Michael Rothberg

Restitution, Repair, and Implication: Afterlives of Colonialism and the Holocaust in the Humboldt Forum

New Frontiers in Memory Studies

Lectures Series of the Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform

Michael Rothberg (UCLA/Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin)

Restitution, Repair, and Implication: Afterlives of Colonialism and the Holocaust in the Humboldt Forum

May 7, 2025
6pm
Campus Westend, IG 311

What does it mean for individuals and institutions to be ‘implicated’ in past violence? This is an urgent question across nations and continents, but it has a particular force in Germany.  In recent years, the German public sphere has been agitated by debates that concern the relationship between the Holocaust and colonialism, antisemitism and racism, and Holocaust memory and violence in Israel/Palestine. These debates have intersected with a longer-standing dispute about colonial legacies that has centered on the reconstruction of Berlin’s imperial palace and the creation of the Humboldt Forum. The Humboldt Forum debate involves the afterlives of colonial structures, stolen artifacts, and human remains. In this lecture, Michael Rothberg will address the stakes of these different debates. Much of the controversy about the relationship between the Holocaust and colonialism concerns the past, but Rothberg’s approach also foregrounds what it means to live in the wake of such histories of violence and addresses questions of memory and responsibility, restitution and repair.