2. Cologne Crossroads

Conversation Shared Commemoration – Polyphonic Memory?  On Solidarity and Belonging in the Postmigrant

Present Germany’s engagement with its history and the ‘German Memory Culture’ are internationally acclaimed as unique. Yet, critical questions are growing louder. In a post-migrant society, diverse, interwoven, and parallel memories and histories coexist. Can different memories exist side by side? Whose memory matters in a pluralizing society? How is it possible to remember in solidarity? How can museums and universities help to counter exclusion and promote coexistence?

Esra Özyürek (Cambridge) and Michael Rothberg (Los Angeles) are among the most significant voices in the discussion of memory dynamics in Germany. They share their research on the possibilities of multidirectional memory in Germany’s post-migrant society and discuss how memory can be multivocal, commemoration preserved, and mutual understanding fostered.

Esra Özyürek is the Sultan Qaboos Professor of Abrahamic Faiths and Shared Values at the University of Cambridge. After completing her studies in Political Science and Sociology at Bogazici University in Istanbul, she earned her PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is the author of Being German, Becoming Muslim: Race, Religion, and Conversion in the New Europe (Princeton University Press 2014) and Subcontractors of Guilt: Holocaust Memory and Muslim Belonging in Postwar Germany (Stanford University Press 2023).

Michael Rothberg holds the 1939 Society Samuel Goetz Chair in Holocaust Studies and is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature in Los Angeles. After studying at Swarthmore College and Duke University, he completed his PhD in Comparative Literature at the City University of New York. His publications include Multidirectional Memory: Holocaust Remembrance in an Age of Decolonization (Stanford University Press 2009) and The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (Stanford University Press 2019).

Cologne Crossroads Conversation No1.

2018-2023. 5 Years of Making and Debating Restitution

For more than 100 years, people and communities in the Global South have been fighting for the restitution of seized and looted cultural artefacts and human remains that are being preserved and researched in Europe. The November 2017 speech by French President Emmanuel Macron in Burkina Faso and the November 2018 restitution report by Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy have set a global agenda. Efforts to address colonial injustice, rethink ethnological museum collections, pluralise knowledge and memory, and combat racism have gained momentum, but such efforts have also been met with resistance. Bénédicte Savoy (Berlin) and Ciraj Rassool (Cape Town) are among the most important players in international restitution debates. They look back on controversies and practices as they emerged within the last five years, discussing what has become of the 'new relational ethics` promised to societies of the Global North and South since the publication of the restitution report

Prof Dr Bénédicte Savoy is an award-winning art historian at the TU Berlin. In addition to the Restitution Report, she has recently published Africa's Struggle for its Art. History of a Postcolonial Defeat (2021) and (with Albert Guaffo et al.) Atlas of Absence. Cameroon's Cultural Heritage in Germany (2023).

Prof. Dr Ciraj Rassool is Director of the African Programme in Museum and Heritage Studies at the University of the Western Cape and an academic consultant to many national and international museum and heritage institutions. His publications include The Politics of Heritage in Africa: Economies, Histories and Infrastructures (2015) and Unsettled History: Making South African Public Pasts (2017).