 9, 8, 7, 6, 7, 4, 3, 2, OK. We are, hello again. We are following our meeting with this first and deep and interesting discussion panel. Will the past change the future? As you know, you may know, we are working always with different, in different scale and multiple scale and dimensions. And of course, the reflection, academic research and reflection studies on the landscape of memories, it's important for us. And this comparative approaches and discussions about reflection, transmission, and nowadays also conflicts and dilemmas on memory politics. So the best people to do it, we are with us. And I want to welcome Marianne Hirsch. Hello, Marianne. Hello. Great to be here. Geraldine Swarth. Bon Swarth, Geraldine. Bienvenue. Siobhan Katago. Hello, Siobhan. Siobhan is a senior research fellow in practical philosophy at the Institute of Humanities and Symiotics at the University of Tartu. She was in Tallinn also, and she has been collaborated also with us and with the European Observatory and not only, of course, around conflicts and dilemmas on memory landscapes. Siobhan is going to be the chair of this panel. But just a few words also. Welcome, Marianne. As I said, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and Professor in the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Among many, many, many, many words and articles and books, she has from 2019 school photos in a lucky time with Leo Spitzer and, of course, this famous book of the generation of post-memory. Hello and welcome. And thanks to be with us, Marianne, from your morning at Uni States. And Geraldine, merci aussi d'être avec nous. Thank you. She's a journalist, a documentary filmmaker and author of this famous book, Those Who Forget My Family Story in Nazi Europe from 2017. And I give the floor to Siobhan, who is going to deal with this question that we proposed. Will the past change the future? Merci, thank you very much. Thank you very much, Jordy. It's really a wonderful pleasure to be able to see you. Too bad we cannot see one another in person, but it is nonetheless wonderful to be able to be here and to be able to be part of this roundtable discussion with Marianne Hirsch and Geraldine Schwartz. In terms of the format, I would make a few general remarks, then introduce Marianne, who would speak for about 10 minutes, then introduce Geraldine, who will speak for about 10 minutes, and then the three of us will have a conversation. After that, we will address and be very happy to address questions that you have either of the speakers or to both of them. If you could kindly write your questions into the chat box on YouTube, I would be able to then read them out to Marianne and Geraldine. So this is then a welcome to the audience and a request to kindly write your questions into the chat box. Also, please write your name and your affiliation so that we have some idea of a person who we will be speaking with. So this panel, we were given the task by Jordy and the observatory on European memories to think about the question, will the past change the future? There are many ways to think about it. The first maybe would be how or in what way, what ways plural might the past change the future? Questions of how the past change the future or may change the future have been anchored into the very foundation of the European Union in its founding documents as never again. And just as Jordy reminded us that indeed, yes, today the 9th of December is the anniversary of the United Nations adaptation of the Convention on the Prevention of a Genocide, which was spearheaded by Rafael Lemkin when he was advisor to Justice Robert Jackson during the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal. And that is also the 70th anniversary or 75th anniversary this year of those trials. And with the codification of genocide, I think there is this sense of never again that is founding in the European Union that we see manifest in memorials, commemorations, Erasmus Exchange programs, as was also noted, commemorative days that are there to not only recall the past, but to provide the promise that we can learn from the past for the sake of the future, for the sake of a common European future. Indeed, I would think or suggest that this promise of the European Union as an idea is one in which individuals and societies have the possibility to learn from the past. This promise or a new beginning is perhaps anchored in two dates, 1945 and 1989. 1945 is the end of World War II. And 1989 is the fall of the Berlin Wall. And this promise of a new beginning is manifest in each expansion of the European Union, perhaps most profoundly, with the expansion in 2004. I think it's from this promise that the Europe for Citizens program, with its emphasis on remembrance, supports a wide range of civic initiatives that are dedicated to the legacy of Europe, not only in the negative cultural trauma, but also in the positive cultural heritage and tradition. But particularly with the traumatic burden of the past, it is one to be reckoned with. Hence the title of today and tomorrow's conference, Taking Stock of European Memory Policies. So in the European for Citizens program, for which this wonderful conference is part of, there is this emphasis on reflecting what does it mean to reckon with, come to terms with, deal with, think about, internalize the past. There's also, I think, a very interesting and important emphasis on youth, as has been very evocatively highlighted to us in the very picture that accompanies our conference. Namely, high school students who are on the photograph of our conference commemorating Republican exile and the refugee camps on the border of Spain and France. So now, one way of thinking about this promise of the European Union that we can learn from the past is to also see it as a Kantian project for peace, peace in Europe and as well for human dignity and human rights as enshrined in Article 2 of the Treaty of the European Union. However, this promise, I think, is challenged in at least three ways that we might talk about related to Geraldine Schwartz's book and related to Mariette Hirsch's many books. The first would be Questions of Hospitality and University Solidarity are challenged by migrants and those seeking asylum into Europe. The second, the entry of far-right populist parties into national and European Parliament does raise worrisome ghosts about a past that perhaps is no longer put to rest. And thirdly, the many multiple directions of European memory as have been referred to earlier today from the Holocaust, crimes of communism, colonialism, slavery, and civil war. So to help us think about the question of how the past is changing or maybe changing, might be changing the future, we are accompanied by two very remarkable and wonderful, wonderful writers who reflect on European memory from different generations and from different perspectives. One, a daughter of Holocaust survivors and one, a daughter of Nazi followers. So we are really given this marvelous breadth of reflections today that is a real treat. So Mariette Hirsch will be the first. And as Jordy mentioned, she is a professor of comparative literature and gender studies at Columbia University. Marianne was raised in a Jewish German-speaking family in Romania and emigrated to the United States when she was 11 or 12. It is really her concept of post-memory that has been extraordinarily formative for scholars and students for thinking about how this complex way for how memories are transmitted from one generation to the next and from one home to the next and from one country to the next. Moreover, I think Hirsch's attention to photography, arts, and perhaps comics addresses the power of images and the work of memory, especially as it concerns the Holocaust, migration and statelessness. In particular, her research on how public images and stories transmit memory, have this massive emotive power to transmit memory so that they are almost kind of ghostly revenants to a lost world. Some of the titles that Jordy briefly mentioned, school photos in liquid time, everyday life, engagements with vernacular photography, women mobilizing memory, those three books were just written in the past two years. I don't know how you did it. The books though that really have been formative for myself and for some of my students are generation of post-memory, writing and visual culture after the Holocaust, family frames, photography narrative and post-memory and ghosts of home, the afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish memory. There are seminal texts for those of us studying memory and migration, particularly between generations in Europe and North America. So please, Marianne, the floor is yours. Thank you so much, Yvonne, for this beautiful and thorough introduction for me and for the questions that we're going to be discussing today. Thank you, Jordy and Yoram, for inviting me and I'm really honored to be here on this particular panel with Shahadin and Siobhan, whose work is so rich in this context. So will the past change the future or how will the past change the future? So I just wanna say at the outset that I come to this question from the contemporary memory wars in the United States where I think we're way behind the European Union and Europe and European countries in dealing with multiple painful pasts. And they've come back to Hanta so many times here and particularly this last summer. And we're still reeling from the effects of recent acts of violence and recent and continuing acts of violence against African-Americans and people of color in the United States. So this is my immediate place but of course I come also from Europe and I come specifically as Siobhan just said as a member of the second generation. And I wanna reflect a little bit about what that means and then so happily hand over the mic to Shahadin who is defining herself as a third generation and we might wanna think of generations of what and when does it start and which is the first and why are we numbering things in the particular way that we're numbering them. So when I speak of myself and right as a daughter of Holocaust survivor when I write as a member of the second generation increasingly because of the way memory gets simplified and history gets simplified over time people think of Auschwitz they think of numbers on my parents arms they think of the trauma of the camps and through the traumatic repetitions the secrets and nightmares that must have shadowed my childhood. So indeed I've written from the perspective of and about the second generation of what Eva Hoffman has called the hinge generation of though the perspective of those who become translators of their parents traumatic experiences and who are the gatekeepers of how those experiences are remembered and memorialized of those who spend lifetimes fighting for the recognition and memorialization of these crimes and against oblivion and forgetting. And yet I think what was handed down to me as a member of the second generation the lessons I've tried to carry over from a past that preceded me to a future that will follow my own lifetime is not exactly that. It's not, it's more complex, it's much more complicated. And of course the Holocaust has many, many different dimensions that are completely lost when we think of it as one particular camp experience. It's true, my parents did survive the Second World War they survived it on the very edges of Europe in a city that was called Chernowitz when it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that was called Chernowitz when it became Romania in 1918 that was called Chernovtsy as a part of the Soviet Union and that is now called Chernivtsy and it's in Ukraine. It was a cultural crossroads and during wartime my parents were interned in a ghetto the city was administered by the Romanian administration which was collaborating with the Nazis and from which Jews, two thirds of Jews were deported they were not deported to death camps but they were deported to ghettos and camps in what was then called Transnistria. My parents were able to evade deportation they survived in their city they survived in their very own home they wore the yellow star, they were persecuted they had to perform forced labor. So certainly they were victims of fascism and along with me after the war they were victims of Soviet block communism and as Siobhan said, we left Romania in 1961 when I was 12 for a year in Vienna and then to emigrate to the US. So, but when I began to write about this memory which was quite late actually in my career I did not become interested in writing about this history until it became clear that the survivors were getting old and that we really needed in some ways to save their history before eyewitnesses disappeared. But I began to write about what I called post-memory because somehow my parents' memory of the war that they discussed every single day were more powerful in some ways than my own childhood memories and I really had to account for why that was and why they were handed down to me so powerfully. The memory of the ghetto of nighttime raids of knocks on the door where you had to hide under the bed you know all of those things. But I have to emphasize here that my parents transmitted something else to me as well and this is important for our discussion something that's especially relevant for a forum on European memories or dare I say European memory. In fact, what they handed down to me is in fact a memory of Europe. The Europe that was their horizon of culture of cosmopolitanism of cohabitation of freedom. And it was that memory that though shattered was strangely not entirely eradicated during the war. So let me try to explain this. So my parents emancipated Jewish identity and life ways go back to their own parents adoption of the promise that was inherent in Joseph II's emancipation of the Jews in the Hapsburg Empire that you could remain Jewish in religious belief while also attaining education, professional advancement, citizenship status and even political representation in the empire. And you could attain these as long as you were willing to speak German, to convert to German Jewish to German European life ways even to dress German as they call that to get rid of the signs of orthodox religious Jewish identities. And many Jews, especially in these outlying areas of the empire enthusiastically did just that. And especially after the first World War their identification was broader but it became broader than of course there was no more empire. So their identification then became not national but it became somehow European. They identified as European citizens. They went to study in Berlin and in Paris. They went to fight in the Spanish Civil War. They learned languages, they traveled. And to be sure this European identity for them was a way to ward off local anti-Semitism which were rising in the 1920s and certainly in the 1930s. But somehow it was so strong as to withstand the assaults that would follow and their loss of local citizenship, the statelessness that they would suffer. So when writing their history what I had in Ghosts of Home particularly in my book Ghosts of Home which was about Chernivts in this Jewish population I had to balance the traumatic memories of persecution, of ghettoization, of difficult survival with this nostalgic memory for Europe that certainly no longer existed for them and that probably never existed at all because that's part of what nostalgia really is. It's a nostalgia, it's a longing for a home that probably never existed, right? But it might never have existed but it persisted. And it persisted to the point where I who grew up on the edges of Europe within the locked borders of communist Romania I was never able to travel as a child and who have lived in the United States for the majority of my life even I still consider myself European in this very broad sense and feel very much at home almost everywhere in Europe. So I'm telling you this because I thought it might be interesting right now in 2020 to revive this idea of Europe however partial and however flawed it is. So that's why I'm very interested in thinking about generations here in Siobhan you asked us to think about generations and their usefulness. So the second generation of what? The Holocaust certainly, right? The Second World War and the Holocaust as the central, as you mentioned the central foundational event the event that we want to say never again, right? So maybe we can talk more about why the Holocaust and other 20th century authoritarianisms have become the ground of European memory cultures on which to build a European identity right now. What other events and what other memories does this common collective event modulate or minimize? Are there other histories that might be equally relevant to the present and future that need to be acknowledged addressed and work through? And I think you talked about this when you mentioned the multidimensionality of European memory. So I think my parents story shows how much the persecution and extermination of European Jews was part of a larger modern history of creating disposable others both within Europe, certainly Jews but also Roma at various points Southern Europeans or Eastern Europeans or other minority Europeans, right? There's always a disposable other. And outside of Europe, colonial subject and slave subjects and now refugees, migrants, asylum seekers. How can we account for the histories of the slave trade, of colonialism, of empire alongside the histories of the Holocaust and subsequent authoritarian regimes if we number generations only with the start of World War II, right? How do these structures of othering and of persecution connect and intersect or are they separate? And how do we want to, I think this would be really important to try to discuss. And how can the memory of these many and multidimensional painful past be mobilized for more progressive futures and that's the topic of today. So as I witnessed the alarming growth of nationalism and ethnocentrism of racism and anti-Semitism often based on past grievances often mobilizing memory to as an alibi for present prejudice and violence. I'm keenly aware of how the memory of painful past can serve present day exclusion and violence. The memory of the Holocaust in fact itself is regularly and ubiquitously used to instill fear, to instill xenophobia and also to instill Islamophobia and racism. So what I believe that as descendants of Holocaust survivors, and I'm speaking here of my own cohort, right of my own friends and comrades, we need to resist this kind of instrumentalization of the Holocaust. We need to refuse to allow the suffering of our ancestors to be used to inflict further violence and to blind us to contemporary acts of racism. So this is what I feel I owe my parents and my family and their contemporaries, their neighbors and friends. And I think it's a debt as weighty as the injunction to tell their story, which I had felt was my debt before, but I feel like I have an additional debt now and it may even be more intractable. So for those of us who have inherited such violent histories and are witnesses to a violent presence, there's challenges to allow ourselves to be vulnerable to what Susan Sontak has called the pain of others. And maybe I would like to change that and say not the pain of others but the pain of our co-citizens and to recognize the entanglements of our multiple, what I've called connective histories. It's to resist appropriating that pain and to respect the integrity of different pasts as well as their effects on the present. So when we say, will the past change the present, we need to ask which past, right? Or how different pasts intersect and connect to one another. So our, yes, our responsibility is to do that. And it's to mobilize the vulnerability that we've inherited as post-generations to serve as a platform for a kind of attunement and connectivity that reaches beyond identity and ethnicity in favor of solidarity, perhaps of co-witnessing of co-resistance. And I wonder whether that's not related to the idea of Europe that my parents wanted to transmit to me and that they also evoked every day of their lives just like the war, they also evoked this dream, this other thing. And perhaps not a Europe that ever existed but that's throughout their many difficult and traumatic moments in their life when they lost their homes over and over again, they needed somehow to hold on as a promise and also as a possibility. And I think it's the possibility of co-citizenship. So thank you very much for your attention. Thank you, Mary-Anne. This was really, this was really beautiful. And I think it picks up on many, many of the ideas that we will be discussing. And I think it's a wonderful counterpart and introduction also to some of the themes that Joadine Schwartz will be discussing with us. So Joadine Schwartz is raised in a bilingual French-German family. As Jordi mentioned, she's a journalist, she's a writer and documentary filmmaker. She's written for The Guardian for Time Magazine and is a German correspondent with Agence France Press. Her debut book, which was just published in English in May of this year, is entitled and each of the books are slightly different in whether they're English, German or French. But in English, those who forget, my family's story in Nazi Europe, a memoir, a history, a warning. And it was originally published in French in 2017, Les Zernestiques, and translated into German as the Gedeckneslosen, and along Anna-European in 2018. Her debut book, Those Who Forget, won the European Book Prize in 2018. It also won the Winfield Prize and the Nord-South Prize. It's currently being translated into 10 languages. In the book, Joadine then traces her discovery of her grandfather's life during the Third Reich, in which literally going to the basement of her family home in Mannheim, she finds out that her grandfather Carl Schwartz was a member of the Nazi Party and after Kristallnacht had been able to buy a Jewish petroleum business for a very cheap, low price. Later she discovered letters, I think, also in the basement in which one of the family members, surviving family members of the Jewish family who had this petroleum business had written to her grandfather asking for reparations, asking for some kind of settlements. And he had, I think he was the only family member who survived and had emigrated to, or had been able to leave as a child and emigrated to the United States. And in the book also, Joadine traces how she met one of the family members in London who was in a nursing home who could tell her a little bit about the Jewish family, most of whom perished. And what she then traced and found were also letters of correspondence between her grandfather and Julius Leubmann, I think, the Jewish businessman, family member who was seeking reparations. And in these letters discovered that her grandfather was more defiant than contrite. So she has a quote in one of the magazines that says, for me, my grandparents are ghosts. There's ghost equality of their past. On your mother's side, if I'm not mistaken, and this is also in the book, your grandfather was a policeman during the Vichy regime. So as a third generation European, Hirsch is examining letters, documents, and photographs in order to trace her family history and reflect more broadly on how memory influences national and European identity. If Marian Hirsch writes from this perspective, as we just heard, of the second generation, and perhaps then the question we'll talk about, the second generation to what, Geraldine Schwartz reflects from the perspective of a grandchild of Nazi Europe, but also as a child of parents from the 1968 generation and your father figures quite prominently in your book. And the floor is yours, or the screen is yours, yeah. Thank you very much, Shobian, and very much Marianne for this very interesting and personal presentation. My presentation won't be as personal. I will try to answer, actually, the question of can the past make the present better? And it is a question which has hounded me while writing the book, and it's still haunting me. So why actually am I interested in this topic? Maybe because my mother is French and my father is German. So in a way, I see myself as the result of the French-German reconciliation, and in a way as a child of Europe, as the French-German reconciliation made actually the emergence of a united Europe possible. And maybe because of this education, French-German education, I think I've been aware quite early as a teenager that our capacity of shaping a future of freedom and of peace will also depend on how we will be able to remember. Before writing the book, I was more thinking of remembering in the sense of not forgetting. But while writing the book, I noticed or I understood that it's not only about not forgetting, it's really about how to remember. The key for me is really how should be remembered in order to learn from history. And Marianne also said it, which past are we talking about? But independently of which past we're talking about, I got really interested in the way different countries are actually dealing with the shadows of their history and the way they are actually remembering the past. The question today is all the more acute since the last witnesses are dying and young generations feel less and less linked to this past. So I thought of some maybe some suggestions of how to get this new generation be more feel more linked to this past. I think first maybe the younger generations should have the chance to understand why remembering is fundamental. Because it's a question as I often have also in classrooms, it's why should we remember? And sometimes I have the feeling that this question is not addressed enough. Why should we remember? And why should these young people remember? I don't think this will be reached if remembering is presented only as a moral duty as it is the case in France and also in Germany. In France there is a word for that which is called Devoir de mémoire, which is the duty of remembering. So it's kind of order. In German there are many words actually to define the work, the remembering culture or the way to look at the past, coming to terms with the past. So this is the first thing which I think is a condition if you want the young generations to be interested in that past is to have a more pragmatic approach to enable the young generations to take from the past what they need to shape the future they want to understand the present rather than suffer it and to act instead of taking the posture of the victim to enable them also to learn from the past how to recognize patterns in politics in order to defend themselves against demagogy and manipulation strategies but also to learn to identify dangers which can come from themselves, from ourselves, citizens, our own moral credibility, our capacity of becoming accomplices of criminal regimes by indifference, by opportunism, by conformism. I think with this approach, memory can help provide a kind of political education, politische Bildung to citizens and help them take responsibility and shape the future. But second to this pragmatic approach, I think it is very important to keep an emotional link and this is quite difficult to keep an emotional link with the past for young people who have never lived that past and feel very distant from that past. I think one way maybe to get them interested in that past is to encourage them to dig into personal stories and why not their own family's stories. In this way, the abstract distant history can become part of one's family and take the face of an ancestor and this might allow younger generation to ask themselves if what sense does it has that my grandparents or my grand-grandparents made mistakes or suffered or made sacrifices if I don't learn anything from their experience. So in my book you mentioned and thank you very much for that, Tjöbjön, I try to combine these two approach. I try to combine the pragmatical and the emotional approach. I chose also a transgenerational perspective and also a transnational perspective by describing how the memory of the war and of fascism was handed down through three generations of my German and my French family. So for the third generation, which I am, on one side it is easier to write about grandparents than to write about parents because as you mentioned it, my grandparents are ghosts for me. My grandfather died before I was born and my grandmother died soon after. So I don't have the problem of loyalty. I don't have the problem of my perception being filtered by emotions or by love, by memories that I could have with these grandparents. But on the other side, maybe because I haven't known them, I feel even more responsible. It is not easy to write about an era you haven't lived through it and about dead people who cannot defend themselves anymore. It's actually a huge responsibility and I wanted to be fair or as fair as possible, especially with my grandfather, Karl Schwartz, whom I have barely known. In order to get to know them better, I called on two witnesses, which are my aunt, my German aunt, who kept excusing her father's actions and my own father who kept condemning these actions very clearly. And the difference is maybe their age. My aunt was born in 1936 and she's lived the war, the bombings in Mannheim and she might also have been a bit influenced by the Nazi propaganda. My father was born in 43 and he often confronted my father in the 50s, end of the 50s and was part of this generation of Germans that forced the German society to face the shadows of the past and their own responsibility in it. And the difference between these two perspectives really made me realize how testimonies can be filtered by emotions and experience and also that memory is a living organism which evolves over time. That means with time, witnesses can change the way they look at their past in order to give a new meaning to their own life. And so it was very important for me to submit my family narrative to different accounts and especially to the wisdom of historical facts and documents. But still doing this, the greatest challenge was to assess the responsibility of my grandfather, to avoid judging by what I know today that involves not applying today's moral and social standards to them, but rather to contextualize and to ask myself, was it possible to say no, what were the risks? What did they know about the fate of the Jews? Also what was their political education? There is also the psychological dimension which is very important to take into consideration and also the political manipulation. But after that work, my conclusion was that in its essence, the story of my grandparents is the story of many Germans of that time. And furthermore, it embodies a timeless and universal attitude many can identify with. And this attitude is called by the Germans mitleifer which means those who follow the current. And that idea of mitleifer brings me to my final thought to the question, can the past change the future? I've tried to understand how many countries in Europe have dealt with their past. And I've observed that in many countries in the collective memory of war, dictatorship or crime against humanity, we tend to divide the attitude of society in three categories, which would be the perpetrators, the victims and the heroes. And in doing so, we forget a category which is second to me central since it often concerns the majority of a population. And this is the mitleifer, those who follow the current. So my grandparents basically. And however, in my opinion, this category is very important to acknowledge and study if we want to learn something from history. Most of us cannot imagine being a monster like Mengele or Eichmann, nor can we imagine being a hero. So we tend to take the perspective of the victim which is also very important. But in order to learn from history, I think one needs also to try to take the perspective of at least the mitleifer. And asked to himself, how can an ordinary citizen like myself or a society as a whole become complicit of a criminal regime? And that step is very essential to link the past to the present and maybe to the future because it helps bring us back to our own responsibilities today. And it helps us realize that we do not become complicit in an unfair system only by serving it directly, but also by following the crowd out of indifference, opportunism, or conformism. So these are my thoughts to answer the question of, can we learn from history or at least make the future being better thanks to the past? Thank you very much for articulating this. And I think this is also perhaps a very good entrance into reflecting on this idea of the indifference or the mass following of individuals. Many people have perhaps seen parallels in mass society then as in now, and there's a resurgence of reading of books upon our ends and Adorno and the whole Frankfurt School to try to see these patterns of the past and the future. To try to see these patterns, but perhaps I would ask you Marianne and Gervadin if you want to ask one another or if you have thoughts or reflections about what you have said because Marianne, you brought out this duty to your parents, to their memory in the sense of not only recalling and remembering the Holocaust but also remembering this idea or this promise of Europe. And I wonder Gervadin, particularly since your title of the book is also of reflecting on Europe and seeing yourself as not only German or French but as European if this promise or idea of Europe also resonates with you. Yes, I think I was educated with this promise. The problem today is will Europe be able to fulfill this promise? And also I think what is important is that this promise was actually decided by only a part of Europe. The European Union was created in the West. The French-German friendship was very important to create this European Union. This idea of reconciliation, French-German reconciliation is the founding myth of Europe. And the problem with this founding myth is that it's excluding half, the other half of Europe. That means the European Union was much more founded on the memory of 45 than on the memory of 89. Have I answered your question? I'm just opening a new door maybe. I can't hear you. Sorry, Marianne, would you like to respond or? Yeah, I'm wondering, I mean, I agree that it's a very partial idea right now. And I wanna, sometimes I think to think about how the past can mobilize us to create a different present and future. Maybe we need to not just remember but rewind and go back to an earlier moment and think of how an earlier moment thought of the future, even if that future didn't hold. And that's sort of what I was trying to do. I was trying to rewind and think of how my parents thought of their future in an ideal way, of course, it never happened. And it probably never had the possibility as they had to block out a lot of realities about Europe in order to hold on to this idea. So, the rewinding sounds to, I think is a different kind of exercise that also might be a pragmatic educational exercise in the way Jehadine that you were talking about, the pragmatic and how we might think of learning about the past. I mean, this is an exercise I do with my students is like, how might it have gone differently? It's not really a counterfactual history, but it's a way of looking at a crossroads and say, what might people have done in order to affect a different kind of course? So not looking at time as linear, but at looking at the different paths that we might have taken. But if I might respond to something very powerful that you said, Jehadine, which is this idea, the idea invoking the idea of the mid-loyfer of the ordinary citizen who really just wanted to survive, just wanted to make it to the next day to raise their children to have a peaceful life or to not be so much affected by the grand drama of history. So I think that's a really important category to add to the perpetrator victim. It's really the bystander idea, but more than bystander because they're not neutral, bystanders aren't neutral. But I think we may need to add a yet a fourth category to think about the present, which is the category of the beneficiary. Mahmood Mamdani wrote a book about the beneficiary and so did Bruce Robbins. So the beneficiary, and I think of this very much in the context of the US today, thinking that even though I came to the United States in 1962, I'm a beneficiary of the history of slavery because I am white-skinned because of the economic factors because white people are not dying of the COVID-19 to the degree that black people are dying of COVID-19 right now. So in some ways, I am a beneficiary of the system, which none of my ancestors had anything to do with. And I think in Europe, we may want to think of contemporary Europeans as beneficiaries, also of colonialism. And what would that add to the kind of educational pragmatic strategies that you so beautifully evoked for us? What I totally agree with this category of beneficiary because it's much more present. Is it what I have understood well? Yes, so I would be also a beneficiary in that sense. Well, you're a beneficiary of your grandfather's purchasing or acquiring that business, right? Which was, he didn't deal the business in a good way, but... But directly, but then you're also a beneficiary more largely of the objects that are in the luffa or in the pinacotec, you know? Yes, yes. But I have maybe another vision. I feel more as a beneficiary of the work my father did, this generation did. I feel like I have a debt towards this generation who had the courage to confront their own parents. Because when I was writing this book, I thought if this book, if I should have written a similar book about my parents, my parents being my grandparents, I think I wouldn't have had the courage to do it. So I acknowledged, I realized how the courage of this generation to confront their own parents, to see in their own parents accomplices of crime, it mustn't have been very easy. And so I am very thankful to that generation. I feel I am a beneficiary of their work, of their courage to having confronted that society which was totally plunged into amnesia and didn't want to face the past and to face their own responsibility. And this is I think maybe something a bit German to feel this this thankfulness for having been able to change a society, the transformation of a society of institutions and the building of a democracy. But it's I have never thought actually of myself being a beneficiary of the Third Reich indirectly. But it's a question I could ask myself. But at least but we are always beneficiaries of of the past, in a way, or I mean, or for the victims, probably the country. I don't know what is the contrary of beneficiary. So this is also maybe a positive way to try to transmit the will of the interest into the past to the younger generations, at least in Europe, to be thankful for that work which has been done after the war, to make it able to transform the mentalities and to inspire the young people to protect this legacy and to develop it further, of course, because this legacy is not perfect. So it has to be perfectionist. But I think it's a very important point also because the past, we shouldn't only look at the negative past, the negative legacy, but also to the positive legacy. Otherwise, young generations will feel totally crushed by this negative legacy. So it's very important to give the opportunity to look at something positive also in the past. And most of the time, there is something positive. We don't have to build it or to invent it like Vladimir Putin. It is there. Perhaps one idea is to add to this beneficiary would be Michael Rothbard's implicated subject, ways in which we are implicated in institutional structures of racism and also of indifference to the plight of others. Perhaps the direction that we are going is also a complement to what Hannah Arendt writes in collective responsibility, that we have this kind of vicarious responsibility for things we have not done, and that in a way is the leitmotif of Rothbard's book, I think this implicated subject. But that is perhaps important then to see that in looking at the past, it can be blinding to only see it through either the line of identification of the victim or as a perpetrator or the bystander. But the broader, more gray areas of implication, and I think for this pragmatic one for students, this is one that's open and that where they can also think about their own patterns or we can think about our own patterns in the presence and with an eye for the future. And on that note, I was curious about your reflections on the sort of perennial problem of European memories in the plural of how to deal with the many, many different pasts without having a hierarchy, whether we look at commemorative days or we look at clashes as to which is more important and which ones are completely forgotten. Do you see that as a problem within European memory that there is a kind of a hierarchy? And is there a way that we can think about memories of the past in Europe in a more open and empathetic way to avoid hierarchies? And Gerardine, I was thinking perhaps with respect to the Mbembe affair, if this was one issue where this historical comparison becomes problematic and Marianne perhaps with Black Lives Matter movement, how did that become such a catalyst for thinking about slavery and colonialism, not only in the United States but in Europe. So this sort of transnational open broader way of thinking about memory in a comparative context that does not relativize. But that learns from one another. I don't know, would like to go first. Okay, Maria, I'll sleep. Maybe Gerardine this time. Okay, Gerardine, you first. Well, I think that, I mean, the European Union has this problem with the probability of the memories that's for sure. And it's always seeking its identity. What is the European identity? I think the European identity is that everybody can choose his identity. That's actually the European identity. And that's why it is also so difficult to define. It's this freedom to choose your identity. Now, what you were, I think you mentioned the hierarchy of memory is in the European Union. In 2005, I think the European Union decided that the 27th of January would be the, which is the liberation of Auschwitz would be the commemoration day, the memory day of the European Union. And 30 years after, are we 30 years after? No, 15, 15 years after. We have to, we can observe that it hasn't worked very well, especially in some Eastern European countries where anti-Semitism is raging, but also in other countries and also racism and intolerance and populism is arising. So the idea of 2005 to invite the member countries of the European Union to rise the awareness of the young population, but also the population in general, and also their interest for the Holocaust by building museums, Holocaust museums, for example, was not, actually didn't reach the expected results. I think this is a good lesson that imposing one traumatic memory as an absolute reference runs the risk of destroying other ones. In that case, communism and a European memory should not lead to an enforced commemoration, but rather make it possible for people to change perspective, to place themselves in both the position of the victim and the perpetrator, to accept also the view of another country on your own history, to question yourself, to engage dialogue, and this is for the form and for the content. I think Europe should make more room for other memories in addition to the memory of the Holocaust. There is in Western European countries a lack of interest for communist experience of Eastern European, and this is a major obstacle also to build a European identity for all the Europeans. Part of Europe doesn't feel represented in this European memory. And the other past, which I think we should really give more room today, but I think Marianne will tell us much more about that, is the colonial history, of course. It is the main link between native Europeans and population groups with a background of migration. And if we want to live together in solidarity, their past too have to become part of the European memory. The Netherlands have tried something in that direction by renaming the day of the commemoration of the end of the war is now called the day of freedom. The intention of renaming that day is to include the population with a migration background in order to really have an inclusive memory. And I think this is one of the big challenge today is to have this inclusive memory in Europe and probably also in the United States. I couldn't agree more with everything you said. I mean, I think it's now turned out to be a real problem to choose January 27th and to make World War II and the Holocaust a template for what a traumatic memory is. And I think it's really important to remember that it's not the Holocaust. It's not the Holocaust. It's not the Holocaust. It's not the Holocaust. It's not the Holocaust. It enables you to look at other acts of violence and war and genocide to say it's bad, but it's not the Holocaust. So then you minimize the gravity of some of these crimes. But it also, as you said, are minimizing the Holocaust. And therefore it becomes a huge bone of contention. And then takes up so much attention that you're not able then to see these other crimes. Making any history sacrosanct or unenviable is a huge mistake. And I think it's doing a disservice to the victims of the Holocaust. So I think it's turned out to be a real problem. And I think these other histories that have been displaced are coming back to haunt us and to demand attention. How to hold these different histories together in one idea of a European past or European memory has become really difficult. And so the first thing is the idea of comparison. I mean, we cannot talk about any moment today without comparing. I mean, we cannot learn anything without comparing it to anything else. So right now in the United States in 2020, we're talking about 1918. What have we learned from the flu? Not much. And what have we learned? Is it the 1930s? Is it 1972 in Chile? Or in Argentina? Are we having a coup? Is Trump performing? I mean, all of these comparisons are really important because they enable us to learn something and to make a specific analysis of what's happening right now. So the important thing to me is to say, none of these things are comparable. They're not the same. They're distinct. But they're equally, you know, they each have their own distinct history. But to put them in conversation or to connect them doesn't mean we're not minimizing one as opposed to the other. And I think in relation to the Holocaust, this is really, really important to say because it's too long served as an alibi, I think for other acts of victimization in the present. I think learning about it is important, but what do memorials do? What do commemorative dates do? What do museums do? I think we really need to ask ourselves whether just having a museum of terror as in Budapest or a museum of the Holocaust or a new museum of the Holocaust in Amsterdam or another museum, whether that will do the job of trying to create a future that's more progressive. Or will it only again victimize the victims by putting them into this position forever, right? Of having those photographs of those people be the ultimate evil so that we no longer recognize ourselves in them but can put them into a museum storage in a way. So what does it, you know, how can you mobilize those? So I would say, you know, smaller acts of commemoration, smaller moments of remembrance, the flowers that you put in a place, the shoes, the small objects, the groups that gather, I mean, digital forms of remembrance. There's so many other ways to try to perform memory and making the past present, but making the past present not only for its own sake, but for the sake of doing something in that present, building community through commemoration and memory, but not to the exclusion of others and it's a real challenge. I don't know. I mean, I'm so glad that the European Union is funding these projects, but I think we need to fight for what we, what they will consider recognizable as memory work. And it's not just the big museums or the huge projects, it's also the smaller local ways in which museums and memorials and commemorative dates serve as points of discussion and contestation and debate, not just only of observance. Right, so then the European Union becomes this public sphere, opening up and enabling conflicting and alternative ways of thinking. We also have a chat room here where we had some questions to you. Yes. For Marian here from Sophia Lovegrove, she's a student in heritage and memory studies at the University of Amsterdam. She's wondering what are Marian's thoughts about the dominance. It's a similar question we just talked about, the dominance for the lack of better word of the memory of the Holocaust in Europe in relation to others, particularly colonialism. So in a way, we've addressed this, but she has a little bit of a question here, slightly different. Is it the location of the suffering in Europe versus elsewhere or a question of the identity of the victims? So is the location of the suffering, if the person who is not like, doesn't look like a European, but looks like somebody else, does that perhaps affect the way in which memory events are remembered or compared? So that's slightly different one, the location. Well, I mean, I think that's so true because looking at the Holocaust, teaching the Holocaust in the United States right now is a really different venture than doing it 20 or 30 years ago where it was this urgent need to learn about this history. I think right now when the mission of many of our students is to decolonize knowledge and decolonize ways of thinking, I think some of my students have said, why really should we learn about this? It's really Europeans doing violence to other Europeans. Hasn't, didn't Europeans do this to colonial subjects over centuries before where they practiced some of this and why aren't we looking at these histories in conversation with one another? So it's a way of really, yes, I think the location of discussing the Holocaust in Europe maybe or in Amsterdam where all the deportations happen and where there's so many sites of specific expulsion of people from their homes and deportation of people is very different than studying it in New York. But in New York, we have to think of other histories of police violence against black bodies and how does the, how is the Holocaust relevant to that? Thank you. There's a question to both of you. And the person's, I'm not sure how to say the name, how can the EU memory policies work against accepting or silencing the creation of disposable others like Palestinians and against reproducing and maintaining trauma? Are we reproducing conformism? So this is quite complicated. How can the EU memory policies work against silencing the creation of disposable, let's maybe disposable others, others who do not, we're subhuman, not rendered fully individuals? How can the EU memory policies work against these? I don't know if either one of you would like to. So then would you like to, well this maybe fits, if your book you mentioned about the SS model was that one cannot have empathy or empathy is a crime. Was that one? I'm remembering right now. Yes. In the book I describe how I visit a gathering of right extremist groups, European right extremist groups in Austria. And I was very shocked by the use of empathy, of the word empathy as being something weak and negative. And it maybe, it reminded me of the slogan of the SS which was empathy is weakness. And it reminded me of this capacity of the third Reich to distort the words. And this is something I observed today again where we confuse freedom with hate, of course, freedom of speech with hate, democracy with the domination of the people, we against the others, only we are actually the real citizens. Courage with actually insults and vulgarity. And yes, I'm not sure I understood the question well, but these are, of course, this is happening in Europe today. And these political parties have actually have had more and more success in the last 10 years. And it is one of the reasons actually why I started to read the book because I was really surprised that Europe having made this promise, having been really actually built on this promise of never again. How can Europe survive if it forgets? Because I think what unites Europe since 45, 45 are these humanistic values in the sense that the human should always be in the center and consider it as a goal and not as a mean. And of course today Europe is at a crossroads with the refugee crisis because these values which are the value which are found, the EU are not applied to these refugees. So this is one of the big challenges of Europe because Europe needs to define itself, to define an identity. But if you define an identity, you always define it in a position to others. So maybe that's the big contradiction of Europe. I agree and I guess I would add that one of the things the European Union could do is precisely to encourage comparison or connection between these different histories of exclusion and persecution of creation of others and of disposable others or ungrievable lives as Judith Butler calls them. How did this happen in the past? What is the history of that? And how are we repeating that today against different populations? So that's where I wanted to raise the insides and the outside which is really the history of European modernity. And I mean, American, American, or Western modernity is really its creation of others against which they define themselves. As you just said, how does this happen? What are the structures of that? How are they part of our education system? How are they part of our identity? I think one of the reasons maybe it's repeating itself is that where we are lacking, when we approach this history of violence and of exclusion, as I said before, we tend to have empathy with the victim, but we don't imagine that we might be part of the system, of the perpetrator, of the... And this is also missing in the museums, this link, you know? So you can build all the museums you want, but if the museums don't help us to reflect on our own responsibility, only half of the work is done. Right. We have a question from Johannes Börmann from the commission who writes that he would like to add something. He finds it problematic to speak in this context of the Holocaust as something done to people who look like us Europeans. Jews were certainly not seen and perceived as Europeans or rooted in Europe, but quite clearly as the opposite. An additional question. How is Holocaust denial and distortion used nowadays as a weapon to advance anti-Semitism and what can memorials on the Holocaust do against it? So again, to take issue with and clarify that Jews were not seen as Europeans, but seen as others. And how can Holocaust denial and distortion be used nowadays to advance anti-Semitism? I don't know if either of you would like to comment. I mean, I was the one who said, you know, that I've heard that from some students. Yeah. And of course, it's incorrect. It's just how it's, you know, the question that I responded to was, you know, where is the site at which you remember or talk about these things? And from a specific site, which is in the United States, which has its own battles with otherness, it certainly looks like it's old, you know, it's always a question like when is it over? You know, when is the history over? Well, what we're talking about is it's not over, right? And, but from the perspective of a young student in the United States, a student of color, let's say, who's inherited a different history, right? It looks like, well, you know, Jews are white, they are, you know, wealthy, they, you know, middle class, they have property and, you know, they haven't. So, I mean, that's sort of what it looks like, right? And so therefore they say Europeans and other Europeans. Of course, that's why it's so important, in fact, to put these histories next to each other and to say, to gain the category white, right? I mean, let's think of South Africa, Jews were not white. I mean, they had to fight for being white, right? So, I mean, there's always, you know, in the United States, Italians were not white, you know, then they became white at a certain point. So, I mean, I think this is a constant struggle and I think that's why studying these histories in comparison or in conjunction with each other is really important educationally and pedagogically. So, of course, it was an erroneous comment. It's just, that's what it looks like from the present to somebody who hasn't done a kind of in-depth study. Yes, the Holocaust denial has always been there and will always be there, but it's not the only history that's being denied. I mean, I think their denial is part of the historical study and denial or minimizing or saying, well, it wasn't, you know, we brought a lot to the colonies, you know, we brought them education, we brought them modernity. I mean, that's another form of denial of a cultural erasure. So, I think we need to also look at some of these denials as advancing racism and so on. But I think in terms of the multiple populations of Europe right now, the other problem with the centralizing the Holocaust in that way is that refugees and immigrants to Europe are, as my colleague Andrea Swiss had said, they're migrating into another's past, the past of another people. So, having to observe January 27, if you are from one of the African colonies, right, it's just, is that appropriate? I mean, is that the day of remembrance that you should be observing? Right, I mean, I think this is the idea of putting the different histories or memories into conversation with one another in a comparative context is extremely important. And I think this is also one of the great benefits and strengths of these type of conversations that we're having right now under the auspices of the European Union and the whole Europe for Citizens program, and citizens to speak and to think with one another in lively debates. We are soon ending our time here though. So, and I want to thank the audience for the questions that they post, but also allow the two of you if you'd like to say any closing words. Otherwise. Thank you. Yeah, I mean, it was really a pleasure to speak with you. You are in Vermont, you're in Berlin, I'm in Tallinn, we're over these screens. I really also want to thank the team at the back there, Fernanda, Oriol, Riccardo, Raphael and Jordi, who is really the man who has made this all possible for this marvelous conversation. This is truly something to have this public sphere over Zoom and to have this conversation with these two powerhouses, Marianne Hirsch and Geraldine Schwartz. I sincerely appreciated reading your books. You have been accompanying me, you know, in my thoughts and places and Marianne, two of your books are propping up my laptop right now. I'm glad they have an important function to play. Practical function as well as a pedagogic one. And Geraldine was really great to read your book and to have the two of you from the generational perspective, but also then thinking more broadly in terms of moral and political questions. It's a real, real pleasure. So I thank you from the bottom of my heart. Jordi, thank you so much. Do you want to say anything else? No, just thank you, all of you. It was a pleasure to see each other again. And of course, we have a lot to learn, a lot to share and then also a lot to improve with this kind of multiple memories and comparations and comparative memories. And we can look for Marianne's interview and Geraldine's article in the next issue, right? Observing memories. We are going to talk about tomorrow. Tomorrow is more practical session also at 10 o'clock release and we are going to present a little bit about this new Euro magazine. Right, where you two figure in. We are always at the end of the year, but it's going to be out. Yeah. But it's very good because so many of us are going to be stuck at home, right? In isolation, right? So we look forward to reading these articles, right? Online, as our lives are now online, but you've made a marvelous online public forum. So thank you so much. Thank you. Really, Marianne and Geraldine. I hope one day in person, right? Have a glass of wine. You know, what have you.