Contested Histories: German-American Politics of Remembrance and the Holocaust

10:00 – 12:00pm at AGI

The increasing role of the memory of the Holocaust in American life since the 1970s did not prevent, but rather enabled and catalyzed the recent successes of German-American identity politics by shifting the burden of Holocaust remembrance to the American public as a whole. Julia Lange, AGI Visiting Fellow, will address this development in German-American relations. She will also focus on the emergence of two memory cultures that have shaped the U.S. image of Germany’s identity since the 1980s and continue to compete for interpretive power over the German past: one by German-American organizations and the other by U.S. Holocaust institutions. This seminar aims to stimulate discussion on the ongoing reverberations of WWII from a transnational perspective and to explore the enduring impact of a disturbing past on subnational communities and their attempts at reconciliation. Dr. Lily Gardner Feldman, Director of the AGI Society, Culture & Politics Program, will be moderating.

Julia Lange is a PhD candidate at the University of Hamburg, Germany, and a Visiting Fellow at AGI. She has recently published a book entitled Herman the German: Das Hermann Monument in der deutsch-amerikanischen Erinnerungskultur (2013, LIT Verlag). Ms. Lange studied American Studies, English Literature, and Law at the University of Hamburg and the University of Oxford. After receiving her Masters of Arts in 2011, she was a Visiting Fellow at the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University in 2012, followed by a Visiting Scholarship in the Department of Germanic Languages at Columbia University in 2013. Ms. Lange is currently a scholar with the German National Academic Foundation and has previously been awarded a scholarship in the European Excellence Program of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).

Please contact Ms. Kimberly Frank with any questions at kfrank@aicgs.org.