As the American novelist William Faulkner famously wrote in 1951: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Just like Germany, the United States has tried to come to terms with a difficult past – a legacy of slavery and segregation, inequality, discrimination, and violence. There are many controversies about how to teach, narrate, and remember history, about what has been remembered, forgotten, or distorted and what impact that still has today. In the past few decades, new museums and memorial sites have been opened that offer a much more critical and inclusive history, while many Confederate monuments have been taken down and places have been renamed. Nevertheless many Confederate monuments still have not been taken down and places still have not been renamed. And there has been a backlash against building a critical memory and transitioning from denial to collective responsibility. With the new Trump administration, some institutions are even under attack.
Panelists:
- Lonnie G. Bunch III, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution
- Margaret Huang, President and CEO of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama
- Jim R. Grossman, Executive Director of the American Historical Association
- Desirée Cormier Smith, former Special Representative for Racial Equity and Justice for the U.S. State Department
- Moderator: Andreas Etges, Amerika-Institut, LMU München
The event is part of the comparative project “Building a Critical Memory: Transitioning from Denial to Collective Responsibility in Germany and the United States” that brings together about 50 scholars and teachers, curators and educators from museums and memorial sites, other public historians, people working in foundations and NGOs as well as journalists.
In cooperation with the Bavarian American Academy and the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism. Main sponsors: Foundation Remembrance, Responsibility and Future in Berlin and The Halle Foundation in Atlanta, GA.
A registration is required. More information on the registration and the livestream can be found on the Amerikahaus website.