Carol Kahn Strauss Lecture

Holocaust Migration: The Future of Memory

As the generation of Holocaust survivors passes away, so too does direct testimony of its horrors. This loss, argues Agnes Mueller, affects how we think about migration, marginalized people, social and economic mobility, gender, the environment, race, and class. In this talk, she looks at contemporary German–Jewish fiction by young post-Holocaust writers who deftly articulate their evolving identities and sometimes controversial ways of understanding the Shoah. She highlights two popular novelists—Olga Grjasnowa and Kat Kaufmann—whose protagonists are suspicious of authenticity and firsthand (survivor) accounts, question Germany’s culture of commemoration (Erinnerungskultur), and are alert to the country’s resurgent racism and antisemitism. These young authors also deal with complex themes of Jewish ancestry and Muslim identity and the reality of multilingual, migratory writing, given that many new Jewish voices in German literature today originate from Russia and Eastern Europe.