The collective memory of events is not linear in its intensity, beginning with prominence and then fading to obscurity, nor is independent from identity or political complications of the present. With the Holocaust, the complications of who remembers, when, and with what interpretive lens, has taken on an especially contested character. The papers that make up this session explore specific moments of the Holocaust’s reemergence in consciousness, all in some manner shaped by conflict. This includes invocations of the Holocaust in the context of war and attempts to re-approach lingering questions of complicity.
The Biafran War/Nigerian Civil War was a deeply contentious ordeal that took place between 1967-1970 and claimed the lives of upwards of 3 million Igbos. Many statements were given in response to this crisis, but none as provocative as that of former US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger who labeled the Igbos the “Jews of West Africa.” This would not be the first nor last time global spectators of the Biafran War would draw comparisons between the atrocities attributed towards the Jews during the Holocaust and the experiences of the Igbos in Biafra. This paper asks in what ways did post-Holocaust consciousness affect international responses to anti-Igbo violence prior to and during the Biafran War (1965-1970) and to what extent did these framings have enduring effects on the Igbos in the post-Biafran epoch?
This paper presents the contours of a new book that charts the necessity of Catholic institutions to know their history and navigate submerged memory, in order to be part of the project of repair today. Grace of the Ghosts: A Theology of Institutional Reparation (Fordham University Press, 2025), sets out a roadmap for navigating memories of institutional complicity in the evils of White supremacy that have been death-dealing in the United States. With micro-histories of some among the ghosts who haunt specific Catholic institutions – of university and parish – the paper details some ways of navigating memories of harm toward institutional reparation.
What does it mean to identify with former East German writer Christa Wolf as scholars in Holocaust studies? Through her elegiac efforts, I argue that we too can begin to confront our complicity in the oppression of others past and present. Focusing on Wolf’s novel Patterns of Childhood, I consider what it has meant for me as an American Jew to see myself mirrored in the life of a former Nazi through Nelly, the Nazi child Wolf’s protagonist once was, a child, like Wolf herself, raised and educated under the Nazi regime. I ask what we might learn about how, at least this one former Nazi child, a writer spent the rest of her life working through her past as it continued to shape an ever-shifting present. To do this, I turn to key moments from chapter 11 of Wolf’s novel, a chapter that begins with the final solution.