Workshop

Amnesia and History Politics

Sunday, June 28, 2015, 2–6 p.m.

Monday, June 29, 2015, 6–9 p.m.

A workshop with Brigitta Kuster and Regina Sarreiter (Artefakte//anti-humboldt)

Please register: leitung@shedhalle.ch

In the year 2015, Switzerland discusses which historic date is most suitable for the production of a national history. Meanwhile in Germany, there are disagreements about artistic forms to commemorate the victims of the deadly European border policy in the Mediterranean.

With regard to the crimes of the Nazis, however, during the last decades a new narrative has been established in Germany and partly also in Austria: one is proud to remember. More and more people seem to have „understood“ and „internalised“ the Nazi crimes and the Holocaust in particular, historian Cornelia Siebeck writes.

At the same time, the slogan of a "European memory" suggests, that the European Community as the alleged cradle of democracy and humanism could, with its many different historical starting points, formulate a common memory, which makes any struggles over the interpretation of history dispensable.

But the interpretation of history is challenged: Switzerland’s colonial involvement and it’s collaborative role towards the Nazi regime is increasingly clarified and being made visible.

The aim of the workshop is to discuss concepts and strategies of a historicopolitical practice, that conceptualizes memory as the production and mediation of a „resisting knowledge“, that empowers to intervene in emancipatory hegemonic views of history.