In September 2019, I had the good fortune to present for the second time at Mnemonics: Network for Memory Studies, a collaborative initiative for graduate education in memory studies. Each year, a partner institution hosts this three-day summer school around a pressing theme in cultural memory studies. Utrecht University hosted the 2019 summer school. This year’s program generated lively discussions pertaining to the theme of “Memory and Activism.” Previously, I participated in the Mnemonics summer school held on our Urbana-Champaign campus. The theme for that 2016 session was “The Other Side of Memory: Forgetting, Denial, Repression.”

​The Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies (HGMS) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) is a partner institution of Mnemonics. Before departing to Utrecht, Professor Brett Kaplan (Director of HGMS) asked me if I would be interested in writing a blog post about my experience. In preparation to do just that, I took several pages of notes in my sketchbook during the summer school. However, when I sat down to write this blog post, I realized that my tidy notes organized in blue, green, purple, and brown ink do not capture what my participation in Mnemonics means to me.

As I did in a previous blog post for HGMS, I will illustrate the importance of an academic event by situating it in a larger context. By telling a brief story, I hope to elucidate what Mnemonics, an exemplary interactive forum in which junior and senior memory scholars meet, has meant for me and what I trust the venue can mean for other graduate students. That is, Mnemonics has played a central role in my journey to finding my intellectual home in the US academy. To explain what I mean by “finding my intellectual home,” though, I need to return to my undergraduate years, when I pursued a bachelor's degree in English and Art.

No institution of higher education in Utah has an Armenian studies program. Still, at Westminster College, faculty supported me as I tried to figure out the aims of Armenian studies, what its scope had been historically, the current state of the field, and what I envisioned for the field. To that end, Professor Katherine Evans gave me a 2005 PMLA article written by Shari Huhndorf (Yup'ik) and titled “Literature and the Politics of Native American Studies.” Huhndorf recaps the proceedings of a panel titled “American (Indian) Studies: Can the ASA Be an Intellectual Home?” from the 2002 meeting of the American Studies Association. In that panel, Robert Warrior (Osage), Philip Deloria (Dakota descent), and Jean O’Brien (White Earth Ojibwe) addressed the relation of Native American studies to American studies at large. The point of course was not for me to equate the aims and trajectory of Native American studies with that of Armenian studies. Rather, Professor Evans showed me that in my own way, I was asking: where is my intellectual home in academia?

And so I learned to listen: to listen for how we in Armenian studies posed questions for inquiry; to listen for models of interdisciplinary research; to listen for how we defined, applied, and carried forward cultural and critical theory; to listen for how we could bring the conversations at kitchen tables into our academic lives and vice versa; and to listen for the ways in which Armenian studies already was but could also better be in conversation with other area studies. I suppose “listen” is a misnomer as I was, rather, reading anything I could access through library systems.

To capture this notion of listening in my senior thesis, I titled the methodology section “At the Kitchen Table.” I decided on that title after reading a text Professor Evans taught in class: Abenaki historian Lisa Brook’s afterword to American Indian Literary Nationalism. I did cite critical theory in my thesis on Micheline Aharonian Marcom’s Three Apples Fell from Heaven. But the phrase “At the kitchen table” allowed me to acknowledge that my work was not done, that I was still finding my intellectual home, that the observations I made about my family’s multilingual, multinational diasporic Armenian experience (like so many others I knew) could be the springboard for scholarly, well-argued, and meaningful contributions to various disciplines and area studies with which my projects engaged, and that while I did not yet fully know how to make all of that visible and legible in academia, I was learning to listen before speaking.

This background leads me to understand Mnemonics as more than the usual components of a conference. That is, the Mnemonics summer school is structured so that we graduate students have a space to listen. True, graduate students present fifteen-minute long papers. The 2019 call for papers invited applicants to refine conceptual and methodological tools through three axes of inquiry. The first concerned memory activism, or how people work together to shape memory culture as a contribution to present-day politics. The second concerned the memory of activism, or how acts of civil resistance are culturally remembered. The final axis concerned memory in activism, or how memory informs civil resistance in the present. Presenters and audience members soon realized that in taking up one line of inquiry, we were often addressing the intersection of all three points. Indeed, the organization of the panels meant that if we did not address all three axes in our individual presentations, we certainly did so collectively.

Additionally, each panel has a senior scholar in the field of cultural studies serve as a respondent. I will take one for the team and admit that sharing work in progress is often intimidating. But, rest assured! Each respondent at Mnemonics reads the papers on a panel in advance and leads the question and answer session by highlighting the ways in which the presentations are in conversation. Respondents also provide thoughtful questions, both for individual presenters and for the panel as a whole. It is my sense that respondents actively participate because at the end of the day, Mnemonics is an environment that fosters graduate student learning, international academic community building, and the belief that a panel participant will become a member of the academia and practice that model of collaboration evinced during the summer school.

Mnemonics also features keynote speakers. At Utrecht University, we heard from Lorenzo Zamponi (Scuola Normale Superiore, Florence) who presented “Memory in Action: Reflections on the Role of the Past in Social Movements.” We also heard from Wulf Kansteiner (Aarhus University) who presented “Memory, Right-Wing Politics, and the European Election of 2019.” This year’s program also saw the European launch of Women Mobilizing Memory (a thought-provoking and timely edited collection of essays). Two of the book editors, Marianne Hirsch (Columbia University) and Ayşe Gül Altınay (Sabancı University), gave a talk titled “Women Mobilising Memory: Stories of Feminist Co-Resistance.” (Videos of the keynotes available here).

On the final day of the summer school in Utrecht, participants formed small discussion groups. Presenters, keynote lecturers, panel chairs, and panel respondents reflected on recurring themes that arose and what questions remained unanswered. We then asked the deceptively straightforward question: What do we do next in the field of cultural memory studies? We generated a list of topics in response. It will be exciting to see how future Mnemonics organizing committees take up these avenues for inquiry.

And, yes, conversations take place at tables beyond those found in the conference room. The Mnemonics summer school hosts a dinner for participants. Throughout the three days, you and your colleagues will likely also find yourselves at cafes. The conversation might be about recommendations for readings, it might be about the differences and similarities between your graduate school programs, it might be about a question that your presentation prompted, or it might not be academic at all.

What I have most appreciated about summer school experiences is that both times, Mnemonics reminded me to value my admissions in that methodology section of my thesis so many years ago. To put it differently, Mnemonics encourages you to see that as a graduate student on your own path to finding your own intellectual home in the academy, you do not have to have all the answers. Think your work concerns memory but maybe you have not had exposure to the theoretical tools necessary to frame your inquiries and answer them? Hear the phrase “interdisciplinary research” often but could benefit from seeing what that entails as a praxis? Mnemonics is structured to welcome and be responsive to these different ways of not knowing. Curious about what methodologies are employed by others interested in the same topics or themes in memory studies as you? Mnemonics is designed to bring different research frameworks in conversation and have participants reflect on those very methodologies.

In 2020, Mnemonics will head to Aarhaus, where the theme will be “Memory and Migration.” To graduate students reading this post, I hope you will have the opportunity to present at that session or a future one. While there, remember to practice listening. One day, a colleague’s or a student's research trajectory might prompt you to recall how Mnemonics helped you on your own journey to finding your place in academia. While you attend Mnemonics, then, don’t just listen for the purpose of your own research. Also listen so that you can pay it forward and model the collaborative learning you will have witnessed as a Mnemonics participant.
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Helen Makhdoumian is a PhD candidate in English and an HGMS student. At UIUC, she is also completing a graduate minor in American Indian Studies and a graduate certificate through the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. Her dissertation is tentatively titled “A Map of This Place: Resurgence and Remembering Removal in Armenian, Palestinian, and American Indian/First Nations Literatures.”

Going to the archive is not always a conscious choice. As I write about the 2019 Graduate Symposium in Memory Studies (Friday 03/01/2019), I feel like a mediator between the notes in my notebook and my personal memory of the event. At times both forms of inscription work in tandem, but at other times they seem to be at odds with each other. Much beyond my own mediation, this year’s Symposium illustrated the potent research being conducted by Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies (HGMS) members and scholars who are dealing with memory studies from a plurality of angles.
 
In her assessment of Agata Tuszynska, Lizy Mostowski made a compelling analysis about how the Holocaust blurred the frontiers between the sacred and the profane, as evidenced by the destruction of cemeteries. Her Derridian reading of Tuszynska allowed Mostowski to thread the importance of dream in the novel as contingent to the architecture of the Death Drive. Sarah Chitwood examined Patrick Modiano’s novel Dora Bruder, and her careful analysis pushed us to consider how archives might be public institutions, but their contents are mediated by private entities. I attempted to show how the walls of two prisons, one in Argentina (Caseros) and the other in Ecuador (Ex-Penal García Moreno), narrate archival practices that have been destroyed by the State.
 
After archive fever, the following panel brought some fascinating engagement with the body and memory. Helen Makhdoumian focused on the spatial demarcations created through the movement of the body in Susan Power’s The Grass Dancer (1994). Naomi Taub examined, through multiple articles by James Baldwin and Tony Eprile, the intersection between whiteness and Jewishness. Dilara Caliskan brought an ethnographic lens to discuss how a trans woman was memorialized through her funeral. Connecting the weight of guilt, the destruction of the body, and brutal state violence, Estibalitz Ezkerra discussed Twist (2018), the novel by Harkaitz Cano that narrates the assassination of two ETA militants in the Basque Country.
 
In between panels, keynote speaker Nafissa Thompson-Spires read some excerpts from her award-winning book Heads of the Colored People (2018). Her wonderful short story “Belles Lettres” shows how memory can be mobilized in the context of epistolary exchanges between two African-American mothers who have sent their daughters to PWI (Primary White Institutions). Thompson-Spires pointed out that writing about memory can be ludic and painful at the same time, but accurate engagement with time allows the mixture of registers.
 
The members of the panel about the state and memory sought to place into dialogue strategies to memorialize through and beyond institutions. Jorge Rojas assessed the role of Colombian “Acción de Cultura Popular” during the armed conflict that has affected Colombia since the second half of the Twentieth century. ArCasia D. James-Galloway focused on the connection between race and gender in different school desegregation processes between 1968 and 1980. Daria Semenova focused on children’s literature produced by emigré Ukrainian writers, and the function of those texts in creating alternative narratives about national identity. Piercing into the pistons of commemoration and erasure at work in post-dictatorship Chile, Ethan Madarieta theorized how different performers have embodied memory as an aesthetic and political tool.
 
The Symposium concluded with a deep engagement between memory and borders. Megan Smith inquired into speculative fiction, and the role of fiction in the production of utopian and dystopian politics. Ragini Chakraborty analyzed Saadan Hasan Manto’s well-known short story “Toba Tek Singh” (1954), examining how mental health institutions are connected with the formation of political borders. Sana Saboowala presented her fascinating research about the intersection between memory and genetics.  This year’s Symposium was a wonderful occasion for intellectual solidarity and collaboration. Can’t wait for next year’s presentations!
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​By Helen Makhdoumian
 
As part of its commitment to hosting an annual Armenian Studies event, the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies (HGMS) welcomed Melissa Bilal this April. Professor Bilal received her PhD in Ethnomusicology from the University of Chicago and is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at the American University of Armenia.
 
Professor Bilal visited with graduate students, undergraduates, and faculty from across campus. Each time that I assumed that we had exhausted her archive of information, I watched as Professor Bilal pointed us towards fascinating sources, raised thoughtful questions because she genuinely loves to learn from others, and taught with a vision that the exchange of knowledge and stories has repercussions beyond the classroom, the library, or the dinner table.
 
Indeed, Professor Bilal’s presentations generated thought-provoking discussions that will undoubtedly influence the research in comparative trauma and memory studies undertaken by HGMS students and faculty. Moreover, for us graduate students who hope to become professors, Professor Bilal provided a wonderful example of mentoring in academia. I trust that at whatever institutions we call home after we graduate, we will put into practice what we witnessed. That is, I cannot wait to see how we champion our own students’ intellectual curiosity and model community-building between novice and more-experienced scholars from different disciplines.
 
For the HGMS faculty lecture series, Professor Bilal gave a talk titled “Injuries of Reconciliation: Being an Armenian in Post-Genocide Turkey.” Professor Bilal articulated city-level microhistories of Armenian exile, the intertwined histories of dislocated peoples in this early 20th century period of population transfer in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, and connections between Armenians’ experiences and those of Kurds and Alevis who also continue to face political violence in Turkey. She further called our attention to the affective and embodied elements of memory work and asserted that in narrating silenced histories, storytelling and music are powerful decolonizing modes of knowing constituted by feeling.
 
Graduate student members of the Future of Trauma and Memory Studies reading group and Professor Bilal then visited the Rare Book and Manuscript Library on campus. Curator Cate Coker pulled out a fantastic selection of Armenian language and Armenian history texts from the library’s collections, spanning the 16th through the 20th centuries. We looked at bilingual dictionaries, books on comparative linguistic studies, travel narratives, a translation of Lord Byron’s poems into Armenian, a book of sonnets penned by the English poet William Watson about England’s response to the Hamidian Massacres of Armenians from 1894 to 1896, a book of letters written by English humanitarian relief workers who witnessed those massacres, and issues of the Hairenik Weekly periodical from 1934.
 
The next day, Professor Bilal visited the Introduction to Poetry undergraduate-level course I taught this semester, which I had themed “Memories, Witnesses, Diasporas.” The course culminated in a class discussion on witnessing and bearing witness in our contemporary moment. In preparation, students read Professor Bilal’s recent journal article titled “Lullabies and the Memory of Pain: Armenian Women’s Remembrance of the Past in Turkey.” Students pursuing majors within and beyond the Liberal Arts and Sciences asked Professor Bilal questions regarding communal storytelling practices and history writing, the intergenerational transmission of traumatic cultural memory, and how remembrance practices, including telling narratives about painful pasts through lullabies, can inform the pursuit of justice for victims of mass violence.
 
In the evening, Professor Bilal gave a Center for Advanced Study/MillerComm lecture titled “Historians in Action: How and Why We Reclaim an Armenian Feminist Past.” Professor Bilal provided an overview of Feminism in Armenian: An Interpretive Anthology and Digital Archive, a book and digital humanities project that she is working on with Professor Lerna Ekmekçioğlu (MIT). The project recovers work by twelve Ottoman-born Armenian feminist activist writers. It aims to end the ever-present invisibility of activist women in Armenian historiography and collective memory.
 
These women’s writings offer a rich archive of intellectual discourse on social justice concerns. They also register the transatlantic migration of print culture in that these Armenian women writers referenced conversations on abolition and women’s rights movements. In her lecture, Professor Bilal focused on Yelbis Gesaratsian (1830-1913). Gesaratsian published seven issues of Կիթառ/Guitar (1862-1863), the first Armenian women’s journal which fought for women’s rights and the second women’s journal ever published in the Ottoman Empire. Unfortunately, the journal was silenced and Gesaratsian’s overall intellectual contributions were overlooked during her lifetime. However, Professor Bilal and Ekmekçioğlu’s critical return to these twelve women authors’ works is paving the way for research on Armenian feminist movements past and present as well as for comparative historiographies.
 
We are grateful for all the programs which made Professor Bilal’s visit possible: Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies; Program in Jewish Culture & Society; April 24 Fund; Center for Global Studies; Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies; Department of Gender and Women's Studies; Department of History; Department of Political Science; Department of Sociology; European Union Center; Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities; Program in Women and Gender in Global Perspectives; Russian, East European, Eurasian Center, School of Literatures, Cultures, and Linguistics; Spurlock Museum.
 
By Helen Makhdoumian
 
Bio:
Helen Makhdoumian is pursuing her PhD through English and HGMS. She has spearheaded many of HGMS’s events and served as a co-organizer of the Future of Trauma and Memory Studies, an interdisciplinary Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH) reading group, as well as a co-organizer of the HGMS graduate student conference. Her dissertation brings together but also carries forward two research frameworks in contemporary cultural memory studies—the migration of memory as well as migration and memory—by staging a conversation between diasporic Armenian, Palestinian, and American Indian literatures

By: Helen Makhdoumian

I want to begin this blog post differently than previous ones that I’ve written regarding programming supported by the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies (HGMS) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. 
 
I will, of course, still write in detail about the wonderful campus visits we had this year from Khatchig Mouradian (Columbia), Diana Hambardzumyan (Yerevan State Linguistic University), and Victor Pambuccian (Arizona State) as well as other related events. However, to emphasize how a single event has the potential to produce lasting effects beyond sparking fascinating questions, fostering avenues for innovative research, and bringing together a campus community in positive ways, I want to share a brief story. 
 
A few years ago, as a McNair Scholar at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, Utah, I listened to a panel of graduate students discuss their experiences in academia. Opportunities like these gave me hope for the possibility of being fortunate enough to continue to receive a higher education and invaluable insights that would help me further think through the questions I was asking about the Armenian diaspora and its memory work, the travels of Western Armenian and its potential vibrancy between two mountain ranges locally and across borders globally, and our ever-changing transnational community’s beautiful artistic and literary production.
 
Still, with the daunting question in my mind as to whether a space would even welcome me to do just that, I could not have imagined that in the not too distant future, I would participate for the second time as a panelist myself and champion another cohort of McNarians. Indeed, as I think about what I will tell these future graduate students about my journey, I can’t help but smile.
 
Why? Well, it’s been incredible (to say the least), and the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies has played an instrumental role in making it so! As an undergraduate, I had wonderful professors who encouraged me to design directed studies and research projects to pursue my inquiries. It was there that I started to believe in the potential to create spaces for Armenian Studies in unexpected places, and it was there that I started to learn the value of mentorship. And, it’s been through HGMS that my faith in both of these things has skyrocketed!
 
In April 2016, HGMS organized a visit from Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, memoirist, and scholar Peter Balakian who delivered a CAS/MillerComm lecture titled “The Armenian Genocide, Poetry of Witness, and Postmemory.” In April 2017, for the Spaces of Remembering the Armenian Genocide Conference and Film Screening, HGMS was delighted to host a group of talented, sharp, and inspiring scholars and artists: Silvina Der-Meguerditchian, Nancy Kricorian, Scout Tufankjian, Talar Chahinian, and Myrna Douzjian. These are some of the events that HGMS has supported me and other graduate students in organizing over the years. Additionally, this year, as part of its commitment to offering an annual, on-campus Armenian Studies event in commemoration of the Armenian Genocide, HGMS set up the April 24th Fund (links to info/donation page for the fund).
 
From this trajectory of events, I have learned that a workshop, lecture, or conference is more than just an opportunity to exchange knowledge, gain feedback, and engage the public. As the community of faculty and graduate students affiliated with HGMS has led me to see, an event is part of a larger way to “pay it forward.” It is this message of paying it forward that I will carry with me and share with students, whether at the upcoming panel or in the classroom.
 
So, while I now turn to the spaces that wonderful guest lecturers activated this year at UIUC, I hope that this larger context also helps you see, as I do, the following events as more than just events.
 
For the HGMS Faculty Seminar Series, Khatchig Mouradian first gave a workshop titled “‘The Very Limit of Our Endurance’: Unarmed Resistance During the Armenian Genocide.” Mouradian invited the audience to first understand that a “perpetrator driven narrative” has traditionally framed studies of the Armenian Genocide. This emphasis, he argued, overlooks victims’ voices and resistance efforts. He further suggested that in contrast, a shift in the discussion to unarmed resistance, such as humanitarian efforts against the will of authorities, allows for a more complex understanding of the catastrophe. For example, looking at this network of acts of resistance, including the formation of relief communities through churches and efforts to document refugees’ stories and familial histories, underscores the importance of gender and class as lenses through which to analyze this period.
 
In the evening, Mouradian also delivered a lecture titled “Internment and Destruction: Concentration Camps During the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1917.” Mouradian provided a nuanced account of the perpetrators’ process of removing populations out of their homes and the combination of circumstances and conditions that undergirded the genocidal project. Specifically, he discussed the administrative infrastructure and daily operations of concentration camps along the Euphrates River. The interdisciplinary community of HGMS faculty and grad students had several questions for Mouradian, and he deftly responded, often by situating the history of the Armenian Genocide in relation to other case studies of mass violence and dispossession. Many of us in HGMS work comparatively within the larger umbrella of trauma and memory studies; thus, Mouradian’s careful, thoughtful connective gestures were well-received.
 
In this vein of comparison and connection, Mouradian’s lecture and workshop couldn’t have come at a better time. Previously, HGMS hosted an on-campus screening of the 2016 documentary The Destruction of Memory, which was followed by a Skype Q and A with director Tim Slade. I mention the documentary here because of a point that fellow HGMS graduate student Claire Baytas and I didn’t address in our post about the film. Towards the end of the documentary, interviewees connect the experiences of Armenian Genocide refugees with those of Syrian Civil War refugees. Both through his presentations and conversations with us afterwards, Mouradian helped us return to and refine questions about memory work that the documentary had prompted us to grapple with.
 
It wasn’t just through the study of history, though, that we mapped connections and charted comparisons. Indeed, this year, several events on literature and translation brought together diverse audiences and, perhaps, laid the foundations for future student work on campus.
 
In November, literary translator, writer, and professor Diana Hambardzumyan (Yerevan State Linguistic University) gave a presentation on modern Armenian literature. Specifically, Hambardzumyan discussed her own writing experiences, her translation of Kurt Vonnegut’s Armenian-themed Bluebeard, and Armenian American writers such as William Saroyan and Peter Najarian. We are deeply grateful for two of our wonderful community members, Tigran Hakobyan and Arpi Arakelyan, who generously arranged for Hambardzumyan to visit our campus. It was Arpi who first approached me about organizing this event, and the enthusiasm and energy she brought to the table still inspires me months later.
 
A lively conversation followed the presentation and as a graduate student instructor of literature, I especially loved watching undergraduate students pose complex and exigent questions. Hambardzumyan’s responses prompted audience members to reflect upon the following: what do we mean when we refer to “Armenian literature,” what might we include under that rubric, and what factors inform the rationales behind our selections? Another student asked whether the development of technology in Armenia has played a role in prompting youth to develop an interest in translating literature. Hambardzumyan stressed that despite the proliferation of technological tools, it is still necessary to train individuals to become good translators. She also emphasized both the need for and importance of translating literature from other languages into Armenian and vice versa.
 
Questions like these led me to view my own research interests from a different angle. That is, I had not thoroughly inquired before if and how literature produced by writers of Armenian descent in dispersion and in a myriad of languages has migrated into public and private spheres within a nation-state formation of Armenia. For me, then, one of the meaningful takeaways from Hambardzumyan’s visit was for those of us in the diaspora and those of us in the nation-state to ask ourselves, how have we come to understand (or misunderstand) one another through the circulation of our literatures? And, if our literatures are “stuck” in isolated sites, how do we create connective spokes so that, as I’ve written about in my own work, we “translate” our stories, lived conditions, and memoryscapes to one another and in so doing, better conceptualize the fabric of our transnational kinship?
 
Since Hambardzumyan’s visit, Assistant Professor Anush Tserunyan (Mathematics), my dear friend and Western-Eastern Armenian language ally on campus, has been a sharp and willing interlocutor and has pushed me to keep asking questions along these routes. Indeed, it was Anush who first got the ball rolling for another event on literature and translation on campus. Anush had invited Professor Victor Pambuccian (Arizona State) to give a lecture for the Logic Seminar that she organizes on campus and in the meantime, she introduced me to some of his translations (including the poetry of Vahe Godel, a Swiss-French writer of Armenian heritage). With Anush’s encouragement, I asked Pambuccian if he would be interested in giving an informal talk while he visited campus, and we were thrilled when he said “yes.” And, so, that’s how we got a Romanian-born, Armenian Mathematics professor with a passion for translating poetry to discuss his translations of Romanian avant-garde poetry!
 
Pambuccian introduced an audience to three generations of poets, many of whom were of different ethnic backgrounds, wrote in languages other than Romanian, and worked outside the territory of Romania. We learned about poets whose works have regularly appeared in anthologies (such as Tristan Tzara, Eugene Ionesco, and Paul Celan) alongside perhaps lesser-familiar poets (such as Nora Iuga and Mariana Marin). Pambuccian historicized the poets’ work and their contributions to Dadaism, Symbolism, and Onirism. Additionally, Pambuccian read some of his translations, which generated a lively discussion about what we saw in the poems: negotiation of identity, rootlessness, and belonging; thick descriptions of landscape and place; and play with sound.
 
Despite humbly pointing out that he has not been trained in literary or translation studies, Pambuccian’s informal talk sparked thoughtful questions from audience members. We came to see that Romanian avant-garde poetry remains a ripe site through which to return to and complicate some of the theories many of us engage as students interested in diasporic, transnational, cosmopolitan, world, and comparative literatures. I’d like to also think that among the lasting impressions that both talks by Hambardzumyan and Pambuccian left on our campus is some inspiration in us to begin (or continue) our own journeys with translation.
 
The final literature- and translation-related event I want to highlight is an annual event organized by the students of the Armenian Association on campus: a candlelight vigil on April 24th to commemorate the Armenian Genocide. It’s been my great pleasure to lead a literary reading as part of this event, which is open to the public. Some volunteer readers come prepared with their own literary selections but in the days leading up, I think critically about picking texts that help us make meaning of that day in relation to the world around us, the present “moment” in which we find ourselves. Last year, I picked poems and short passages of prose that would help us think about the past and our gathering in the context of what we were hearing about the Syrian Civil War, reading about refugee crises globally, and the land on which we were going to hold the then upcoming Spaces of Remembering the Armenian Genocide Conference and Film Screening.
 
This year, as I watched individuals on campus ask “What’s happening in Armenia?” hour-to-hour and as I saw the phrase “revolution” crop up in one news headline after another, I felt we needed to conclude the commemoration that evening with messages in literature about Spring (about change, resilience, upbuilding communities, and ushering in a bright future). Ultimately, I selected texts by the following writers (which we read in Armenian and English): Diana Der-Hovanessian, Micheline Aharonian Marcom, Michael Arlen, Peter Balakian, Arto Vaun, Yeghishe Charents, and Vahan Tekeyan. Dilara Çalışkan also brought and read from an English translation of Zabel Yesayan’s prose, and Albert Tamazyan recited poetry by Paruyr Sevak. 
 
What’s next for HGMS and me? I’ll definitely continue to read, think, and write a lot in this next stage of my graduate education (and afterwards, of course). HGMS will continue to work with amazing people who also believe in creating spaces for Armenian Studies events on campus. And, as I said earlier, an event is never just an event. Through it all, I know that I’ll continue to learn how to become a great mentor and “pay it forward. ”Դէպի առա՜ջ։ Onward we go!
 
Bio:
Helen Makhdoumian is pursuing her PhD through English and HGMS. She has spearheaded many of HGMS’s events and served as a co-organizer of the Future of Trauma and Memory Studies, an interdisciplinary Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH) reading group, as well as a co-organizer of the HGMS graduate student conference. Her dissertation brings together but also carries forward two research frameworks in contemporary cultural memory studies—the migration of memory as well as migration and memory—by staging a conversation between diasporic Armenian, Palestinian, and American Indian literatures.

By: ​Steve Pelczarski

​I am a student in Lizy Mostowski’s POL 102 class. Throughout the course we’ve been invited to attend Dialogue: A Polish-Jewish Film Seriesa series of several film screenings and discussions organized by Lizy Mostowski and Diana Sacilowski tackling the events of the Holocaust and the extent of Polish involvement. One film featured in the series was Ulica Granicznaor Border Street,the 1948 film follows the story of Polish and Jewish families living together in Warsaw at the time of Nazi invasion and occupation. The children serve as a microcosm of Polish citizens to represent the various actions and stances of the common Pole during the war.   
​
With the recently passed Polish laws restricting speech about Polish involvement or complacency in the Holocaust, I wondered if this sentiment of victimhood has been present since the end of World War II or if it is a result of the recent right-wing resurgence in the country. I feel that Border Street, being made only a few years following the events of the Holocaust, would provide insight as to how Poles felt immediately following the genocide that took place. Without as much time for the nation to process their collective emotions, would an artistic reflection let through more truth than we’d see today? Or, with wounds not yet scabbed, would blame still be levied completely against the Nazi occupiers?

​I found the most glaring part of the film to be the lengths taken to distance the antagonist’s family from Polish identity. As the air sirens ring out calling men to war, we see the antagonist’s father demand the barber style his hair after Hitler. Occupation had not even begun and the film has said, “The bad guys are not Polish as you are, they are turn-coat cowards.” Later on in a scene with a Nazi officer, the characters go on an unnecessary tangent about their German heritage. This serves little purpose in the film besides severing the ideas of Polishness and anti-Semitism. While such a plot point could have been used as a dramatic motivational reveal further on in the story, the information is given nearly from the outset to distance the antagonist from the audience. After some time without being presented as Germans, the film takes the time to not-so-subtly remind you with a shot of Hitler Youth singing and dancing about their apartment.

​None of the three scenes mentioned above are integral to the story being told. Their trivial nature, coupled with the over-the-top presentation, leads me to believe their inclusion served to prevent the Polish audience from identifying with these anti-Semitic characters. If we were to suppose art imitates life, this leads to the conclusion that, following the war, public opinion said anti-Semitism among Poles should be swept under the rug. After the screening we spoke briefly as a group as to whether this apologetic or dismissive nature we see in films is benevolent or not. Whether it is done with the purpose of allying the Polish and Jewish identities, or whether it is done to absolve Gentile Poles of involvement or complacency. I think it’s worth considering the artists behind the works when pondering the intent of a piece.

Aleksander Ford, the director of the film, was a Polish Jew who was placed in charge of the nation’s film industry following the war. Being one of the most prominent filmmakers in post-war Poland, he felt that “Cinema cannot be a cabaret, it much be a school” (Misiak). To him his work was about educating the audience as opposed to pure entertainment. Given his background and commitment to using his position to tackle societal issues I feel confident that this film was made with benevolent intent to unite the Polish and Jewish identities as opposed to downplaying Polish involvement.
​
Through attendance of this film series I have learned a lot about the realities of the Holocaust and gained a new insight in to the current Polish political landscape. While the Dialogue: A Polish-Jewish Film Series has completed all of its screenings for this schoolyear, the organizers have expressed interest in hosting a similar series of events in the future. If you are in the Champaign-Urbana area and are interested in this idea, reach out to Lizy Mostowski or Diana Sacilowski for information on future events of this nature.

​_____________________________________________________________________________________
Anna Misiak, "Politically Involved Filmmaker: Aleksander Ford and Film Censorship in Poland after 1945", Kinema, 2003

By: ​Helen Makhdoumian and Claire Baytas

On October 9th, 2017, the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies (HGMS) hosted a campus screening of the 2016 documentary The Destruction of Memory, directed by Tim Slade and narrated by actress Sophie Okonedo. A conversation via Skype between Slade and audience members from across the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign campus followed the screening. The screening of this exigent film, which invites its viewership to closely consider the relevance of what Raphael Lemkin once termed the “cultural” dimension of genocide: the destruction of cultural property, and the Skype discussion could not have come at a better time.

​During Fall 2017, Professor Brett Kaplan taught the Introduction to Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies graduate seminar. Members of our interdisciplinary class, many of whom will present at the upcoming One Day Graduate Symposium in Memory Studies on campus this April 6th, 2018, engage with the histories, legacies, and memories of diverse traumatic events in different national contexts, past and present. Broadly, then, the documentary offered us another avenue to grapple with some of the questions that we recurrently raised in class. That is, we regularly discussed the politics, stakes, and potentials that working comparatively within the fields of trauma and memory studies affords and the codification of terminology that informs processes of identifying, historicizing, and adjudicating acts of mass violence. In what follows, we will focus our reflection on the documentary around some of its comparative gestures. Before we do so, however, we want to provide a brief overview of the film.

​Specifically, Slade’s documentary is based upon Robert Bevan’s book, entitled The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War (2006). Bevan, a widely-published journalist, architecture critic for The London Evening Standard, and member of the International Council on Monuments and Sites, examines in his book a variety of cases of war and conflict during which physical structures of cultural and historical significance were razed to the ground. Slade’s documentary walks its viewership through a selection of historical instances analyzed in Bevan’s book, employing video clips, photographs, and interviews with witnesses, scholars of genocide, and experts on cultural heritage sites. A few case studies examined in the film include the Siege of Sarajevo in the mid-nineties, the bombing of Germany during the Second World War, and the actions of the self-proclaimed Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

Slade’s juxtaposition of case studies of cultural destruction—or the annihilation of irreplaceable artwork, artifacts, and historical sites—in the 20th and 21st centuries comes to the fore as the documentary’s primary comparative gesture. Indeed, the film begins with a series of clips in which interviewees articulate the purpose of perpetrators’ deliberate destruction of cultural property before, during, and after presumably historically-bound acts of mass violence. This includes the words of Simon Maghakyan, an Armenian American educator and activist, who draws upon the history of the Armenian Genocide to assert, by “targeting monuments,” for example, “you are oppressing the people and making it easier to get rid of them, not just to wipe out their physical record and make it impossible for them to return, but also using it as a weapon.” We will later discuss in more detail the effects of the film’s return to such arguments, which it does by situating collective traumatic histories and ensuing memory work in conversation. For now, we want to map another key conceptual knot of connection that percolates throughout the film and manifests most legibly when Okonedo states in her voiceover regarding a trial judgment as part of the proceedings for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), “The voice of Lemkin could be heard distantly returning.”[1]

​This comment about the pertinence of Lemkin’s words also welcomes audiences to recall the beginning of the documentary, which prepares viewers to ask the following of the temporally and spatially distant yet intimately linked contexts that the film ultimately references: how do these histories lend themselves to a call for an expansion of definition of the term “genocide” to include a key component Lemkin originally proposed? Indeed, the documentary illuminates that while the United Nations General Assembly formally adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide on December 9th, 1948, the definition of genocide in legal terms is best understood when seen as a culmination of years of efforts by Lemkin and when situated within a larger trajectory of declarations on the laws of war and war crimes within international law.

In this vein, the documentary illuminates that clauses to protect cultural property in times of war were introduced in early twentieth-century peace conferences, such as in The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, and the inclusion of wanton destruction of cultural property as part of a list of 32 individual criminal acts identified by the Commission on Responsibility of the Authors of War, which was created by victorious Allies to investigate allegations of criminality against the leaders of the defeated German and Ottoman Empires.[1] While the documentary, like others, goes on to note how the failure to prosecute the perpetrators of the Armenian Genocide informed Lemkin’s conceptualization and coinage of the term “genocide,” it departs from others by seemingly arguing for 1933, 1944, and 1946 as years just as defining as 1948 (if not more so) in the genesis of the term “genocide.”[2] At a League of Nations legal conference in 1933, historian of genocide Dirk Moses explains, Lemkin proposed the prosecution of two new international crimes: “vandalism” (attack on cultural property) and “barbarism” (what we would now call genocide, physical attacks on peoples). States in the League of Nations at that time declined to criminalize these kinds of acts and in 1944, Lemkin used “genocide” as a single term for what he earlier called barbarism and vandalism. Shortly after, in 1946, early drafts of the genocide convention, commissioned by United Nations General Assembly, defined genocide as one of three acts: physical, biological, or cultural genocide. The United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand objected to the inclusion of a cultural dimension because, as Moses asserts, they “worried about the fallout from their treatment of indigenous peoples and their cultures.” Thus, with the exclusion of cultural elements, the 1948 convention remains “essentially what Lemkin proposed as barbarism in 1933.”

By “reading” what is present in the 1948 convention in relation to what is absent from Lemkin’s original proposals and the repercussions of this removal, The Destruction of Memory prepares audiences to contend with the implications of arguments presented through Okenodo’s voiceover about succeeding legal documents that address attacks on cultural heritage and property. These include the ruling of appeal ​judges in the ICTY in April 2015 that targeted cultural destruction cannot be considered as evidence of genocide nor possibly even intent of genocide, the citation of “military necessity” to cloud intent, the lack of recognition of the intents to suppress the culture of groups as a matter of human rights despite arguments during the adoption of the 1948 convention that this question would one day be dealt with as such, and the need to protect cultural heritage more than through a document such as the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict that is bound by the rules of war. In so doing, viewers are deliberately left to imagine the potential repercussions of, as Bonnie Burnham, President Emirata of the World Monuments Fund, posits, recognizing cultural heritage destruction as a crime against humanity and as Bevan asserts in an interview in the documentary, inserting those vandalism clauses back into the 1948 genocide convention.

​One way in which The Destruction of Memory emphasizes the significance of taking into consideration attacks on cultural heritage and property within the study of genocide and mass violence is through the connections the documentary makes between the numerous case studies it examines. The manner in which The Destruction of Memory links the variety of historical events with which it engages is not done arbitrarily: the film leaves its viewership with a few key impactful messages as a result of its comparative approach. Firstly, the documentary underlines the repetitive nature of the strategies employed by those who set out to eradicate a certain group of people. One can notice across the different cases mentioned in the film that the eradication of objects and/or buildings representative of the targeted group’s culture and history is an often carefully arranged dimension of the overall plan of genocide. 

​However, it is not just the ways in which genocide and acts of mass violence are plotted and carried out that are portrayed as symptomatic of a common phenomenon. The Destruction of Memory furthermore demonstrates that the underlying intentions of the perpetrators when they plot to destroy cultural property tend to be similar: they are fueled by motivations such as launching a symbolic attack on a group’s collective identity or disseminating fear and intimidation. During the lengthy interview with Bevan that appears in the film, he explains the “carpet bombing” of Germany by the Allies during the Second World War as “clearly a tactic to attack historic cities… [in order to] to demoralize people.” Nazi politician Joseph Goebbels’ diaries are subsequently quoted by Okonedo to reveal that the Axis powers had similar intentions. “Like the English,” Goebbels proclaimed, “we must attack centers of culture… such centers should be leveled to the ground.” This point is driven home even further with regard to the Croat-Bosniak War of the 1990s, when the film recalls Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulic’s words from her elegy to the Mostar Bridge. Yet again, an attack on a physical structure is described as an attack on identity: “because [the bridge] was the product of both individual creativity and collective experience, it transcended our individual destiny… the bridge was all of us, forever.” In each case study, the desires of those committing the crimes and the willful nature with which they commit them are clearly portrayed to be similar across time and space. The Destruction of Memory thereby traces the common threads in perpetrator practices for its viewership, demonstrating the unsettling ways in which many aspects of the implementation of genocide tend to repeat themselves throughout history.

​The documentary’s manner of connecting these different events furthermore serves to blur the line between the past and present for its viewers. This is a result of the fact that the film touches upon both historical and contemporary instances of destruction of cultural property, suggesting that all are trends of the same phenomenon. As a result, when learning about these attacks on symbols of culture during genocide or war that occurred decades ago, the film’s viewership cannot simply disregard these events as tragic losses of the distant past. The documentary mentions both at its beginning and examines in more detail towards the end contemporary instances in which the Islamic State is acting to eradicate objects and sites representative of cultural heritage. The group’s annihilation of the Tomb of Jonah in 2014 and their looting, damaging, and destroying artifacts of the Mosul Museum in 2015 are but two of the examples highlighted in the film. Therefore, although certain precious artifacts or structures of the past may already be lost, the film makes it clear that plans to eradicate materials of cultural and historical relevance in certain areas are still being carried out and will continue to be in the future. The Destruction of Memory thus encourages its viewership to recognize the continued significance of the destruction of cultural property as well as the importance of speaking out against such acts.

​One of the many intriguing avenues for future reflection that The Destruction of Memory opens up for us as viewers is inquiry into the ethics of studying the cultural dimension of genocide. Professor Brett Kaplan posed a question on this very subject to Slade during the question and answer session that followed our October 9th screening, asking whether he found it morally problematic to produce a film that gives more screen time and attention to the loss of objects, buildings, and other structures during genocide than it does to the loss of human life. One could, on the one on hand, take issue with the filmmakers’ choice to focus at length on critiquing violence against physical edifices rather than violence against human beings, which was simultaneously occurring during these moments in history cited in the film. On the other hand, it can also be argued that this documentary portrays the different dimensions of genocide as closely interconnected. As previously quoted, Maghakyan for one qualifies “targeting monuments” as a “weapon” against people and as an act of “oppression.” Early in the film, Okonedo lingers upon Lemkin’s words on this same subject: “physical and biological genocide,” Lemkin claimed, “are always preceded by cultural genocide or by an attack on symbols of the group.” The film thereby also proposes that the destruction of cultural property can serve as an indicator of a broader plan to eliminate an entire people, which begins with the elimination of the physical proof of that people’s history.
 
​We thus conclude by proposing that how one understands and chooses to represent the links between violence against human beings and cultural heritage broadly construed is a matter open to debate. It is this type of conversation—challenging, yet important on an ethical level—that The Destruction of Memory will serve to incite among its viewers. With each screening, Slade’s documentary will reopen discussions concerning the study of the different dimensions of acts of mass violence and genocide of our societies’ pasts, thereby promoting an enduring critical engagement with these crucial topics.

[1] Okonedo quotes the following from a trial judgement: “Where there is physical or biological destruction, there are often simultaneous attacks on the cultural and religious property of the targeted group as well, attacks which may be considered as evidence of an attempt to physically destroy the group.”
[2] Specifically in the Commission on Responsibility of the Authors of War, under Chapter II: Violations of the Laws and Customs of War, the list includes “Wanton devastation and destruction of property” (item #18) and “Wanton destruction of religious, charitable, educational, and historic buildings and monuments” (item # 20). See the Commission on Responsibility of the Authors of War document here. For the Hague Convention documents, see here and here.
[3] For a timeline noting the major and conceptual legal advances in the development of the term “genocide” see this page on the United States and Holocaust Memorial Museum website. For the text of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, see here.

By Lizy Mostowski

​I created Dialogue: A Polish-Jewish Film Series about a year ago with the intention of starting a forum for cross-cultural dialogue around Polish-Jewish issues that extend well beyond the scope of this particular cultural space. The goal of the Series is to breakdown perceived binaries between “Polish” and “Jewish” cultures through dialogue and discussion about a film. I was inspired by Professor Erica Lehrer’s exhibition Souvenir, Talisman, Toy put on at the Seweryn Udziela Ethnographic Museum in Krakow, Poland in 2013 where Prof. Lehrer attempted to create cross-cultural dialogue through her exhibition featuring wooden figurines of Jews carved by Poles after the Second World War. Each of my screenings begins with a film (sometimes a particularly controversial film) on a Polish-Jewish topic and is followed by a discussion led by graduate students specializing in the area. This academic year, Diana Sacilowski and I have curated the lineup of films and together we introduce and discuss the films with participants. In past semesters, we have screened films like Aftermath (2012), Ida (2013), Austeria (1982), and Little Rose (2010).  

​Our first screening this semester was the largely independently produced documentary film entitled Shimon’s Returns (2014). The film is directed by US-based Polish-Jewish filmmakers Katka Reszke and Slawomir Grunberg—both of whom have been vital in many grassroots Jewish revival efforts in Poland. The film allows a glimpse into the life of a man named Shimon Redlich, an Israeli historian and child Holocaust survivor. In 1948– before
emigrating to Israel, Shimon was cast in Unzere Kinder–Poland’s last ever Yiddish feature film. In four languages—English, Polish, Yiddish, and Hebrew—Shimon guides viewers through his story and his recurrent visits to contemporary Poland and Ukraine. 

​Diana introduced the film, suggesting that, “various critics have noted, despite the dark history the film contends with and how charged the topic of the Holocaust is in this region of the world as of late, particularly regarding issues of complicity and who helped and who participated, the documentary itself is fairly uplifting.”

​The film seems to have been created to speak to a North American audience as Shimon narrates to the camera only in English while his interactions with others throughout the documentary occur predominantly in Polish and Hebrew. The film complicates common stereotypes around Polish-Jewish relations after the Holocaust. As one participant noted in the post-film discussion, it is as though there is a dramatically swinging pendulum between scenes that illustrate pro-Polish and anti-Polish sentiments in Shimon’s interactions and experiences in his returns to Poland throughout the documentary.  For example, in one scene Shimon approaches a right-wing group who are dressed in Nazi uniforms in Lwow (which was a part of Poland before the Second World War), yet instead of overtly confronting them, Shimon climbs up on a Nazi motorcycle and pretends to ride it. In another scene, Shimon meets his childhood sweetheart in Lodź, where they ride in a cycle-rickshaw and reminisce about their youth in the city, organically alternating between Polish and Hebrew. In this way, the film may seem to reinforce preconceived stereotypes that a North American viewer might carry with them before seeing the film, such as a notion that all Poles are anti-Semitic because of the complicity of some Poles in the Holocaust or that Poland was a thriving (Yiddish) Jewish homeland before the Holocaust (think of the nostalgia produced by the American film Fiddler on the Roof (1971)), but in fact, the film reveals the complex texture of Shimon’s identity and relationship with Poland, Poles, and the past.  Shimon’s Returns thereby shows that Polish-Jewish identity and Polish-Jewish relations after the Holocaust are likewise more nuanced and complex than many anticipate before viewing the film.

​It is important to note that Shimon’s Returns was made in 2014, before the introduction of the recent law which seeks to criminalize certain discourses on Polish complicity in the Holocaust. “On the one hand, this film might seem like it’s in line with new political discourse focusing on Polish heroism over complicity. But the story is far more complicated than that,” Diana rightly highlighted in her introduction to the film. In its complexity, Shimon’s Returns opens up a space for dialogue between perceived cultural boundaries that linger from the anti-Semitic laws of the Second World War and the Anti-Semitic Campaign of 1968.  In our discussion we considered how such dialogue-initiating films may be at risk in light of the new policies implemented by Poland’s right-wing government and the extreme responses to them from the Jewish right-wing.
 
All are welcome to join us for the screening of Scandal in Ivansk (2017) on Thursday, April 19th at 5:45pm in the Lucy Ellis Lounge of the Foreign Languages Building (707 S. Matthews, Urbana) which will be followed by a special Q & A with the film’s director, David Blumenfeld, via Skype!

One Day Graduate Student Symposium in Memory Studies
​
Open to UIUC graduate students in all disciplines
 
Friday, April 6, 2018, 9am-4pm, English Building, Room 304 (608 S. Wright St, Urbana)

The Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies and the Future of Trauma and Memory Studies reading group are delighted to co-sponsor the following on-campus graduate symposium in memory studies. We hope that this symposium will showcase the diverse and wonderful work within memory studies (broadly conceived) that students are doing here at UIUC. It will be an opportunity to share ideas and resources, to schmooze and connect. Students from diverse disciplines sent in abstracts and HGMS faculty have generously agreed to provide on-the-spot feedback to papers. Thank you! And thank you to the organizing committee: Claire Baytas, Claire Branigan, Dilara Çalışkan, Brett Kaplan, Helen Makhdoumian, Naomi Taub.
 
Conference Schedule:

9 – 10 am: Telling the Story: Narrative, Memoir, Testimony
Faculty Respondent: Jamie Jones (English)
Chair: Brett Kaplan (Jewish Studies and Comparative and World Literatures)
Claire Baytas (Comparative and World Literatures) Hrant Dink’s Assassination as Retold by Karin Karakaşlı in ‘An-bul-ist’: The Strengths and Pitfalls of Literature as a Space for Representing Public Acts of Violence and Cultivating Conversation on the Ethics of Commemoration
Leah Becker (English): Sharing Wounds: How Ishmael’s Narrative Voices Spread the Burden of Testimony in Moby-Dick
Helen Makhdoumian (English): Across and Between: Cultural Memory Translation in Michael Arlen’s Passage to Ararat (1975)

10 – 11 am: From Generation to Generation: Kinship, Performance, Trauma
Faculty Respondent: Jodi Byrd (English)
Chair: Helen Makhdoumian (English)
Susan Rudahindwa (Psychology): An Analysis of PTSD Symptom Severity Domains Between Genocide-Exposed Mothers and Offspring
Dilara Çalışkan (Anthropology): Time of Queer Postmemory: (Dis)Familiar Temporal Humdrums and Disidentificatory Archives
Claire Branigan (Anthropology): Caught in Bad Scripts? Performance, Repetition, and Survival in Contemporary Argentina
 
11 – 12 am: Citizen/Self: History, Affect, National Identity
Faculty Respondent: Eduard Ledesma (Spanish and Portuguese)
Chair: Claire Branigan (Anthropology)
Estibalitz Ezkerra (Comparative and World Literatures): The End of Irish History? The Place of Memory in Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland
Beatriz Maldonado (Anthropology): Memory, Affect, and Family: Exploring Representations of the Disappeared Members of El Salvador’s Civil War
Arkaitz Ibarretxe Diego (Spanish and Portuguese): Soaring Nationalism: Competing Imaginings of the Basque Country in Spanish and Basque Aerial Documentaries
 
12 – 1 pm: Brown Bag Lunch
We encourage everyone to bring lunch with them and take the opportunity to connect and share ideas!
 
1 – 2 pm: Counterpublics: The Archive, the Other, the Museum
Faculty Respondent: Peter Fritzsche, History
Chair: Naomi Taub (English)
Evin Groundwater (English/Writing Studies): Collective Memory, the Men's Rights Movement, and the Divergent Archive
Lizy Mostowski (Comparative and World Literatures): The Reconstruction of Canadian Collective Memory: Canada’s New National Holocaust Monument
Diana Sacilowski (Slavic): What’s in a Name?: Writing the Jewish Person in Contemporary Polish Literature
 
2 – 3 pm: Image Transfer: Digitization, Dissent, Visual Memory
Faculty Respondent: Anke Pinkert (German)
Chair: Dilara Çalışkan
Ruohua Han (School of Information Sciences): What Can You See? Implications of the Digitization of Historical Personal Scrapbooks
Nancy Karrels (Art History): Memory and Spolia in Post-Revolutionary France
Rachel Rose (German): Anti-Anti-Anti-Fascism: Public Dissent in the Post-Socialist Era
 
3-4 pm: Reception with refreshments!
More information about the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, Memory Studies can be found here:
https://jewishculture.illinois.edu/academics/initiative-holocaust-genocide-and-memory-studies​
 
Our blog can be read here: https://hgmsblog.weebly.com/
 
Future of Trauma and Memory Studies reading group information can be found here: https://traumaandmemory.weebly.com/

​The Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, Memory Studies invites abstracts from graduate students at UIUC for a one day symposium to take place on campus on Friday March 9, 2018 from 9am-3pm at the IPRH (422 Levis). (2-3pm will be a reception with coffee and cookies).
 
We hope that this symposium will showcase the diverse and wonderful work within memory studies (broadly conceived) that students are doing here. It will be an opportunity to share ideas and resources, to schmooze and connect. This will also be a great time to practice conference papers and receive invaluable feedback from faculty and other graduate students.
 
We invite applications from graduate students working in different fields and with diverse interests across the UIUC campus. These aspects of memory studies might include (but are not limited to): racial aspects of memory, neuroscience, disability studies, how societies remember, the construction of national narratives, cultural and/or religious practices of memory, museums, archiving, representation and art, sciences of memory (or science and memory), technological aspects of memory, politics of memory, forgetting, erasing, and oversaturating.
 
Please send a brief abstract (not more than 200 words) that includes the title of your paper, your email, and your department to the director, Professor Brett Ashley Kaplan at bakaplan@illinois.edu by 1 February, 2018.
​
More information about the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, Memory Studies can be found here: http://www.jewishculture.illinois.edu/programs/holocaust/

​Andreas Huyssen

​The prehistory of Trump’s twitter strategies comes into sharp focus as one thinks about them in relation to Andrew Breitbart and Stephen Bannon’s media politics. It was the political rise of Bannon in Trump’s inner circle that made me curious about Andrew Breitbart and the online news organization he founded and which Bannon directed for several years. Reading Breitbart’s 2011 book Righteous Indignation and skimming Breitbart News online, I made a surprising discovery: an obsession with the Frankfurt School as bête noire, not just in Breitbart himself, but in the wider circles of American white supremacists and their publications.

​Breitbart’s stated goal in creating the news outlet that bears his name was to attack the “Democrat media complex” with the help of the Internet and social media. Bannon, inspired by Lenin, Julius Evola, a darling of the Italian fascists and today popular with Greek neo-Nazis (the GoldenDawn) and Hungarian nationalists, and by Charles Maurras, anti-semite and founder of the action française, embraces the “deconstruction (forget the con) of the administrative state.”  Trump’s twitter habits and his constant attacks on the so-called fake media and on the Washington swamp seem to be quite in tune with both those goals. There is method to this madness of substituting “alternative facts” for allegedly “fake news.” What we are witnessing here is the concerted attack on the fourth estate by what one could now call the fifth estate—right-wing populist digital media politics writ large as a prerequisite for Bannon’s project of destroying the administrative state.

Hannah Arendt got it right when she wrote : “The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world […] is being destroyed.”[i]
 
While Andrew Breitbart celebrated the internet as the great disruptor of the mainstream media, Bannon’s intellectual and political ambitions went further. He embraced a rise-and-decline theory of 80-year cycles of American history, popularized by William Strauss and Neil Howe in the 1990s in their book The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy  (1997).  It’s a generational theory of history, divided into roughly 20year “highs,” “awakenings,” “unravelings,” and “crises”: from the American revolution to the civil war to the great depression and World War II and finally to the present moment, the decade after 2008. From which, after deep crisis and chaos, the Phoenix of a new old America would rise again in the 2020s. ‘Make America great again’ is the perfect slogan. This historical master-narrative underlies another document in the pre-history of Trumpism: the documentary film Generation Zero (2010) which Bannon scripted and directed. It is a documentary film targeting the Wall Street elites by blaming the 2008 economic crisis and its aftermath on the 1960s generation by a slight of hand. Implausible? Yes, but blaming the 1960s has been a standard trope in the discourse of a broad spectrum of American conservatism (for instance with the trope of yippies becoming yuppies, young urban professionals). But here it comes clothed in a global political prophecy that imagines itself at the cusp of a new populist movement to save America in the coming war against radical Islam.

​The generational theory of history Bannon embraces is strongly reminiscent of German right wing cyclical philosophies of history as they were articulated after WWI. In the context of current discussions of American decline, Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West comes to mind, Untergang des Abendlandes perhaps better translated as ruin or downfall of the ‘Judeo-Christian World’. Bannon’s film recycles the conservative trope that the decline of America was brought about by a generation of spoiled narcissistic brats who drove America to the abyss of feminism, environmentalism, affirmative action, gay rights, and multi-culturalism before becoming Wall Street bankers in the Clinton age and creating the crash of 2008. A master-misrepresentation of history quite typical of the dangers of generational theorizing. Given his recent loss of influence in the West Wing though, it seems that Bannon is now having his come-uppance in a cabinet of Wall Street bankers and billionaires in the middle of the swamp he was determined to drain.

​Recycling of old discredited ideas as radical and new is indeed the major rhetorical strategy of both Breitbart and Bannon. When after all was Bannon’s “economic nationalism” last proposed? In the 1930s in Nazi Germany and with disastrous effects. And the German connection continues to give in the most surprising way when it comes to apportioning blame for what Alan Bloom, in the context of the culture wars of the 1990s, called The Closing of the American Mind (1987). Then it was Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the consequences (Including Mick Jagger) who were blamed for the decline of American culture. Now it is the Frankfurt School. Here’s what we read in Breitbart’s book: 

​“Critical Theory was exactly the material we were taught at Tulane. It was, quite literally, a theory of criticizing everyone and everything everywhere. It was an attempt to tear down the social fabric by using all the social sciences…; it was an infinite and unending criticism of the status quo, adolescent rebellion against all established social rules and norms…. The real idea behind all of this was to make society totally unworkable by making everything basically meaningless.” 113The rise of Hitler is then given as the reason why these “boring and bleating philosophers” did not fade into oblivion:”With Hitler’s rise, they had to flee (virtually all of them—Horkheimer, Marcuse, Adorno, Fromm—were of Jewish descent). And they had no place to go. Except the United States” (114). 

​The obsession with the Frankfurt School and ‘cultural marxism’, however, is not original to Breitbart. Nor is the bizarre counter-factual idea that the culture industry theory of Adorno and Horkheimer was developed in the service of American capital in order to control the American masses through the media, Hollywood and, later on, rock’n roll. This idea goes back to Pat Buchanan and Lyndon Larouche, both of them right wing presidential candidates in the 1990s. And it culminates in Breitbart’s claim that Obama was a Frankfurt School scholar in the Saul Alinsky mode (139). Saul Alinsky being a Chicago community organizer whose pamphlet Rules for Radicals (1971) has consistently raised the ire and enthusiastic envy of the radical right. Anti-semitism, after all, still grounds this white supremacist and racist discourse about brown, black, and any other other. The question is not whether Breitbart, whose adoptive father was Jewish, and Bannon, who is catholic, are anti-semites and racists. But they consciously encourage and nurture the right-wing fringe that has brought an outright neo-nazi figure like “Hail Trump” Richard Spencer into the public eye, a man who wrote his thesis at the University of Chicago about Theodor Adorno and Richard Wagner.

​How can we explain this crazy theory about Frankfurt School critical theory which in reality opposed everything the so-called alt right stands for now? Is it just the fact that an external enemy, preferably from the orbit of Cold War leftist thinking, is needed in order to raise the specter of infiltration and subversion of American innocence? Is Frankfurt School just another code word for Jews at a time when open anti-Semitism is out of tune with conservative politics vis-à-vis Israel? Or is it something else?  What is it that draws the fringe to Critical Theory like moths to the candle?  Martin Jay put it well in an article of 2011 that analyzed the dialectic of counter-enlightenment at a time when he could still simply speak of a lunatic fringe not yet normalized into the alt-right:

“In looking for a scapegoat for all the transformations of culture which they can’t abide, they have recognized the most acute analysis of their own condition. In the fog of their blighted understanding, they have discerned a real threat. But it is not to some phantasm called ‘Western civilization’, whose most valuable achievements they themselves routinely betray, but rather to their own pathetic and misguided worldview and the dangerous politics it has spawned in our climate of heightened fear and despair.”[i]

​I think this analysis is correct. Looking into the mirror of Critical Theory and its analysis of race hatred and media domination, they recognized themselves and their history. But in order to preserve their righteous indignation based on pathologically conspiratorial thought, they had to make Critical Theory into a primary intellectual enemy and scapegoat. The over the top attack on the Frankfurt School in a host of white supremacist publications, including the recent confused rant by another Breitbart editor Michael Walsh entitled The Devil’s Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West (2015), only points to the fact that they themselves are doing what they accuse their opponents of doing: subverting American politics and culture. For what is the difference between making society unworkable and destroying the administrative state or making everything basically meaningless and creating alternative facts and fake news? Central to this kind of inverted appropriation of critical theory is what Adorno and Horkheimer analyzed in Nazi ideology and behavior as the processes of mimesis, projection, and inversion. Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman, two other members of the Institute for Social Research, put it quite succinctly in their 1949 book Prophets of Deceit about fascist tendencies in the US when they wrote that the follower of right-wing ideology ”is nothing but an inverted reflection of the enemy” (117). 

Breitbart never says in his book which texts of Critical Theory were central during his undergrad education at Tulane, but his obsession with the Democrat media complex as major culprit suggests it was the media and mass culture theory of the Frankfurters. A theory which the alt right turned from a structural analysis of commodity relations in capitalism into a conspiracy theory whose alleged purpose it was to control the population at large. The evidence? The Rockefeller Foundation funded the Princeton radio project, directed by Paul Lazarsfeld, another Jewish immigrant invested in mass media research with whom Adorno cooperated in the late 1930s on radio and music research. Lazarsfeld then became professor of sociology at Columbia where he created the Bureau of Applied Social Research and worked in close proximity to the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research which had found a home in exile at Columbia in 1934. No surprise then that Columbia itself became a target of attack. According to Breitbart, Columbia’s sociology dept. was dying: ”They needed new blood and they liked what they saw in the Frankfurt School” (116). He holds Ed Murrow, famous broadcast journalist who later helped bring ​down Joe McCarthy, responsible for shipping in the Frankfurters as displaced foreign scholars, and then he concludes: “Once in the country the Frankfurt School was almost immediately accepted at Columbia University. It was a marriage made in hell” (116). Quote Bannon from the Hollywood Reporter: “Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power.” And so it went with Michael Walsh who, in The Devil’s Pleasure Palace claims that “Critical Theory is the very essence of Satanism” (50), its only purpose being destruction, not (mind you) deconstruction. Oh, what a tiny syllable can do for Steve Bannon…

​Bannon does not talk about the Frankfurt School. But as close collaborator and friend of Breitbart he shares his analysis of the media and of cultural decline. And his radical critique of bureaucracy and the administered state can be directly linked to Marcuse, Adorno, and Horkheimer. As metaphor it differs significantly from Trump’s line about clearing out the swamp. But this coexistence of abstract sociological notions such as the administered state and bio-metaphors such as the swamp or parasites destroying the body of the nation from within, has also been a long standing characteristic of radical right wing language. Löwenthal and Guterman have analyzed it cogently in Prophets of Deceit, a book that has become amazingly topical again. Its sociological analysis of American style right-wing agitators like Father Charles Coughlin, radio preacher from Detroit, resonates strongly with the present despite major differences in media culture, racial discourse, political environment. Let me just conclude with a passage from Prophets of Deceit where the authors give us the language of right wing agitators of their time: “Liquidate the millions of bureaucrats…kick out the top heavy Jew majority, many foreign born that NOW dictate and direct our domestic and foreign policies.” Or this against the New Dealers: “The rank and file of sober, sincere, and peaceable citizens [should] pull them out of power and lock them up, pronto, as their crimes may be proven” (114f). Remember the chant at Trump rallies against Hillary Clinton accusing her of all kinds of crimes? “Lock her up!”

​In December 2016, Alex Ross published a piece in the New Yorker entitled: The Frankfurt School Knew Trump Was Coming. Indeed!

[1] Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books, 1993) 257.
[1] Martin Jay, “Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment: The Frankfurt School as Scapegoat of the Lunatic Fringe,” Salmagundi 168/6 (Fall 2010/Winter 2011). Quoted here from the web: http://rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=39179
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Note:
Andreas Huyssen is the Villard Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His work has been enormously influential in memory studies and includes such texts as After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (1986); Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (1995); Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (2003). This blog post came about because Andreas and I started talking about contemporary politics during the Mnemonics 2017 Frankfurt conference and he sent me this fantastic article. At the Mnemonics conference Andreas delivered a brilliant keynote entitled: “Memories of Europe in the Art from Elsewhere.” (Brett Kaplan)

​Every time I flaneuse around a German city I stumble, as I am supposed to, over the Stolpersteine. These stones are not new: in 1996 Gunter Demnig began a project to memorialize some of the victims of the Nazi genocide through a seemingly simple but intensely engaging and important method. Each small, squarish metal plaque is embedded into the sidewalk and inscribed with straightforward information about the person or people who lived there. There are now some 60,000 of them in many European cities. “Hier Wohnte Leo Böttigheimer Jg. 1886 Flucht Holland Ermordet 1943 Aushwitz,” and right below this stone: “Hier Wohnte Else Böttigheimer Geb. Levy Jg. 1901 Flucht Holland Ermordet 1943 in Auschwitz.” The family names that group the stones remind us of the loves and kinships of these people who died or were forced to flee.

​While in Frankfurt for the 2017 Mnemonics conference in September, I was photographing a shockingly large group of Stolpersteine (they are often in groups of just two or three, or sometimes just a lone stone) whilst the residents walked around me—I seemed to be almost invisible to them at first, a tourist with her camera, probably a Jewish tourist, I imagined them thinking—they were carrying something rather large (a boxed bookshelf from Ikea?) and they pretended I was not in their way. I was about to ask them how they felt about the stones and the tourists who visit them when one of them looked at me with such a sense of pity that I felt ashamed and shuffled away.  When I found this large group of memorial stones I was only about a block away from my hotel on Hebelstrasse, and the proximity felt uncanny and a little scary.

​Every time I have seen stones—in Frankfurt and, a few years ago, in Cologne, and in Berlin—I stop and take a photo and try to picture what those people might have been like. They may have been lovely, selfish, awful, generous, or, likely, some combination of all. Every time I pause for a photo the locals around me just move aside—sometimes they seem confused given that I am photographing the ground rather than making a selfie or taking a photo up high, above the sight line. I wonder whether the passersby have seen the curious taking photos a zillion times and what it might feel like for them to walk familiar routes past a succession of gawkers from all over the world capturing an image of these unimposing but very powerful memorials. I wonder if those on the stones who may have surviving family have been visited in these not-graves by their families?

​I wonder how many of the those who live in the houses formerly inhabited by the Jewish residents who are no longer there—either murdered or left for safety—knew, before the Stolpersteine were installed in front of their houses, that Jewish residents used to live there. In Frankfurt, there is a great likelihood that the houses wherein the murdered or fled lived are no longer there—Frankfurt was heavily bombed and many of the “old” sections are actually reproductions of what was there before ’45. Place and the traces of the past are displaced by the vast destruction of the fire- bombing. 

​I live in Illinois and there are no Stolpersteine to the native peoples who may have lived where we live now. There are no monuments in front of our house and we do not who may have been displaced, murdered, long before we arrived. I imagine that the folks who live in the Stopel-houses think to themselves, on occasion, “but I had nothing to do with the Nazis! I wasn’t even born yet.” Or “Why are they dredging up the past and making tourists stop in front of our house with their iPhones?” Both of my parents are either immigrants or descended from immigrants—my mother from England, my father the grand-son of a rabbi from a shtetl outside Minsk. I have no bio connection to the Mayflower murderers who committed genocide so many generations ago. I do not feel absolved, though, and while not feeling guilty I do own my complicity. The “ordinary Germans” who live in the houses marked by those gripping, melancholic stones may feel the same way. Did their parents or grandparents, if they were in Frankfurt during the war, resist? Am I doing enough to resist the current strands of racism and antisemitism that are manifesting now? If the forebears of the folks in the houses had done more to resist would history have looked different,  millions never murdered by the state, Frankfurt never been bombed? Chances are good, though, that those forebears did not want or need to resist because they believed in the tantalizing Nazi vision of a pure, better, homogenous world full of Lebesraum and racial purtiy.

Along with the Stolpersteine I also saw in Frankfurt a sign that read: “Der Jugend Eine Zukunft HEIMAT Verteidigen! Junge Nationalisten Wahlen: NPD.”
Before Trump, I might have taken this shocking sign less seriously. But now, we need to recognize that while they may be a laughably small group in Germany, they have kindred spirits in the U.S.
 
More information about the Stolperstine is here http://www.stolpersteine.eu/en/home/
 
The Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, Memory Studies is delighted to share this article about the Stolpersteine by Anja Reich, translated by Hunter Frederick, orginally published here: http://www.berliner-zeitung.de/panorama/reportage-der-goldene-stein-10695994
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The Golden Stone
BERLIN – A young road builder gets the first job assignment of his life from a family in Israel. The story behind the setting of a Stolperstein in Berlin.
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​Sixty-nine years and seventy-one days after Jewish resident Else Hecht was taken from her apartment on Motzstrasse, roadwork apprentice Andreas Wünsch is assigned the job of laying a stone in her memory into the city curbstone. Just before the end of his shift at the training site for apprentices in Berlin, where Wünsch has spent the day laying cobblestones – in a row, in a circle, in a mosaic – his training supervisor Herr Saager informs him that the next day he wouldn't be working in the shop. Instead, they'd be driving into the city to lay Stolpersteine, thirteen in all.

​Dirk Saager shows him a cardboard box containing a dozen small concrete blocks, on top of which metal plates have been fastened. Names, dates, and places are engraved on each of these plates. Andreas Wünsch had never heard of these memorial stones. He only knew about old war memorials from the villages in Brandenburg where he grew up, he says later. He's nineteen years old, a skinny kid with a shaved head, a soft smile, and restless eyes. He's from Wildau, near Berlin.

He refers to himself as Andi. His friends call him Neger or Kanake because his father comes from Saudi Arabia and he likes wearing hip-hop pants. He says it doesn't bother him: “I'm an open-minded person, I get along with everyone, including Turks.” The only people he might have any problems with are “those Turk wanna-be sorts or other pseudo-foreigners, otherwise I respect everybody.” Andreas Wünsch says he respects Jews as well: “I don't know any, but if I did, I wouldn't have a problem with them.”

Ruth Rotstein couldn't get much sleep last night. She went to bed late and kept waking up in her hotel room on Kochstrasse. She's waited for this moment for a long time – she made a special trip from Israel for the occasion – but now she has to tell herself over and over again that it's OK, that she's doing the right thing.

​At the beginning of this year Ruth Rotstein dialed a telephone number in Berlin, and said to the man who answered on the other end that she would like to place two memorial stones (Stolpersteine, she said – she has a good command of German) for her grandparents Else and Karl Hecht.
 
She told the man from the Stolperstein initiative what she knew about her grandparents: Else and Karl Hecht came from Plauen, where they ran two stores. Else had one for ladies' wear, and Karl one for men's. They had two daughters, who managed to get out of Germany just in time: one to England, the other to Palestine. Else and Karl Hecht stayed behind; they probably felt too old to be moving to a foreign country. Or perhaps they didn't fully anticipate what the Nazis were capable of.

Ruth Rotstein doesn't know much about her grandparents. She was born in Palestine and never met them. Her older sister Inge can still remember saying goodbye to her grandmother before she escaped from Germany: how she took Inge into her arms and held her tight, how her grandmother's face and clothes felt wet – wet from tears, which Inge came to understand only much later.

​Documents show that Karl Hecht died from a lung infection in January of 1942 in the Jewish Hospital in Berlin, and was buried in the (Weißensee) Jewish Cemetery. Two letters survive from Else Hecht to her daughter Eva in London: short, truncated missives without a single negative word. Jews were prohibited from complaining about their situation; their letters were not allowed to exceed thirty words.
 
One of the letters is dated August 9, 1942. “Beloved child,” it begins, “replying to uplifting June letter. From children naught? Am healthy, working, earning. Endless yearning. Stay healthy, strong. Heartfelt kisses – to you, children.” With date and address, it adds up to exactly thirty words.

​Six days later, on August 15, 1942, Else Hecht was taken from her apartment in 82 Motzstrasse and deported to a concentration camp in Riga. She was murdered there on August 18.
 
Else's other daughter, Tina, the mother of Ruth Rotstein and Inge Goldstein, never spoke about it, not a word. All she ever mentioned were the lovely German forests, where one could forage for berries and mushrooms. Now that both of Else’s daughters are dead, it's too late to ask questions. All that remains is the need to do something, to create a connection to the forgotten grandparents. This little brass stone might be such a connection.

​Almost the entire family has come to Berlin: Ruth Rotstein's daughter from New Jersey, daughter and son-in-law from Israel, her sister and brother-in-law and niece from New York, and her granddaughter from London. After she gets up this morning, Ruth Rotstein unpacks a couple of old photographs and her grandmother's letters, which she had brought with her from Israel. She lays the items side by side by the window. Outside, it's slowly beginning to grow light.
 
Andreas Wünsch loads the box with the stones into the small blue truck belonging to the  builders' cooperative. It's cold, damp, and gray. There had been frost overnight.
Frost is bad for road work. Dirk Saager briefly considers calling off the day's work, but then decides to go ahead after making a call and learning that family members have come to Motzstrasse all the way from Israel and the USA. They can't be sent away again.

​They set off in a group of four. Shop superintendent Ahmed drives the truck.
Andreas Wünsch sits in the back with Akin Gündogdu, a second-year apprentice. Dirk Saager follows in his car with the planned route in his pocket: seven locations, thirteen stones. Work gets going on Kreuznacher Strasse at 9:00 a.m. with Sebastian Jezower and his wife Erna, deported on January 13, 1942. If all goes well, by 12:30 p.m. they'll be done at 24 Aschaffenburger Strasse with Margarete Schenk, murdered on December 16, 1942 in Theresienstadt.
 
Stolpersteine are based on an idea by the artist Gunter Demnig. At the beginning of the 1990's he laid the first memorial stone in Kreuzberg – which was illegal at the time
– in order to remind people that here, in the middle of the city, lived someone who was taken from their apartment and murdered by the Nazis. Since then, almost 30,000 Stolpersteine have been laid in Germany alone. Most requests for the memorial stones are made by family members or by the building's occupants.

Sometimes residents refuse to contribute towards the 120 euro cost of a Stolperstein, other times building owners complain because they worry about loss of property value. And occasionally, relatives make idiosyncratic requests, such as the recent request of one family member that the inscription on the stone for his great uncle mention the fact the Americans had denied him an entry visa.
 
The project initiators found that request inappropriate, but then went ahead and did it anyway with a somewhat toned down inscription. There is no state funding and no political litmus test for Stolpersteine. No mayors or state secretaries come for  Stolperstein dedications. Rather, those who take part are family members, local residents, and people who just happen to be walking down the street.

​Ruth Rotstein and her relatives are in Berlin for ten days. They've been to the Barn District, the Turkish Market in Kreuzberg, as well as the C/O Gallery on Oranienburger Street. When the last family member finally arrived on Saturday, they all took the 200 bus to Weißensee to seek out Karl's gravesite in the Jewish Cemetery.
 
The cemetery was closed, as it always is on Shabbat. They stood in front of the big gate, eight family members from three generations, and wondered how this could happen to them. Maybe they were too excited, or tired, or maybe they just couldn't imagine that Jewish precepts pertained even in Berlin.
 
The city is familiar and strange to them at the same time. Ruth Rotstein expresses hope that a circle will be closed with this family gathering in Berlin. But the older sister, Inge Goldstein, born in 1930 in Plauen, will have none of it. For decades she refused to return, but then came back in the 1980's as an American scientist to study the effect of air pollution on the incidence of asthma in East Germany.

​The professional distance helped her. But when she visited Berlin with her children five years ago, though she liked the liveliness and openness of the city, at the same time it disturbed her. She knew these were the same reasons her mother loved the city in the 30's, and why she never got over having been forced to leave.
 
For a long time, Inge Goldstein didn't know if she would come to the Stolperstein dedication or not – first she agreed to participate, then she declined. But now she's here, with her husband and daughter. Shorty after 10 a.m., the family sets off for Motzstrasse.

​Dirk Saager is a little jittery, as he always is when he makes the rounds with his apprentices on this project, which he began doing this past spring. Gunter Demnig used to knock every stone into the pavement himself, but now there are so many Stolperstein requests that he rarely puts in an appearance anymore. One day in November Saager's crew laid sixty-six Stolpersteine on Sybel Street, twenty-one of them in front of a single building. With these kind of  numbers, Saager marches in with a whole brigade. “It's  good for the apprentices to get out once in a while,” he says, “and once they're out there, they get the big picture pretty quickly.”
 
His apprentices come from Marzahn, Neukölln, Hohenschönhausen, Brandenburg – kids with piercings, tattoos, and shaved heads. These are mostly young men who never went to high school, sent over from the Employment Office [Arbeitsamt]. They don't know very much about the Holocaust; when asked about it, Andreas Wünsch says that his great-grandfather was killed in WWII, and that his great-grandmother was raped by Russian soldiers.

​He says he's always wondered “why Adolf, who wasn't even German, made such a big deal about race theories.” When asked if he knew how many Jews the Nazis had murdered, he squints into the milky autumn sky and guesses, “Fifty thousand?”

​A silver medallion hangs around his neck. On one side is his name, on the other his father's: Abdul Manhan Fahet. He barely knows his father. His mother met him after the two Germanies unified. Now he supposedly lives somewhere in Thuringia. He had the medallion chain made a month ago. “A dog tag like soldiers have,” says Andreas Wünsch.
 
He finished school on his second try. He tried to join the Army, but they wouldn't take him. “Because I have ADHD,” he says – attention deficit disorder. He began an apprenticeship as an elder-care worker, but then quit. He got jobs on construction sites and waiting tables, but then wanted to “do something proper” again, like his grandfather. “Grandpa had himself a driving school and built two houses”, he says. His grandfather is his role model.

In September, Andreas Wünsch began his apprenticeship as a road builder. For hours at a time, he squats on his knees in the sand and learns how to lay stones in a join. He learns what a 45-degree radial pattern is. He learns that Bernburg cobblestones are not as hard as granite. “It's a blast,” he says.

Ruth Rotstein and her family members arrive at Motzstrasse far too early. One might mistake them for tourists, standing around in their warm jackets and sensible shoes, cameras at the ready, even though there's no tourist destination anywhere in the area.

​Motzstrasse is a long street whose character alters at several points. The street begins at Nollendorfplatz, which is lively, colorful, and distinctly gay; then, at about the mid-point around Viktoria-Luise-Platz, it becomes opulent and bourgeois; towards the end, just before Prager Platz, it becomes austere and low-rent.
 
Here, the trees are recently planted, and the buildings consist of post-war apartments with tiny balconies. On one corner is a discount drugstore, on the other a tanning salon called “Sunshine.” 82 Motzstrasse is just about in the middle of the block. It has six stories and a gray facade. The lawn is clipped, and there's a round ornamental shrub. Not a single leaf is to be found on the sidewalks. A bird house hangs from one of the balconies. A sign warns to beware of the dog. It's a tidy German post-war apartment building. There's nothing here that would bring Else Hecht to mind.

Dirk Saager and his apprentices are making slow progress. It has nothing to do with the weather: the ground isn't frozen anymore, and the dirt is easy to dig into. The cobblestones are easily removed and replaced with the brass ones. The obstacles are of a rather different sort. At the first stop, on Kreuznacher Strasse, Andreas Wünsch has to be shown the procedure. On Georg-Wilhelm-Strasse, an older Stolperstein had been put in the wrong way, which Saager immediately corrects.

​To make up for lost time, they work through their morning break, and get back on schedule. But then Akin, the second-year apprentice, remembers that he left his work shoes at a construction site yesterday. They make a detour so Akin can retrieve his shoes. He's quick about it, but then on the way to Motzstrasse, Ahmed makes a wrong turn, which he only realizes after it's too late.

​Ruth Rotstein looks at her watch. It's already ten minutes before noon, and things were supposed to get started twenty minutes ago – but so far there's no sign of the stone. The air is still frigid, the sky still gray. The gathered relatives rub their hands together, pump their legs, talk about the weather (who'd have thought it'd already be so cold in Berlin?), about the food in the restaurants (they'd expected better) – but at least the hair dressers in Berlin lived up to expectations.
 
Two of the women got their hair cut short in Kreuzberg, and now everyone is admiring their new hairdos. Seemingly trivial conversations, but a current of tension is in the air. This becomes evident in small gestures: a sudden jolt when a bicyclist shouts “Careful!” as he passes, or a nervous glance at a watch. Every so often people walk by: elderly women with walkers, men with shopping bags, mothers with strollers.

​Just after noon the blue truck pulls into Motzstrasse and double-parks. Time for  the seventh stone: Else Hecht, with family members in attendance. Estimated time of work: ten minutes. Meanwhile, the group in front of 82 Motzstrasse has grown even larger. A man in sweatpants and a cut-off vest is standing on the lawn, one of the tenants from 82 Motzstrasse. He's been standing there a while, at something of a distance, as if he was afraid of disturbing anyone.
 
Superintendent Ahmed shuts off the engine, and the apprentices spring out of the truck and unload their tools: bucket, chisels, trowel, pickax, and hammer. Ruth Rotstein and her family, somewhat startled by all the action and the new arrivals, grow quiet. Andreas Wünsch runs back to the truck and returns with the stone. It's lovely, very simple, and glitters like gold. The family members take pictures of it from all angles with their cameras and cell phones.

​The sidewalk on Motzstrasse and the entrance to 82 are both laid in flagstone, and between the two flagstone segments lies a strip of small rough stones: Bernburg cobblestones. Andreas Wünsch sets down the Stolperstein exactly in the middle of this strip. He looks at his instructor. Dirk Saager nods his head: it's show time. Andreas Wünsch makes a chalk outline around the stone. Akin loosens up the dirt with the pickax, lifts out some stones, and digs a hole. Ruth Rotstein's family stands in a circle looking down toward the two men working.

​Nobody talks. It all goes very quickly: remove dirt, insert stone, pack dirt, put back cobbles, pound in  Stolperstein, brush dirt away, wash off stone, brush off hands.
​
Done. Dirk Saager nods at the family members. The apprentices put the tools back into the truck. Before Andreas Wünsch gets into the truck, he turns around and says, “Have a nice day.”

The workmen are gone, they did their job — much as if they had just patched a pipe or laid down some telephone cable. And yet it's a special, even solemn moment. Maybe it has something to do with the sun, which at this moment breaks through the clouds for the first time. Or maybe something to do with the building tenant, who has now moved closer to the group and explains in halting German that he's from Sri Lanka, that he's a refugee.

A man rushes down the street and yells, “Religious freedom for all!” A young Turkish woman with a stroller comes back from the store with groceries; on her way into the building, she notices the stone and stands still. Ruth Rotstein asks her if she lives here. The Turkish woman nods. Ruth Rotstein tells her that her grandmother used to live here. It's still the same city after all.

​Ruth Rotstein stands behind the Stolperstein and pulls a slip of paper out of her pocket. She had prepared a speech at home in Israel. “I would like to thank everyone who took part today in this important ceremony,” she reads from her note. She especially wants to thank her sister Inge. “I know it wasn't an easy decision for her.” Ruth Rotstein talks about her mother, who never once talked about Else, never explained why she and her sister fled the country, nor why Else and Karl didn't.

​“My mother kept all that inside her heart and it must have caused her great pain.” Ruth Rotstein says that this ceremony is her way of asking for forgiveness for never having asked those questions. She can barely say the words, her voice is breaking. Her sister steps in and talks about the beautiful house in Plauen, and about saying goodbye to her grandmother. Afterward, Ruth Rotstein's granddaughter solemnly sings a song in Hebrew. Without being able to understand the words, it sounds as if it cried out all the lamentations that Else Hecht had been forbidden to write in the letters to her family. It Is heartbreaking.
 
The apprentice Andreas Wünsch is now on Schaperstrasse, the next to last job before he punches out for the day. He lays three stones, one each for Max and Käthe Herrmann, and one for their twelve-year-old daughter Ilse-Ruth.

original article by Anja Reich, published Dec. 10, 2011 in the Berliner Zeitung Magazin translation by Hunter Frederick
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