The Hayden V. White Distinguished Annual Lecture: Debating Holocaust Memory: The Politics of Comparison in Contemporary Germany

We are excited to promote  The Hayden V. White Distinguished Annual Lecture: Debating Holocaust Memory: The Politics of Comparison in Contemporary Germany. Taking place on Monday, April 4th at 6:00 pm in the University Center, Bhojwani Room The event features Michael Rothberg, who is the 1939 Society Samuel Goetz Chair in Holocaust Studies, Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature, and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. Over the past two years, the German public sphere has been roiled by a series of debates concerning the uniqueness and comparability of the Holocaust. These debates have called up older controversies, especially the Historikerstreit (the Historians’ Debate) of the 1980s in which the left-liberal philosopher Jürgen Habermas took on conservative historians who sought to relativize the Nazi genocide. Despite certain similarities, however, the new debates cannot be reduced to a repetition of that earlier moment. The Historikerstreit turned on the relation between Nazi and Stalinist crimes and the question of German responsibility for the Holocaust; today’s controversies involve instead the relation between colonialism and the Holocaust and between racism and antisemitism as well as the ongoing crisis in Israel/Palestine. In this talk, Michael Rothberg will reflect on these ongoing debates, including the particular place in them of his book Multidirectional Memory, which was translated into German in early 2021.