Seminars

The events of October 7 and their aftermath have revealed major shifts in the often celebrated German memory culture regarding the Holocaust. This lecture will address these shifts in the context of recent debates surrounding memory of the Holocaust and colonialism in Germany. In light of blind spots in German responses to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the talk casts doubt on the efficacy of German “negative exceptionalism” regarding memory of the Nazi past.

In its focus on Müküs, a small town in the mountainous far East of Turkey and her late father’s birthplace, this prize winning essay film by Kurdish artist Pinar Öğrenci listens gently to the memories of a landscape that has witnessed the eruptions of the Armenian genocide and the recent and ongoing Turkish war on the Kurds. Archival photo images of Armenian life are superimposed ghost-like on documentary images from the present under Turkish military occupation. Armenian songs accompany pans of snowy mountains. As the film shows old men playing chess, Öğrenci, who now works in Berlin, conjures up Stefan Zweig’s Schachnovelle in silent subtitles, thus broadening a local memory work into a multirelational realm. In its move to salvage remembrance of a submerged and threatened past, Avalanche offers a palimpsest of enforced erasures, not just of avalanches of political violence, but of slowly changing ways of life that have led inexorably to a loss of population, migration and exile. The film was shown at Documenta 15, Berlinische Galerie and at several biennials.

In March 1999, struck by the preponderance of images of refugees fleeing Kosovo that appeared above the fold on the front page of the New York Times when NATO began bombing Serbian military positions, Novak started saving the front section of the Times. She continued collecting for 25 years of multiplying wars and political upheavals. What started out as an attempt to visualize a war evolved into a multi-faceted presentation and analysis of trends and biases in U.S. media. The over 9,000 front page sections are sorted into 33 categories suggested by the photograph above the fold. By drawing attention to the overabundance of some images and the absences of others, Novak questions how mainstream media’s focus on objectivity has minimized systemic injustices and current threats to democracy. Novak's presentation will offer us insight into her process as she concludes her 25-year project and prepares its publication in book form by Blow Up Press in 2026.

Historian Rachel Nolan and journalist Jonathan Blitzer will discuss two new books on Central America's close and fraught relations with the US., past and present. Two forms of different but related migrations have linked the regions: asylum-seeking and international adoption. Connecting the historical realities of political violence in Central America to our present immigration impasses helps us see this mass movement of people in a new way.

As many of you may know, Shibli's novel--which was a finalist for the National Book Award and longlisted for the International Booker Prize--was recently awarded a German literary prize, and the author was to be honored at the Frankfurt Book Fair. On 10/13, the prize ceremony was cancelled and postponed to a later date, suppressing Shibli's voice in favor of Israeli voices at the Book Fair instead. Shibli's novel is about the politics of cultural memory and the limits of the archive as a resource for reconstructing and repairing the history of violence. Her work speaks directly to the preoccupations of this seminar and it has emerged as a cultural flashpoint in the current human and political catastrophe unfolding in Palestine and Israel. We invite members of this seminar to read this short novel, if you have not already, and come together to discuss what it teaches us about memory, and what we do with this insight in the present.