In the last two years, the German public sphere has been roiled by a cycle of debates concerning the uniqueness and comparability of the Holocaust. At stake in the debates have been the relationship between colonialism and the Nazi genocide and that between racism and antisemitism as well as the contours of public memory culture. In this talk, Michael Rothberg will describe and reflect on these ongoing debates and discuss the particular place of his book Multidirectional Memory, which was translated into German in early 2021, in the controversies.

Michael Rothberg is the 1939 Society Samuel Goetz Chair in Holocaust Studies, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, and Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. His latest book is The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (2019), published by Stanford University Press in their “Cultural Memory in the Present” series. Previous books include Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (2009), Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (2000), and, co-edited with Neil Levi, The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings (2003). The 2021 translation of Multidirectional Memory into German led to a national debate about the relationship between the Holocaust and colonialism. With Yasemin Yildiz, he is working on a book about Germany called Memory Citizenship: Migrant Archives of Holocaust Remembrance for Fordham University Press.