For a long time, Europeans held the sovereignty of interpretation over colonial history in academia as well as in some wider audiences. This panel explores how the history of colonial violence, economies and knowledge production can be reappraised without the creation of new hierarchies. How can we develop, write, and communicate a shared history? What are the possibilities and limits of such a history?
Manuela Bauche | Bridging Divides? Entangled Injustices and German Memory Politics
My talk takes two histories as a starting point: the history of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics (1927–1945) whose eugenic research impacted on a wide range of people whom we have come to understand as belonging to distinct “groups”—Rom*nja and Sint*izze, Jews, Black people, Asian-Germans, poor people, disabled people; and the history of the German state’s engagement with its colonial past. I argue that these histories reveal several understandings of “shared history”. I stress that there is sufficient historical evidence for considering histories of injustices that we have come to engage with separately, together—without dismissing their differences.