Placing memories of the Holocaust into a comparative framework with memories of slavery and violence against American Indians, crimes at the heart of America’s founding, was the subject of the Strassler Center conference. Participants examined whether it is possible for the United States to deal constructively with its racist and even genocidal past, as post-Nazi Germany has largely done regarding the Holocaust. Collective memory can be a tool for building national identity and promoting integration but it can also serve the opposite end. Given the recent intensification of harmful rhetoric and violence based on white supremacy in the US and elsewhere around the globe, it is clear that we have not come to terms with the legacies of mass violence and racism. In fact, nostalgia for the past has fueled memory conflicts and threatened democratic values.

In the keynote address, IAN BURUMA (New York) examined the negative effects of recalling only victimhood or triumph. Some nations glorify heroic resistance against tyranny, as in the Dutch struggle against Spanish tyranny often conflated with the Dutch resistance to Nazi occupation. Other nations celebrate national martyrdom that fosters a desire for revenge, such as the 14th century “Battle of Kosovo” that led to Serbian atrocities in the Balkan Wars. Moving to memories of World War II in Germany and Japan, Buruma advocated facing historical truths in order to understand contemporary politics. In his view, when suffering becomes the core of identity, it can function like a religious sensibility that resists honest examination. Historians should avoid writing history from the perspective of a particular culture in order to escape the noxious bias of nationalism. Legitimate remembrance of suffering differs from dangerous remembering rooted in a sense of collective victimhood, which can be a powerful source of political mobilization.

THOMAS KÜHNE (Worcester) examined memory politics in terms of national identity, citing Lincoln’s first inaugural address that appealed to the “mystic chords of memory” to avert the Civil War. In its aftermath the Civil War, competing ideas about the conflict gave way to a rigid hegemonic structure that fostered white supremacy at the expense of mechanisms to establish peace and justice. A century later, the rise of the Civil Rights movement introduced counter narratives challenging a single collective memory that effectively whitewashed history. The rise of the conservative movement in the 1980s and 1990s and the legacy of the Vietnam War prompted renewed fascination with Civil War symbols, including the rebel flag and confederate monuments that continue to polarize American society. By contrast, post-war Germany confronted Nazism and took responsibility for the crimes committed. Despite some continuities with the Nazi past, a negative memory culture emerged that entailed a deliberate break. Driven by shame and a desire to return to the community of nations, Germany embraced pacifism and refused to heroize the past. Today, Germany’s negative memory culture serves as model for a common European approach to Holocaust memory.

Panel I began with JOHN BODNAR (Bloomington) who defined patriotism in response to America’s War on Terror. War-based patriotism rooted in an authoritarian view of an all-good, all-powerful nation, rekindled nativism and led to racist violence following 9/11; while empathic patriotism is able to offer critical views of state sponsored violence. These divergent expressions of patriotism challenge efforts to construct a uniform national identity and frame ideas about what it means to be a devoted citizen in a time of conflict. PHIA SALTER (College Station) kept the focus on the US context with a discussion that examined how schools use Black History Month to respond to racist concepts and to affirm black youth through stories highlighting black accomplishment. Yet, she cautioned against celebrating individual success at the expense of recognizing the structures of injustice that remain intact. Citing her ethnographic study of a highly segregated Kansas City school that measured responses to representations of black history, she concluded that broad support for racial justice can only succeed, when it aligns with the priorities of white America.

IRENE KACANDES (Hanover) explored victimhood. Victim status, she explained, secures sympathy in a victim-saturated world but also provokes counterclaims of victimization. Drawing on personal observations and informed by her scholarship on trauma and memory, she asked who is allowed to be a victim. Reversals in victimization include Germans who became targets of the Allied Air War, Europeans who consider themselves victims of the current refugee crisis, and white males who feel penalized by diversity politics in the US. Kacandes introduced the concept of “co-witnessing”, which allows real victims to keep their identity but gives space for allies. Continuing the comparative framework, JEFFREY HERF (College Park) contrasted the US response to its violent past after the Civil War with Germany’s approach following the Holocaust. Referencing the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, he posited that the key to reconciling conflict has typically been to forget. The US obeyed western norms by withdrawing the Federal Army from the south and ignoring the development of the Ku Klux Klan. In contrast, Germany’s total defeat allowed the allies to bring many Nazis to trial at Nuremberg. After that, no West German politician could overlook the enormity of the Holocaust, a reckoning with the past that extended to German sympathy for Israel.

DIRK MOSES (Sydney) examined the supposed threat of “white genocide” as understood by the far right in Europe and settler colonial nations including the US, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Citing white power propaganda on the Internet, he described the inversion of reality that mobilizes white rage. Pithy statements, such as “we have the right to preserve our ethnocultural identity,” capture the white power movement’s response to the ideology of diversity. Globalization, deindustrialization, ethnic competition, and multiculturalism fuel far right anxieties about maintaining a white demographic majority. JENNIFER EVANS (Ottawa) explained how social media and online conversations serve as repositories of cultural memory. Describing technology’s “black box effect,” she demonstrated how historians might harness the digital footprint and rich demographic data that users willingly provide for archival research. Digital content offers a window into how past traumas shape the present. Her social media analysis further showed how memories of mass violence are weaponized. Yet, while highlighting the ethical challenges to monitoring user data, she cautioned that the more we clamp down, the harder it will be to access information.

JOHANNA VOLLHARDT (Worcester) spelled out the psychological motivations underlying collective identities and showed how they shape different construal’s of the same events. Vollhardt identified five dimensions that prompt disagreement: who is the victim; who is responsible; perpetrator intent; severity of harm; and timeline of the violence. She showed how responses to past events play out differently between high power perpetrator groups seeking to avoid responsibility and low power victim groups seeking acknowledgement. The former is typically less willing to recognize harms, while the latter tends toward pro-social behavior in supporting other victims. RON EYERMAN (New Haven) analyzed group formation in making white American identity. Drawing on social theories of trauma and his research on social movements, he described the mechanisms behind the white supremacy revival. Public symbols from the traumatic past, such as the Lee statue in Charlottesville, serve as sites of public memory that embody deeply felt emotions and become sites of mass mobilization. Threats to remove the statue provoked a massive alt right protest, which became a performative act that strengthened the original protest group, incited a counter group, and served to recruit the wider public to the movement.

OUSMANE POWER-GREENE (Worcester) also looked at social and political movements in his discussion of reparations for victims of the Red Summer of 1919. The racial pogrom against the African American community in East St. Louis, Illinois resulted in more than 500 deaths that shocked the nation. While President Wilson resisted calls for a federal investigation, violence against black communities unfolded across the nation. The movement to secure financial reparations has historically focused on slavery but Power-Greene advocated for compensation to repair the intergenerational consequences of the devastating race riots of 1919 and to redress the material conditions of black people living in those cities today. PAULINE WAKEHAM (London) addressed the imperative to reckon with the Indian Residential School System in Canada. In 2015, Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) concluded its inquiry into the century long practice of forcible separation and aggressive assimilation of Indigenous children. A key mechanism of transitional justice, the TRC process aims to transition nations to liberal democracy once an unjust system ends. Yet, in Canada, the structural injustice of white settler colonialism persists on land expropriated from Indigenous Nations. Moreover, the politics of post-truth North America coincide with settler denialism in ways that seek to recuperate Canada’s image as a tolerant multicultural democracy.

Shifting to museums as a form of repair, PAUL CHAAT SMITH (Washington), a member of the Comanche tribe, asserted that widespread Native imagery shapes American consciousness in profound ways. It is acceptable to love imaginary Indians, he argued, because genuine Indians are mostly invisible to the American public. In creating an exhibition at the National Museum of the American Indian, he leveraged nostalgia to create an emotional connection. While many activists and scholars reject this approach as hate speech, Smith used levity to address the crime at the heart of the American project without excusing the brutal truth that the US exists because of the massive displacement of Indian Nations. ROBYN AUTRY (Middletown) interrogated museums as sites for making collective sense of the nation and its painful past. Her research into the politics of museum development shows how US history museums represent racial violence, especially the treatment of slavery and the black American experience, as part of a unifying national narrative. These museums are sites of memory but they are also institutions that must sustain themselves and so they cast difficult history into neat narratives. In contrast, artists who refuse collective memory recast traumatic events in their work and complicate the idea of a uniform version of the past.

MARITA STURKEN (New York) shifted from museums to memorials (with museums) that commemorate victims of terrorism, focusing on the National September 11 Memorial (New York City) and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice (Montgomery, Alabama). Both emerged in the early 21st century, and despite radically different origins, employ a vocabulary of modernism to tell stories about America. One uses memory to affirm the nation, the other demonstrates that terrorism was at the heart of the nation’s story despite the myth of American exceptionalism. However, they both draw on minimalism, which is devoid of emotion and artistic expression, in service to commemoration and mourning. ALISON LANDSBERG (Fairfax) continued discussion of the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice already nationally acclaimed since its spring 2018 opening. While historians have written powerful accounts of slavery, terror lynchings, the Jim Crow era, segregation, and mass incarceration, they have not changed the national narrative or advanced social justice around race. Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, which established the Montgomery memorial, recognized that this failure of national memory abets the crisis of mass incarceration. Unlike other nations that have endured inhumanity and cruelty on a massive scale, the US has been disinclined to confront its violent past through public memorials and memorial museums. Drawing a distinction between memory and history, Landsberg argued that as long as state sponsored violence remains in the realm of history, it cannot be mobilized to advance political change.

Meditating on loss, absence, and regeneration as themes that have informed Holocaust memorials, JAMES YOUNG (Amherst) reflected on whether the negative forms of the 9/11 Memorial qualify it as another Holocaust monument. Highlighting Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veteran’s memorial as a paradigmatic example of the counter memorial, Young described her use of minimalism to formalize loss. Her design, indebted to WW I and II memorials, opened a wound in the landscape to create space for memory. Rejecting the idea of repair, her black horizontal design gives expression to unresolved emotions about the war and contrasts with conventional monuments built in soaring white marble. Subsequent Holocaust monuments follow Lin’s abstract approach to counter memorialization. The fraught process for selecting a design for the Berlin Denkmal asked how to remember and reunite Germany on the bedrock of a national crime. In the end, the memorial’s waving field of stelae lacks historical logic but the museum, located below, anchors the memorial in the specific history of the Holocaust. This interplay between museum and minimalist architecture became the model for the 9/11 memorial, with its monumental footprints articulating absence.

E Pluribus Unum called on participants to consider whether remembering state sponsored violence contributes toward unifying national identity or whether it deepens divisions. The complicated tension between memory and history raised important debates about the traumatic past focused on victimhood, identity formation, national shame, truth and reconciliation, collective memory, individual trauma, repair, memorialization, and national narratives. While the papers did not reach consensus, the presenters acknowledged generative threads that might shape future research and modes for thinking about conflicted history. Massive crimes, if confined to the category of history, are resistant to change in the present. In contrast, a vibrant memory culture calls on citizens to challenge consensus narratives, to question structural injustice, to intervene in present-day genocides. Monuments and museums are not substitutes for action. Yet, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, a tour de force in memory, asks visitors to “co-witness” historical violence and to render the past alive. Redemption is possible if memory is put in service to history with the aim of advancing justice in the present.

Conference Overview:

KEYNOTE

Ian Buruma (Bard College): Bad Memories

WELCOME AND INTRODUCTION

Thomas Kühne (Clark University): Memory Conflicts and National Identity: Germany and the United States

PANEL I – COLLECTIVE IDENTITY AND MEMORY POLITICS IN THE UNITED STATES

John Bodnar (Indiana University): Patriotism, Memory, and America’s War on Terrorism

Phia S. Salter (Texas A & M University): The Dynamic Psychological Resonance between Black History Representations and Sociocultural Change

PANEL II – GERMAN MEMORIES, AMERICAN MEMORIES
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Irene Kacandes (Dartmouth College): Victim Talk: Comparative Reflections by a US American Who Works on Germany

Jeffrey Herf (University of Maryland): Remembering the Holocaust, Attacking Israel, Defending Israel: Memory and Politics in West Germany, East Germany, and Unified Germany

Dirk Moses (University of Sydney): The Fear of “White Genocide” in the US, Germany, and Australia

Jennifer V. Evans (Carleton University): Facebook and the Use and Abuse of History in the Digital Public Sphere

PANEL III – TRAUMA, IDENTITY, AND RECONCILIATION

Johanna Ray Vollhardt (Clark University): Psychological Processes Contributing to Collective Memory Conflicts in the Aftermath of Collective Violence

Ron Eyerman (Yale University): The Weight of the Past in the White Supremacy Revival, The Making of White American Identity

Ousmane Power-Greene (Clark University): “Beyond Recognition, Toward Redress.” The State of Truth and Reconciliation Committees 100 years after the Red Summer of 1919: A Critique

Pauline Wakeham (Western University): Truth and Reconciliation in a Post-Truth Age: Confronting Settler Amnesia in Contemporary Canada

PANEL IV – MUSEUMS, MEMORIALS AND NATIONAL IMAGINATION

Paul Chaat Smith (National Museum of the American Indian): The Redsonian: Negotiating the Politics of Memory at the Smithsonian’s American Indian Museum

Robyn Autry (Wesleyan University): The Museumification of Memory: Unsettling (Black) History at the Museum

Marita Sturken (New York University): Designing the Memory of Terror, Negotiating National Memory. The 9/11 Memorial and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice

Alison Landsberg (George Mason University): Post-Postracial America: Confronting the Afterlife of Slavery at the Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama

SPECIAL PRESENTATION

James E. Young (University of Massachusetts, Amherst): The Stages of Memory: Reflections on Memorial Art, Loss, and the Spaces Between

CONCLUDING ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION

John Bodnar, Irene Kacandes, Phia S. Salter: Introductory Remarks