Monday, January 25, 2021, 11:30 AM – 1 PM EST

Angelika Bammer, Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities, Department of Comparative Literature

“German Family Memory and the Nazi Past: A Reckoning across Generations”

Angelika Bammer’s recent book, Born After: Reckoning with the German Past, explores the relationship between history and memory in the wake of a traumatic past. Arguing that, as William Faulkner famously said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” she considers the ways that history is transmitted through family memories: the stories we tell and the silences that we carry. Drawing on her own family history, she traces the legacy of Nazi history across several generations of a German family to explore the affective impact of this legacy. In response to the question “What do we do with pasts that carry guilt or shame?” she proposes that the shifting ground between remembering, forgetting, and misremembering is the ethical foundation on which we build our lives. Her presentation will interweave a reading of selections from her book with reflections on how and why she wrote it.