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In the last two decades, flight and expulsion have emerged as critical topics in contemporary German literature and culture, with authors exploring narrative modes in literary texts that open transnational perspectives. Reinhard Jirgl’s Die Unvollendeten (2003) and Sabrina Janesch’s Katzenberge (2010) are examples of such texts, dealing with traumatic experiences of displacement in the aftermath of the Holocaust and Second World War, while challenging exclusionary narratives. Both novels employ the railway journey, including places and objects associated with it such as the platform and the station, tracks and railcars, as a central motif. In the following, I will show the degree to which this motif allows for “multidirectional” (Rothberg) modes of “postmemory” (Hirsch) that transcend national borders and memory discourses. The railway provides a link between generations in both of the texts discussed. However, it also interlinks the traumatic displacement of ethnic Germans and Poles at the end of the Second World War with the experience of Holocaust victims. Can modes of postmemory in Jirgl and Janesch therefore be read as multidirectional, or do they simply equate distinct experiences, blurring distinguishing features of different groups’ suffering and historical contexts?

This article explores how nostalgic memories of Italy's colonial past are preserved and re-articulated through Il Reduce d'Africa, the journal of the Associazione Nazionale Reduci e Rimpatriati d'Africa (ANRRA). Founded by colonial returnees and veterans in the early 1960s, ANRRA became a key platform for expressing and perpetuating nostalgic and partial memories of Italy's empire. By examining the journal's content over several decades, the article challenges the prevailing view that Italy's colonial past has been erased or forgotten. Instead, it argues that colonial memories have persisted in plain sight, often conflicting with one another, and continue to influence contemporary Italian society. Using Michael Rothberg's concept of multidirectional memory, the article offers a new interpretation of these memories, considering their complexity and ongoing relevance. It highlights the roles played by individuals who, though not directly involved in colonialism, have been implicated in reshaping the narratives and cultural practices that underpin Italy's imperial legacy. The analysis underscores the significance of understanding these contested memories in shaping present-day perspectives on Italy's colonial past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how British Jews responded to the Bosnian War of 1992-1995. It questions how Jewish memories of the Holocaust influenced the way the community responded to the genocide in Bosnia. Using the British Jewish press as its source base, it identifies how British Jews extensively referenced the Shoah when responding to events in Bosnia. Highlighting a lack of international action to stop the Holocaust, British Jews attached a moral imperative to military intervention in Bosnia. It probes the idea that genocide in the Balkans had an important role in the expansion, and universalization, of Holocaust consciousness in the 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the largely forgotten early period of (pro-)Refugee activism in the 1980s West-Germany and the role of memory politics therein, this article explores the ambiguity in critiquing the nation-state. Drawing on original data collected in seven social movement archives in Germany, different ways in which German Nazism and the Holocaust are invoked to frame and critique the present (West-)German nation-state and its migration and asylum regime are scrutinised. Three ways in which Nazism and the Holocaust were invoked and discussed by Refugee activists and their supporters are differentiated: the past as 'reminder and warning for the present', the past as 'discrediting and incriminating the present', and explicit attempts not to draw analogies between the past and the present. Overall, the article makes two key contributions. First, the article makes a historical and empirical contribution as the focus on the 1980s sheds light on a period that has so far been largely ignored when it comes to the study of (pro-)Refugee activism. By tracing different ways in which memory politics has informed and been integral to Refugee activism and support, the article makes, second, an innovative contribution to studying the nexus of (forced) migration, national identity, and memory politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we apply Michael Rothberg's concept of "multidirectional memory" to an empirical setting, by analyzing qualitative interviews with 124 educators in the field of memory work, such as museum and memorial site employees, teachers, volunteers of non-governmental organizations, and civil society initiatives. We analyzed where they come across memory conflicts and commonality, and what the respective "enabling conditions" were, that is, the influencing factors that promoted or prevented developments toward multidirectionality in the sense of a "differentiated solidarity." We found only a few examples of this kind of multidirectional memory in educational settings. It was fostered by four factors: personal autobiographical experiences, political positions, structural/institutional aspects, and certain pedagogical principles. By contrast, different forms of competitive memory were dominant: first, "Conflicting Memory" characterized by differing politics; second, "Divided Memory" characterized by a perception of resource competition; and third, "Fragmented Memory," consisting of a form of sympathetic ignorance by which memories of other groups or events are tolerated, but not actively interlinked. Central topics that emerge within memory conflicts and entanglements are the history of National Socialism, World War II and the Shoah, the history of the state of Israel and the Israel-Palestinian conflict, the Armenian Genocide, the history of the Ottoman Empire and—to a lesser extent—the history of colonialism. We argue that much can be gained by applying Rothberg's concept to contemporary empirical settings, both in order to understand its current implications but also to help flesh out its underlying theoretical notions. These are regarding possible "negative" forms of multidirectional memory, as well as the implications and ethics of historical comparisons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Zeitschrift für Pädagogik is the property of Julius Beltz GmbH & Co. KG Beltz Juventa and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

From 1989 to 1991, the majority of Kashmiri Pandits (Hindus) were displaced from their home in the Muslim-majority Indian-administered Kashmir Valley, in a crisis which I refer to as the displacement. The period that has followed in the Kashmir Valley has been marred by heavy military presence and state violence against Kashmiris – mostly Muslim – who have remained in Kashmir. More than three decades later, Kashmir is still a contested region; memories of the displacement are unreconciled and its diaspora remains divided. This article reveals how memory-work through storytelling can impede reconciliation processes by reinforcing enduring narratives of marginalisation. These enduring narratives frame contemporary memory-making and prevent groups from seeing their implication in oppressive structures. Drawing on Kashmiri conceptual paradigms and oral history interviews with Kashmiri Pandit and Muslim diasporic communities in Australia, I examine both what Kashmiri Pandit and Muslim diaspora share, and why they find it hard to take on the narrative perspective of the other side. While Pandits and Muslims draw on a shared Kashmiri repertoire, they locate themselves very differently within this narrative past. As such, neither Pandits nor Muslims find it easy to see how they are implicated in the direct and structural forms of violence that led to the displacement and subsequent acts of violence. These historical narratives, transmitted through oral stories, may disrupt attempts to institute reparative processes in Kashmir. By analysing this archive of Kashmiri diasporic memory, I argue that this case study complicates our assumptions that personal narratives, particularly in memory-work, are activist vehicles that offer a pathway to healing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines two heritage site case studies that juxtapose historical British mill workers with enslaved labourers working on cotton plantations in the Americas, thus creating what Michael Rothberg has termed 'multidirectional memory'. Through close analysis of the People's History Museum in Manchester and Cromford Mills in Derbyshire, the article engages with the difficult issue of guilt, the role of community co-production and the potential power of such displays to disrupt division and promote solidarity, while acknowledging challenges involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay assesses the acrimonious debates about Holocaust memory that took place in Germany in 2020–2021 and that have come to be known as Historikerstreit 2.0. These debates call up older controversies, especially the 1986 Historikerstreit (Historians’ Debate) in which Jürgen Habermas took on conservative historians who sought to relativize the Nazi genocide. The Historikerstreit concerned 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 racism and antisemitism as well as the ongoing crisis in Israel/Palestine. As the current debates reveal, the dominant Holocaust memory regime in Germany is based on an absolutist understanding of the Holocaust’s uniqueness and a rejection of multidirectional approaches to the genocide. While that memory regime represented a major societal accomplishment of the 1980s and 1990s, it has reached its limits in Germany’s “postmigrant” present. Yet, as an example of migrant engagement with the Holocaust illustrates, German society already includes alternative practices of memory that could transform the German model of coming to terms with the past in productive ways.

When the Lebanese playwright Wajdi Mouawad invited Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai to stage his documentary trilogy House (1980, 1998, 2005) at the Théâtre national de la Colline in 2023, geopolitical animosities made way for artistic solidarities. In this article and interview, I explore how Gitai’s play critiques the violent logics of home and homelands, exploring how a commandeered house in West Jerusalem plays host to the multidirectional memory of violent Jewish and Palestinian erasure. Stones become metonyms of the Israel–Palestine conflict: as they are quarried, chiselled, split, cemented, and erected, they testify to the construction of homes that also become tools of destruction, expulsion, and mutual ontological violence (Kotef, 2020). Drawing on an interview I conducted with Gitai in July 2023, and his Collège de France lectures from 2018 to 2019, I read his archaeological journey into the remains of this Arab-Jewish house as a call to hospitality (Derrida, 1997): troubling the subject positions of host and hostage that both underpin and impede a ‘chez soi’.

This article focuses on the anthology Los peces de la amargura by Fernando Aramburu. It examines the effects of ETA terrorism on its victims from different perspectives. The main purpose of this study is to analyse the recurrent themes in the literature of memory that Aramburu uses to situate himself in the context of the transnational culture of memory of the recent past. To this end, we will draw on concepts such as ‘Multidirectional Memory’ and ‘The Implicated Subject’, developed by Michael Rothberg. Literary topoi will be explored, using German-language works that deal with the violence of Nazism and right-wing extremism, taking into account spatio-temporal differences and avoiding a ‘competition of victims’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Zeitschrift für Rechtsextremismusforschung is the property of Verlag Barbara Budrich GmbH and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Our essay examines the use of multidirectional memory in three different classrooms and institutions. It reflects on the possibilities and challenges of a multidirectional framework for Europeanists seeking to teach students how to identify and/or commemorate historical linkages between minoritized groups, encourage students to develop bonds of solidarity among themselves, and diversify and globalize their syllabi. Reading authors such as W.E.B Du Bois, Amié Césaire, and William Gardener Smith through a multidirectional lens helped students place events such as the Holocaust, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Algerian Revolution in conversation with one another while staying attuned to the spaces between particularist and universalist readings of the past. Discussing media sources such as films La Haine and Battle of Algiers within this larger multidirectional context give students a frame with which to imagine alternative trajectories of memory and solidarity in Europe. Finally, by applying their understanding of multidirectional memory to a real-life scenario in a commemorative proposal, students attempt to grasp the never-finished complexities of creating liberatory, solidarity-based historical commemorations. We argue that the concept of multidirectional memory helps students to develop a stronger sense of investment in learning about the complex historical legacies of persecution of violence and to engage more critically with the competitive memory frameworks that remain dominant in contemporary political discourse about antisemitism and racism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Less than a decade after the proclamation of "the end of history", the anxieties about "the end of utopia" are gaining ground in the intellectual field all over the world, in the context of both "the crisis of the future" and the haunting of the present by the painful pasts. The latter two are the main consequences of the fracture in the contemporary temporal order -- occurred in the '70s and deepened after the fall of the Iron Curtain -- which defines the "presentist regime of historicity". These dynamics are counterbalanced, in the same period, by a "global epidemic of nostalgia", including the commodified forms of "retromania", that reveals the presentist "faces of utopianism", from the non-instrumental "retrospective utopias" -- as poles of "existential" types of reflective nostalgic practices -- to the instrumental "retrotopias" based on the "restorative nostalgia", which were mobillized in the contemporary memory wars, starting from the '80s. Reflecting the tensions between the fixation on the traumatic legacy of the "age of extremes" and the apprehensions about "the future of nostalgia", the presentist dynamics of multidirectional memory discloses conflictual landscapes (social, cultural, and political), from the mnemonic turn of the '70s and the '80s -- which has arisen against the background of the decline of both welfare state and the nation-states, and of the global economic crisis -- to the post--Cold War contests around "the divised memories" of "Europe's Europes", coexisting with the clashes of contradictory "faces" of nostalgia and utopia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Berlin-based initiative Weiter Schreiben was founded in 2017 by the writer Annika Reich and responds to the daunting refugee situation in contemporary Europe by encouraging collaboration between established and displaced writers living in Germany. The initiative’s objective is to foster multidirectional networks instead of one-directional support.This article explores how the organizational features of Weiter Schreiben are directly tied to its successful fostering of transnational and multilingual communities. A discussion of the initiative’s journal, (Weiter Schreiben Magazin, June, 2019) illustrates that these communities emerge through the conversation about – and the production and reception of – creative writing and other artistic endeavors. Specifically, the journal’s emphasis on locations and memories links the work of displaced writers and visual artists hailing from a range of continents and countries. My main case study is the collaborative exchange between the Syrian poet Lina Atfah who escaped Syria in 2014 and the author Nino Haratischwili who was born in Georgia and moved to Germany in 2003. The multiple forms of proximity that emerge between these two writers underscore the utter inadequacy of thinking in categories of national literatures. Inspired by Ann Rigney’s work on transnational memory and the “conjunctures” Susan Stanford Friedman observes between “‘New’ World Literature and Migration Studies,” I conclude by pondering some of the broader implications of the Weiter Schreiben initiative for the role of creative writing in an increasingly interconnected world.

In this article, we analyse Il Memoriale della Shoah, the memorial of the victims of the Shoah in Milan, which was inaugurated in 2013 and, in 2015, was turned into a night shelter for destitute migrants. To understand the rhetoric and politics of the Memorial, we bring together the notions of affective practices, découpages du temps (lit. slices of time) and multidirectional memory. This analytic approach allows us to examine the nonlinear shape of remembering, the dialectic relationships between the spatialisation of time and the temporalisation of space, the ways in which emotions are brought into being semiotically in context, and the ethical questions that these feelings raise. Through detailed multimodal and affective analysis of the affordances of the built environment and its soundscape, the curation of the Memorial, the contextualisation of three guided tours (two online and one insitu) and politicised commentary on the Memorial's decision to shelter refugees, our paper illustrates the multi-layered character of the relationship between space and time – one in which the past, the present and the future partly overlap and mobilise political action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces the key issues and themes that the articles in the Special Issue aim to apply and develop in greater detail. First, we argue that the field of collective remembering can be conceived as a site of active contestation, rather than simply a means of communicating a historic past or our deontic position in relation to these pasts. Approaching collective remembering as a Lieu de Dispute allows us, in turn, to foreground three consequential dimensions of remembrance, which the articles in the issue examine in different ways: that collective remembering is an interpersonal, political and affective practice. This introduction discusses these three dimensions to collective remembering in greater detail, before outlining the remaining contents of the Special Issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

May 10, 2007, the city of Bagneux inaugurates a sculpture commemorating the abolition of slavery and the fights for human emancipation. Sculpted by the artist Nicolas Alquin, this tripartite monument, celebrates Solitude, legendary figure of the resistance in Guadeloupe. If the municipality hesitates on the place which should host the sculpture, it finally chooses to erect it close to the Pierre Plate neighborhood. The location is strategic for the town hall, which wants to thwart socio-political and multi-ethnic tensions between Black, Arab and Jewish communities. It is indeed this low-cost housing complex which made the front page of the national and international news in 2006. One remembers the "gang des barbares" who kidnapped and tortured Ilan Halimi, a twenty-three year old Jew. This antisemitic hate crime shocked French society who pressed for political mobilization. With this monument and this location, I argue that a despecification effect occurs. Through borrowed memories and prosthetic associations, the memory of Ilan joins that of Solitude, both united and defined as laïc martyrs. Renewed, the sculpture became, by transgression of the temporal equilibrium, a substitute medium for different contemporary ethnic communities who are also victims of violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When I first visited Auschwitz, I visited it as an analyst, a cultural anthropologist accompanying a group of mostly Turkish, Turkish-German, Palestinian, and Palestinian-German youth participating in a federally and locally sponsored program meant to teach them about German history and to address their own antisemitism. I was there as an observer who could not help but be dislodged from my professional role and deeply moved by flakes of bone on the ground, and sites of intimate, state-sponsored murder: a shooting wall where guards killed at close range; the collection and smell of the human hair of the murdered a wheelbarrow used to carry human ashes produced after the gas chamber in crematoria. I was moved also by the tears and horror of these same youth, also traumatized by the remains of state-sponsored mass murder. Although the program that led them to Auschwitz was meant to teach them democracy, I wondered about the extent to which actually existing democracy, using its tool of democratization, has the adequate means, humility, or desire to transform itself or to start anew from the position of the mass murdered, the slave, or the noncitizen. What unexpected lessons would it then learn? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper focuses on Aleksandar Petrov’s novel Kao zlato u vatri, originally published by this Serbian author in 1998. The novel’s main characters represent diverse ethnic groups inhabiting the Balkans (Jews, Serbians, Russians), and their fortunes intertwined with the tumultuous events of 20th century history, namely WWII and the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. The primary objective of the article is to address the question of whether it is feasible to apply Michael Rothberg’s model of multifaceted memory in a scenario involving distinct memory communities (such as Serbs, Croatians, and possibly Jews), characterized by a specific proximity (primarily territorial, historical and rooted in past coexistence within one national entity) and where relations are predominantly shaped by unresolved past grievances and mutual accusations of guilt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent Polish theater, numerous projects have drawn inspiration from biographies. These practices not only reflect the prevailing biographical trend in culture but also indicate that theater serves as a “memory machine,” playing a socially important role in establishing connections between the past and the present. Drawing on the examples of two plays staged at the Silesian Theatre in Katowice, namely Leni Riefenstahl. Epizody niepamięci [Leni Riefenstahl. Episodes of Non-memory] (2016) and What the heil?! (2022), and employing the concepts of cultural memory (A. Assmann, J. Assmann), postmemory (M. Hirsch) and multidirectional memory (M. Rothberg), this study examines the conventions employed in reconstructing the past with in the theatrical space . Furthermore, it delves into the dynamics of various forms of memory (e.g. cultural memory, communicative memory, individual memory) in theatrical representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The years 2014-2022 witnessed dynamic changes in Ukraine’s social, political and symbolic landscape. In its conflict against Ukraine, the Russian Federation employed methods of hybrid warfare that extended into the realms of communication, ideology, and historical discourse. In response, Ukraine sought to emphasize the distinctiveness and divergence of its symbolic sphere. Decommunization efforts included renaming streets and systematic removal of monuments associated with the communist era. The full-scale war that commenced after February 24, 2022, added deeper meaning to this process. The removal of monuments now extends beyond those commemorating figures and events from the communist period (decommunization), and extends to the tsarist and post-1991 Russian periods (deimperalization and derussification). The current article examines the dynamics of the monument removal process and the government’s endeavors to organize and institutionalize spontaneous public action. Prior to February 2022, decommunization in Ukraine focused on the Ukrainian collective memory, but now the “war of monuments” is directed against Russia. The analysis draws upon Michael Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses selected memoirs by American women who came from the Danube Swabian minority in present-day Hungary and Serbia (former Yugoslavia). The entire ethnic group was expelled from the region at the end of World War II. All five memoirs were published in the new millennium. This article examines how the narratives frame memories of a prewar happy childhood from young women’s perspective. The childhood memories are presented in stark contrast to the authors’ postwar experiences of expulsion, sexual violence, genocide, flight, and the eventual building of a new life in a new country. All narratives document the brutality with which the Danube Swabian communities were destroyed, particularly in Yugoslavia. Nostalgic overtones about a lost homeland intersect with a lasting feeling of being atopos—i.e., “of no place,” in exile and in the diaspora. While most of the narratives emphasize Danube Swabian victimhood, one narrative stands out in its attempt to create a more multidirectional approach to memory about World War II. agathas@uottawa.ca

This essay identifies a major blind spot in comparative memory studies despite the field’s recent “transcultural” turn: the danger of earmarking select globally recognized atrocities—specifically, the Holocaust, transatlantic slavery, and the Rwandan genocide—as emblematic analogies for renewed racial violence against marginalized groups. The essay points to a tendency to refer to these three events as limit cases for state-sanctioned violence in both public and academic commentary on rising authoritarianism. These events risk being reduced to monoliths, and the enormity of the crime eclipses the specific historical and cultural implications at stake in our contemporary moment. The essay calls on memory theorists to more aggressively scrutinize less ubiquitous, even previously peripheral histories tied to the interconnected legacies of colonialism, state terror, and slavery. As an example, this essay contrasts common comparisons between monolithic events and Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric with the 1937 Parsley Massacre, a lesser-known genocide motivated by populist discontent in the Dominican Republic, depicted in Edwidge Danticat’s novel The Farming of Bones. Seeking more nuanced comparisons not only challenges us to better understand the details of contemporary fascism but also reinforces the remembrance of less-known atrocities at risk for erasure in world history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The formula of the leading research problem in this article takes the following form and is an attempt to answer the question: to what extent can (post)memory be considered a multidirectional phenomenon, and how does the multi-directionality of (post)memory affect identity? The work is therefore divided into two main parts, which can be named successively: theoretical, including definitional and methodological comments, and analytical, focusing on the interpretation of A Little Annihilation by Anna Janko (the daughter of Teresa Ferenc, who survived the pacification of Sochy in the Zamość region) as a testimony changing memory of the Holocaust. The theoretical part is filled with studies on (post)memory, its multi-directionality (as understood by Michael Rothberg), and the concept (as presented by Marianne Hirsch). A more extensive analytical part focuses on the uniqueness of the extermination experience of Teresa Ferenc and Anna Janko — it is a reflection on the transmission of traumatic memory, which can take place in many dimensions: from the subject already experiencing the trauma (Teresa Ferenc) to the subject just experiencing this trauma (Anna Janko) and just experiencing this trauma (Anna Janko) to the subject already experienced by the trauma (Teresa Ferenc). This work also considers the competitive aspect of (post)memory multidirectional. The analyzed work also reveals the fruit of (post)trauma, which boils down to difficulties in mentalization and double personalities, the common element of which is the specter of nine-year-old Renia, nesting in the mother and daughter’s bodies like the worst parasite. The juxtaposition of A Little Annihilation with post-memorial works also makes it possible to see the intricate construction of this text, which determines that it is here that the issue of multidirectional (post)memory is most fully realized.

In this article, I examine two case studies of spatial representation of atrocity and trauma: Jerzy Skąpski's poster Każdy Dzień Oświęcimia (Every Day at Auschwitz) (1974), published in the October 1978 edition of The Unesco Courier, and the aesthetic/activist action known as "El Siluetazo" (1983), which was created by Rodolfo Aguerreberry, Julio Flores, and Guillermo Kexel, and carried out as a memory-activist intervention by the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo and the Argentinian public on 21–22 September 1983. To examine the interconnections of Holocaust memory within these two case studies, I follow Michael Rothberg's notion of multidirectional memory and Astrid Erll's conceptualization of transcultural and travelling memory. In particular, I analyze how Skąpski's use of silhouettes to spatially depict the victims of Auschwitz is adopted and transformed by the Argentinian artists and public to denounce the disappearance of 30,000 of their compatriots. I argue that in outlining the figures of the victims of the Holocaust and the Argentinian dictatorship, respectively, these creative works exemplify the transcultural use of silhouettes originating in Holocaust memory and the multidirectional influence, derived from their organic connection, of spatial visualizations of absent bodies as they commemorate and make present the victims of these traumatic histories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This conversation between the German critical race theorist Iman Attia and the American memory studies scholar Michael Rothberg originally appeared in German in a special issue of the journal Neue Rundschau (190.2 [2018]). Edited by Manuela Bauche and Sharon Dodua Otoo, the issue, “Geschichte Schreiben” [Writing History], was dedicated to exploring non-hegemonic ways of narrating the past, especially from the perspectives of people of color. The editors asked Attia and Rothberg to discuss their contributions to the reimagination of history and memory, with particular emphasis on Attia’s project “Verworbene Geschichte(n)”(http://www.verwobenegeschichten.de) and Rothberg’s concept of“multidirectional memory.” The bilingual dialogue took place over email during the course of winter 2017-2018 with Attia drafting her comments in German and Rothberg writing in English.

This article examines 64 autobiographical narratives written by erstwhile political prisoners who were forced to cohabitate with their adversaries in post-1980 coup military prisons of Turkey in the mixing-for-peace (karıştır-barıştır) program. Tracing these narratives published between 1988 and 2019, it argues that there are three recurrent versions of remembering the enemy: 'the unjust' is utilized in the identity reformulation of right-wing Ülkücü militants whereas 'the miserable fascist' reaffirmed the leftists' superior self-image vis-à-vis the right-wingers. While these two are predominantly entrenched in far-right and far-left memory camps, remembering the enemy as 'the fellow victim' provides a case of multidirectional memory as it was expressed by both left-wing and right-wing political figures to narrativize their break from radicalism and to whitewash their responsibility in the past violence. This tripartite division in remembering the enemy suggests the addition of a radical/centrist axis to the conventional left/right axis for a more comprehensive understanding of post-coup memory in Turkey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses selected memoirs by American women who came from the Danube Swabian minority in present-day Hungary and Serbia (former Yugoslavia). The entire ethnic group was expelled from the region at the end of World War II. All five memoirs were published in the new millennium. This article examines how the narratives frame memories of a prewar happy childhood from young women's perspective. The childhood memories are presented in stark contrast to the authors' postwar experiences of expulsion, sexual violence, genocide, flight, and the eventual building of a new life in a new country. All narratives document the brutality with which the Danube Swabian communities were destroyed, particularly in Yugoslavia. Nostalgic overtones about a lost homeland intersect with a lasting feeling of being atopos--i.e., "of no place," in exile and in the diaspora. While most of the narratives emphasize Danube Swabian victimhood, one narrative stands out in its attempt to create a more multidirectional approach to memory about World War II. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The formula of the leading research problem in this article takes the following form and is an attempt to answer the question: to what extent can (post)memory be considered a multidirectional phenomenon, and how does the multi-directionality of (post)memory affect identity? The work is therefore divided into two main parts, which can be named successively: theoretical, including definitional and methodological comments, and analytical, focusing on the interpretation of A Little Annihilation by Anna Janko (the daughter of Teresa Ferenc, who survived the pacification of Sochy in the Zamość region) as a testimony changing memory of the Holocaust. The theoretical part is filled with studies on (post)memory, its multi-directionality (as understood by Michael Rothberg), and the concept (as presented by Marianne Hirsch). A more extensive analytical part focuses on the uniqueness of the extermination experience of Teresa Ferenc and Anna Janko - it is a reflection on the transmission of traumatic memory, which can take place in many dimensions: from the subject already experiencing the trauma (Teresa Ferenc) to the subject just experiencing this trauma (Anna Janko) and just experiencing this trauma (Anna Janko) to the subject already experienced by the trauma (Teresa Ferenc). This work also considers the competitive aspect of (post)memory multidirectional. The analyzed work also reveals the fruit of (post)trauma, which boils down to difficulties in mentalization and double personalities, the common element of which is the specter of nine-year-old Renia, nesting in the mother and daughter's bodies like the worst parasite. The juxtaposition of A Little Annihilation with post-memorial works also makes it possible to see the intricate construction of this text, which determines that it is here that the issue of multidirectional (post)memory is most fully realized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay traces the unlearning and transformation of racial violence and trauma through reparative workshops, developed as bodywork and micropolitical tools in the field of art in the late 1960s and today. In a historical critique, we analyze Anna Halprin’s iconic workshop series for Ceremony of Us (1969), created as a political performance project for the catharsis and healing of racial violence and trauma in response to the so-called Watts riots in Los Angeles (1965). This work will be juxtaposed with the contemporary project Merkabah for the Hoetep (since 2016) by Tabita Rezaire, as a “collective healing offering” and a somatic, mental, and spiritual way of mending. Both artists assume that violence and trauma caused by experiences of racism have inscribed themselves in the body and sedimented as corporeal archives in all intersectional dimensions of discrimination. We aim to critically investigate the different conceptions of trauma—structural, historical, and cultural—that occur in the artworks. The performance project Ceremony of Us (1969) was intended for the African American community and the (usually) white art and theater scene to mutually go through a process of catharsis and create a new community. As a prototype of the Western workshop model, it brought together many (body) therapeutic tools in the spirit of the Human Potential Movement. In contrast to these Western concepts of trauma, a movement of Black yoga therapy emerged in the US in the late 1960s, which provided fundamental knowledge to treat race-based traumatic stress and focused on African ancestry—as was the case in Kemetic Yoga. In light of this historical analysis, we investigate Tabita Rezaire’s contemporary reparative art practices, navigating digital, corporeal, and ancestral memory as sites of struggles. Addressing structural trauma and “slow violence,” her workshop Merkabah for the Hoetep (2016–20) is a decolonial form of somatic, mental, and spiritual resistance that nourishes visions of entanglement, mending, and kinship.

This essay opens on the streets of Rome in 2019 among displays of fascist relics, architecture, and memorial sites. Each display speaks to Italy's violent colonial and fascist history, one that continues to be entangled with and to overdetermine Italy's contemporary restrictive citizenship laws and anti‐immigrant policies. Here, Paula M. Salvio turns to a psychoanalytic understanding of omnipotence, and to Michael Rothberg's concept of multidirectional memory, in order to pursue the half‐spoken history of Italian fascism that is hauntingly absent from Italy's public school curriculum, as well as from sites of public pedagogy such as museums, cinema, memorials, and social media platforms. This absence raises important questions about the ethical obligation education has to teach against omnipotence in conventional classroom settings and sites of public pedagogy. Salvio concludes with a reading of a socially engaged project, the Holocaust Memorial located in the Milan Central Railway Station on Platform 21, that is aimed at teaching against omnipotence. The memorial stands as a site of conscience that is committed to making visible what was hidden for years — the deportation between 1943 and 1945 of Italian Jews from the Milan Central Railway Station to Auschwitz‐Birkenau and Bergen‐Belsen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of films of the 1980s have noted a tendency towards "ideological conglomeration"—the presence of multiple contradictory ideological registers. This article argues that 80s films' "ideological conglomeration" is made legible and coherent through Michael Rothberg's (2009, Multidirectional memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the age of decolonization. Stanford University Press) concept of multidirectional memory. It thus proceeds to apply a theoretical framework of multidirectional memory to the analysis of two "New Cold War" films—Sylvester Stallone's Rocky IV (1985) and Taylor Hackford's White Nights (1985). Reading Rocky IV through a lens of multidirectional memory allows us to perceive links between the "New Cold War," U.S. racializing logics, and the racializing schemas of the Nazi regime. In White Nights an analytic of multidirectional memory foregrounds the connections between Little Rock, Arkansas, the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and the displacement of the associated discourses of state brutality, racism, and accountability onto the Soviet Union. The article concludes that multidirectional memory offers a generative theoretical framework for the study of the cinema of the "New Cold War" that illuminates how films link U.S. Cold War and racial logics to secure the hegemony of white masculinity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The staging of history in literature is engaged in dynamic exchange with society's memory discourses and in this context, literature is generally seen as playing a creative role as a formative medium in memory cultures. For some time, however, many feel that established concepts of Cultural Memory Studies need to be reconsidered for multiethnic societies. The assumption is that official memory cultures tend to exclude people with a migrant background from identity-forming discourses about the past. Using Germany as an example, this paper argues, first, that the question of memory in multiethnic societies needs to be reconsidered indeed, but in a different direction than has been assumed so far, and, second, that much-discussed concepts such as the post-migrant paradigm or multidirectional memory tend to circumvent the problems at hand rather than contribute to their solution. The paper therefore discusses the preconditions for a literary-theoretical engagement with this socio-political issue and the direction in which an alternative conceptualization would have to go – that is, not a new theory or method, but a novel perspectivethat should bethe basis for future theory building. Rather than confining the notion of a »shared history« to, either the common history of a country's native population, or to the history since migration shared by minorities and receiving society, this paper proposes to focus on actual links between the histories of Germany as the receiving society and the histories of the new Germans' countries of origin. Using literary texts and discussing a concrete example, it brings such shared histories to the fore and explores how they open up national memory discourses transnationally. The underlying vision is that these important components of multiethnic societies have the potential to show a way in which national and transnational memory landscapes as a whole could be transformed. In this sense, the metaphor of »Migration into Other Pasts« may be rephrased as migration not »into the past of others« but a territorial move within one common shared history. The paper therefore shows that the prerequisites for a literary-theoretical examination of the question of memory culture in multiethnic societies and its literary representations must be sought in the offerings of literature itself. The literary example, Orkun Ertener's novel Lebt (Alive/Live! 2014), with its numerous entangled and interweaving shared histories shows particularly clearly how literature can function as a drive or even theory generator for concepts to be developed – instead of, conversely, imposing readymade concepts on both German multiethnic societies and its literary production. The novel perspective of this paper can be summarized in the inversion of the conventional point of departure: Instead of looking for a way to include people with a migrant background into the German memory culture, the first question to be asked should be how, in the age of the general recognition of concepts of entangled history, the idea could arise and persist for so long that migrants with Turkish roots, for instance, have no relation to German history. By focusing on the historical connectivities between Germans and new Germans, Orkun Ertener's novel Lebt chooses a different approach in this regard. It provides a transnational expansion of memory discourses on German, Greek, Jewish and Turkish/Ottoman history and thus opens up a new and long overdue memory space that is of central interest to multiethnic societies in Germany and beyond. As it seems, it takes writers who are more interested in entangled histories than in history as a resource for identity to get this right. Ertener undoubtedly belongs to this type of writers, as evidenced not least by the fact that he cites or refers to some of the most important historical studies for his context from Mark Mazower's Salonica – City of Ghosts, a standard reference on the multiethnic and multicultural history of Thessaloniki, to Turkey, the Jews and the Holocaust by Corry Guttstadt who challenged the myth of a Jewish-friendly policy in Turkey. Ertener's novel Lebt is saturated with the interconnected histories of various ethnic groups and may therefore serve as a blueprintfor a vision of memory culture in a multiethnic society. In conclusion, the essay outlines that developing an alternative concept of memory and historical consciousness in multiethnic societies and their literary representations cannot be based on much-discussed concepts such as post-migration or multidirectional memory. Although a superficial glance suggests that they might be the obvious choice for the topic of this paper, a novel take on multiethnic memory landscapes must start from specific shared histories and their entanglements. The paper therefore proposes that a bottom-up development of theoretical-methodological work is necessary in the case of representations of memory in multiethnic societies. This approach must highlight how links between the histories of the receiving societies and the histories of the migrants' countries of origin are, or could become, important components of an alternative memory culture in multiethnic landscapes – and that these links hold the potential for transforming national and transnational memory landscapes as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ivan Kozlenko’s novel Tanzher (Tangier) became one of Ukraine’s biggest cultural events of 2017, vigorously debated in the country’s media and shortlisted for multiple prizes. This ambitious Ukrainian-language novel by a native of a predominantly Russophone city is simultaneously a love letter to Odesa and a daring subversion of the superficial version of the city’s popular myth, widely disseminated both by mass media and by scholarly discourse. A novel whose plot centres on two pansexual love triangles, one taking place in the 1920s, the other in the early 2000s, Tangier employs strategies of intertextual engagement and multidirectional memory to construct an alternative affirming narrative. It focuses on the episodes in Odesa’s history during Ukraine’s wars of independence in 1918–20 and the time it served as Ukraine’s capital of filmmaking in the 1920s and seeks to reinsert this queer-positive narrative into the national literary canon. This article analyzes the project of utopian transgression the novel seeks to enact and situates it both in the domestic socio-cultural field and in the broader contexts of global countercultural practices. It also examines the challenges faced by post-communist societies struggling with the new conservative turn in national cultural politics.

Ivan Kozlenko's novel Tanzher (Tangier) became one of Ukraine's biggest cultural events of 2017, vigorously debated in the country's media and shortlisted for multiple prizes. This ambitious Ukrainian-language novel by a native of a predominantly Russophone city is simultaneously a love letter to Odesa and a daring subversion of the superficial version of the city's popular myth, widely disseminated both by mass media and by scholarly discourse. A novel whose plot centres on two pansexual love triangles, one taking place in the 1920s, the other in the early 2000s, Tangier employs strategies of intertextual engagement and multidirectional memory to construct an alternative affirming narrative. It focuses on the episodes in Odesa's history during Ukraine's wars of independence in 1918-20 and the time it served as Ukraine's capital of filmmaking in the 1920s and seeks to reinsert this queer-positive narrative into the national literary canon. This article analyzes the project of utopian transgression the novel seeks to enact and situates it both in the domestic sociocultural field and in the broader contexts of global countercultural practices. It also examines the challenges faced by post-communist societies struggling with the new conservative turn in national cultural politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently Chile has undergone significant socio-economic and geopolitical changes following efforts to forge sustainable pathways challenging disparities in power and wealth in the country. In 2006 secondary-school students launched the Penguin Revolution to protest inequalities in the educational system resulting from policies implemented during and after Pinochet's dictatorship (1973-1990) and to critique the cause of economic differences that allowed the wealthy to prosper and marginalized the poor. This article explores the contributions of the novel Al sur de la Alameda: diario de una toma (2014) to the memory-building exercise undertaken by the Penguin Revolution, situating it in the context of memory activism over the last thirty years. Furthermore, it examines the novel's promotion of public pedagogy in the context of its production, aligning it with the goals of the Penguin Revolution and argues that it is the polyphonic narrative and intermedial storytelling process that facilitate the novel's socio-historical contributions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The British myth of World War II has long been successfully mobilised to police the ideological borders of the UK. The article considers narratives about the war as a key site for the negotiation of British identity and the UK's relation to its imperial past. It, first, seeks to unpack some of the contradictions of the dominant British view on the war to then consider the 2010 novel Black Mamba Boy by Somali-British writer Nadifa Mohamed. It is argued that the novel effectively opposes ideas of an ethnically homogenous nation. Drawing on Michael Rothberg's notion of multidirectional memory, the article shows how the novel interweaves different traumatic histories and thus presents memories of the war as an opportunity, not to consolidate national borders, but to forge new solidarities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]