Memory Citizenship: Migrant Archives of Holocaust Remembrance in Contemporary Germany

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 For an account of the submission process and the ensuing debate, we draw on the artist's own account. See Hans Haacke, ‘Der Bevölkerung’, Oxford Art Journal, 24:2 (2001), pp.127–41; and Rosalyn Deutsche, Hans Haacke, and Miwon Kwon, ‘DER BEVÖLKERUNG: A Conversation’, Grey Room, 16 (2004), pp.60–81. See also Mark Rectanus, ‘The Politics of Promotion: Multiculturalism, Performance, and Art,’ New German Critique, 92 (2004), pp.141–58; esp. pp.155–8. Information about the artwork as well as the ongoing archive of photographs of it is available on the website: www.derbevoelkerung.de. 2 A transcript of the debate can be found on the artwork's website and in English translation in ‘DER BEVÖLKERUNG: The German Parliamentary Debate’, trans. Sara Ogger, Grey Room, 16 (2004), pp.82–115. 3 In using the term ‘migrants’ Migranten/ Migrantinnen rather than ‘immigrants’, which is more common in the Anglo-American context, we adopt a grassroots self-designation that emerged in West Germany in the 1980s in response to the dominant label ‘foreigner’ Ausländer. 4 In bringing together the concepts of ‘the people’ and ‘the population’, the work evokes central issues in political theory, including Habermas's notion of ‘constitutional patriotism’, Ernesto Laclau's theory of populism, and Seyla Benhabib's work on citizenship in a transnational age. See, for example, Jürgen Habermas, The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays, ed. and trans. Max Pensky (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001); Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (New York: Verso, 2007); and Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens (New York: Cambridge UP, 2004). 5 Hans Haacke, ‘Der Bevölkerung’, p.135. 6 ‘Jewish’ and ‘Turkish’ are not mutually exclusive categories, of course. On Turkish Jews living in 1930s Europe, a number of whom became victims of the Nazis because of Turkish state policies towards their own citizens, see Cory Guttstadt, Die Türkei, die Juden und der Holocaust (Berlin: Assoziation A, 2008). 7 On the recasting of ‘Turks’ into ‘Muslims’ and its larger implications see Yasemin Yildiz, ‘Turkish Girls, Allah's Daughters, and the Contemporary German Subject: Itinerary of a Figure’, German Life and Letters, 62:3 (2009), pp.465–481. 8 Thilo Sarrazin, Deutschland schafft sich ab: Wie wir unser Land aufs Spiel setzen (Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2010). For a review of the book, see Timothy Garten Ash, ‘Germans, More or Less: Review of Thilo Sarrazin, Deutschland schafft sich ab’, New York Review of Books, February 24, 2011. For a systematic fact-checking of Sarrazin's claims regarding Muslim immigrants, which documents that many of the numbers he cites are false, baseless, or misleading, see Naika Foroutan, ed., Sarrazins Thesen auf dem Prüfstand: Ein empirischer Gegenentwurf zu Thilo Sarrazins Thesen über Muslime in Deutschland (2010) available online 07/07/2011. 9 On multidirectional memory, see Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). The claim that migrants are not interested in German history and the Holocaust is made frequently in popular discourse. For a scholarly argument along those lines, see Gilad Margalit, ‘On Being Other in Post-Holocaust Germany. German Turkish Intellectuals and the German Past’, Tel-Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte, 38 (2009), pp.209–32. 10 While no history of Holocaust memory in the context of migration exists, a growing body of scholarship that has inspired our own does look at the conjunction of German/Jewish/migrant history and memory, often with reference to the Holocaust and Nazi past. See Leslie A. Adelson, The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature: Toward a New Critical Grammar of Migration (New York: Palgrave, 2005); Y. Michael Bodemann and Gökçe Yurdakul, ‘Geborgte Narrative: Wie sich türkische Einwanderer an den Juden in Deutschland orientieren’, Soziale Welt 56 (2005), pp.441–52; ‘“We Don't Want to be the Jews of Tomorrow”: Jews and Turks in Germany after 9/11’, German Politics and Society, 24:2 (2006), pp.44–67; Viola Georgi, Entliehene Erinnerung: Geschichtsbilder junger Migranten in Deutschland (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2003); Andreas Huyssen, ‘Diaspora and Nation: Migration into Other Pasts’, New German Critique, 88 (2003), pp.147–64; Kader Konuk, ‘Taking on German and Turkish History: Emine Sevgi Özdamar's Seltsame Sterne’, Gegenwartsliteratur, 6 (2007), pp.232–56; Ruth Mandel, Cosmopolitan Anxieties: Turkish Challenges to Citizenship and Belonging in Germany (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Astrid Messerschmidt, Weltbilder und Selbstbilder: Bildungsprozesse im Umgang mit Globalisierung, Migration und Zeitgeschichte (Frankfurt am Main: Brandes Damani Partridge, ‘Holocaust Mahnmal (Memorial): Monumental Memory amidst Contemporary Race’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 52:4 (2010), pp.820–50; Jeffrey Peck, Being Jewish in the New Germany (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007); and Annette Seidel-Arpacı, ‘National Memory's Schlüsselkinder: Migration, Pedagogy, and German Remembrance Culture’, in German Culture, Politics, and Literature into the Twenty-First Century: Beyond Normalization, eds, Stuart Taberner and Paul Cooke (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2006), pp.105–19. See also Rita Chin, Heide Fehrenbach, Geoff Eley, and Atina Grossman, After the Nazi Racial State: Difference and Democracy in Germany and Europe (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2009). 11 For the emergence of Holocaust memory as a point of orientation for Europeanizing and universalizing notions of human rights, see Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005). 12 By ‘migrant archives’ we do not primarily mean existing document collections or their places of storage. The texts and practices that form the basis of our analysis here have not been collected in any single institutional location (although archives of migrant life exist in Germany, as elsewhere: see, e.g., DOMiD: Dokumentationszentrum und Museum über die Migration in Deutschland e.V. ). Rather, our paradoxical concept of ‘migrant archives’ is meant to evoke a realm of (trans)cultural memory that does not easily fit into Aleida Assmann's otherwise useful distinction between an ‘actively circulated memory that keeps the past present as the canon and the passively stored memory that preserves the past as the archive’. Migrant practices of memory are neither canonical nor comprehensively stored in official political or historical archives, but they do circulate widely, even if they are not recognized by national memory cultures; access to ‘migrant archives’ thus requires a transversal approach that gathers together traces of memory work distributed across realms of culture and everyday life. Without doubt, such an approach proves fruitful beyond the contexts discussed here: as we will argue in our conclusion, migrant memory may provide a useful model for all study of cultural memory. See Aleida Assmann, ‘Canon and Archive’, in Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, eds, Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), p.98. 13 Engin F. Isin, ‘Theorizing Acts of Citizenship’, in Acts of Citizenship, eds, Engin F. Isin and Greg M. Nielsen (London: Zed Books, 2008), p.17. 14 Zafer Şenocak, Atlas of a Tropical Germany: Essays on Politics and Culture, 1990–1998, tr. and ed. Leslie A. Adelson (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), p.6. We have slightly altered Adelson's translation in this case. See Z. Şenocak, Atlas des tropischen Deutschland (Berlin: Babel Verlag, 1993), p.16. Şenocak and Tulay's essay has been much discussed among US- and UK-based scholars of German culture – including Adelson, Chin and Fehrenbach, Huyssen, and Mandel – but we have not found extensive discussion in Germany itself, a symptom of the situation we analyze here. 15 Zafer Şenocak, Atlas of a Tropical Germany, p.7. 16 Zafer Şenocak, Atlas of a Tropical Germany, p.26. As cited in Rita Chin, Heide Fehrenbach, Geoff Eley, and Atina Grossman, After the Nazi Racial State, p.133. 17 For more on Şenocak's argument and its implications for Holocaust memory and the ‘question of difference’ in contemporary Germany, see Rita Chin, Heide Fehrenbach, Geoff Eley, and Atina Grossman, After the Nazi Racial State, pp.131–6. See also Leslie A. Adelson, The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature, and Leslie A. Adelson's introduction to her translation of Şenocak's Atlas of a Tropical Germany, pp. xi–xxvii. 18 Education scholar Astrid Messerschmidt refers in this regard to the ‘Nachwirkungen’ –the aftereffects – of National Socialism. See Astrid Messerschmidt, Weltbilder und Selbstbilder, esp. chap. 3. See also Astrid Messerschmidt, ‘Kritische Zugehörigkeit als Ausdruck geschichtsbewusster Integrationsarbeit’, in Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste, Neuköllner Stadtteilmütter und ihre Auseinandersetzung mit der Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus (Berlin: Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste, e.V., 2010), pp. 25–30. 19 Dan Diner, ‘Nation, Migration, and Memory: On Historical Concepts of Citizenship’, Constellations, 4:3 (1998), p.303. 20 Dan Diner, ‘Nation, Migration, and Memory’, p.306. 21 For further discussion of this issue, see A. Dirk Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), esp. p.17. 22 Astrid Messerschmidt, Weltbilder und Selbstbilder, p.144. 23 Havva Jürgensen, ‘Ich wünsche mir einmal eine Bundeskanzlerin mit türkischen oder arabischen Wurzeln’, in Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste, Neuköllner Stadtteilmütter, p.54. 24 For more on this issue, see Jutta Weduwen, ‘Was haben Neuköllner Migrantinnen mit der Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus zu tun?’, in Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste, Neuköllner Stadtteilmütter, p.12. 25 In assembling these traces we draw on the work of Kader Konuk, who was one of the first scholars to begin making this constellation visible. As both Konuk and Adelson note, literary works emerging from Turkish migration began to address German national history – specifically, the Holocaust – in more sustained form in the 1990s, making this a distinctly post-unification phenomenon. It remains to be investigated how much migrant memory work took place in other realms in pre-unification East and West Germany. See Kader Konuk, ‘Taking on German and Turkish History, p.233–234; and Leslie A. Adelson, The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature, p.85. 26 Zafer Şenocak, Gefährliche Verwandschaft (Munich: Babel, 1998). On Şenocak, see Leslie A. Adelson, The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature, p.85; and Andreas Huyssen, ‘Diaspora and Nation’. See the website of the Ballhaus Naunynstrasse: http://www.ballhausnaunynstrasse.de/. On the collaboration of Microphone Mafia and Esther Bejarano, see ‘Auschwitz Survivor and Turkish Rapper Team Up to Fight Racism’, Haaretz, 27 January 2010. Available online 22/03/2010. See the homepage of Doğan Akhanlı: . For the Amadeu Antonio Stiftung, see: 22/03/2010. 27 On the significance of Armenian references in Turkish-German literature (whether written in Turkish or in German) see also Konuk, who sketches how the writings of Şenocak, Akhanlı, and Germany-based Turkish-language author Kemal Yalçın configure genocidal German and Turkish histories. Kader Konuk, ‘Taking on German and Turkish History, pp.247–51. 28 In Germany, Akçam was affiliated with the Hamburg Institute for Social Research and went on to earn his doctorate at the University of Hannover with a dissertation on the Armenian genocide. He is currently a professor in the Department of History at Clark University, where he is associated with the Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. See his Clark homepage: http://www.clarku.edu/departments/history/facultybio.cfm?id = 722 and Yildiz, ‘Governing European Subjects: Tolerance and Guilt in the Discourse of “Muslim Women”, Cultural Critique, 77:1 (2011), pp.70–101. 35 Saskia Sassen, ‘The Repositioning of Citzenship and Alienage: Emergent Subjects and Spaces for Politics’, Globalizations, 2:1 (2005), pp.79–94; here p.87. We have reversed the order of these two sentences. 36 Isin, ‘Theorizing Acts of Citizenship’, p.38. 37 Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste, Neuköllner Stadtteilmütter, p.48. 38 Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste, Neuköllner Stadtteilmütter, p.45. 39 Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste, Neuköllner Stadtteilmütter, p.43. 40 Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste, Neuköllner Stadtteilmütter,p.51. 41 Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste, Neuköllner Stadtteilmütter, p.67. 42 Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste, Neuköllner Stadtteilmütter, p.57. 43 Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste, Neuköllner Stadtteilmütter, p.41. 44 The event, ‘Miteinander statt übereinander. Geschichte in der Einwanderungsgesellschaft’, took place on 25 February 2009 in Berlin's Werkstatt der Kulturen. See also Partridge's account of this event, Damani Partridge, ‘Holocaust Mahnmal (Memorial)’, pp.842–844. 45 Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste, Neuköllner Stadtteilmütter, p.54. In referring to this transmission as both prosthetic and postmemorial, we draw on: Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); and Marianne Hirsch, ‘The Generation of Postmemory’, Poetics Today, 29:1 (2008), pp.103–28. For more on the relation of postmemory and migrant memories, see Annette Seidel-Arpacı, ‘National Memory's Schlüsselkinder: Migration, Pedagogy, and German Remembrance Culture’. 46 Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste, Neuköllner Stadtteilmütter, p.54. 47 Anne Whitehead, Memory (New York: Routledge, 2009), p.152. See also Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 48 See Rosalyn Deutsche, Branden W. Joseph, and Thomas Keenan, ‘“Every Form of Art Has a Political Dimension”: Interview with Chantal Mouffe’, Grey Room, 2 (2001), pp.98–125; here pp.107–8. Mouffe's comments in the interview led to an exchange with Bruce Robbins. See Bruce Robbins, ‘The Aesthetic and the International’, Grey Room, 5 (2001), pp.112–7; and Chantal Mouffe, ‘Response to Bruce Robbins’, Grey Room, 5 (2001), p.118. 49 Murat Aydemir and Alex Rotas, ‘Introduction: Migratory Settings’, in Migratory Settings, eds, Aydemir and Rotas (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), p.7. 50 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor, tr. P. Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).