THE ARCHIVE AS ... CIVIL SOCIETY

Conversation with A. Dirk Moses

Tuesday, August 1
7pm

After the Holocaust, a tortous search for a new collective identity in the Federal Republic of Germany took place, in which the memory of the Nazi crimes played a central role. According to the historian and genocide researcher A. Dirk Moses in his book German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past (2007), Germans could either try to convince themselves and others that they had invented (or were inventing) a new collectivity, divorced from an unbearable past. Or they could defend the viability of their collective identity by making the national past bearable through various displacement strategies. What happens, however, when these national modes of identification are confronted with experiences and perspectives shaped by a history other than the Nazi past? And how do those subconscious dynamics affect today’s debates about German memory?

In conversation with A. Dirk Moses, we look at moments in the history of the Kunstverein in which the conflictual search for a German national consciousness becomes evident in order to better understand current discourses around German memory. A. Dirk Moses is the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor of Political Science at the City College of New York. His book Nach dem Genozid. Grundlage für eine neue Erinnerungskultur (“After Genocide. Foundations for a New Culture of Memory”) will be published in August by Matthes & Seitz.