This project jointly investigates German and US “memory cultures,” which, though asymmetrical and distinct, are nevertheless firmly bound by politics, history and decades of cultural exchange. Drawing on the expertise of Prof. Dr Jens Gurr (University of Duisburg-Essen) and Prof. Dr William Donahue (University of Notre Dame, USA), and attending both to production and reception, this joint research venture addresses cultural interventions in broader socio-political memory practices. The specific outcomes are threefold: 1) a seminar for students of the University Alliance Ruhr to be taught jointly by Professors Donahue and Gurr; 2) a conference on the topic of German-US comparative memory cultures, to include international scholars as well as students from the aforementioned seminar; and 3) an anthology of essays emerging from the conference. The conference title is ‘Beleaguered German Memory Culture: Implications for the Public Humanities and Social Sciences’.
The term “Erinnerungskultur” (memory culture) refers somewhat elliptically to a plethora of diverse phenomena – didactic materials, monuments, public rituals, museums, historical sites, etc. – meant in the first instance to preserve and promote the memory of the genocide against European Jews. The second term in this decidedly elastic compound noun (Kultur) embraces all these efforts – and possibly many more – and in doing so suggests a truly pervasive ethos. Culture, after all, is everywhere (Raymond Williams). In this sense, the term may exceed its charge of descriptive inclusivity and begin to answer the very question it should pose: namely, to what extent do these various attempts at prompting memory actually succeed? And how would we know? To what degree do they actually suffuse society, and to what extent are they shunted aside, overlooked, or even outright rejected? Is this a matter, as Barbie Zelizer cleverly put it, of Remembering to Forget (1998)? Any study of memory cultures, such as the one proposed here, must include, but also look beyond, production and public display to consider more finely grained matters of meaning and reception. By juxtaposing German and American memory cultures we stand to learn significantly more about each than by studying them in isolation. The comparative approach illuminates in both directions, suggesting questions and categories of analysis that may otherwise have remained obscure.
Prof. William Donahue
University of Notre Dame (USA) | Film, Television and Theatre; German Studies; European Studies
William Donahue is Professor of European studies, Cavanaugh Professor of the Humanities and Professor of German at the University of Notre Dame (USA). A scholar of contemporary German literature and film, Donahue is a concurrent professor of film, television, and theatre. His research interests include contemporary European Studies (migration, refugees, European Union, populism), German literature and film, Holocaust Studies, German Jewish Studies, and art as a form of protest, social engagement and community building. He is the author of Holocaust as Fiction: Bernhard Schlink’s "Nazi" Novels and Their Films and The End of Modernism: Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-Fé.
William Donahue has served as chair of the University of Notre Dame’s Department of German and Russian Languages and Literatures. He is co-director of the Notre Dame Berlin Seminar, which brings American scholars of German literary and cultural studies together with experts and leading figures of Germany’s literary scene. He holds a PhD in German Literature from Harvard.
William Donahue has been a visiting scholar at the University of Duisburg-Essen several times and co-editor of andererseits: Yearbook of Transatlantic German Studies together with Georg Mein and Rolf Parr.
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© Daniel Schumann
Prof. Dr. Jens Martin Gurr
University of Duisburg-Essen | British and Anglophone Literature and Culture
E-mail: jens.gurr@uni-due.de
©
© Daniel Schumann
Prof. Jens Martin Gurr
University of Duisburg-Essen | British and Anglophone Literature and Culture
E-mail: jens.gurr@uni-due.de
Jens Martin Gurr has been Professor of British and Anglophone Literature and Culture at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany, since 2007. Research interests include 17th-21st-century English literature, contemporary Anglophone fiction, as well as literary and cultural theory. Thematically, he works on public functions of narrative, conflict narratives, climate change fiction and climate change communication, theory of models, literary urban studies, urban cultural studies, transatlantic comparative memory research, theories and methods of inter- and transdisciplinary research, and functions of literature and of literary studies in pluralist societies. He is the author or co-author of six monographs, including Charting Literary Urban Studies: Texts as Models of and for the City (Routledge, 2021), and (with Julia Hoydis and Roman Bartosch) Climate Change Literacy (Cambridge University Press [Elements series], 2023). His most recent book, Understanding Public Debates: What Literary Studies Can Do came out with Routledge in June 2024. He is currently completing a monograph provisionally entitled Enlightenment Controversies: The Literary Self-Enlightenment of the Enlightenment, 1720-1800. Jens Gurr is a member of the UDE University Council and of the Board of Trustees of the Volkswagen Foundation. In research, teaching and administration, a consistent concern has been to define and strengthen the role of the humanities in academia and in society generally.
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