Veranstaltungen

Was ist „Ostdeutschland“? Wir wollen reden, über einen Raum, der meist als grau, kalt und politisch rechts wahrgenommen wird. Wir wollen diskutieren, wie ostdeutsche Lebenswelten in medialen Darstellungen, politischen Debatten und kulturellen und literarischen Erzählungen konstruiert werden zwischen Selbstbeschreibung und Fremdzuschreibung, zwischen Erinnerung und Gegenwart.

 Im Herbst 2025 wird Worlds of Contradiction (WOC) 10 Jahre alt. Eine Übersicht über das geplante Programm ist auf der WOC Website verfügbar.

Early Career Vernetzungsworkshop im Rahmen von 10 Jahre WOC Contradictions Festivals mit Mitgliedern des WOC Graduiertennetzwerks (WOC GradNet), des DFG-Graduiertenkollegs 2686 Contradiction Studies, der Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences (BIGSSS) & des Instituts für Sozialforschung (IfS) und des GRK 2638 Normativität, Kritik, Wandel

Historical references have become part and parcel of modern political and public discourse while today’s ever-changing postmigrant societies pose new challenges to long-standing mnemonic practices, as has been vividly discussed in Germany over the past years. Since 2017, claims that newly arriving migrants should be educated in Holocaust history became louder, recently culminating in a revised curriculum for the mandatory integration courses. In our paper we will show how, based on the assumption that Holocaust remembrance can convey values of German society, this new curriculum aims at historical literacy for the purpose of igniting a sense of responsibility for society amongst the newcomers.Yet, so we will argue, the same memory politics also risk to exclude people from the „national culture“ by neglecting responses to Holocaust history that might look different to the ones expected by mainstream society. By drawing from ongoing ethnographic research into different memory-educational programs for refugees in Germany, we seek to illustrate how paradoxes of plural democracy are negotiated on the basis of mnemonic practices and the construction of a collective memory more generally. Our aim is to shift the focus of current debates on German memory politics to the contradictions that underly some of the claims about its collective memory, especially the idea that a shared memory will create harmony amid a diverse society shaped by a multitude of memories.

Konferenz des European Network on Discourses of Marginality and Demarginalization (DeMarg)