Virtual Library

By taking migrants seriously as subjects of national and transnational memory, this essay picks up where Haacke’s project leaves off. It re-envisions the ‘population’ parallax as an active bearer of memory, rather than as merely a passive object of commemoration. Such a perspective uncovers the multidirectional and transcultural memory work of the population at large: it draws attention in particular to the formation of as-yet under-recognized archives of migrant engagement with the German national past, with a history and memory of which they are ostensibly not

a part and about which they are frequently said to be indifferent. In other words, DER BEVOLKERUNG, a performance of memory by a German artist who migrated out of Germany, constitutes only the tip of a rarely explored iceberg: the unavoidable conjunction in contemporary Europe of Holocaust remembrance and

migrant history. This conjunction offers an essential perspective on contemporary European society because the continent’s postwar unification – and especially Germany’s central role in that process – has taken place via the explicit rejection of the Nazi past and against the backdrop of demographic changes resulting from labour, postcolonial and post-Communist migrations. Collective memory of the Holocaust has functioned as a point of reference for a post-fascist Europe and the basis of a new human rights regime at the same time that migrations have

complicated the ‘unity’ of Europe’s population and posed challenges to Europe’s liberal model of rights.

Translated by Assenka Oksiloff.

Can collective memories of the past shape the future? If one of the fears about a globalized society is the homogenization of culture, can it nevertheless be true that the homogenization of memory might have a positive impact on political and cultural norms? Originally published in Germany, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age examines the nature of collective memory in a globalized world, and how the memory of one particular event--the Holocaust--helped give rise to an emerging global consensus on human rights. Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider show how memories of the Holocaust have been de-contextualized from the original event and offer a framework for interpreting contemporary acts of injustice such as ethnic cleansing and genocide. Representations of mass atrocities in Bosnia and Kosovo during the 1990s resonated with iconographies of the Holocaust and played a significant role in the political and military interventions in the Balkans. Subsequently, these representations have had a crucial impact on the consolidation of international human rights and related issues of transitional justice, reparations, and restitution.

Trauma Cinema focuses on a new breed of documentary films and videos that adopt catastrophe as their subject matter and trauma as their aesthetic. Incorporating oral testimony, home-movie footage, and documentary reenactment, these documentaries express the havoc trauma wreaks on history and memory. Janet Walker uses incest and the Holocaust as a double thematic focus and fiction films as a point of comparison.

A total of 160,000 people, a mix of résistants and Jews, were deported from France to camps in Central and Eastern Europe during the Second World War. In this compelling new study, Philip Nord addresses how the Deportation, as it came to be known, was remembered after the war and how Deportation memory from the very outset, became politicized against the backdrop of changing domestic and international contexts. He shows how the Deportation generated competing narratives - Jewish, Catholic, Communist, and Gaullist - and analyzes the stories told by and about deportees after the war and how these stories were given form in literature, art, film, monuments, and ceremonials.

 Austerlitz is the story of a man’s search for the answer to his life’s central riddle. A small child when he comes to England on a Kindertransport in the summer of 1939, Jacques Austerlitz is told nothing of his real family by the Welsh Methodist minister and his wife who raise him. When he is a much older man, fleeting memories return to him, and obeying an instinct he only dimly understands, Austerlitz follows their trail back to the world he left behind a half century before. There, faced with the void at the heart of twentieth-century Europe, he struggles to rescue his heritage from oblivion.

With Between Vengeance and Forgiveness, Martha Minow, Harvard law professor and one of our most brilliant and humane legal minds, offers a landmark book on justice and healing after horrific violence. Remembering and forgetting, judging and forgiving, reconciling and avenging, grieving and educating -- Minow shows us why each may be necessary, yet painfully inadequate, to individuals and societies living in the wake of past horrors. She explores the rich and often troubling range of responses to massive, societal-level oppression. She writes of the legacy of war-crime prosecutions, beginning with the Nuremberg trials. She explores whether reparation -- such as the monetary awards given to Japanese-Americans for internment during World War II, or art, such as Holocaust memorials -- can be a basis for reconciliation after immeasurable personal and cultural loss. Minow also writes with informed, searching prose of the extraordinary drama of truth commissions in Argentina, East Germany, and most notably South Africa, and in the process delves into the risks and requirements involved in hearing from victims, the dynamics of gender, and the value of even imperfect gestures in the midst of these riveting experiments in justice and healing.

Despite familiar images of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan and the controversy over its fiftieth anniversary, the human impact of those horrific events often seems lost to view. In this uncommon memoir, Dr. James N. Yamazaki tells us in personal and moving terms of the human toll of nuclear warfare and the specific vulnerability of children to the effects of these weapons. Giving voice to the brutal ironies of racial and cultural conflict, of war and sacrifice, his story creates an inspiring and humbling portrait of events whose lessons remain difficult and troubling fifty years later.

Children of the Atomic Bomb is Dr. Yamazaki’s account of a lifelong effort to understand and document the impact of nuclear explosions on children, particularly the children conceived but not yet born at the time of the explosions. Assigned in 1949 as Physician-in-Charge of the United States Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission in Nagasaki, Yamazaki had served as a combat surgeon at the Battle of the Bulge where he had been captured and held as a prisoner of war by the Germans. In Japan he was confronted with violence of another dimension—the devastating impact of a nuclear blast and the particularly insidious effects of radiation on children.

Yamazaki’s story is also one of striking juxtapositions, an account of a Japanese-American’s encounter with racism, the story of a man who fought for his country while his parents were interned in a concentration camp in Arkansas. Once the object of discrimination at home, Yamazaki paradoxically found himself in Japan for the first time as an American, part of the Allied occupation forces, and again an outsider. This experience resonates through his work with the children of Nagasaki and Hiroshima and with the Marshallese people who bore the brunt of America’s postwar testing of nuclear weapons in the Pacific.

Recalling a career that has spanned five decades, Dr. Yamazaki chronicles the discoveries that helped chart the dangers of nuclear radiation and presents powerful observations of both the medical and social effects of the bomb. He offers an indelible picture of human tragedy, a tale of unimaginable suffering, and a dedication to healing that is ultimately an unwavering, impassioned plea for peace.

Documentary Testimonies examines documentary films that compel us to bear witness, move us to anger or tears, and possibly mobilize us to action.

Comprising ten new essays and a substantive introduction, this interdisciplinary volume examines audiovisual testimonial practices, forms, and institutions. Topics include: technologies of capture, storage and circulation; problems of historical veracity/frail memory; generation of video archives--official, renegade, and ephemeral; limits and potentialities of documentary as public record; architectonics of memory; ethics of witnessing and commemoration; human rights and activist publics.

The essays provide in-depth analysis of archives of social suffering tied to particular locales: Cambodia, Chiapas, Darfur, India, Indonesia, Korea, New Orleans, Norway, Rwanda, South Africa, and Washington, DC. The contributors focus on the generation and use of testimony by public administrators and institutions, human rights activists, documentary filmmakers, and others with interest in environmental justice, human rights, social advocacy, and the commemoration/prevention of genocide. Thus, this volume aims to investigate, from a critical and translocal perspective, testimony as social practice.

Inserting China into the history of nineteenth-century colonialism, English Lessons explores the ways that Euroamerican imperial powers humiliated the Qing monarchy and disciplined the Qing polity in the wake of multipower invasions of China in 1860 and 1900. Focusing on the processes by which Great Britain enacted a pedagogical project that was itself a form of colonization, James L. Hevia demonstrates how British actors instructed the Manchu-Chinese elite on “proper” behavior in a world dominated by multiple imperial powers. Their aim was to “bring China low” and make it a willing participant in British strategic goals in Asia. These lessons not only transformed the Qing dynasty but ultimately contributed to its destruction.

Hevia analyzes British Foreign Office documents, diplomatic memoirs, auction house and museum records, nineteenth-century scholarly analyses of Chinese history and culture, campaign records, and photographs. He shows how Britain refigured its imperial project in China as a cultural endeavor through examinations of the circulation of military loot in Europe, the creation of an art history of “things Chinese,” the construction of a field of knowledge about China, and the Great Game rivalry between Britain, Russia, and the Qing empire in Central Asia. In so doing, he illuminates the impact of these elements on the colonial project and the creation of a national consciousness in China.

On July 16, 1942, little Annette Muller was nine years old. After having survived the hell that was the Velodrome d’Hiver, she was interned with her mother and younger brother, Michel at Beaune-la-Rolande. She witnessed the terrible fate of the thousands of young Jewish children interned in the Loiret camps who were cruelly separated from their mothers, then sent to Auschwitz -- from which none of them would return.

Annette escaped deportations thanks to her father who succeeded in securing her and her brother’s release from Drancy. She was one of the rare few children to have survived the Velodrome d’Hiver. 

From the Vel d’Hiv to the camps of  Beaune-la-Rolande camp and Drancy to the Lamarck refuge to the Catholic orphanage where she was hidden to the children’s home in Mans, she has never been able to forget. She finally decided to tell her story; she returns the perspective of the child that she was, as if those moments never settled in the past.