Abstract: The article discusses the development of the symbolic meanings of Auschwitz in Poland since the end of the Second World War, taking into account the context of Polish history and memory, in particular the memory of the Holocaust and disputes surrounding it. Analyzing various kinds of representations, the article examines chronologically the major symbolisms of the former camp – Polish, international, universalist, and Jewish – as well as pointing to others, and identifying the periods of their development. The article argues that Auschwitz has had various meanings in Poland. At present, it is, among others, a symbol of the Holocaust, but not the symbol thereof.
Abstract: The memories of the child refugees who fled Central Europe on the so-called Kindertransport between December 1938 and September 1939 are the most widely documented of any refugee and migrant group to come the United Kingdom. However, the dominant narrative has been one of migration to and settling in England, despite the fact that the child refugees settled in places across the British Isles, including Northern Ireland, Wales, and Scotland—the last of which, for example, received an estimated eight hundred Kindertransportees. This essay will investigate how former Kindertransportees negotiate their different identities in their memory narratives. The majority of the Kindertransportees were Jewish, although approximately 20 percent came from families that did not identify as Jewish but were persecuted as Jews. Therefore, there is a complicated interplay of religious identities, those derived from the country the child refugees were leaving behind and those of the country and the nations of settlement. This article will compare those narratives that construct non-English identity as Other, those that adopt separate national identities in the Diaspora with earlier definitions of Englishness versus Britishness, and others that adopt a center/margin hierarchy common in British culture.
Abstract: In 1976, German political scientist Wolf Oschlies published Bulgaria – A Country with No Antisemitism. Since then, the slogan ‘A Country with No Antisemitism’ has circulated in Bulgaria as evidence of international recognition of the so-called ‘Rescue of Bulgarian Jews during World War II.’ Official Holocaust remembrance policies rely heavily on this discourse, presenting Bulgaria as the only country in German-controlled Europe to have saved its entire Jewish population from Nazi extermination camps. This celebratory framing serves as proof of civic values and ethnic tolerance, while marginalizing the fate of Jews in territories administered by Bulgaria during the war.
This article examines how that official discourse is translated into educational narratives through state requirements and history textbooks. It asks what Bulgarian students are expected to learn about the ‘rescue’ and the rescuers of the Jews, and analyzes how the theme is presented in terms of scope, depth, and emphasis. The findings show that textbooks largely reproduce the official discourse, but in the form of simplified narratives that place collective ‘rescue’ at the center, silence Jewish voices, and obscure contradictions in Bulgaria’s wartime policies. The article concludes by discussing the implications of these representations for Bulgaria’s nation-building strategies, as well as for the projection of a positive national image abroad.
Abstract: This special section explores the experiences of cohabitation and transnational migration routes of Jews from the Caucasus through the lens of anthropology, sociology, and social history. Focusing on underrepresented Jewish groups from Georgia, Azerbaijan, and the North Caucasus (Russian Federation), it suggests an innovative view on Jewish studies, the study of the Caucasus and Post-Soviet migration studies. The contributions challenge dominant narratives that subsume diverse Jewish identities from Georgia, Azerbaijan and the North Caucasus under the label “Russian Jews” and instead foreground the multi-layered entanglements of Jewish life in and beyond the Caucasus – as locals, minorities, and migrants in multi-religious and multi-ethnic settings. The special section papers reveal how Soviet secularism, post-Soviet nationalism, and global Jewish discourses intersect with local memory, of living together, religious practice, and belonging. By situating Caucasus Jews in broader debates on diversity, migration, and coloniality, this section calls for a rethinking Jewish studies beyond the taken-for granted binary formulas of Ashkenazi/Mizrahi or European/Non European frameworks.
Abstract: In Italy, after the victory of Giorgia Meloni’s post-fascist party, “Fratelli d’Italia,” several studies began to discuss whether or not the country has come to terms with the memory of fascism, its role as an inspirer of Nazism, and the collaboration with Nazi Germany in the Holocaust. Especially the latter, scholarly literature pointed out, has failed to receive the attention it deserves. This article argues that this is particularly true with regard to public history, the way historical information and events are interpreted and presented to the general public, and focuses on public museums exhibiting the Holocaust and resistance. Evidence for this article comes from two in-depth case studies regarding the oldest yet unaltered Liberation Museum in Rome and the Museum-Monument to Racial and Political Deportees in the Nazi Lagers in Carpi. The article contends that within these museums, the narration of resistance prevails, whilst evidence of Italy’s past collaborationism remains hidden and unexhibited. In essence, these museums emphasise national heroism and sidestep Italian accountability in the Holocaust.
Abstract: Cet article aborde la restauration de la mémoire de la Shoah en Ukraine, ainsi que le rôle, dans ce processus, de différents acteurs de la mémoire et de leurs actions. Cette question sera étudiée à la lumière des changements intervenus dans la politique historique ukrainienne au cours des années 1990-2010, à travers le prisme de l’interaction entre un récit national ethnocentré et la mémoire de la Shoah. Les choix mémoriels de l’Ukraine s’inscrivent dans ce qu’on pourrait qualifier de « modèle est-européen » au sein duquel domine un récit focalisé sur le groupe ethnique majoritaire qui y tient le rôle principal. L’histoire de l’Ukraine est celle des Ukrainiens ethniques et est racontée comme le long cheminement d’un peuple vers la création d’un État national (ou vers le rétablissement de celui-ci). On y observe enfin surtout des discours post-traumatiques et postcoloniaux, ainsi qu’une lecture des relations avec les pays voisins fondée sur des rivalités. Dans ce contexte, l’appropriation de la mémoire sociale (culturelle) de la Shoah et son inclusion dans le récit mémoriel officiel font inévitablement face à des difficultés.
En Ukraine, cette intégration rencontre les mêmes obstacles qu’ailleurs en Europe centrale et orientale et dans les pays baltes :
Premièrement, nous l’avons dit, on ne peut brosser le tableau complet de la Shoah sans se heurter au récit national canonique dans lequel la mémoire de la Shoah, que ce soit sous sa forme nationale ou transnationale, n’est pas présentée comme faisant partie de la mémoire collective…
Abstract: This special issue, based around the European Encounters project research carried out before October 2023, explores ambivalence and boundary work in Jewish and Muslim encounters across urban European contexts. Drawing on case studies in Frankfurt, London and Paris, it examines intercultural negotiations and identity constructions among minoritised groups. Contributors analyse diverse sites of encounter, from musical collaborations to more formal interfaith initiatives and everyday commercial spaces. Across these settings, the articles highlight complex layers of commonality and difference shaping boundary dynamics between Muslims and Jews. Analytically, this issue deploys central cultural studies concepts like symbolic boundaries, conviviality and superdiversity to elucidate lived realities. Empirically, grounded examination of understudied intercultural encounters advances cultural studies scholarship. The juxtaposition of the cities enables a relational understanding of how national repertoires of discourse shape boundary negotiations differently across contexts. Furthermore, analysis complicates assumptions of conflict, foregrounding marginalised perspectives on identity and power. Key findings demonstrate the ambivalence underpinning most Muslim-Jewish interactions. Structural inequalities, avoidance and indifference more frequently characterise encounters than outright hostility. Yet significations of difference still dominate, as groups navigate uneasy proximities. This special issue challenges essentialist portrayals of immutable intergroup divisions. Its nuanced analysis underscores the need to understand quotidian encounters relationally, as a multi-level interdependency, grounded in their socio-historical contexts across and within groups. This yields multifaceted insights into minority experiences of othering and belonging in Europe’s superdiverse cities.
Abstract: The dissertation explores anti-Jewish racism as a structural phenomenon inherent to Swedish society. While research often has separated the study of anti-Jewish racism/antisemitism from other racisms, this dissertation is located within the field of critical race studies to explore anti-Jewish racism as part of larger social and racialised structures.
The study is theoretically framed by a feminist and antiracist gaze that locates Sweden and constructions of “Swedishness” at the core of the analysis, enabling a perspective on anti-Jewish racism as a relational and dynamic social phenomenon. Methodologically the study is inspired by a qualitative tradition, situated at the crossroads of in-depth interviews with self-identified Jews on experiences of anti-Jewish racism and Jewish identity, discourse analysis of media debates, film analysis, and participant observations.
The dissertation explores the entanglements of anti-Jewish racism with notions of “Swedish exceptionalism”, “Swedish gender equality”, the categories of Protestantism and secularism, and racism against other “Others” within what is referred to as the Swedish racial regime. By doing so, the thesis expands the field of critical race studies in Sweden to incorporate an analysis of anti-Jewish racism as a social phenomenon, but also develops a critical analysis of the Swedish racial regime through a specific focus of anti-Jewish racism.
The study illuminates that migration from the Global South is often portrayed within hegemonic discourses as a racist threat against Jews, obscuring Swedish anti-Jewish racism. At the same time, the important demographical shifts that have occurred in Sweden due to this migration have rendered Jews “whiter” in relative terms, and the pressure to adapt to Protestant-secular norms of Swedish “sameness” has decreased, opening up for demands of recognition and Jewish visibility. However, Protestant-secular norms regulating Swedish society confer the category of Jews to a position of conditional “Swedishness”, with public display of Jewishness creating instances of Swedish white discomfort. Thus, the category of Jews embodies a position of ambivalence in the Swedish racial regime, subjected to processes of racialisation but also relative racial privilege. Moreover, this ambiguity occurs in a context of a dynamic of “care” towards the Jewish “Other”, shaped through the perceived threat of the Muslim “Other”, partly reducing the category of Jews to a position of victimhood, while producing an image of Sweden as a progressive and “tolerant” nation, disavowing the ongoing exclusion of those categorised as “different” from Swedish Protestant secularism.
The dissertation suggests that challenging the demands for Swedish “sameness” and the dismantling of hegemonic and racist notions of “Swedishness” would open up for greater possibilities of lives beyond racism.
Abstract: The article deals with two legitimate cultures that were created in Poland after 1989. "Legitimate culture" means the axiological frame of reference that defines the criteria of prestige and dishonor, that is, the criteria of supreme values and anti-values. No authority (in Poland or any other country) can exist without controlling legitimate culture. However, legitimate culture in Poland is threatened by a history of domestic violence against Jews (massive pre-war Polish anti-Semitism, the murder of Jews during the Holocaust, the murder and persecution of Jews in the post-war period). respect, any Polish authority must control Holocaust-related content. The first concept of Holocaust management, created within the framework of the first legitimate culture (corresponding to the legal and institutional arrangements of 1989–2005 and 2007–2015) treated the Holocaust and Polish attitudes toward Jews as: an affirmation of the need to weaken the “nation,” the religious community and other collective entities; a problem that each Pole individually solves on his/her own. The second legitimacy culture (2005–2007; 2015–2023) works to: recognize the Holocaust as a problem that only the Polish nation can resolve; criminalize claims that Poles murdered Jews; present (and justify) violence against Jews as a struggle against communism; and portray Poles helping Jews as the norm, which the majority met during the occupation. The first culture of legitimacy used the Holocaust to weaken the social bond; the second uses the Holocaust to reactivate nationalism. Both cultures are responsible for the current crisis of social communication, and therefore another legitimate culture is needed to emerge from this crisis.
Abstract: Despite the increasingly diverse societal landscape in Greece for more than three decades within a context of migration, understandings of its fragile histories are still limited in shaping a sense of belonging that is open to ‘otherness’. While Greek communities have utilised history as a pathway to maintain identity, other parallel histories and understandings do not resonate with ‘Greekness’ for most, such as the case of Greek Jewry. Critical historical perspectives can benefit from tracing ‘re-membering’ as a feminist practice in the reassessment of societal values of inclusivity. Histories of violence and injustice can also include elements of ‘difficult histories’ and must be embraced to seek acknowledgement of these in promoting social change and cultural analysis for public humanities informing curation and curricula. Between eduscapes, art heritage spaces, an entry into contested and conflictual histories can expand a sense of belonging and the way we imagine our own connected histories with communities, place and nation. Greek Jews do not constitute a strong part of historical memory for Greeks in their past and present; in contrast to what is perceived as ‘official’ history, theirs is quite marginal. As a result, contemporary Greeks, from everyday life to academia, do not have a holistic understanding in relation to the identities of Jews in Greece, their culture or the Holocaust. Given the emergence of a new wave of artistic activism in recent years in response to the ever-increasing dominance of authoritarian neoliberalism, along with activist practices in the art field as undercurrents of resistance, in this intervention I bring together bodies of works to create a dialogic reflection with historical, artistic and feminist sources. In turn, the discussion then explores the spatiotemporal contestations of the historical geographies of Holocaust monuments in Greece. While interrogating historical amnesia, I endeavour to provide a space to engage with ‘difficult histories’ in their aesthetic context as a heritage of healing and social justice.
Abstract: This article focuses on a multireligious building project named House of One in contemporary Berlin. Initiated in 2012 by a Protestant community at the center of Berlin, House of One consists of a synagogue, a church, a mosque, and a communal room. My central suggestion is that House of One is invested in a pluralist re-branding of (liberal) Protestantism, a rebranding that underlies the post-unification emergence of a new national German imaginary: out of “soil” marked as historically Christian spreads an “Abrahamic” future that transcends its particularity via its assumed ability to incorporate Islam and Judaism. Liberal, Christian-secularized norms and affects are thus being rearticulated in a language of religious pluralism, so that a normative, Christian-secularized category of religion can be extended to Christianity’s “monotheistic brothers.” Elaborations of this building project’s intended purpose, I argue, are thus animated by a broader question about the appropriate relation between religion and the state, and conjointly, between the self and culture at a moment in time in which hitherto normative, Christian-secularized assumptions concerning this relation are challenged. As such, the discursive representation that sustains the yet-to-be-built House of One is conducive to the making of a new national imaginary: it is driven both by the desire to renounce past evil through a recognition and inclusion of alterity into the body politic, as much as by the simultaneous de-politization and scrutinization of such alterity.
Abstract: In 2015, Spain passed a law that concedes Spanish citizenship extraterritorially to persons recognized as Sephardic Jews and descended from the Sephardic Jews expelled from Spanish kingdoms in the fifteenth century. This chapter explores the implications of this institutional effort to repair a historical injustice. Given Spain’s membership in the European Union, this granting of national citizenship implies by extension European citizenship as well. In addition to proving Sephardic ancestry, applicants need to demonstrate cultural ties to Spain. This cultural connection is inflected by the official notion of Hispanicness and its legal implications. However, the 2015 law omitted the expulsions of Muslims and Moriscos (converts to Christianity from Islam), which took place during a similar historical period. By doing so, the 2015 law established a three-pronged way of redefining certain collective identities as deserving, or undeserving, of Spanish/EU citizenship: by requiring proof of Sephardic origins; by requiring a recognized cultural connection to Spain; and by denying Muslim ancestry. This chapter argues that this law fits into a rewriting of Spanish and European identity, coding Europe in racialized terms. Multiple scales of inclusion/exclusion are at work in this law, ultimately through a process of de- and re-racialization of citizenship.
Abstract: The racial formation of nationalism from the perspective of migration produces multiple forms of “whiteness”. “Not quite/not white” (Bhabha) translated racial difference into a culturally-hybrid formulation of the postcolonial subject in postcolonial theory. The consequence of translating racial difference into culturally hybridity also diluted a focus on the nation by focusing on the diasporic subject. In Eastern Europe however, “whiteness” is firstly marked by the ambiguous history of the racial other within the nation rather than the historical colonization of racial others beyond. Further, the often traumatic displacement of racial others in/from Eastern Europe has more to do with forms of nationalism than colonialism. Thus, the displacement of racial others in relation to Eastern European nationalism take on an importance largely missing in deracinated postcolonial condemnations of the nation. Europe-based Israeli artist Yael Bartana’s And Europe will be stunned: the Polish trilogy, provides a provocative invitation to think the disturbing place of race in the formation of nationalism in Eastern Europe precisely from these two dimensions: the history of racial difference (Jews) within the nation (Poland), and the centering of racial “returns” for the past and future of nations both in Eastern Europe and beyond it. Through film, public performance and spoken/written word, And Europe… firstly stages the nation from the historical perspective of displaced/exterminated racial others. Through a provocative call to return of the Jews into the Polish nation from which they fled or were exterminated, Bartana proposes a ghostly and literal racially hybridity within the nation to counter the ongoing construction of “whiteness” in Eastern Europe. Secondly, And Europe.. also performs a powerful critique of the problematic politics of return in Israel which deploys Europe’s treatment of its Jewish others to now consecrate the Israeli nation as an exclusively Jewish state. The currency of “whiteness” from the doubled perspective of a future Poland and the present in Israel delivers contradictory returns for the nation by producing hybridity here in Europe and homogeneity there outside it.
By thinking “whiteness” for/against the nation, the essay shows how the returns of race and of racial others can help think a hybrid nation both within Eastern Europe and outside it. Seen from a global perspective, “Whiteness” in Eastern Europe thus offers the racially hybrid nation rather than the culturally hybrid postcolonial subject as a counter to the racism of contemporary nationalisms.
Abstract: At the turn of the millennium, Middle Eastern and Muslim Germans had rather unexpectedly become central to the country's Holocaust memory culture—not as welcome participants, but as targets for re-education and reform. Since then, Turkish- and Arab-Germans have been considered as the prime obstacles to German national reconciliation with its Nazi past, a status shared to a lesser degree by Germans from the formerly socialist East Germany. It is for this reason that the German government, German NGOs, and Muslim minority groups have begun to design Holocaust education and anti-Semitism prevention programs specifically tailored for Muslim immigrants and refugees, so that they, too, can learn the lessons of the Holocaust and embrace Germany's most important postwar democratic political values.
Based on ethnographic research conducted over a decade, Subcontractors of Guilt explores when, how, and why Muslim Germans have moved to the center of Holocaust memory discussions. Esra Özyürek argues that German society "subcontracts" guilt of the Holocaust to new minority immigrant arrivals, with the false promise of this process leading to inclusion into the German social contract and equality with other members of postwar German society. By focusing on the recently formed but already sizable sector of Muslim-only anti-Semitism and Holocaust education programs, this book explores the paradoxes of postwar German national identity.
Abstract: As one of the most visited museums in Germany’s capital city, the Jewish Museum Berlin is a key site for understanding not only German-Jewish history, but also German identity in an era of unprecedented ethnic and religious diversity. Visitors to the House of Memory is an intimate exploration of how young Berliners experience the Museum. How do modern students relate to the museum’s evocative architecture, its cultural-political context, and its narrative of Jewish history? By accompanying a range of high school history students before, during, and after their visits to the museum, this book offers an illuminating exploration of political education, affect, remembrance, and belonging.
Abstract: How attached do European Jews feel to the countries in which they live? Or to the European Union? And are their loyalties ‘divided’ in some way – between their home country and Israel? Answering these types of questions helps us to see how integrated European Jews feel today, and brings some empiricism to the antisemitic claim that Jews don’t fully ‘belong.’
This mini-report, based on JPR's groundbreaking report ‘The Jewish identities of European Jews’, explores European Jews’ levels of attachment to the countries in which they live, to Israel, and to the European Union, and compares them with those of wider society and other minority groups across Europe. Some of the key findings in this study written by Professor Sergio DellaPergola and Dr Daniel Staetsky of JPR’s European Jewish Demography Unit include:
European Jews tend to feel somewhat less strongly attached to the countries in which they live than the general population of those countries, but more strongly attached than other minority groups and people of no religion.
That said, levels of strong attachment to country vary significantly from one country to another, both among Jews and others.
European Jews tend to feel somewhat more strongly attached to the European Union than the general populations of their countries, although in many cases, the distinctions are small.
Some European Jewish populations feel more strongly attached to Israel than to the countries in which they live, and some do not. The Jewish populations that tend to feel more attached to Israel than the countries in which they live often have high proportions of recent Jewish immigrants.
Having a strong attachment to Israel has no bearing on Jewish people's attachments to the EU or the countries in which they live, and vice versa: one attachment does not come at the expense of another. They are neither competitive nor complementary; they are rather completely unrelated.
Jews of different denominations show very similar levels of attachment to the countries in which they live, but rather different levels of attachment to Israel and the EU.
Abstract: In the last decade there has been widely shared discomfort about the way Muslim minority Germans engage with the Holocaust. They are accused of not showing empathy towards its Jewish victims and, as a result, of not being able to learn the necessary lessons from this massive crime. By focusing on instances in which the emotional reactions of Muslim minority Germans towards the Holocaust are judged as not empathetic enough and morally wrong, this article explores how Holocaust education and contemporary understandings of empathy, in teaching about the worst manifestation of racism in history, can also at times be a mechanism to exclude minorities from the German/European moral makeup and the fold of national belonging. Expanding from Edmund Husserl’s embodied approach to empathy to a socially situated approach, via the process of paarung, allows us to reinterpret expressions of fear and envy, currently seen as failed empathy, as instances of intersubjective connections at work. In my reinterpretation of Husserl’s ideas, the process of paarung that enables empathy to happen is not abstract, but pairs particular experiences happening at particular times and places under particular circumstances to individuals of certain social standing and cultural influences. An analogy can be made to shoes. Anyone has the capacity to imagine themselves in someone else’s shoes. Nevertheless, the emotional reactions the experience triggers in each person will be shaped by individual past experiences and social positioning. Hence, grandchildren of workers who arrived in Germany after World War II to rebuild the country resist an ethnicized Holocaust memory and engage with it keenly through their own subject positions.
Abstract: Since the early 2000s, Poland has experienced a remarkable Jewish revival, largely driven by non-Jewish Poles with a passionate new interest in all things Jewish. Klezmer music, Jewish-style restaurants, kosher vodka, and festivals of Jewish culture have become popular, while new museums, memorials, Jewish studies programs, and Holocaust research centers reflect soul-searching about Polish-Jewish relations before, during, and after the Holocaust. In Resurrecting the Jew, Geneviève Zubrzycki examines this revival and asks what it means to try to bring Jewish culture back to life in a country where 3 million Jews were murdered and where only about 10,000 Jews now live.
Drawing on a decade of participant-observation in Jewish and Jewish-related organizations in Poland, a Birthright trip to Israel with young Polish Jews, and more than a hundred interviews with Jewish and non-Jewish Poles engaged in the Jewish revival, Resurrecting the Jew presents an in-depth look at Jewish life in Poland today. The book shows how the revival has been spurred by progressive Poles who want to break the association between Polishness and Catholicism, promote the idea of a multicultural Poland, and resist the Far Right government. The book also raises urgent questions, relevant far beyond Poland, about the limits of performative solidarity and empathetic forms of cultural appropriatio
Abstract: 2011 marked 20 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union. This represented a change not just in the content of schools or ideologies, but in the relationships between individuals, institutions, and systems. During this time, the post-Soviet Republic of Lithuania not only had to reimagine its national identity in a local context, but it also had to reimagine itself as a community within the political,economic, and historical imaginations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union (EU). Therefore, in Lithuania, as in many other post-Soviet countries, debates over which events should or should not be included as part of the national identity, and thus represented in the school curriculum, are more than just discussions about educational content; they are debates over the moral legitimacy of certain narratives and the ability of sovereign states to define them.
Abstract: This paper examines whether the re-emergence of the “Jewish Question” in the 2010-2016 Hungarian public discourse has also re-surfaced the “us” and “them” distinction between Hungarians and Jews that has lain dormant within the Hungarian population, and whether this symbolic exclusion of Jews from the Hungarian nation creates new, additional Jewish and quasi-Jewish groups as “others”, to be lumped together with the “other others”. The paper was submitted in 2016 and therefore does not cover the discussions around the openly antisemitic 2018 election campain’s discourse. The paper makes two main claims. The first is that the state “protectively” treats Hungarian Jews as a distinct group, as a community that is distinguished by its “otherness”, separated from the “us” of the national narrative. The second claim is that an “out-grouped other”, which does not identify with the government’s concept of an ethnic nation, is depicted with stereotypes that historically described Jews, regardless of their background, origins or religion. As populist, ethnic nationalism is being resurrected in Europe, the following questions arise: How can affiliated Hungarian Jews and “outed”, “non-Jewish Jews” take part in a nation that rhetorically excludes them while cynically attempting to promote their (Jewish) separateness in a seemingly positive manner? Why is this separation important and perhaps even dangerous? And how can Hungarians (who are cast as Jewish) credibly participate in Hungary’s internal and external politics and democracy?It is argued that the current “Jewish Question” debate in Hungary after 2010 may have less to do with actual Jews and more to do with creating the populist fiction of a homogeneous, isolated, ethnic nation, reminiscent of the ethnic nationalist concepts championed during the 1920s and 1930s with tragic consequences.
Abstract: Around 2011 Israeli (Jewish) immigration to Germany became a recurring subject in public discourse. Reflecting ideological investments, the migration was reported with curiosity. Israeli migrants turned into Jews in German imagination, contradicting their self-definition of being primarily Israelis. As Jews they were welcome, but within limits. If the ‘guests’ expressed too much agency and challenged the status quo of German/Jewish and more so Jewish/Muslim and Israeli/Palestinian relations, things could become complicated. While Palestinian issues are met with increasing support across the social, media, and political spheres, Palestinians are not that welcome as (Muslim) migrants. They are suspected of importing a ‘new antisemitism.’ This paper seeks to unravel the conflicting attitudes towards the interlinked categories Israelis/Jews and Muslims/Palestinians, by focussing on the issue of the politics of hospitality. These reveal how agentic presences of those categorised as others destabilise the assumed ethnic, and ethno-religious boundaries of the German, nominally Christian, majority.
Abstract: To date, scholars have mainly focussed on the history of the Kindertransport. This thesis is the first to examine extensively how the Kindertransport has been remembered in Britain, and to compare British memory of this event with memory in the other English-speaking host nations which took in the refugee children (Kinder), namely America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. ‘Kindertransport’ is understood here as referring not just to the actual rescue of children with mainly Jewish origins from Nazism that took place between 1938 and 1940, but also the effects it had, such as transplantation to strange environments. There is yet to be a true exploration of how the memories of the Kinder and these nations’ memories of the Kindertransport developed. Any comparison of these various host countries must consider the degree to which memory of the Kindertransport is not uniform, and the extent to which it is shaped by factors such as the role of these countries in the Second World War, and – above all – nationally conditioned memory discourses. Increasingly, according to memory scholars, Holocaust memory operates in a transnational, even global network. This thesis will assess this expectation against the empirical evidence. Is it more the case that host nations remember the Kindertransport in essentially national terms, even where they are aware of its transnational history? In order to assess this question, this thesis will examine a representative cross-section of different genres including testimony, museum exhibitions, memorials, and novels. I argue that the Kindertransport is much more nationally focussed and celebratory in Britain than in other host nations, where this memory is more transnational in focus. However, there are signs that national memory in Britain is beginning to develop in a more self-critical direction.
