Legacies of Violence and Genocide: Can Memorials and Museums Help Us Build a Better Future?

Holocaust Memorial Lecture

Can memory prevent injustice and violence? Panelists of this virtual roundtable will discuss the role of museums and memorials in building the bridge between history, understanding, empathy, and action. In recent years, questions about the representation of history in public spaces have become more pressing than ever.

The legacies of the Holocaust, colonial violence, and racist exploitation are at the center of resulting debates and actions that range from redesigning commemorative and exhibition spaces to toppling monuments. Can museums and memorials fulfill the tasks of remembrance, reconciliation, and prevention that genocidal and other instances of mass violence pose? The roundtable takes the history of the Holocaust as a starting point for a conversation on the capacity of public portrayals of complex histories of violence to shape a more just future.

Multidirectional Memories, Implicated Subjects, and the Possibilities of Art

Following the lecture, Michael Rothberg will join Washington University professors Anika Walke (History) and Geoff Ward (African and African-American Studies) in conversation about Memory for the Future, a Washington University initiative that combines critical memory studies with curatorial and public education projects. In partnership with museums, archives, and commemorative projects, this initiative will facilitate reparative and multidirectional memorial practices in St. Louis.

Anxious Ears: Soundscapes and the Art of Listening in Postwar German Radio Drama

The success of National Socialism in mobilizing the radio for propaganda purposes led to widespread anxiety and distrust of the medium in the burgeoning postwar democracies of the Federal Republic of Germany and Austria. Could Germans and Austrians be taught to critically listen? Or would their ears remain passive and susceptible to indoctrination? This paper will examine how narrative Hörspiel of the 1950s and early 1960s offer a site for exploring these questions, by drawing on brief examples from radio plays in which characters display anxieties surrounding listening – the sense of being overwhelmed by sound and unable to discern its messages; the fear of being transformed into mechanized receivers and transmitters of sound, and the desire to “tune out,” or to choose not to listen. It reveals how these works reconstruct traumatic or problematic experiences of listening to encourage a different kind of engagement with the radio medium grounded in a critical, self-reflective act of reception.

Hosted by the Department of Germanic Studies, University of Texas.