for building communities, Ye has chosen to use it to advocate hate and intolerance. While we should be concerned about the views Ye has espoused, just as worrisome is the level of support he has seen. Hatred and bigotry, in any form, cannot go unchallenged.

Griffin Mckinney is a CHGS undergraduate student staff member.

There are some odd places in Germany’s Deep South that are strangely attractive to American tourists. For one, there is the Eagle’s Nest, Hitler’s Alpine refuge, which, not too long ago, one of my university colleagues cheerfully described as the high point of his German sightseeing tour; on TripAdvisor the Eagle’s Nest gets just as many thumbs-up as Austria’s Sound of Music tour. Growing up in 1970s Germany, I don’t remember anyone using the term “Eagle’s Nest” or Adlerhorst, probably because political winds were steadily blowing left and pilgrimage to Nazi remnants wasn’t a thing. Another southern tourist attraction—less creepy but still weird enough—is Bavaria’s fairy tale castle Neuschwanstein. A kitsch monster from the 19^th century, it was designed by Mad King Ludwig who never, even in his wildest hallucinations, imagined that one day it would be lifted into the corporate logo of the Walt Disney company and become the go-to castle for Snow White, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty.

It was only recently that northern Germany came up with an answer to these architectural challenges from the south, which is no less Disneyesque than Neuschwanstein and historically at least as unappetizing as the Eagle’s Nest. It’s a replica of the Royal Prussian Palace planted in the middle of Berlin, home to Germany’s last kaiser whose madness was far more consequential for world politics than Ludwig’s. Kaiser Wilhelm’s passion was world domination, not building fairy tale castles, and WWI was a direct result of his imperial hubris. In the end the Kaiser’s empire collapsed, but his palace didn’t. It even remained more or less intact through the next world war and another failed attempt at world domination, this time by the owner of the Eagle’s Nest. And yes, this all sounds like the typical plot for 007 movies: supervillains living in fancy hideouts trying to bring the planet under their control. Even the grand finale could have been taken from a James Bond novel: the Kaiser’s palace was spectacularly blown to bits with dynamite like Auric Goldfinger’s volcano lair in You Only Live Twice. The palace’s lucky streak was over when it ended up on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, in Berlin’s Soviet Sector, where feudal architecture didn’t have many fans. Later, the communists would proudly claim responsibility for the Big Bang that finished off Prussia’s history and its most visible symbol. Once and for all, so they thought.

You could argue that predicting history and getting it wrong is what Marxists do. But a sequel to the palace’s story in which the German taxpayer is willing to pay half a billion euros for a tacky remake—70 years into the federal republic and with no monarch in sight—would have been even beyond Ian Fleming’s imagination. How did that come about? How could a group of wealthy ultraconservatives, some with close ties to Germany’s far right and antisemitic AfD, lead the entire country by the nose and make parliament agree to pay the bill for a palace look-alike that had virtually no artistic merit? With pockets as deep as their minds were shallow, these businessmen were running campaigns in Germany with Trumpian slogans at a time when Donald Trump was still running casinos into the ground. “Let’s make Berlin beautiful again” was one of those slogans. And it caught on. Hard to believe this happened in the same country that, just a few years earlier and a few blocks away, had reserved prime real estate, bigger than three football fields, for its Holocaust Memorial.

To top it all off, as a finishing touch the palace received its shiny dome again bearing the exact same inscription as in the 1850s. It’s printed in flashy golden letters on a blue ribbon that runs around the dome’s base and demands that “in the name of Jesus all of them that are in heaven and on earth and under the earth should bow down on their knees.” This made clear that Prussia was a Christian state with its king solely reporting to God and certainly not to his underlings. And to leave no doubt about which faith is the right faith, the dome was topped with a glittering giant cross that sat on a tiny orb and sent yet another message of world domination. This particular piece of roof decoration has been remade from scratch and reinstalled as well. For what? As a nod to American tourists from the Bible Belt? While the glaring resurrection of cross and orb may warm the hearts of Christian nationalists from all around the globe, it keeps sending chills down the spines of Berlin’s Jewish community who, along with many other groups, protested against the uncontextualized display of religious supremacy.

The palace is no longer called the palace. It’s now a public building named the Humboldt Forum, which at first didn’t have a real function beyond pretending to be the palace. Then, in another breathtakingly callous move, it was decided that the Forum should house Berlin’s Ethnological Museum. Many of its artifacts and treasures are from the heady days when the Kaiser’s navy was roaming the seas, making landfalls in Africa and Asia, massacring the population and mopping up what other colonial powers had missed. Putting the stolen artwork back in the Kaiser’s palace is like decorating the Eagle’s Nest with Nazi plunder. As a result, curators at the Humboldt Forum have a lot of explaining to do right now. There is a good chance that eventually, when claims are settled and things returned to their rightful owners, all that’s left to curate is a Potemkin palace.

So, should you decide to invest your soaring US dollars into cheap euros during the next travel season, there is nothing wrong with spending them on a trip to Mad King Ludwig’s and Walt Disney’s Neuschwanstein. It is, after all, more than a hundred years old and a real castle.

Henning Schroeder is a professor at the University of Minnesota and currently teaches in the Department of German, Nordic, Slavic & Dutch. His email address is schro601@umn.edu and his Twitter handle is @HenningSchroed1.

This year marks the 70th anniversary of the Luxembourg Agreement, the resulting agreements from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, commonly known as the Claims Conference. The meeting, held just six years after the Holocaust, negotiated tens of billions of dollars in compensation for survivors of the Holocaust, implemented the following year. Each year, the Claims Conference continues to support survivors in dozens of countries around the world. Just last month, the German government pledged another $1.2 billion in funding, including funds explicitly for Holocaust education for the first time. 

The staggering level of support from the German government is in line with the horrors perpetrated by the Nazi government between 1933 and 1945. The Claims Conference, while clearly unable to atone for the past, is an attempt by the German government to answer to crimes committed against European Jews under the Nazi regime. On a recent trip to Berlin, I was reminded that signs of this culpability extend all the way down to the streets, where memorials, placards, and other public history displays make clear the role of the National Socialist government in perpetrating the Holocaust.

But while these memorials to the Holocaust ensure that it can never be ignored or forgotten, not all of German history is on public display. There is a story that is conspicuously absent; Germany’s role as a colonial power. The country’s colonial aspirations began even before it gained overseas territories—through merchants who profited off slave labor in other European colonies. It wasn’t until 1884 when the Berlin Conference established the rules for the European colonization of Africa, that the newly formed German Empire established colonies in East and West Africa and the South Pacific. Like their European counterparts, German officials brutally exploited its colonies. Many of the hallmarks of genocidal oppression elsewhere in African colonies could be found in Germany’s colonies as well, including the violent campaigns of retaliation against tribes asserting independence, most notably the 1904-1907 genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples in what is now Namibia. The legacies of German colonialism run much deeper than what can be presented in a blog article, but they still reverberate across the African continent and Germany today. 

The German government has accepted responsibility for its colonial crimes, but only somewhat. In May 2021, Germany formally apologized for its treatment of the Herero and Nama peoples, officially labeling its actions as genocide in a statement read by then Foreign Minister Heiko Maas:

We will officially call these events what they were from today’s perspective, a genocide. In doing so, we acknowledge our historical responsibility. In light of Germany’s historical and moral responsibility, we will ask Namibia and the descendants of victims for forgiveness. 

In December, the agreement was finalized. In addition to a formal apology from the German government, Namibia will receive more than a billion dollars in aid meant to support Namibia’s infrastructure and public services over the next three decades, which amounts to just under $37 million in funds annually. While the funds appear low, Namibia’s Human Development Index is ranked 139th out of 191 nations, meaning there is a great need for support in the country. 

The apology has significant symbolic value and aid for Namibia is much-needed, but I couldn’t help but notice the absence of acknowledgment of Germany’s colonial past in its public history. Berlin’s Tiergarten, which features Holocaust memorials to the Persecuted Homosexuals Under National Socialism and the Roma and Sinti, still includes a statue of Otto von Bismark, the architect of the Berlin Conference. These histories are seemingly at odds with each other and are representative of a country willing to confront the horrors of one past while ignoring another. It’s important to remember that like the Holocaust, Germans of the colonial period would have been exposed to colonialism directly; it wasn’t restricted to overseas territories. Many Africans settled in Germany and, in some cases, even married white German women. However, the experience of Afro-Germans and those in the former colonies don’t seem to be a part of mainstream discourse from the German state. 

In light of this erasure, several groups across Germany are working to raise the profile of the country’s colonial past in the public consciousness. Located in Berlin, the organization Dekoloniale “tests how a metropolis, its space, its institutions and its society can be examined on a broad level for (post-)colonial effects, how the invisible can be experienced and the visible can be irritated.” In so doing, the organization aims to shift the public discourse away from the history of the oppressors to the story of the victims. Some of its work has included the exhibition Looking Back, organized in conjunction with the Treptow Museum. When the museum wanted to revisit the problematic 1896 colonial exhibition in Berlin, Dekoloniale stepped in, helping organize an exhibit that tells the story of the more than 100 African and Pacific Islanders sent to Germany to serve as a human zoo. For me, a particularly astonishing project is its mapping project, connecting the stories of Afro-Germans with Berlin and former German African colonies, bringing the story of the city’s ties with colonialism home.

In Hamburg, Afro-German activists have opened Arca – Afrikanisches Bildungszentrum, an African-focused library, helping to fill a need they felt public libraries would not and providing a cultural hub. The library itself is housed in a former prison (and before that, military barracks) that’s now being used as an artist commune. It’s one of a number of education centers opened across Germany showcasing Black, Afro-German, and Afro-diasporic perspectives and resources. Coming from the United States which incarcerates its Black population at a staggering rate, the symbolism of a former prison now housing an organization that celebrates African & Black identity cannot be missed. 

Despite the many groups working across Germany to raise awareness of its colonial past, it’s an uphill challenge. For instance in Berlin, attempts to rename M-Street (M being a racial slur commonly used during the colonial past) have been rebuffed by residents, echoing a similar unwillingness to rename sites across the Twin Cities (see the debate around Bde Maka Ska and, more recently, Historic Fort Snelling). The street name remains in place, despite continued efforts. In Hamburg, the city’s Speicherstadt district, a UNESCO world heritage site, is receiving millions of dollars in reinvestment in an effort to turn the area into a tourism destination. In spite of the city’s stated goal to create an inclusive space, many of the buildings in the area will now feature the names of European colonial explorers like Columbus, Vespucci, and Marco Polo. These names tie back to a glorified history of European exploration that Hamburg no doubt wants to connect itself to, but do not reflect the diverse population of the city today and serve to reinforce the legacies of colonialism. 

I wrote several years ago after the disappointing vote of Rep. Ilhan Omar on the Armenian genocide that recognizing one genocide doesn’t preclude acknowledging another. I can’t shake a similar feeling I have after my two weeks in Germany. The memorials, displays, and exhibitions across Germany serve as an important reminder to never forget the horrors of the Holocaust but also stand in stark contrast to the largely absent public memory of colonial history. I went to Germany expecting to examine how the Holocaust can serve as a catalyst to publicly present other difficult pasts but I left with the impression that many of the challenges we have in representing the legacies of colonialism in Minnesota are similar in Germany. It became clear that while in some instances Germany can serve as the prime example of a country reckoning with its difficult past, its lack of colonial awareness, at times bordering on denial, shows that it’s essentially no different than many other former colonial powers. 

Note: This trip was part of the “Building a Diverse and Inclusive Culture of Remembrance (DAICOR)” fellowship, a project hosted by the Heinrich Böll Stiftung in Washington, DC, and CulturalVistas and funded by the Transatlantic Program of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy. 

Joe Eggers is the Interim Director of the Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies.

*Editor’s Note: This piece was originally published in the Oral History Journal.

Gelinada Grinchenko, Professor of History at Kharkiv National University, Ukraine, President of the Oral History Association, Ukraine, and Scholar at Risk at the University of Wuppertal, Germany, reflects on her forthcoming book and series of accompanying short films On Kharkiv and ourselves: the city’s fates and experiences in its inhabitants’ oral histories. Gelinada also discusses her experience and role in the context of the current conflict in Ukraine as an oral historian, survivor, and potential storyteller in the future.

‘On the evening of 23 February 2022, my colleagues and I recorded my commentary for a short film to accompany the second part of the book.  The book is in three parts: the beginning of the Nazi-Soviet war and the Nazi invasion in Kharkiv; the Holocaust and the Nazi crimes in the city; and life under occupation, liberation and the end of the war.  This second film focused on the Nazi persecution of the Jews of Kharkiv and its culmination in the execution of about ten thousand Jews in Drobytsky Yar in December 1941-January 1942 on the eastern outskirts of the city. Recording the commentary was hard and back at home, I was worried about how best to combine the voices of the narrators in the film with my commentary as the researcher, together with archive photographs, animation, sound effects, and music. I fell asleep late that night, and two hours later, I woke up from the sound of real explosions: at 5 am on the 24 February 2022 the Russians bombed my city.

‘I began my work on this book in 2021 with two groups of sources: the University of Southern California (USC) Shoah Foundation collection of oral histories of the Holocaust survivors’ from Ukraine – recorded in the mid 1990s, and those recorded by the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center (Kyiv, Ukraine) between 2018 and 2021. Being recorded at different times, these oral histories provide an opportunity to analyse, among other things, changes in the official narrative of the war.

‘The book is dedicated to my mother. She was born and raised in Kharkiv and experienced the war as a little girl.  The most terrible thing that she remembers is how the track in which she and her mother and several other officer’s families, who were leaving the city, came under bombardment.

‘I am sure that when I am 86, I will also recall with horror the sound of a Russian plane over Kharkiv when my family fled. And now, I perceive the stories of many of the Second World War survivors in a completely different way. When they say that, according to their impression, the plane was flying to kill them directly, earlier I considered that as a hyperbole, an emotional exaggeration. Now I understand and empathise with them. Two months ago, when we fled from Kharkiv in March 2022, it seemed to me too that there were only three of us in the whole world: the Russian killer pilot, my frightened little son, and me.

‘Now that I am in a safe place, I think a lot about the parallels between my experience and the experience of those who survived the Second World War. The escalation of “never again” into “never? again!” turned my personal life and my research beliefs and priorities upside down.  From my own experience – no longer as a researcher but as a survivor – I see that we have very few ethical standards, and moral guidelines for conducting oral history research in times of war. This is a particular concern for people who continue to experience the trauma of loss, displacement, bombing, or flight. How should researchers approach fieldwork in times of continuously unfolding trauma? How can we conduct interview-based research in times of war without harming those with whom we work? These are the central questions of a planned summer institute: Witnessing War in Ukraine, Oral History and Interview-based research.’

For more information about the summer institute, click here.

To watch the first of the short films about the beginning of the war in 1941 in Kharkiv: