Rethinking Holocaust Memory Courses and Curricula in German Studies: The Holocaust-Nakba Nexus

Jason Groves (University of Washington)

Toward the close of a recent article on “Rethinking Holocaust Memory After October 7,” Marianne Hirsch, one of the most distinguished scholars of Holocaust Studies of her generation, shares a notable admission: “I cannot imagine a course on the Holocaust that would not include reflections on a Palestinian narrative following from the Nakba and acknowledging its continuity.” In the interest in imagining and supporting the development of such courses within German Studies programs, I want to linger for a moment on what makes this admission noteworthy. I see it as an admission in at least two senses of the word: first, as an acknowledgment or concession of something widely held to be true and, second, as a process of being allowed to enter somewhere, like a place, an organization, or an institution. I welcome Hirsch’s admission as an opening within Holocaust Studies (and German Studies, too) for Palestinian narratives and for the acknowledgment of the Nakba and its relation to the Holocaust. (In the interest of brevity, I will not rehearse the myriad connections that scholars have elaborated between the genocide of European Jews during the National Socialist regime of World War II and the atrocities, including the forcible dispossession of over 750,000 Palestinians from their homes, that accompanied the founding of Israel, but I include a selected bibliography of this scholarship below.)

To be sure, it would be easy to overestimate the importance of Hirsch’s essay, given the existence of numerous Palestinian narratives that have elaborated these very connections for decades. At the same time, it would be difficult to underestimate the importance of Hirsch’s advocacy. As I recently noted in DDGC organizing spaces, a cursory search in 2024 of the entire online catalogues (going back to 2005) of the respective journals of the two largest professional institutions in German Studies yielded only three results for the term “Nakba,” two of which come from book reviews. In one of those journals, “Palestinian” appears only twice over this entire 19-year period.

How do you imagine a course on the Holocaust that would include reflections on Palestinian narratives of the Nakba when the main publication organs of your field’s institutions do not attest to the existence of Palestinians, let alone the Nakba? How do you begin to plan such a course? Hirsch’s admission comes toward the close of her article, and we are not left with any elaboration of such a course, though the article itself could certainly figure into it. Unfortunately, you would not be assisted any further by consulting the journal that names as its mission the devotion to “the improvement, innovation, and expansion of the teaching and learning of German language and culture.”

Notwithstanding the studied ignorance and enforced historical amnesia of our leading institutions, there are initiatives, like the current DDGC reading group series and the DDGC Germanists for Palestine Research Cooperative, that have formed to make space for, among other things, the collective study and production of scholarship that would form the basis of a course such as the one that Hirsch envisions. Below I offer something of an annotated bibliography of texts that helped me (or will help my colleagues and me in the future) imagine, plan, and teach a course on postwar German memory culture that makes the connections that Hirsch regards as “imperative.”

In my case, this was for a lower division course for non-majors on German memory cultures, with a focus on Holocaust remembrance. We spent week eight (of a nine-week course) reading and discussing excerpts from The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, Palestinians (2020) by Sa’ed Atshan and Katharina Galor, with a focus on what they term “the “Holocaust-Nakba nexus.” This was not the only text to connect Holocaust remembrance in Germany with the Nakba. Students had encountered such connections in previous weeks in the article “Memory Citizenship: Migrant Archives of Holocaust Remembrance in Contemporary Germany” (2011) by Michael Rothberg and Yasemin Yildiz, as well as “Comparison Limits – ‘Touching Tales’ of Atrocity: An Anthropologist’s Reflections” (2022) by Damani Partridge. Additionally, we spent some time reading and evaluating different frameworks, forms, and genres for connecting histories of violence and their remembrance. Offering this course in a format that only allowed 19 meetings made it somewhat compressed, and the knowledge that other courses will have significantly more meetings, combined with the research that I have done since then, means that I include below several readings that were not included in the first iteration of this course. 

I first made the discovery of the absence of the Nakba and of Palestinians from these German Studies journals—and I readily admit that my scholarship is implicated in this absence—while fruitlessly searching for a review of The Moral Triangle. (There are a handful of reviews, most notably one by Anna-E. Younes in The Journal of Palestine Studies, which insightfully details the book’s shortcomings.) The Moral Triangle is an ethnographically-based study of the overlapping historical events that the authors refer to “the Holocaust-Nakba nexus,” as it has been experienced and perceived (or not) by inhabitants of Berlin, home to the largest Palestinian diaspora in Europe, where the authors collected over 100 interviews with Germans, Israelis, and Palestinians. It is a highly accessible book that addresses a number of topics central to a study of contemporary Germany, including the politics of migration; demography and the politics of statistics; racism, antisemitism, and Islamophobia; and political activism, while also offering brief but useful overviews of interpretive frameworks for their ethnographic material, including discourse analysis, moral philosophy, urban studies, and restorative justice. It lends itself to being excerpted, as I did in my course over the course of two sessions, or it could be taught in its entirely over four sessions or so. Instructors would be advised to read Younes’s review of The Moral Triangle, if not also assign it, for a critical perspective of how “the book furthers the mythmaking project of liberalism where a colonial power gets to re-/fashion itself as the magnanimous guarantor for spaces of colonial reconciliation.” Younes takes issue in particular with the “rose-tinted” lenses through which the book regards Berlin and the German state, in particular its unwarranted optimism regarding prospects for the redress of injustices experienced by Palestinians in the city and beyond.

While The Moral Triangle gives voice to a broad cross-section of Berlin’s inhabitants as they engage with these two overlapping historical catastrophes of dispossession, the book does not reflect on the figure of the “nexus” that plays a significant rhetorical role in the book’s main figure of the Holocaust-Nakba nexus. Here Marianne Hirsch’s earlier work can offer some insight into, as she writes in the Public Books article, the “connective methodologies that relate, without conflating, distinct historical catastrophes, while also granting each its own historical specificity and evolution.” The first chapter of Hirsch’s influential study The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust(2012) is not infrequently taught in the German Studies classroom. However, it is specifically a chapter in the book’s final section (Chapter 8, “Objects of Return”) that fulfills Hirsch’s more recent imperative “to connect the memories and postmemories of the Holocaust and the Nakba, connections that are essential to what Edward Said called the ‘bases for coexistence.’” It does so by reading a Palestinian narrative of return (Ghassan Kanafani’s novella Return to Haifa) alongside two Jewish narratives of return to Łódź (Lily Brett’s novel Too Many Men and Bracha L. Ettinger’s Eurydiceseries of photographs). Hirsch’s advocacy for, and performance of, a feminist, connective reading of these works that address distinct but related histories could well inform the curriculum that she envisions. (For a broader discussion of the pedagogies of connective reading within the framework of what Michael Rothberg terms “multidirectional memory,” I also suggest consulting Nick Barr, Jazmine Contreras, and Johanna Mellis, “Memory in Action: Reflections on Multidirectionality’s Possibilities in the Classroom.”)

Another landmark book published in the same year as Postmemory, Judith Butler’s Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (2012), offers a more sustained theorization and demonstration of the connective reading that Hirsch rehearses. In the particular context of Hirsch’s call, I would highlight Chapter 5 and the connective readings that Butler discovers in the essays collected in Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory (2007) as well as the connective reading that Butler practices as they read Benjamin’s reflections on memory in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” together with Palestinians testimonies of dispossession and claims for justice. “Remembrance,” the chapter concludes, “may be nothing more than struggling against amnesia in order to find those forms of coexistence opened up by convergent and resonant histories” (113). I couldn’t imagine a more urgent objective for a Holocaust memory course. 

The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History (2018), edited by political scientist Bashir Bashir and historian Amos Goldberg also deserves mention here. The introduction could pair well with a discussion of the “Holocaust-Nakba nexus” in The Moral Triangle and any of the readings in Part 1 in particular would be apposite in a German Studies course on Holocaust memory.

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The connective reading that we examined and practiced in my course—looking at how and where distinct histories, aesthetics, commemorative acts, and/or reading practices are interconnected—extended beyond the Holocaust-Nakba nexus. An argument made by Michael Rothberg and Yasemin Yildiz in their 2011 article, “Memory Citizenship: Migrant Archives of Holocaust Remembrance in Contemporary Germany,” invites a much broader rethinking of Holocaust memory in German Studies. Given that “migrants are recognized as already bearing and transmitting memory of Germany’s recent past,” then, they continue, 

The non-organic nature of such remembrance and transmission is not an aberration, but rather something closer to the norm: as generational change continues to distance all Germans from the National Socialist past, migrant subjectivity vis-à-vis national history might become a model for how to remember and retain responsibility for a nation’s past crimes. (42–43)

Rothberg’s and Yildiz’s study of the future of Holocaust memory from transcultural and transnational perspectives has been bolstered by two recent books: Esra Özyürek's The Subcontractors of Guilt: Holocaust Memory and Muslim Belonging in Postwar Germany (2023) and Damani Partridge, Blackness as a Universal Claim: Holocaust Heritage, Noncitizen Futures, and Black Power in Berlin (2022), in particular Chapters 4 and 5 of the latter. Instead of Blackness as a Universal Claim, I assigned Partridge’s “Comparison Limits – ‘Touching Tales’ of Atrocity: An Anthropologist’s Reflections,” which is collected in Tales That Touch: Migration, Translation, and Temporality in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century German Literature and Culture, edited by Bettina Brandt and Yasemin Yildiz. In it, Partridge makes a case, like Hirsch, for methodologies of connection and touch over those of comparison, out of a concern with what Partridge sees as the latter’s reductive and totalizing tendencies. The questions of language, of naming, and of overnaming that surface in all of these readings are handled most carefully by Butler in Chapter 5 of Parting Ways, though readers today might find their reticence unnecessary.

Below is a selected bibliography for teaching the Nakba in German Studies courses on Holocaust memory, which I have compiled in part by drawing on others’ bibliographies.

Bibliography

Al-Taher, Hanna, and Anna-Esther Younes. “Lebensraum, Geopolitics and Race—Palestine as a Feminist Issue in German-Speaking Academia.” Ethnography (2024): 142–68.

Atshan, Sa’ed and Katharina Galor. The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, Palestinians. Duke UP, 2020.

Barr, Nick, Jazmine Contreras, and Johanne Mellis. “Memory in Action: Reflections on Multidirectionality’s Possibilities in the Classroom” in Memory Studies Vol. 16, no. 6 (2023), 1671–78.

Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg (eds). The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of History and Trauma. Columbia UP, 2018.

Butler, Judith. Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism. Columbia UP, 2012.

Gessen, Masha. “In the Shadow of the Holocaust.” The New Yorker, December 9, 2023. 

Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. Columbia UP, 2012.

Hirsch, Marianne. “Rethinking Holocaust Memory After October 7.” Public Books, July 15, 2024.

Jewish Currents staff, “Bad Memory.” Jewish Currents, July 5, 2023. See here for a German translation.

Khoury, Nadim. “Postnational memory: Narrating the Holocaust and the Nakba,” Philosophy and Social Criticism, Vol. 46, No.1 (2020): 91–110.

Mishra, Pankaj. “The Shoah after Gaza.” London Review, March, 2024.

Özyürek, Esra. The Subcontractors of Guilt: Holocaust Memory and Muslim Belonging in Postwar Germany. Stanford UP, 2023.

Partridge, Damani. “Comparison Limits – ‘Touching Tales’ of Atrocity: An Anthropologist’s Reflections” in Tales That Touch: Migration, Translation, and Temporality in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century German Literature and Culture, eds. Bettina Brandt and Yasemin Yildiz. De Gruyter, 2022: 323–32. 

Rothberg, Michael. “From Gaza to Warsaw: Mapping Multidirectional Memory,” Criticism: 53, no. 4 (2011): 523–48.

Rothberg, Michael, and Yasemin Yildiz. “Memory Citizenship: Migrant Archives of Holocaust Remembrance in Contemporary Germany.” Parallax 17, no. 4 (2011): 32–48.

Saʻdī, Aḥmad, and Lila Abu-Lughod. Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory. New York: Columbia UP, 2007.

Samudzi, Zoé. “‘We are Fighting Nazis’: Genocidal Fashionings of Gaza(ns) After 7 October.” Journal of Genocide Research (2024): 1–9.

Younes, Anna-E. Review of Sa’ed Atshan and Katharina Galor, The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, Palestinians in The Journal of Palestine Studies 5, no. 2 (2022): 81–83.