Agnes Mueller

In the organizer's words:

Migration history of the Holocaust: The future of the culture of remembrance

Lecture

With the passing of the generation of Holocaust witnesses, important forms of direct communication of Holocaust remembrance are also dying. This applies to the victims as well as the perpetrators and viewers of survivor narratives. This loss influences how we think today about migration, marginalized groups, social and economic mobility, gender, the environment, and issues of ethnic and social attribution.

In her lecture, Agnes Mueller analyzes contemporary German Jewish literature by important writers such as Olga Grjasnowa and Kat Kaufmann. She will show how they productively process their ever-changing Jewish identities and their sometimes controversial views of Holocaust memory in fictional texts. It becomes clear how more recent texts in particular deal with themes of Jewish ancestors and Muslim identities in a new context of multilingual writing influenced by migration experiences.

Agnes Mueller is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina (USC) as well as a core member of USC's Jewish Studies Program and an Associate Faculty Member in Women's and Gender Studies. Her numerous publications include Holocaust memory, German Jewish history and culture, German-American relations, and gender in contemporary German literature. Agnes Mueller is currently the Carol Kahn Strauss Fellow in Jewish Studies at the American Academy Berlin.

In cooperation with the Heidelberg Center for American Studies and the American Academy Berlin