Exkursion: 3.90.133 EMMIR Study trip + WS Gender & Genocide - Details

Exkursion: 3.90.133 EMMIR Study trip + WS Gender & Genocide - Details

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Veranstaltungsname Exkursion: 3.90.133 EMMIR Study trip + WS Gender & Genocide
Untertitel
Veranstaltungsnummer 3.90.133
Semester Wise19/20
Aktuelle Anzahl der Teilnehmenden 3
Heimat-Einrichtung Institut für Anglistik/Amerikanistik
Veranstaltungstyp Exkursion in der Kategorie Lehre
Erster Termin Donnerstag, 17.10.2019 16:00 - 19:00, Ort: (A5 1-136)
Art/Form plus workshop
Lehrsprache englisch
ECTS-Punkte 2

Räume und Zeiten

(A5 1-136)
Donnerstag, 17.10.2019 16:00 - 19:00
Montag, 28.10.2019 14:00 - 20:00

Kommentar/Beschreibung

Outline
Since the second half of the 20th century, the term ‘genocide’, coined by Raphael Lemkin in the 1940s, has become central in international discourses and conventions as well as in research on mass killings and atrocities. The systematic murder of European Jews during the National Socialist Regime is considered the key case of genocide initiated and executed by a modern state’s bureaucratic apparatus backed by the majority of ‘ordinary’ men and women.
The study trip provides an introduction to Nazi genocidal politics, its implementation and consequences in and beyond Germany. Starting right after the seizure of power (‘Machtergreifung’) in 1933 the ideal of a German ‘Arian community’ constituted the basis of many forms of societal exclusion and persecution with often lethal consequences for individuals and groups – Germans as well as people of different national and ethnic origin. Hundreds of concentration camps were core sites of the Nazi regime’s strategy for intimidating, punishing, segregating and eliminating those who deviated from the political and societal order and norms of the imagined racialized community. Both, the detention in concentration camps (where death was omnipresent) and the systematic killing in specialized extermination camps resulting in the Holocaust, were interwoven with forms of forced migration and labour. Moreover, the forced labour of East European civilians shoud also be read as an aspect of the genocidal strategies for creating space for German settlements in Poland and the Soviet Union. During WW II millions of civilians, men, women and children were forced to work for the German wartime economy, encompassing all kinds of private, state, municipal or church fields of works. Their working and living conditions differed according to the implemented racial order, but were also framed by wartime politics and the everyday attitudes and actions of Germans in different political and social positions. The majority of forced labourers lived in camps in order to control them and manifest their exclusion from the desirable German population. Many Germans and German companies profited from the system of forced labour taking action to keep the system of exploitation, deprivation and humiliation running.
The Nazi past is not just an important historical case of extreme violence; it is also a crucial reference point not only in German and European but also in global memory discourses. Given the fact that atrocities committed before and after the Holocaust have caused further legacies of traumatic experiences and play a crucial role for individuals and groups on national and international scales, it is also essential to discuss how remembrance in the public sphere can address the multitude of perspectives without creating hierarchical memory politics. Recent research scrutinises the effects of globalised Holocaust memory cultures, obligations of remembering and forgetting extreme cases of violence. In the German context, this concerns questions on the marginalisation of remembering genocides committed during colonial times. The Herero and Nama(qua) genocide committed by the German colonial army (1904-1908) in then German South West Africa (now Namibia) has been categorized as the first genocide of the 20th century. Only recently, over a hundred years after the massacre, the German government officially acknowledged the atrocities as genocide. In line with but also beyond the need to decolonise social practices of remembering the European history of extreme violence, it is also crucial to bear in mind that genocide has still been a serious issue in the recent history of different world regions. Despite the adoption of the “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment” of the Crime of Genocide by the UN (1948) and its ratification by many states, geopolitical interests and power constellations influence (inter)national campaigns of awareness raising as well as (inter)national politics of intervention and remembering.
In this vein, the genocide in Bangladesh during the liberation war in 1971 will be a further reference point for our reflections on memory politics and knowledge production. This genocide in is one of the nearly forgotten genocides, which even “[w]ithin comparative genocide studies the Bangladesh genocide remains strikingly little known” as the genocide scholar Adam Jones stated. He argues “[t]his reflects the peripheral position of East Pakistan/Bangladesh in the global order – something that also accounts for the lack of international interest and intervention at the time.” Two students from Bangladesh will attend our study trip and introduce us to the history of this genocide and the past and presence of remembrance.
Three genocides, the Holocaust, the Herero and Nama(qua) genocide as well as the Bangladesh genocide will serve as case studies to discuss the linkages between power, knowledge production and memory politics. Central to the discussion will be the impact of gender in politics and practices of exclusion in terms of perpetrators, victims and beneficiaries, if such sharply delineated categories are at all applicable. This should include a close scrutiny of gender dimensions of memory (politics).

We will visit in particular:
• House of the Wannsee Conference, https://www.ghwk.de/en
The representative villa in the affluent and respectable neighbourhood at the lake Wannsee on the outskirts of Berlin was used as an SS guesthouse from 1941 to 1945. In 1942, representatives of the SS, the Nazi party and the state met there to discuss their cooperation in the deportation and murder of the European Jews. We will visit the exhibition and have a seminar on the ‘Final Solution’.
• Postcolonial Berlin, http://www.berlin-postkolonial.de (in German)
The organisation addresses German and European colonialism and its aftermath up to the present. Like other organisations in German cities, their work includes initiatives for remembrance integrating the views of descendants of the colonized and the racialized people in Germany and Europe. We will have a guided tour with a member of the non-governmental organisation focussing on the genocide in German South West Africa.
• Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, http://www.stiftung-denkmal.de/en/home.html
This national memorial, located in the centre of the capital, was opened in 2006. The erection and design of the memorial was controversially discussed in public and finally approved by the German parliament. The part of the memorial on ground level “the Field of Stelae”, designed by the internationally renowned US-American architect Peter Eisenstein, can be accessed and walked through from all directions. The subterranean information centre provides a permanent exhibition, which documents the persecution and murder of the European Jews. We will visit the two components of the memorial and discuss our impressions and points of view with a guide of the memorial.
• Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum, http://www.stiftung-bg.de/gums/en/index.htm
The concentration camp Sachsenhausen, located on the outskirts of the town of Oranienburg near the capital Berlin, operated as role model and education centre for the SS. From 1936 to 1945 more than 200,000 men were incarcerated, first mostly political opponents, then increasingly men from Germany and the occupied countries, who were accused of various transgressions of the social and racial order and/or because they embodied the undesirable population for creating an “Arian society”. The memorial site provides information about the terror system and is perpetrators, the life and death of prisoners in this camp and in the earlier concentration camp for around 3000 male political opponents, which was located in the heart of Oranienburg from March 1933 to July 1934. The subsequent use of the camp Sachsenhausen by the Soviet secret service (1945-1950) is addressed by the memorial site as is the history of commemoration, particularly in the GDR (1950-1990). The visit will be a combination of a tour of the memorial site and a seminar.
• The Nazi Forced Labour Documentation Centre, http://www.dz-ns-zwangsarbeit.de/en
The documentation centre is a relatively new memorial site, established in 2006 on the historical site of a Berlin camp for forced labourers during the Nazi time. The centre serves to raise awareness for the forced labour of civilians from different European countries. This aspect of the Nazi time, for decades marginalised in official and public memory, became a prominent topic during the (inter)national public debate of the compensation of forced labourers in the late 1990s. A guided tour will provide an overview about forced labour during the Nazi time, its aftermath, particularly the fate of those who were repatriated to the Soviet Union.

Students are expected to prepare the study trip through extensive reading. Notes, visual and audio files should be taken during the study trip. The study trip will close with a workshop in Oldenburg (on October 29) to provide space for articulating different perspectives on the topics. Students are also invited to write (photo) essays, poems etc. that can be published in journals or on websites.

Costs
EMMIR will cover all of the expenses connected to the educational parts of the study trip; you will have to contribute 80 Euro (for accommodation and local travel) and self-fund your travel to and from Berlin.

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