November 9:  A day of infamy or a day of celebration?

This past weekend, Germany launched three days of celebrations marking the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, which led eventually to a reunified German state. The bright lights of the jubilee, however, may cast a shadow on other important events in German history that also took place on November 9, events to which the German post-war division can be traced back. On November 9, 1923, Adolf Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch marked the emergence of the Nazi Party as an important player in Germany's political landscape. On the night of November 9, 1938, Nazis set hundreds of synagogues on fire throughout Germany and annexed Austria, vandalized Jewish homes, schools and businesses and killed close to 100 Jews in what became known as Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass.

What history should inhabit Germany's collective memory?  Five years ago, during the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, I was teaching at a German university. When I confronted my students with the less-jubilant occurrences of November 9, several expressed a sense of Holocaust fatigue and asserted their right not to be constantly reminded of the Nazis' evil deeds. They also said that they were entitled to a positive identification with their history, as were people of any other nation.

We know that too much remembering can create a threat of exhaustion. But replacing shameful pasts with selectively adapted histories that are consistent with an affirmative collective memory can have adverse consequences. In this case, it clearly imperils the important self-reflective and anti-nationalistic culture of remembrance that emerged in German society as it sought to come to terms with its Nazi past.
  

Both pasts, the Nazi crimes and the partition of Germany, are connected. This twofold remembrance on November 9 may serve Germans as a counterbalance to the flood of self-congratulation that is engulfing the country during these days of celebration.

Alejandro Baer

More than a Name: 82 years of NFL Racism

A Conversation with Gabriel Gatti (Professor of Sociology, University of the Basque Country, Spain)

Photo: Beatriz No. 2 Sylvia Horowitz

Thursday, November 20, 3:00p.m. Room 710 Social Sciences

(Spanish with translation)

Due in large part to humanitarian law and transitional justice, the categories of detained-disappeared and forced disappearance are today well established - so much so that in some places like Argentina and Uruguay an intense social life has taken shape around them and in their wake. Victims mix with institutions, laws, and professionals (forensic anthropologists, social scientists, jurists, psychologists, artists, archivists, writers), occupying intersecting positions and doing so with varied narratives, from the epic and heroic to the tragic and traumatic. Based on extensive fieldwork in Argentina and Uruguay, Gatti analyzes these worlds in an attempt to understand how one inhabits the categories that international law has constructed to mark, judge, think about, and repair horror.

Gabriel Gatti is Professor of Sociology at the University of the Basque Country, Spain. His research and teaching focus on contemporary forms of identity, in particular those constituted in situations of social catastrophe, rupture, and fracture. He is the author of Identidades d�biles, Identidades desaparecidas, Les nouveaux r�p�res de l'identit� collective en Europe, and Basque society. His latest work, Surviving Forced Disappearance in Argentina and Uruguay: Identity and Meaning was published in august of 2014. He is also a main researcher behind the Mundo(s) de victimas (World(s) of victims) a study of four cases that deal with the construction of the "victim" category in contemporary Spain.

Professor Gatti's visit is part of the Reframing Mass Violence Collaborative Series. Sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Study, the Human Rights Program, the Department of Sociology, the Department of Political Science and the Department of Spanish & Portuguese.