Restitution, Repair and the Memory Wars

What does it mean for individuals and institutions to be ‘implicated’ in past violence? This is an urgent question across nations and continents, not least in the UK, but it has a particular force in Germany. 

 

Today the German public sphere is agitated by debates that concern the relationship between the Holocaust and colonialism, between antisemitism and racism, and between Holocaust memory and violence in Israel/Palestine. These debates have intersected with a longer-standing dispute about colonial legacies that has centered on the reconstruction of Berlin’s imperial palace and the creation of the Humboldt Forum, which now occupies the space of the rebuilt palace with displays of ethnological materials and art from beyond Europe. The Humboldt Forum debate directly concerns the afterlives of colonial structures, desires, stolen artifacts and human remains. 

 

In this lecture, Professor Rothberg will introduce these different debates and the questions they raise. Much of the controversy about the relationship between the Holocaust and colonialism concerns the past, but Michael Rothberg’s approach also foregrounds what it means to live in the wake of such histories of violence and addresses questions of memory and responsibility, restitution and repair.