Your most recent book, Misrepresentation in Silence in United States History Textbooks, demonstrates the distortion of history in American textbooks. What are the implications or effects of misrepresentation?

Dr. Gellman: Misrepresentation continues to allow certain kinds of stories to be told about groups of people in ways that maintain and perpetuate dominant social hierarchies. For example, when we misrepresent White violence towards Black, Indigenous, and people of color groups, it encodes narratives of White supremacy that teach children in the K-12 system, who are encountering these narratives, that White groups are superior, that they are dominant, that they are victorious, that they should be identified with. So, it becomes an assimilation facilitator, and it demeans and undercuts the experiences and sometimes the resistances of BIPOC groups that may have worked against those actions of White supremacy. So, misrepresentation writ large has the ability to perpetuate the encoding of White supremacy in our society in ways that have many repercussions for structural justice, racial justice, and gender justice.

The other thing it does is create false justification for patterns of domination that, again, reinforce erroneous beliefs about who has what kinds of rights. So, when we misrepresent, Indigenous people, for example, as conquered, it sends a message that those people don’t count in the contemporary story. They have been conquered; therefore, they are not contemporarily relevant. Many Indigenous movements in the United States use the claim of “we are still here to assert contemporary native visibility.” Because, as I document in the book, so much misrepresentation only portrays Indigenous people in what is now the United States in the past tense as people that were here, that were dominated and have essentially disappeared.

In my book, Indigenous Language Politics in the Schoolroom, I include an ethnographic content from interviews and focus groups with students. In other publications I document this as well, where White students in California talk about how they didn’t know that there were contemporary Native people in their home area, even though they live in a place that is the confluence of numerous different tribes that are active today, that have ongoing membership and tribal governance structures.

And so, when we misrepresent, we miseducate the next generation in understanding who their neighbors are in contemporary society as well as the perception of the past, that some groups were dominant and superior over others, and therefore we should perpetuate that same social hierarchy today.

What does “good” representation look like? How should textbook authors and educators balance strength (for example: emphasizing groups’ contributions) vs. deficit (for example: emphasizing violence against groups) approaches?

One thing that a Yurok interviewee said to me several years ago, when I was asking; how do we teach about the violent past in the contemporary classroom, they said to me: White people are insulated from the reality of the genocide of Native Americans. Native American children do not have that luxury. They grow up knowing that their extended ancestors were slaughtered, or that their grandparents or great grandparents were forcibly interned in boarding schools, or that their parents or grandparents chose to assimilate into a boarding school because they didn’t feel like they had any other options for upward mobility. So, when we ask: how do we represent the violent past, we need to remember who we are protecting when we say we can’t do it, or that it’s too confronting to do. BIPOC communities know their histories within oral tradition, within families, but those can be eroded or undermined by a public-school curriculum that doesn’t validate those stories. So good representation to me looks like historically accurate representation that is based not only on the White victors’ perspectives but on a plurality of voices that accurately depict what took place and also brings, particularly BIPOC, communities into the present day.

One of the main points of critique I found in my analysis of U.S. history textbooks was the constant representation of Native people in the United States only in the past tense. Good representation looks like reminding us that they are still here, that they are a vibrant community. So, next to the picture of someone collecting acorns in a loincloth, we also need the picture of the contemporary tribal meeting house and the tribal council that is managing governance for the community that is active next door to us. The emphasis on contemporary representation is really important.

The deficit approach is something that I’ve really had to think about in my own work with Native American communities in California, as well as Indigenous people in Mexico. It’s important to talk about the things that are broken. It’s important to talk about violence and how we address it. But that can’t be the only thing we talk about. We have to talk about the impressive ways that these communities are also working together to confront issues and be resilient, demonstrating survivance in these spaces. The Lakota curriculum that Darlene Saint Clair has created is an excellent example of how this can be done well, as are the ethnic studies curricula in California. We can talk about the things that are hard, but we can focus on positive examples that demonstrate meaningful, contemporary, dignified, Indigenous lives.

You’ve argued that identity politics during the first Trump administration allowed for more hostility towards BIPOC people, but you also demonstrated how schools can be sites of resistance. Specifically, you point to Yurok and Spanish language courses. How can educators in other disciplines practice resistance in their classrooms?

They can mainstream Indigenous knowledge into a variety of classes. Of course, the Indigenous language classes are the starting point for that, but bringing traditional ecological knowledge into science classes, or bringing Indigenous literature into an English language arts curriculum are ways where we can think about mainstreaming Indigenous knowledge into the contemporary curriculum.

Resistance is hard. It is easier to acquiesce to the kind of mandates that we are facing both in higher education and in the K-12 system right now in the United States. It is safer and easier for teachers to say, “I’m not going to talk about diversity, equity, and inclusion. I’m not going to teach this novel that talks about different ways of performing gender, or anything having to do with race and ethnicity.”

I understand why some teachers feel like they have to make that choice. But the education system in the United States is the primary site of state contact with its residents. It is a place where we’re forming young people. So, teachers, staff, and administrators who are willing to stand up and say, “In this school, everybody is valued” goes a long way – particularly in this political moment, toward resisting in small ways. So that might look like bringing in a book that is on the banned list and having the school district administrator or having your principal support you. It’s saying, “here’s why it matters to me –because I have students that resonate with this story.”

One example that I’ll give, and I discuss this in a chapter of my upcoming book, Learning to Survive: Yurok Well-being in School, which will come out in November 2025 – focuses on an interview with Theyallen Gensaw, who graduated from Del Norte High School a few years ago. He talks about the Del Norte County School Board. After receiving complaints from parents trying to get rid of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexi, he said, “I live in two worlds all the time. I live as a Yurok man, and I live my colonized life. That book is the only thing I read in high school, besides Yurok language class, where I felt seen, where I saw myself in the curriculum.” So, we shouldn’t underestimate the power of an English language arts teacher, or a science teacher, to bring in something that resonates.

In the science curriculum, we can talk about traditional burning practices when we live in a country that is on fire –from Los Angeles to the Canadian fires to the Oregon fires—this country is burning. Let’s figure out how to incorporate traditional ecological knowledge around fire burning practices into our science curriculum. Let’s at least introduce it as an idea. So, it doesn’t have to only be the Indigenous language classes, which, of course, are vital places to start. But let’s figure out how to mainstream Indigenous knowledge into other spaces, and say, this is important because it’s contemporary knowledge that honors other communities that are part of this school system, this residential area, whatever it is. In doing so, we’re sending a message to young people that White knowledge is not the only kind of knowledge that is valuable.

And another example that I’ll give, because I run a college in prison program, and we work a lot with different kinds of Englishes, is recognizing that Standard English—White academic English— is the lingua franca of the education system. It is an important tool in upward mobility. But it’s not the only way of expression, so we can work with Black Englishes and validate that those are meaningful ways of expression –while again, not working from a deficit perspective –while also talking about Standard English methods of syntax and grammar, so that students are equipped with a broad toolkit of ways to express. And they can make decisions about when they code switch in between those languages. But we’re not denigrating one in order to uplift the other.

Related to that, I think there’s a lot of space to think about how our English Language Learner curriculum operates as well, and the kinds of messages that we send about why learning English is important. It’s one language repertoire that is useful for people. But it is not the only valid language repertoire. There’s just tremendous space within the K-12 system for schools to be sites of resistance in ways that can be quite subtle. Teachers can make decisions about how public or private they want to be with these micro practices of resistance. But they really are vital in helping students see themselves and feel like they can be welcomed with their whole self.

We know education is important, and typically in the aftermath of violence, much onus is placed on the education system to promote peace and quell violence — despite the fact education and schools have historically been places of violence. What do you make of this dissonance? Can education repair these harms?

As an educator, I want to believe that education can be a site of peace, but it absolutely has not always been that. One example that has been meaningful for me to think about is the Hoopa Valley High School, a public high school that sits on the Hoopa Indian Reservation in far Northern California. The school sits where the previous Hoopa Indian Boarding School used to be. So, there are Native students from multiple tribal backgrounds who attend this public school today, whose grandparents, great grandparents, or related family members were interned in the boarding school in previous generations.

Today, those students have dreams of charting their own career paths. They’re playing school sports. They’re making their own lives. Some are studying the Hupa or Yurok language. But they’re walking in the footsteps of people that did not have that choice and that were subject to state violence through the forced assimilation process of the boarding school. So, that dissonance is something that those students and the educators there live with every day, acutely. In many other contexts, it’s much more subtle. But the same sort of dynamics play out for the formal education system, which is often a site of educational trauma.

Many of the students in the college-in-prison program I run talk about some of their earliest memories in school being made fun of for their names. So, they had different names, or they had names that made sense in the context of their own ethnic lineage but didn’t translate easily into White society. So, some of their earliest educational memories were being shamed or teased, ridiculed for their names, a form of educational trauma –when educational spaces become spaces of trauma that then push people away from meaningful engagement in school.

The promise of education to use self-actualization and knowledge to rebuild the world in a way that recognizes the dignity of everyone is an important goal. But historically, and up through the present day, there is so much educational trauma that is inflicted, particularly on BIPOC young people, as they make their way through that system. I think doing trauma-informed teaching is one way of recognizing that that is their reality. And supporting teachers and staff to be trauma-informed in how they manage both their classrooms and the curricula is important.

Yesterday, I was teaching my human rights class. We were discussing how so many of the folks who end up in U.S. prison systems are themselves products of cradle to prison pipelines, and with many of them going from the K-12 system into prison in their teens. And they’re saying, “Oh, well, how do we fix what’s broken in the system?” And I said, “What if the system is operating exactly as it was designed to? What if the education system is operating perfectly to maintain a White supremacist social hierarchy that we live in today? What do we do differently when we recognize that the education system is set up to maintain the system of social privilege that diminishes BIPOC power and lifts up White superiority?”

How do we grapple with the education system when we recognize that maybe it’s producing the outcomes exactly as intended. And then, we have to ask different kinds of questions. How do we fix the system if it’s not broken for some? We have to change what the output is as a society that we want from that system and work backwards to address the deep flaws, the baked-in inequality within the system itself.

Dr. Mneesha Gellman is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Emerson College. Her work examines the politics of violence globally, with her current research focusing on decolonization and human rights within various educational contexts in North America. She is the author of Democratization and Memories of Violence: Ethnic Minority Social Movements in Mexico (now open access), Indigenous Language Politics in the Schoolroom: Cultural Survival in Mexico and the United States, and Misrepresentation in Silence in United States History Textbooks(open access).

On January 27th, 2025, on the occasion of the commemoration of the 80th Anniversary of the Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Center for Austrian Studies and the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota invited Dr. Sarah Cramsey to give a lecture, titled: “The Other Holocaust: Care, Children and the Jewish Catastrophe”. 

In your recent talk on January 27th, you presented the study of caretaking through three distinct case studies. Does your forthcoming book adopt a similar structure?

Yes, in my book there are three chapters that correspond to each of those three case studies – the Warsaw Ghetto, Auschwitz-Birkenau and the Soviet Union during the Second World War –, and that is the heart of the book. 

I have a personal and an academic answer to this question. The personal answer is that during the time that I was pregnant with my two kids, one of them during the pandemic, I began to realize that the way that my life had shifted, and the horizon of my consciousness wasn’t necessarily reflected in a lot of the histories that I had read, particularly in the region that I am interested in – the land between Salzburg, Sarajevo and St. Petersburg. 

As a historian, whenever you are thrown into a situation, you like to go see what people have written about this situation in past circumstances. And, of course, there is work about the history of childhood, but I was very interested in the conceptual idea of care: how we care for the very young, and I became interested in how this invisible work sustains human life at a very young age.

When you have a child, you confront so many assumptions that people have about how you should be caring for that child: whether or not you should be breastfeeding that child, using the cry-it-out method, sleep training, etc. And this is something that happens differently in different societies, and beyond the care of the baby: governing women’s bodies, what constitutes a good home for the child, what role is the mother supposed to have… And, in a more fundamental level, in terms of the transmission of caretaking knowledge: relying on the knowledge of your relatives and older people as to what to do with the baby. Here you also see a lot of contradictions and assumptions. I became really interested in the contradictions, in the tensions, because it was something that I was living through as I became aware of the historical tensions spiraling out from my own experiences. 

And the academic answer?

The other side of my answer, a more academic one, stems from my first book, “Uprooting the Diaspora”. In that book I look at changing ideas of Jewish belonging and conceptions of Jewish citizenships in Europe. I looked at an organization that was very important for this narrative, the World Jewish Congress (WJC), and there was a really moving document, a transcript of a meeting from June 8^th, 1944. Members of the executive committee had learned that there were systematic trains leaving the occupied (now) Hungary, and towards Auschwitz-Birkenau. They began to realize that not even Hungarian Jews would be safe from the Shoah unfolding in Europe. In this meeting, members gave their honest opinion on the question of whether they should support the return of Jews to Germany after the war. A.L. Kubowitzki, secretary of the WJC and representing Belgian Jewry, gave a speech in response to this question, and he said that his opinion had changed from the last time they talked about this. In his speech, he references his son, he says “I need an answer to bring to my son”. 

After I finished the book, I was reading through it and I thought to myself “I wonder what happened to that son, I wonder if I can find him”. I found him, Michael Kubovy, now a retired professor emeritus in psychology at the university of Virginia in Charlottesville. I reached out to him, and he was very receptive, so I planned a visit. And it was then that I realized how much I was missing about A.L. Kubowitzki’s life, about the day to day of this very important diplomat. I knew nothing about the family behind him. His wife, for instance: Michael’s mother, who had been supporting the family during those important years I had researched. So, I started wondering what I knew and did not know about this family that had a very interesting life. Michael knew so many important things about his father and his life, and talking to him let me to see more of the invisibility of the history that I had written. Talking to him answered very different questions than the ones I had initially asked, ones that really highlighted the nuts and bolts of life, which led me to become interested in this taboo subject of early childhood caretaking, which is often invisible to the written record.

What do you mean when you say caretaking is universal, yet invisible to the eye and to the written record?

I see this as a timeless historical question, and these are the best historical questions to write a book about. A question that can relate to any time period or any group of people. Anyone who has ever spent more than a minute with a baby knows that, at some point, you look at that baby and you think: “What do I do to keep you alive? How do I get you to be happy and stop crying?” That is a very universal human question dating back to Neanderthals, and even in the animal world. So, this question of care is universal, beyond human existence, but also historically contingent. And I thought about this puzzle, this question of “How do you tell the history of something that appears timeless but also constantly changing”.

The overall invisibility of caretaking in the written record became to me an important methodological question: how do you write a history of the first two years of being alive, when you often have no direct documents from the people involved in that relationship? Thinking about this dirty, constant, relentless work from the end of the time in the womb and the early years of a child brought me to realize how much I didn’t know about it, and how sparse the available documentation seems to be. That spanned me in a different direction to try to figure out how can I find documents to make this invisible work visible. 

This goes back to what you mentioned earlier, about how asking new questions about the importance of this invisible work leads us to uncover very different histories. Other than exploring this question in your upcoming book about early childhood caretaking during the Holocaust, you are also leading a broader project funded by the European Research Council, “A Century of Care. Invisible Work and Early Childcare in central and eastern Europe, 1905-2004”. Can you talk more about this project, and about what sources will you be examining to make this invisible work visible?

This project will allow me to have a very long chronology and a very large geographic space – I will be looking at the farthest extent of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the states that have been called its successor states: Austria, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia and Poland. This is already a huge undertaking, to look at a hundred years of childcare, across such a vast territory. The way that I try to make this work visible is by using unique voices, spaces, and things. In the presentation I gave, for instance, I talked about the French Polish Jewish artist David Olère, who after the war, starts sketching about his work in the Sonderkommando working in the gas chambers. If you look through his paintings, you see many depictions of children with their mothers. This made me wonder if I could examine other Sonderkommando testimonies to see if they were also noticing the presence of young children, pregnant women, and what care looked like in those situations. 

Because of these paintings we are also able to conceptualize certain spaces where care continued to happen and allows us to look at the materiality of care because we see things that people had brought along on these long journeys when thinking about providing for their children. For instance, photographs of the arrival of people at a concentration camp is also a valuable source to examine caretaking relationships because we can see if there are people holding a baby, if they hand them off to other people, what are they carrying with them, are the children crying, what are they wearing, etc. By looking at these documents you realize that care and care networks become an important part of how the final solution became possible, because so many women -not necessarily only mothers, but often mothers- would not leave their children. By having young children with them, they would often be considered unfit to work. Care becomes an important weapon to exterminate young mothers, which is something important to think about, because it also helps us think more deeply about the role of the Jewish child in Nazi ideology, which is the focus of another chapter in my book. 

Another space I look at are playgrounds. For instance, in the city of Budapest, in 1907, there was one playground. Of course, children play in many other places, but there was one official playground. By the 1970’s, there’s 1,400. This is a complete revolution in the way that children play and the way that a new parent experiences the city. We can ask so many fascinating questions: Who is designing this playground? How did they pick the slide? It allows us to ask interesting questions about the different spaces where caretaking takes place. 

On the other hand, I will be exploring the materiality of early childcare: baby formula, infant bottles, infant clothes, objects that people used to help infants get certain skills. I am interested in the materiality of care, and it is one way that I can make things more visible.

These are some of the ways that I hope to use voices, spaces and things to identify this invisible work. 

Tibisay Navarro-Mana is a PhD Candidate in the History Department and Research Assistant at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Her research focuses on the politics of historical memory in Spain after the Spanish Civil War and the Francoist Regime, looking particularly at the intersections between memory, media and propaganda by analyzing public media representations of the Francoist Regime’s welfare system. 

John Packer is the Neuberger-Jesin Professor of International Conflict Resolution, Faculty of Law, and Director of the Human Rights Research and Education Centre at the University of Ottawa. Before taking up his position at the University of Ottawa in 2014, John was the Constitutions and Process Design Expert for the UN’s Standby Team of Mediation Experts, advising in numerous peace processes and political transitions around the world, focusing on conflict prevention and resolution, diversity management, constitutional and legal reform, and the protection of human rights including minorities. In a 30-year career, John has contributed to peace processes in over fifty countries and has advised numerous inter-governmental organizations, governments, communities, and other actors.

In your talk yesterday, you spoke about how when you started working at the UN, there was a lack of a mechanism or institution for dealing with human rights issues. Why did it take so long for the UN to adopt a more formal human rights approach?

My impression is that the line of globalization has intensified in a sharp curve up and specifically in my lifetime. Historically, we were hindered by natural frontiers. There aren’t many natural frontiers anymore. We can now communicate across oceans in real-time. Social organizations are bumping up against this integration and these organizations are less and less suitable for it. This is heavily influenced by the preoccupation of those within each state with their own competitive position. Rather than cooperative, the competitive element is predominant. That explains the opposition of states to the deep cooperative operation that is imperative for things like climate change. It is inescapable. 

The same for human rights. Human rights are not as simple as trade, which is transactional. Trade is conceptually easier and much more compelling. We can do a quick calculation and determine if it is a win-win scenario. Human rights involve much more complicated aspects of the human condition: social belonging, cultural attributes, and sentiments. Human rights are not easily tradable. There are certain things I cannot negotiate on with you. If I am a believer in Islam and I will not trade that with you, where do we go from there? Finding a way forward together becomes more complex and has implications for other elements we are trying to protect, like our economic well-being and so forth. It is not surprising that politicians and diplomats will try to stop more integration as a risk reduction and aversion policy.

I’d like to ask specifically about the institutions that work to stop genocide. You mentioned in your talk that the position of Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide is finally in existence, but that you are disappointed by the current Advisor. Could you elaborate? What is being done wrong?

The good thing is that they exist so they can therefore be activated. We have had more than a hundred years with an institution that can adjudicate international disputes. And the Genocide Convention has a special provision. States have agreed that if they do have a dispute, it will go to the International Court of Justice (ICJ). This means that the chances of implementing a non-violent dispute resolution, and potentially in time [to prevent genocide] is not just an imagined idea but concretely a possibility. That is a different thing than using it, however. 

Unfortunately, until about five years ago, there had only really been three references to the Genocide Convention in the ICJ. It had hardly been used, and that was not because there were no genocides. States were hesitant to contest things with other states and had fears of reciprocal problematic aspects. So it is fascinating that there are now a handful of cases, because we actually have many more cases than are being investigated. Tigray we could talk about, and many other cases. With the way the law works in general, we need the mechanisms to exist and be accepted. But a real key point is the habituation of it. Why do you stop at a stop sign when you drive a car? It’s not because you are worried about getting a penalty. You really stop because you are just used to doing it and you have a major self-interest in doing it. We are creating a global system. The law of international cooperation is evolving.

It is very important to develop confidence in these institutions so that those who do use them do so in a very able and effective way. I helped establish the Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide. The idea was to have some mechanism that could help states be proactive and early in addressing situations with the prospect of genocide. This requires that they use these mechanisms. I find it shocking that the current Special Adviser on Prevention has said little about China and has been silent so far on what is going on in Israel-Palestine. How is it that the dedicated mechanism is silent? If you create a mechanism which is supposed to build confidence, and that mechanism is AWOL at the time of need, that does the opposite of inspiring confidence. These institutions are still pretty fragile. There is an extra weight of responsibility on people in those positions and institutions, and they really must carry that responsibility proactively. 

You mention proactivity and timeliness.  The ICJ has just released preliminary measures and Israel is accused of genocide and a final ruling will take years. Are strategies to avoid human rights violations effective and timely enough?

The provisional measure makes more impact than an ultimate decision. An ultimate decision is by definition ex post facto. So we will have a historical record and point the finger of blame. And what will be very important at that point if there is a finding of a breach of the Genocide Convention is there would be a turn to the question of reparations. But what does it mean to repair? We are talking about things that are by definition irreparable. In this kind of atrocity, you don’t want to get to the commission stage; you want to stop them from happening. The premium was on prevention or at least stopping worse from continuing to happen. We know that the immediate people will be destroyed. Those who are sympathetic will be emboldened to work on their own and will say that international institutions aren’t worth a penny and will find their own means. That is a recipe for war and long war and nasty war. 

I am still favorable towards all of this. The provisional measures have been ordered and rely on the parties to fulfill them. To oversee this brings us to implementation mechanisms and ultimately enforcement. In international law, the Court doesn’t have a sergeant of arms or a police force, so it goes to the [UN] Security Council. That will probably not be effective either, and then it will come back to states. What will be very interesting is what states will do and will be permitted to do in fulfilling the judgment of the Court. And that is a potential Pandora’s box. Because if we have states that are divided willy-nilly in taking steps, the problem could be exacerbated, not reduced. 

I know that you are on the board of numerous NGOs, including Human Rights Watch. Could you briefly explain the importance of the role of NGOs in the peace process and in addressing human rights violations? How do they fit in with the UN and other state-based organizations in the peace process? 

The role of NGOs has grown. There is something called the mediation support network of nongovernmental organizations that specialize in this work. There is a lot of work done in what we call Track 2 and Track 3— so not official mediative processes, but non-official people with influence in society at a local level. For sustainable peace, we need these things to link up. Not only official structures, good law, leadership, and so forth, but you need the people on a local level to live together. NGOs have more latitude, flexibility, often more ingenuity, and more appetite for risk. There are problems for NGOs, however. Problems with funding, recognition, and other things. My basic sense is that the world is facing so many problems that, why should we be against anyone who wants to help? I think it is good to have and I want us to have a more robust NGO system. It is irrepressible. People want solutions and are organizing. I am privileged and honored to sit on some of their boards. 

**Editor’s note: This interview excerpt has been edited for clarity and brevity. Find the complete interview here.

Abby Zumbrunnen is a third-year undergraduate student at the University of Minnesota, majoring in Political Science and Biology, Society, and Environment.

Dr. Badema Pitic is a Head of Research Services at the USC Shoah Foundation – Institute for Visual History and Education. She earned her Ph.D. in ethnomusicology in 2017 from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on the intersections of music, memory, and politics in the aftermath of war and genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Her research interests also include oral history and testimony, transitional justice, and perpetrators’ music.

What has been the role of music in the post-war transitional justice and reconciliation processes in Bosnia-Herzegovina? 

​Music has been an important element in these processes, both formally and informally, and through several aspects of what we refer to as transitional justice processes: top-down and grassroots inter-group reconciliation initiatives, so-called “individual reconciliation” processes or individual coming to terms with a traumatic past, and public memorialization and commemorations, to name just a few. There are several relatively known examples of such a use of music, such as the case of Pontanima, a Sarajevo-based inter-religious choir that gathers singers from different religious denominations in Bosnia to perform musical works from diverse religious and other traditions in order to promote coexistence and inter-religious reconciliation. In the early 2000s, Women for Women International, for example, featured music as part of their program offerings to support Bosnian female survivors of the war – women would sing or listen to Bosnian sevdalinke as part of their “individual reconciliation.” An oratorio Srebrenicki Inferno, a musical piece commissioned and written to commemorate the Srebrenica genocide, regularly accompanies annual genocide commemorations on July 11. There are also more grassroots practices, including the izvorna commemorative music that has been the subject of my research, which has been used to not only commemorate the war and genocide in Bosnia, but also to comment on genocide denial and specific transitional justice processes and mechanisms, such as the issue of return or the work of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

You spoke in your talk about how the Bosnian izvorna songs act as a form of survivor testimony and witnessing about the Srebrenica genocide and the ongoing suffering in its aftermath. Do you see these testimonies as a force for countering genocide denial in Bosnia-Herzegovina, or is there any potential for them to do so if they were given more public prominence?

These narrative, neotraditional songs witness about the genocide by narrating about the genocide and its aftermath and, more importantly, by narrating about individual victims of the genocide. However, I would take it a step further and say that we can also observe these songs as a literal witness in itself: they were part and parcel of the wartime life in Srebrenica, during which time izvorna musicians documented the war events and victims in the area. When it comes to genocide denial, this is a complex issue. Rather then saying that I see izvorna songs as a force for countering genocide denial, I would say that I see them as another “tool” among many tools that genocide survivors employ to comment on and counter genocide denial. What is important here, at least in my view, is not so much whether these songs are successful in countering genocide denial (and we know too well that there is no proven tool to do so), it is really what they do for genocide survivors who employ and listen to them. In other words, they provide an important and needed space for expression: expression of pain, sadness, frustration, and anger that plague genocide survivors in today’s Bosnia.

You mentioned in your talk that some perceive the izvorna songs as not the most appropriate way to commemorate the genocide. Could you please say more about why that is the case?

This has to do with the relationship between religion and tradition. As you know, what we today call the Srebrenica genocide refers to the mass murder of over 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys from Srebrenica and its surrounding area in July 1995. The war and genocide in Bosnia had a religious component, which also translated into their commemoration – the annual commemoration of the genocide has strong religious overtones, for example. Many genocide survivors themselves have turned to religion or became more religious after the genocide. The fact that the question of music in Islam is contested (allowed vs. prohibited), and that music does not accompany Islamic rituals, including burial, complicates the way the Srebrenica survivor community perceives the use of izvorna music to commemorate the genocide and its victims. 

I think a lot about potential ways to foster more inclusive or complex narratives about the Yugoslav wars within the Balkans. Do you see potential in the izvorna music to do this or are you aware of other artistic interventions doing this?

Yes, that is indeed something important to address. However, I am not sure that we have reached the point when this is possible, especially in the region with a long history of competing narratives and victimhoods. Cases from other contexts also point to the danger such initiatives carry with them: the danger of relativization of victims and perpetrators and even the danger of deepening the divide, so this is truly something to be approached in a very thoughtful way. I do not think that izvorna music has this potential, especially because this is a very local practice with a very limited appeal.

Could you please tell us a bit about the new Srebrenica survivor testimonies that have been added to the Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive? How did the Shoah Foundation partner with the Srebrenica Memorial Center to collect the testimonies? 

​We’ve been very fortunate to partner with the Srebrenica Memorial Center to bring in a pilot collection of 20 testimonies of Srebrenica survivors and witnesses into our Visual History Archive, and we hope to add many more in the future. The Institute has been invested for a long time into acquiring the testimonies about the war and genocide in Bosnia. With the Memorial’s support, we are now in the process of indexing the testimonies and adding English subtitles. By being in our globally-accessible Visual History Archive, these testimonies are now available to educators and researchers worldwide as an important source for expanding our knowledge about the events in Bosnia. I am especially humbled by the opportunity to contribute to this project and to apply my subject matter knowledge in the best way possible: by elevating and preserving the stories of the survivors. 

Nikoleta Sremac is a PhD Student in Sociology and a Research Assistant at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota. She studies gender, social movements, culture, and genocide and mass violence. Her dissertation focuses on gendered memory politics and activism related to the 1990s Yugoslav Wars in Serbia.

Jelena Subotić is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Georgia State University. Her most recent book, Yellow Star, Red Star: Holocaust Remembrance after Communism was published by Cornell University Press in 2019 and translated into Serbian in 2021. Her first book, Hijacked Justice: Dealing with the Past in the Balkans, published by Cornell University Press in 2009, has been translated and published in Serbia in 2010. She is also the author of more than 30 scholarly articles on, among other topics, memory politics, transitional justice, and politics of the Balkans.

How has your research been received within the region of Eastern Europe? Have there been any positive or negative reactions?

East Europe is just as polarized politically as other regions and this polarization influences how scholarly works are perceived. My book is no exception – depending on what political perspective the reader has, the book was perceived either positively or negatively. There are groups in Serbia, for example, that are very sensitive to any criticism of Serbia’s remembrance practices, and they probably found the book to be too critical. There are other groups, many affiliated with new research centers on the Holocaust, that have been incredibly supportive and complimentary. I have given a number of lectures – some in person, some virtually – in the region since the book came out, and especially since it was published in Serbia in 2021.

How might your thesis in Yellow Star, Red Star on Holocaust memory in Eastern Europe be situated within broader contexts regarding memory politics and cosmopolitan memory? For example, how might European Holocaust remembrance compare to the ways that post-colonial countries frame their memories of colonial crimes?

The relationship between Holocaust remembrance and colonial remembrance is very important and has historically not been sufficiently studied. This is changing, however, with scholars taking a closer look at how one influences the other. The work by Dirk Moses, for example, very explicitly argues that what keeps Germany from more comprehensively dealing with the memory of its colonial crimes is its Holocaust memory, which is not supposed to be compared to anything that came before or after. But, histories of colonialism and reluctance to acknowledge colonial crimes or provide any restitution for colonial violence is related to reluctance to deal with collaboration and complicity in the Holocaust in the West, for example in France. There is a firmly established national narrative that claims that because France (or the Netherlands, or Belgium) resisted the Nazis, a nation so virtuous should not be accused of mass crimes, such as crimes of colonialism.

How does anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe, related to memory politics of the Holocaust, fit with strong diplomatic ties to Israel for countries like Poland?

The relationship between antisemitism against the local Jewish population and foreign policy towards Israel has become almost completely decoupled, not just in Eastern Europe and Poland, but also elsewhere. Part of the reason for this is the politics of Israel itself, as Israel has increasingly cared more about how other countries support it in international organizations (such as the United Nations, for example) and whether they support its domestic policies or policies regarding the Palestinians, than how diaspora Jews are being treated. In other words, Israel cares much more about Israel and Israeli Jews than about diaspora Jews. It may issue complaints or stern warnings about an antisemitic incident here and there, but it is much more important if Poland continues to support Israel’s foreign policy at the UN. This is not necessarily a new issue as the tension between Jews in what was then colonial Palestine and diaspora Jews predates even the formation of the state of Israel. For countries like Poland, Hungary, and others, where there is clearly existing antisemitism, and even official antisemitism from the countries’ leaders, constantly pointing to the “friendly relations with Israel” serves to inoculate the country from criticism about antisemitism. In a sense, this state of affairs serves the political needs of both Israel and these countries, while it leaves local Jews very vulnerable.

At the end of Yellow Star, Red Star you call for “memory solidarity” across identity groups of Eastern Europe. Could you please share a bit more about what this more inclusive, alternative memory of the Holocaust might look like? Is there an Eastern European alternative to the “Western cosmopolitan memory” of the Holocaust which can account for local complicity but also non-Jewish suffering during World War II?

Memory solidarity is an idea, an aspiration, and I build here on the previous work on memory solidarity by Michael Rothberg. The idea is to have space in our memories – at the individual but also at the societal level – for the memories of others, and to make memories of other groups also important. This call for memory solidarity is a result of the observation that so much of political memory is memory of our own suffering, and that memory does not leave space for memory of the suffering of others. As I discuss at length in the book in the case of Lithuania, so much of Lithuanian political memory is the memory of Soviet occupation and deportations of Lithuanian citizens to Siberia. But that memory – however legitimate and important – is so overwhelming that it does not leave space for memory of the suffering of Lithuanian Jews, who were almost all murdered in Lithuania before the Soviet occupation. Memory of both should co-exist, even if the majority population is drawn to remembering only their own suffering.

Are you aware of any activism or other efforts to perform such memory solidarity in Eastern Europe? Are there any lessons activists or practitioners might take from your research?

Yes, there are a number of local groups that are trying to bridge this divide. In Lithuania, for example, there were civic groups of ethnic Lithuanians who wanted to memorialize the victims of the Holocaust and organized marches in small towns and villages in the Lithuanian countryside from where Jews were taken to be shot. These kinds of actions point to the possibility of memory solidarity – where one group remembers the suffering of the other and pays respect and memorializes it in a way that is inclusive.

In your talk, you mentioned a project you are working on now related to looted Holocaust art in Europe. Could you please tell us a bit more about that or any other upcoming projects for you?

I am working on a new book project that will be the history of international art restitution. Specifically, I will look at how restitution of art looted during the Holocaust has changed since WWII, with new understanding of art provenance and new norms about return to owners. I will then explore how these changing norms about art restitution are influencing current debates about return of art looted during colonialism.

Nikoleta Sremac is a PhD Student in Sociology and a Research Assistant at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota. She studies gender, social movements, and collective memory of mass violence. Her dissertation focuses on gendered memory politics and activism related to the 1990s Yugoslav Wars in Serbia.

I jumped in and pointed out that Colombian paramilitaries also committed atrocities, yet the government negotiated their demobilization a decade earlier and rightly did it so. The taxi driver paused for a moment in silence and then replied: “You’re right. At the beginning, paramilitaries only eliminated drug addicts, prostitutes, gays, and communists. Then, they started to do drug-trafficking, and that is when they went bad.” 

In Cali these days, and in other parts of Colombia, this is exactly the kind of mindset at work as we witness white SUVs running into the protesters at roadblocks and shooting at them. In an intercepted communication that Colombian media recently circulated, a vigilante laid out his modus operandi. “We go to the police officer in charge of the area and tell him – we tell him, we do not ask for permission – that we will approach the protesters and try to convince them to remove the roadblocks. And if they don’t get convinced, then we go back and take care of them” – with lead. 

In a country in which a part of society thinks that way at all levels of the social pyramid, the democratic process has little incentive to converge onto the center and support more encompassing and more moderate arrangements that isolate the extremes. There will always be people who will be ready to turn to their own guns if they do not get what they want. And the party that is willing and able to apply the greatest force will be the one that will ultimately have the upper hand. A race to the bottom will ensue: “When they go low, we will go so much lower.” 

For over a decade during my time in Colombia, I have devoted my sociology to identify channels that might help expand the horizon of civil interactions across a variety of social and institutional scenarios and have attempted to convince the parties on one side and on the other that this was the only path to sustainable gains for all. 

There comes a time in life, though, when one needs to acknowledge one’s own limits and accept that there are actors within society that will play the civil game only till it serves their own interests and that when it does not, or no longer, then they will opt for violent confrontation and for a war of attrition. 

Before this bitter realization, one is confronted with a question that is hard to elude: “And now, what?” One option is to leave my sociology and do something else in life. Paraphrasing Adorno, to do sociology of the civil sphere in certain contexts is almost like writing poetry after Auschwitz.

It is not barbarianism, but one is left powerless and without teeth in the face of barbarianism. It is a bit like writing sermons of hope in Germany or Italy in 1941 or in East Berlin in 1965.

Carlo Tognato is a Senior Policy Fellow at the Center for the Study of Social Change, Institutions and Policy (SCIP) of the Schar the School of Policy and Government at George Mason University.

To hear Carlo discuss his newest work, please click here.

Michael Soto: So one of the things that we’re interested in is this idea of the righteous, which originally comes from use related to the Holocaust. Has there been resistance by either the authors, the protagonists they write about, readers, or others about using the term the righteous in these different contexts as opposed to related to the Holocaust as it’s usually associated?

Carlo Tognato: Let’s say that in general, across various societies, for example, the US, attempts to extend the categories that come from Holocaust memory to other contexts that do not belong to Holocaust memory have always been pretty controversial. So some people believe that those kinds of extensions, are in a way, diluting or are hijacking the true Holocaust experience. And then there are others, also within the Jewish community, who believe that actually, the extension of those categories and those experiences from the Holocaust memory to other setting or other situations outside the very phenomenon of the Holocaust are a way to even redeem the very experiences of some of the victims of the Holocaust.

For example, when the Trump administration went along with the policy of family separation at the border, Jewish activists came to Congress and staged a protest that this was a group … called the Never Again Action, and they said that as Jews, they had an obligation to step up and show that in the face of certain kinds of injustice and the specific experience of family separation they couldn’t be indifferent. And so, they had to stand up and take a position. So in societies, it has been controversial. Some have thought that this is legitimate, and some others thought it’s quite illegitimate to extend those categories outside the phenomenon of the Holocaust — categories that were born out of the Holocaust experience.

Among the authors of the book, there have been cases that talk about the experience of righteous that were born out of Jewish communities in Vienna or Berlin. And so, in those cases, in a way, the Holocaust memory is there [in] the background. And there are other cases, for example, the case from Australia, that talks about the actions that doctors and doctor associations took in defense of the immigrants that were secluded in detention centers, sometimes in little islands in the Pacific. …

And then there are other cases in which Holocaust memory is not even latent and it’s not even in the background. And so in these cases, the authors of those chapters, you know, cases from Mexico, from Cyprus, from Columbia — they are looking at the experience of civil courage of particular actors, but what the book does it juxtaposes the memory of the righteous in the Holocaust to cases in which that memory is there, within the cases and it’s evoked or at least indirect — and with other cases in which it doesn’t play a role.

So in a way, that juxtaposition constitutes a sort of narrative intervention on our part by means of which we are trying to translate the experience of certain actors, within certain contexts, to some broader audiences that might use the category of the righteous to understand what those actions within those specific cases (actions of civic courage) might actually be about.

And so, in those cases, the authors are not referring directly to the category of the righteous but, again, the book provides an umbrella to juxtapose those cases — to draw some parallels and incite us to see potential points of [comparison], but also potential differences. […]

Michael Soto: Related or another idea that recurs or comes up in the book is the idea of how it’s sort of a reinforcing cycle. How the acts of the righteous — either inspire or provide insight into a different way of doing things — a better way of doing things, and others sort of follow. Could you tell us more about that?

Carlo Tognato: Okay, there are various factors that have been found to influence the decision of the righteous to stand up and act. There are some in the literature, especially in the Holocaust literature, [and] some have been identified as psychological factors. There are other social factors, for example, the belonging to certain organizations, certain political parties, or gender or religious beliefs. … And then there are other institutional issues that create (or not) the opportunities for the person to act, and you know to actively engage in action, and, you know, be courageous in a moral, civil way.

So what scholars have found is that none of these factors seem to be sufficient by their own to move the person to engage in an act of courage — of moral and civic courage. What we do in the book is that we are focusing also on one specific cultural dimension, and what we are saying is that in order to enact some civil courage, people also needed to be culturally competent and culturally competent about how the horizon of inclusion and exclusion –how that border between outsiders and insiders is defined {culturally speaking) –in civil communities.

And competent about the history of the trial and errors that within a certain specific context, people who belong to those contexts have experienced and therefore they know what we anticipate when they engage in the breach of that horizon of inclusion and exclusion within their own civil community.

And the more we can cultivate that kind of cultural competence –to understand how that border between insiders and outsiders is defined and upheld — the more people will be able to work out ways to breach it and ways to see the cracks in between those borders. 

And they will be able to engage in those acts. They’re trying to modify those borders, while reducing the risk of doing so. What has been found in the literature is that competence is important for people to engage in acts of courage, and what we are doing in the book is to underscore that among all the different types of competence, like you know organizational competence, psychological competence, there is a very specific aspect of cultural competence… and we focus on that.

So essentially there are various factors that play out to make it to allow people to be courageous and the idea is that if we reflect on those ingredients and, in our case on the cultural ingredients, we will be able to make people reflect on what they need to look at in their everyday life, in order to be able to work what are the channels that can be conducive to change. […]

So the idea is that people who engage in acts of civic courage have to understand the risks involved in contesting the social groups or their society that demarcates insiders from outsiders. Because obviously any attempt to contest those borders would be met by backlash and by the defensive reactions of the guardians of that order, who will try to reabsorb the breach and push those who engaged in some breaches back. […]

The people who engage in acts of civil courage are … trying to engage in something that is right, but they are pragmatic enough to understand that the way to achieve that may entail a lot of constraints, and they have to be creative about searching for the cracks that allow them to contest the border between the insiders and outsiders, minimize backlash or reactions, try to make those contestation stick, and come across as authentic and convincing to other people within their own to the communities.

** This interview excerpt has been edited for clarity and brevity. To listen to Dr. Tognato further discuss the concept of the righteous and his new book, please click here.

Michael Soto is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology and fellow at the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Globalization Change (ICGC). His dissertation research is on the transition to peace in Colombia, with a focus on reintegration and reconciliation processes.

Tibisay Navarro-Mana: What sparked your interest in Spanish history, and specifically the experience of Spaniards that were deported to Mauthausen?

Sara Brenneis: My interest in Spanish history blossomed when I lived for a year as an undergraduate student in Madrid. I was an exchange student living with a host family, and I just remember being really intrigued by the conversations around the Francoist period.

I was living with two younger hosts; one of whom was gay and had a partner, which sparked a lot of conversations about the transition and Spain opening up. On the other hand, I would hear from my host mother about the dictatorship, and I just became fascinated about that period of Spanish history.

All this was before the law of historical memory. So you could still see monuments dedicated to Franco, and he was still on the currency, the peseta. So that was what opened me up to Spanish history. Then, when I was working on my dissertation, my advisor suggested that I read Montserrat Roig’s  Els Catalans als camps Nazis (Catalans in Nazi Concentration Camps), and I was fascinated.

I was surprised that I didn’t know anything about the history of Spaniards having been deported to Nazi Concentration Camps, given that I have been studying the Spanish Civil War and the dictatorship, so I was surprised and at the same time, incredibly fascinated with what happened to these men and women.

During your talk, you focused on the representation of victims through literature or through art, specifically the drawings in their memoirs. How do you think that adds, or even changes, the learning of this history as opposed to more traditional or official narratives? Do you think these cultural representations bring a different perspective? 

I firmly believe that art, literature, drawings, photographs, film, and narratives actualizes what we think of traditional historiography. It is something that I have been working with since I was in graduate school. We can read the historiography; we can learn about the facts, the data, but its representation in fiction provides an idea of the personal side of the experiences.

Literature and other forms of art sometimes take some creative liberties with history, but I personally don’t think that the fact that people write fiction about historical events or make fictional films necessarily detracts from our understanding of history. I think you need to be a critical consumer of these different materials to separate fact from fiction, but for example, novels such as Joaquim Amat-Piniella’s K.L. Reich were written based on the author’s own experience. He consciously wrote a fictional account, but what happens in the novel (the details and the context) is all historically accurate. It just gives us a different lens through which to view the history of Mauthausen.

Can you speak more about historical memory in Spain and about the different organizations that work in trying to keep this memory alive? 

Sure, it has really become a groundswell of what I would call grassroots movements. Amical de Mauthausen, for example, the main organization that works with Spanish survivors and family members of victims of Mauthausen, has been around since the 1960s. It was formed in 1963, and it was an illegal organization until Franco died. There are other organizations that are just loose groups of family members and relatives of people that were deported to Mauthausen. They have been the impetus for people in Spain to read about or to see small monuments that commemorate the victims of the concentration camps.

Most of these projects have not been funded by the government, but by individuals who are interested in seeing this historical memory transform the Spanish landscape, so you can see monuments dedicated to people that were deported from Spain. These organizations fill in where the government has been lacking. Because of different political ties that have been going on in the last decades, there has never been consistent funding for any commemoration or memorials for Spanish deportees, and here is where these grassroots organizations fill in. They are the ones who take groups of high schoolers to Mauthausen every year, who organize talks by survivors and family members, and who do presentations in schools. I think this has made historical memory is visible in Spain right now. 

So the lack of support, lack of funding, or even an official narrative that still allows debates on whether or not Franco’s dictatorship was good or bad. Unlike other countries that had totalitarian regimes in the 20^th century, in Spain we don’t see the rejection to that ideology from the government, and that must be really hard on the victims of the Civil War and the post-war repression. 

Exactly, it is terrible — especially this debate on whether Francoism was good or bad for Spain; or the ongoing debate where some people feel like talking about this period of time means the opening of old wounds. And for the victims, survivors, and their families, who need to have their suffering acknowledged by the state, it is not about opening old wounds, but about healing.

It is healing through the acknowledging of what they and their family went through, what the country went through, and also the acknowledgement that the Spanish government was complicit. We can draw a specific line to Franco and his regime and how they disavow themselves of the Spaniards that were sent to Mauthausen. There is a direct line — an uncomfortable connection — but it is one that has to be acknowledged for Spain to move forward and to move towards a healthier relationship with its historical memory. Other countries in Europe have already grappled with this: in France, in Germany, these debates have already been settled, and in Spain they are still ongoing. 

Both victims of the Civil War and the Holocaust are passing away. How do you think this will affect the historical memory building moving forward?

Unfortunately, it really depends on these survivor and family member groups to keep this issue in the public discourse. […] now that we don’t have these survivors to talk to and listen to their first-hand accounts, we are still even more dependent on the kinds of cultural representation that I have been studying. Now we have to depend on all these other groups and all these publications that are trying to tell us these stories in a kind of post-memory world. 

Do you think that official recognition from the government is necessary for both these organizations and the family members of the survivors?

I think it is definitely a step in the right direction. The previous law of historical memory didn’t even mention the deportees to Nazi camps; it was based entirely on victims of the Civil War and the Francoist regime. At the least, acknowledging the existence of Spanish victims of Nazi violence is an important step. Any move that the government makes to acknowledge people that have been silenced or forgotten is a positive step.

In terms of the work that I do, one of the benefits is the reorganization of the archive — making more archival material [available] to scholars and to students. To understand more about the history and the individual stories, we need access to the documents, and there are small steps that they are taking with the law that would be very beneficial. Poco a poco! (little by little). 

Yes, when I was in school, I never learned about the deportation of Spaniards to Mauthausen. 

Yes, exactly and the pedagogical materials are there: novels, movies, memoirs. As I said in my talk, there were Spaniards deported from every single region in Spain without exception. That means that every school curriculum from each region could find someone from that region that was deported to Mauthausen, and that would be a great gateway to learning about that history. If high school and college students can begin to learn about this history, it could have a huge impact on understanding not only the Civil War or the Second World War, but the different issues with fascism, refugees, or economic crises that are present today.

You mentioned that you just published a book this year about the intersections between Spanish history and the Second World War.

Yes, it is a collection volume on Spain, the Second World War and the Holocaust that we just published in April, called Spain, the Second World War, and the Holocaust: History and Representation. Dr. Gina Herrmann and I worked for almost a decade to bring together a collection of different essays and articles from an international group of scholars, all of whom are working on aspects related to Spain’s presence in the Second World War. We have perspectives from different countries and from different fields, and we are hoping that the book is a good resource for people that do not know much about how Spain fits in the bigger picture of the Second World War and the Holocaust but want to learn more. 

** Note: This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity **

Tibisay Navarro-Mana is a PhD student in the History Department at the University of Minnesota. She is an international student from Spain, and her research interests focus on the politics of historical memory after a period of mass-violence and genocide. She is interested in exploring collective and individual memory in Spain and Germany after the Spanish Civil War and the Holocaust, respectively. 

Nikoleta Sremac: One thing I’m curious about which you mentioned in your talk is the application of the concept of trauma from psychiatry and psychology to sociology, or other fields where it’s used in a collective sense like this idea of cultural trauma. What is your take on that concept?

Ran Zwigenberg: I’m very ambivalent about that concept. I don’t reject it completely. I think there are a lot of good arguments made by very smart people for social trauma. However, I’m ambivalent about using psychological concepts that pertain to particular psychological events and individual bodies and expanding them to the body politic or the social body. This has too much resonance to organic ideas of community which I’m very hostile to. It also for me is a bit of a shortcut that I don’t want to take. There is an example in my book, where one scholar said that there is a lapse between the Holocaust and the 1960s when people start talking about the Holocaust and this corresponds to the lapse in PTSD where you only feel the symptoms later on. I don’t buy this. There are very good reasons for why people start talking or don’t start talking at particular moments. There was actually a particular point in time we can point out. It was a very conscious decision made by the government to make people start talking. They put people as witnesses on trial. I think we should use different kinds of narratives and different kinds of sociological explanations here.

What do you think scholars are not taking into account when transporting these concepts?

First and foremost, historically, it’s an anachronism. People of different eras did not experience trauma the way we experience it today. It doesn’t mean they didn’t suffer or have anxiety and other symptoms that we may now see as PTSD. But we have to be very aware of the fact that we are taking a category we have now and retroactively putting it onto different historical situations. They are also neglecting the cultural ethnocentricity of their concepts. The concept of PTSD was developed in 1980 in the U.S. in relation specifically to the Holocaust, Vietnam, Hiroshima, and other places. It’s essentially an American notion, and it’s still not used as much in other cultural situations. To apply it to various places like Israel in the 1950s, France, Europe, the Soviet Union, Serbia in your case—culturally it doesn’t work. It’s doubly problematic when we talk about Japan and other non-Western contexts. It doesn’t mean it can’t be done, but it has to be done very carefully, and you have to be careful about confusing individual experiences with social experience. The mechanism is different. 

Sure. But I think it’s trying to get at this part that you do mention about constructing a narrative of this experience. People do that collectively.

But why are you calling it a trauma? Why do you want to use this term? It’s easy. I don’t think the originators [of the term] meant for it to become a shortcut, but I think for a lot of people it has become one. A shorthand for a whole array of things that are put into one box and called trauma. Different people and communities have different narratives they construct to explain—let’s call them social wounds. One example is the Harkis who fought for the French during the Algerian War of Independence and were then resettled in internment camps in France. The Harkis talk about how they “keep the wound alive,” and pass it on. This might be again a problematic metaphor, but it’s still recognized as a metaphor. We don’t think about social trauma as a metaphor; we think of it as a real thing. 

Thank you; that’s very helpful. Could you please describe your book that’s coming out and your previous research?

My first book, which built on my dissertation, was about memory culture in Hiroshima and its connection and entanglement with the Holocaust. The main thrust of the book is the rise of the idea of survivorhood, as a trope and as a historical process of creating transnational figures of the survivor, the witness, and the like. What I wanted to do in this new book is to write both the pre-history from the Japanese point of view and also the post-history. What was the historical impact of the globalization of those categories? How does this happen and how do we end up with PTSD? What I’m aiming to do in this book is look, as much as possible, at the terms that survivors used at the time to understand their own experiences, and how they were understood by researchers. The book is meant to historicize PTSD in a trans-cultural context.

Could you talk a bit about the terms that survivors were using in Hiroshima at the time and about the development of PTSD as a concept?

Generally speaking, most people cannot discern, both the survivors themselves and doctors, what is somatic, for example, the physical impacts of radiation or starvation, versus the impact of mental shock, or what we now call mental trauma. For survivors, fatigue is the biggest category of symptoms: muscle issues, headaches, nightmares. They talk about their lack of ability to get up in the morning and continue with life. Sometimes people mention wounds of the heart. A lot of times and this is more from work about veterans, they try to rationalize what happened. They don’t really make the connection between their alcoholism and the war. They focus more on the connection between their alcoholism and their inability to find a job. Further, if you don’t believe your trauma is real, this has a mitigating effect. You think: “I shouldn’t be traumatized.” I mean, they did not even think in those terms because no one thought in those terms. If you don’t have the concept, you don’t interpret your experience that way.

They describe issues that we now might say are symptoms of PTSD, but as I said yesterday, you cannot discern causation. These people were also discriminated against because they were survivors and because a lot of them had physical disabilities. People didn’t want to marry them. How much of their anxiety and other symptoms were due to the fact that a lot of them were from very low socioeconomic backgrounds? Most of the bombs were dropped on the center of town and on low-income neighborhoods. People had less resources and ability to pull back from this, and their health was worse, to begin with. There are so many different things that impact this.

A lot of times, these processes leave the survivors in a situation where the real care is done primarily by social workers and nurses and communities. Mostly, women [and not] at the hospital. And this is my last chapter, which I hope I can write. I really want to give a whole chapter to care and praxis of care, because there is a pattern of denial, up until again there are a couple of male heroes that come in. Once the guys are done playing the research game, all the anxiety and social ills fall on women in society. I’m trying to capture this historically, but it’s very hard. People didn’t leave documents. Social workers didn’t write long treaties about how they did their work. 

Because they didn’t think anyone would care?

Or it was oral. Or it was just that the next worker came around and they were too busy. They were not paid enough to have time to sit down and write. They didn’t think it was important enough; they didn’t see the historical context. It might just be another book, but this is what I’m doing now. 

They probably would have the most accurate or insightful descriptions of what people were facing. 

Yes, because they had to deal with this! They had to deal with the husband who didn’t want to go to work, who couldn’t leave the house, who made them the breadwinner and also took out all his frustration on them. They were also carrying the burden of how society treated the guy. It’s tragically classic in a way. I started doing this because I went and looked. I really, really wanted to see how people dealt with this. I want to understand people’s experiences on the ground, and in those documents, I find social workers again and again. I find that they were the ones who would come and go to people’s houses. They were the ones who would collect the data. They were the ones who talked to people. I’m sure there’s some kind of corpus of knowledge that they developed; I just don’t know how to get there. It’s still a work in progress.

That’s great that you’re trying to document that, though, and trying to find that information to include it. I agree that’s really important.  

I’m interested in women who are picking up after all the mess that we [i.e. men] made. A lot of this is similar to my own experience. I was in the army, and when I went back after combat, who had to deal with my moods? It’s very mild compared to what these people went through, but my mom had to deal with this. My girlfriend had to deal with this. I didn’t go to a psychiatrist. I went to a care worker at City Hall. I know that similar things happen to survivors all over the world. And it’s not even institutionalized. It doesn’t even have to be social workers. It can be women in the household.

Could you talk about how some of this has changed in Japan, in terms of the construction of survivors as something that is more accepted now?

It almost went from something people were ashamed of to something people are proud of. Even though some people still don’t want to talk about it, the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are highly regarded in Japan overall as a peace symbol. This is related to the way that the government is pushing the idea of Japan’s unique position as a non-nuclear country. At the same time, if you look at what happened to survivors of Fukushima, they are treated very similarly to how Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors were treated [i.e. discriminated against]. My good friend who works on nuclear production and accidents all over the world has said that radiation makes people invisible. It’s true—once people are contaminated, people don’t care about them. It’s amazing how immediate it is.

Does this sort of stigma continue in Japan even though survivors, in theory, are highly valued?

Yes, because there is a hierarchy of victimhood. Some victims have more status than others. If your event becomes a foundational event for the nation, or institutions, or global memory culture as a whole, you have much more of a voice and status—if you choose to use it. It’s a different situation when people don’t want to talk about it. Then they feel bad because they’re not a “good survivor.” Another example is that people like to talk about civilian victims but no one wants to talk about military victims, because it’s inconvenient. I know a PhD student working on memory maps. There is an app in Hiroshima now, which lets you walk with your phone and see exactly where people were hit by the bomb. It’s an amazing tool, but there are huge gaps. One thing I noticed is there was this enormous military compound in Hiroshima right in the middle of the city, not very far from where the bomb was dropped. And there were 40,000 soldiers there. About half of them became casualties, and the other half, no one really knows. If you walk through this area, there’s not a single memory that was recorded there. It’s totally erased. It’s not on purpose. It’s just a structural idea of whose memory is valid, whose trauma is valid, and whose message will be heard. 

I’m studying Serbia, which is considered a perpetrator country of the wars in ex-Yugoslavia. Nonetheless, when I talk to people there, they have a lot of pain and difficulty with the violence that was done to them, too.

Japan is a perfect example of this. When I went to the museum about the war there, the thing that really shocked me is that the first thing you hear is that on August 6^th, 1945, the bomb was dropped on Japan. What do you mean it was dropped? The use of passive voice is a strategy that divorces the war and Japan’s role as perpetrator and America’s role as the perpetrator, because it’s very convenient. You don’t have to talk about the past, you can just talk about the bomb. History starts August 6^th. To isolate little areas historically or geographically gives you a much purer idea of victimhood. I don’t know what happened in Serbia, but I guess if you go to a Serbian museum of the wars, you’ll see a very particular notion of Serbian victimhood.

Yes, the U.S.-led NATO bombing of Serbia. That’s what is primarily focused on, which nobody talks about here.

It’s the same everywhere. It’s the nation-state. I’m very suspicious every time nation-states take it upon themselves to commemorate anything, even with the best of intentions like the U.S. Holocaust Memorial or Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Power, national narratives, all those things will come into the individual situation. Memories become the tool of nation-states.

What will your next book be about?

The next book will be on the military history of Hiroshima and what was erased by the whole narrative of Hiroshima as a peace city. It is a place that is supposed to commemorate something, yet they always look forward to healing. It’s supposed to leave a memory behind and keep it alive but it’s sort of a paradox. Institutional memories always have a greater goal: reconciliation, peace, democracy, stability, healing, economic recovery. All of those things need forgiveness and forgetting, yet memory institutions keep wounds alive, and those wounds also have a tendency to forget whatever came before them and to overshadow narratives of nationalism, perpetration, and the like.

Fascinating.

I hope so. It interests me, but, you know, it might just be my obsession. 

*Responses have been edited for clarity and length.

Nikoleta Sremac is a Ph.D. student in Sociology and a Research Assistant at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota. She studies gendered power relations and collective memory, primarily in the former Yugoslavia and the United States.  

George Dalbo: You have said that it took leaving Germany for you to get to a place where you could conceive of writing your graphic memoir. Could you expand on this? Additionally, is there something about settling in the United States, your current personal or professional situation, or the present political or social climate that also influenced your decision to write the book?

Nora Krug: Many different factors contributed to my writing this book. One of the strongest was definitely that I left Germany. This is probably an experience that many people have had; when you leave your home, and you find yourself surrounded by people who are not from your cultural context, you suddenly begin to realize how deeply rooted you are in your own culture, and you are simultaneously confronted with your own culture in a much different way than if you had never left. Of course, growing up in Germany in my generation, we learned so much about the Second World War and the atrocities that were committed, but we learned about it collectively. When you remove yourself as an individual from that context, you are suddenly forced to confront the subjects on an individual rather than a collective level because you are approached about them as an individual by the people around you. This, at least, has been my experience. Also, settling in New York City, which traditionally had been the major port of entry for refugees from the war, I was much more aware of the effect that my cultural heritage could have on my neighbors and my friends, many of whom are Jewish. That certainly contributed to my thinking about the book, as well. Had I moved to Seattle or the Midwest, I probably would not have felt the same confrontations.

In the United States, one often hears that Germany has done such a good job confronting their own difficult past with World War Two and the Holocaust, especially. Do you think that this is the case? In your opinion, what have been some of the gaps in the way Germany has approached its difficult past?

I think Germany has done a very good job when it comes to remembering, memorializing, and collectively making public commitments to taking on responsibility so that such things will never happen again. You can see this, despite the recent far-right-wing extremism in Germany,  in everyday German life and in German politics, as well. People go to the barricades very quickly when such developments happen. Just this week, you saw an example of this; the public outcry when the Conservative party [Christian Democratic Union] basically collaborated with Alternative für Deutschland. It was very satisfying to see how quickly people reacted to that in a negative way, a critical way. Where we still have a lot of work to do is on an individual level. I think that a lot of the experiences that we had, as I mentioned before, were collective and institutional. This is tremendously important; if institutions do not recognize and acknowledge the mistakes that a country has made, that is a huge problem for the country. I’m not trying to diminish the collective aspect, but the individual effort is as important because if you only memorialize collectively, you avoid the personal confrontation, and this can lead to a sense of tiredness about having to address the subject as a group, a feeling of being burdened by that task, which, I think, many Germans feel. If you do not approach the subject on an individual level, you can not take agency, individual agency. That is what I tried to do with my book, to think about investigating my own family, because I perceived it as something freeing. It freed me from this paralysis of feeling guilty but not knowing what to do about it. I have not overcome my feelings of guilt, but I have addressed them on an individual level, which made me feel like I had some agency as an artist and as a writer to talk over these things. It made me feel that I had a more constructive way of dealing with the guilt.

For the graphic memoir, you rely on several sources to reconstruct your family history, such as local and national archives, family documents, flea market finds, and personal reflections. In many cases, such as with your grandparents, who had passed away, you were unable to have conversations with family members about their experiences during World War Two. How does this shape the narrative? In what ways does this make your work similar or dissimilar to other works in this genre of Vergangenheitsbewältigung [“working through the past”] memoirs?

I think it was similar for most Germans; the grandparent’s generation did not talk much about these things, and, because of that, our parent’s generation did not know much about their experiences. It was not so much that our parents did not want to talk about these things and deprive us of these stories; they themselves had no information because their parents did not talk about their experiences. Older generations also did not have access to all of the technological tools and the research documents available today. Actually, they could not have gone beyond conversations with their parents or grandparents. In other words, the internet did not exist, and certain documents were not made open to the public at that point, so, even if my parents had wanted to go further with trying to find out about the past, they could not have accessed the same materials that I was able to access. I think my generation has many more entry points into this kind of research, and with my book, I really tried to think of any way in which I could get information. The archival research was just one type of research. I did also have conversations with people who were still alive and who knew my family in person. I conducted interviews with people who took the place of my grandparents. Also, there are the flea market objects and items, which, to me, provided both a collective and personal entry point into that period because they represent objects that were used and collected by many Germans. Such research allowed me to represent a collective German point of view, not necessarily a family member’s point of view from my family. At the same time, it is also a highly individual view; I was able to connect to these objects on an individual level even though they belonged to people I did not know at all.

Who do you see as the audience for the book? Especially as the memoir is released in translation, how do you imagine non-German audiences are connecting with the work?

Every country has its own perspective, experience, and narrative surrounding World War Two. I think that we all construct narratives about traumas retroactively. These narratives say something about our culture, and, for Germans, that narrative is obviously and completely steeped in guilt, as well as neglecting to talk or writing about German loss during the war. The Germans are incapable of really considering what the trauma of the war and the Holocaust did to them; certainly, we brought this trauma on ourselves, but it is still a trauma that we are trying to deal with to this day. I think that it is difficult for some Germans to admit this because it would put us in a position of victimhood. In the United States, there is a very different narrative, which is one of the United States as the liberator, and there is sometimes very little nuance given to different narratives that existed on the American side as well. I have noticed that when I am traveling with the book in the countries where it has come out that the responses I receive and the questions I am asked are informed by these different cultural perspectives. In Germany, the book has probably found its biggest audience, which is because a lot of Germans can identify with this story and this viewpoint, and many Germans have not tried to write about their own personal narrative. They really have not been able to figure out how to do that. Again, maybe this is because talking about one’s own losses is considered inappropriate. To some Germans, my book seems like an entry point for conducting this kind of family research. Indeed, I’m often asked by German audiences how they can begin to do such research. For many people, both German and non-German, there is little consideration that there could be a German viewpoint that is not just the Nazi perspective. I think it is very important to consider these other views because we can learn so much from them. If we try to understand how people came to think this way, we can prevent these things from happening again in the future. I think it is very important to get inside the more intimate, nuanced German war experience. What has been really satisfying when traveling with the book has been that people in all the countries I’ve been to so far have been able to translate the idea of responsibility for a national past to their own country’s history, whether this was a Canadian audience talking about First Nations people and the lack of work that has been done around that or the history of slavery in the United States. In France, journalists talked to me about the importance of actually discussing the French collaboration with Germany which has been underemphasized there because of a focus on the resistance, The memoir has been understood on a universal level, which is the best thing that could have happened, because it is not really about my family or about Germany, but it is about something more universal than that.

In addition to illustration, you use many photographs, both personal and not, in the memoir. Could you speak a little bit about your choice to use photographs and some of the ethical considerations you weighed in using them?

I’m somebody who really believes that it is our responsibility not to look away. Of course, if there is an exploitative aspect to using the photographs, then that is wrong. I think that if you can use images sensitively, you have to show them because we owe it to the people who perished to not look away. I think we owe it to them to confront ourselves with their hardship. That is not only true for World War Two and the Holocaust, but it is also true for things that are going on right now. I Think about how little we know about the conflict in Yemen and how rarely we actually see photographs of injured children, though they are being attacked on a daily basis. I think that once we see these things, we feel much more compassionate. In the course of writing the book, I thought very carefully about how to use images. One of my biggest goals was not to create a sense of false sympathy for the Germans or a sense of sentimentality, which images can very quickly do if they are used in the wrong way. In several images in the book, you see dead bodies in the background, but I decided that I wanted to focus on the German facial expressions and the reactions. On one particular page [see image below], I eliminated the dead bodies entirely because I wanted to show the moment when the German guilt actually set in and what it looked like. I wanted to show how the guilt was visually manifested in their faces and gestures. For me, there was almost something reminiscent of Renaissance paintings about that. Here I really felt that you needed to see what the cause was that led her to look like this.

In the next photo [see below], you have an idyllic landscape that looks very innocent, but the photo shows the contrast of what was actually happening all this time underneath the surface, which we were completely unaware of. In the photo, you can see this; you can experience this ignorance in a way. I think that it is very important to show these images, but it is also equally important to think about how you show them. 

George Dalbo is the Educational Outreach Coordinator for the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and a Ph.D. student in Social Studies Education at the University of Minnesota with research interests in Holocaust, genocide, and human rights education. Previously, he was a middle and high school social studies teacher, having taught every grade from 5th-12th in public, charter, and independent schools in Minnesota, as well as two years at an international school in Vienna, Austria.