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January 22 | JurisTalk: From the Margins to the Centre of Holocaust Studies
January 22, 2015 at 3:00 PM
| Location: | B454 Loeb Building |
| Cost: | Free |
| Audience: | Anyone |
From the Margins to the Centre of Holocaust Studies:
Commemoration and Reconciliation Politics of the Nazi Genocide of the Roma
with Nadine Blumer
The Nazi mass murder of Roma (“Gypsies”) was not officially recognized in West Germany as an act of genocide until 1982. Several reasons, mostly having to do with how victimhood was defined by the courts and society at large, explain why it took almost 40 years for this genocide to be acknowledged. Increasingly, however, the German state is now commemorating this history of violence. The 2012 inauguration of a national Holocaust memorial dedicated to Romani victims, located in the centre of the capital city, is regarded as one of the major achievements in the Roma’s long struggle for recognition.
Why was the genocide of the Roma forgotten—or, deliberately ignored—for as long as it was? What can the new Roma Holocaust Memorial tell us about the relationship between commemorating past violence, contemporary forms of racism, and anti-racist actions? This presentation addresses these questions by charting the biography of the Roma Holocaust Memorial, prior to and since inauguration. A brief introduction will provide a historical overview of the Nazi genocide of the Roma, and how Romani leaders mobilized in the postwar years to be recognized as a victim group of the Holocaust. Blumer will then discuss the role of the memorial in present-day Romani politics.
As remembrance of the Roma genocide increasingly enters Germany’s official Holocaust narrative, the situation for Roma in Germany today—particularly those without citizenship—remains less than optimal. More often than not, this population is defined and dealt with by state and city authorities as a subject of “public concern.” These practices suggest that the state, in its selective distribution of resources—such as citizenship, right of asylum, and social justice—uses tools of redress to demonstrate discontinuity from an authoritarian past rather than as a guarantee of “never again.”
About the Presenter
Nadine Blumer (Ph.D. Sociology, University of Toronto) is a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at Concordia University. She is affiliated with the Centre for Ethnographic Research and Exhibition in the Aftermath of Violence (CEREV) where she is conducting a study on the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, Canada’s newest cultural institution. In this, and in her previous research on commemoration of the Roma Holocaust, Nadine studies sites of cultural production such as museums, monuments and heritage tourism in order to understand why societies remember some histories of violence while ignoring others. She was previously a research fellow at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, where she began work on a manuscript titled, Disentangling Hierarchies of Victimhood: How Germany Commemorates the Nazi Genocide of the Roma.