Michael Rothberg

In 2011, Yasemin Yildiz and I published the essay “Memory Citizenship: Migrant Archives of Holocaust Remembrance in Contemporary Germany” in a special issue of the journal parallax on “Transcultural Memory.” In that essay, we drew on citizenship scholar Engin Isin’s concept of “acts of citizenship” to demonstrate how performances of memory by immigrants can transform understandings of collective belonging. The category of “memory citizenship,” however, remained undefined. In this lecture, I will expand on this category in three steps. First, I will add conceptual precision to the notion of memory citizenship by drawing on additional work by Isin and other scholars of citizenship. Next, I will map out the current field of memory citizenship with particular reference to Germany, but with gestures to its broader transnational implications. The years since our essay was published have seen significant developments in the politics of memory in Germany—developments in which the Holocaust, colonialism, the plight of refugees, antisemitism, far-right populism, and the politics of the Middle East have intersected in frequently explosive ways. At stake in what has been called the Historikerstreit 2.0 (Historians’ Debate 2.0) is the question of the uniqueness and comparability of the Holocaust and its relation to colonialism, racism, and the Israel/Palestine conflict. In the final part of the lecture, I will investigate this explosiveness by turning briefly to three very different examples of migrant memory citizenship. All of these examples testify to what I call—with reference to comments by the anthropologist Sultan Doughan—“lived multidirectionality”: the lived experience of diverse, intersecting memory cultures among migrants and minorities in a context defined by a dominant, relatively univocal Holocaust memory culture. As the debates of recent years have demonstrated, the productive ‘self-doubt’ that characterized German memory culture in its earlier stages has given way to a creeping dogmatism and to feelings of what the German journalist Mohamed Amjahid calls ‘Erinnerungsüberlegenheit’ (‘memory superiority’). Yet, at the same time—as I will argue using examples of migrant engagement with the Holocaust—German society already possesses more relational practices of memory that have the potential to transform the German model of coming to terms with the past in productive ways. Migrant memories of the Holocaust can serve as an inspiration for challenging the orthodoxies of the dominant memory regime, not in order to relativize the Holocaust or the demands it continues to make on Germans and on all of us but rather to experiment with new ways of remembering and taking responsibility for multiple forms of political violence. The three examples I will discuss take very different forms: a video essay, an Instagram “performance,” and a short autobiographical text. I will begin with writer Priya Basil’s video Locked In and Locked Out (2020), which premiered at the virtual opening of Berlin’s controversial Humboldt Forum in the reconstructed Berlin Palace. Basil’s video explicitly links memory and citizenship in a multidirectional constellation involving the Holocaust and colonialism. Basil narrates her journey from outsider to insider through the story of her consecration as a citizen and her decision to enter the Berlin Palace in order to deconstruct it from within. The video thus provides an opportunity for reflecting on the affordances and limits of citizenship as a model for thinking about the politics of memory. The question of who gets to speak also arises in another recent example of migrant memory citizenship. In an Instagram conversation that took place in February 2021—just two months after Basil’s video premiered and amidst ongoing discussion of the Humboldt Forum—the artist Moshtari Hilal and the political geographer Sinthujan Varatharajah approach the question of memory citizenship from a different angle. Identifying themselves as “children of refugees” and thus outside the contours of the dominant Germany identity, they take aim at the center: they propose the category of “Menschen mit Nazihintergrund” (people with a Nazi background) as a way of marking continuities between Germany’s National Socialist past and the inequalities of the present. (“People with a Nazi background” is a deliberate play on the phrase commonly used to describe migrants, postmigrants, and minorities: “people with a migrant background” [Menschen mit Migrationshintergrund].) If Basil criticizes the field of German memory citizenship for its failure to universalize its working through of the Holocaust to encompass colonial history as well, Hilal and Varatharajah draw attention to the limits internal to Germany’s confrontation with the Nazi past. My third example considers a short text by Wafa Mustafa, who is not the child of a refugee, but is herself a refugee from Syria and the child of a political prisoner. Taking the form of an essay as well as a video project, Mustafa’s piece “Travels” (2017)—known in German as “Werde ich je wissen, ob ich überlebt habe?” (Will I Ever Know If I Survived?)—recounts her childhood in Syria and her encounter with Germany’s Holocaust memory culture after she fled her war-torn homeland where her father had been arrested and was being held indefinitely by the regime. Mustafa’s engagement with multiple traumas weaves together public history and personal experience, as do Basil’s and to some extent Hilal and Varatharajah’s. Yet, while Mustafa’s contribution deals with deeply political concerns, it is ultimately less invested in direct political intervention than the other pieces: it instead works with the idiom of the uncanny to unsettle regimes of memory and belonging. Although Mustafa’s experience as a refugee and daughter of a political prisoner is highly specific, her conjoining of migration, political violence, and Holocaust memory is not unique—as Basil and Hilal and Varatharajah also demonstrate—but rather one example among many of how migrants and minorities have developed creative modes of engaging with German memory culture. As Yasemin Yildiz and I detail in a forthcoming book, creative and ethical engagement with the Holocaust from migrant perspectives can be found in works of literature like Menekşe Toprak’s ‘The Letter in the Suitcase’ (Toprak, 2017), in post-migrant theatre by Hakan Savaş Mican, in musical performances by Bejarano and Microphone Mafia, and in visual art by Ani and Sibel Öztürk, among other examples (Rothberg and Yildiz, forthcoming). These modes of engagement with Holocaust memory are heterogeneous and they come with no guarantees. But at their best they offer a relational, multidirectional remembrance that neither denies the specificity of the Holocaust and its lessons for Germany’s present nor elevates that specificity into a sacred and untouchable event.