In recent years, the remembrance of World War II has been intensified internationally to mark the war's function in local, regional, national, and transnational memory cultures. Popular documentary representations such as museums have increasingly taken over the traditional role of historiographic research in shaping public perception of World War II. This trend towards popular historiography is a reaction to new digital technologies as well as reflecting the fact that there are fewer eyewitnesses of World War II alive. Historically, war museums tended to be the ultimate example of representing nationalistic memory, assigning master narratives of victory, victimhood, heroic suffering, or resistance to the countries in question. Since the ongoing world-wide historical museum boom started in the mid-1990's, a re-orientation from merely representing the past to presenting memory forms that create relevance for present and future has taken place, increasingly in terms of understanding war, atrocities, and violence on a comparative and international stage.

The project compares 21st-century World War II museums in Europe and North America in order to understand different representational patterns of the communication of historical knowledge and the shaping of collective memories of World War II today. This project concentrates on Europe and North America by analyzing permanent state-funded exhibitions in countries with very different stakes in remembering and commemorating World War II: Germany, Canada, the U.S., the United Kingdom, Poland, and Belgium. Based on the in-person analysis of about 140 war and World War II museums in 15 countries, twelve museum exhibitions have been selected as core for the project's analysis. The comparative approach allows for a distinct comparison of various forms and functions of identity and memory construction, including representing master narratives, displaying historical knowledge, displaying a historical space wherein visitors can experience the past empathetically (including secondary historical effects), and understanding or questioning causality in history. Whereas the museums increasingly display more normative techniques of representing World War II, they also react to very specific political, ideological, and identity formation circumstances. Furthermore, the project reflects upon the impact of state-funded 'official' memory in terms of diversity in individual and local memories. The project employs various methods from literary studies (representational and aesthetic theory, narratology) and cultural studies (collective memory, identity theory, and transnational memory theory).

The project examines the range of representational possibilities of how museums can create experientiality not just in subjective or in single experiences; by creating secondary, poietic spaces. This is particularly true for museums, since any narrative component of representation happens in space and requires the visitor as an entity to complete the act of perception. These spaces do not simply reference or imitate the past, but simulate historical experience for the museum visitor, who then has a constructed experience that only emerges in the representation. It discusses the depiction of trauma, the relation of the Holocaust and World War II, experientiality, distantiation, narrative, perspective, collectivity, the balancing between documenting and experiencing the past, the relation of past and present, and futurity.

Together with Adam Muller (English, Film and Theatre, University of Manitoba).

(1) the exhibition "Synagogues in Germany: A Virtual Reconstruction," consisting of digital reconstructions of twenty-four Jewish religious sites destroyed by the Nazis during the Holocaust (Jan 27-March 4, 2017);

and (2) a research symposium entitled "Cultural Genocide in Comparative Perspective: Indigenous Studies and the Holocaust." (Feb. 3-5, 2017)

"Synagogues in Germany" is the result of twenty years of architectural research at Darmstadt Technical University working to reclaim some of Germany's lost Jewish heritage in the wake of the 1994 firebombing of a synagogue in Luebeck, the first racist attack on a Jewish house of worship in Germany since 1945. Researchers created elaborate 3D digital reconstructions of destroyed synagogues which exhibition visitors can explore from one of the computer workstations on which they are installed. Along with associated placards, photographs, text panels, and three documentary films, these reconstructions can demonstrate the nature of cultural loss by providing visualizations of destroyed architecture, recall the eradicated buildings' architectural variety and historical importance, and contribute to commemorative work ongoing in the wake of the Nazi genocide by providing a source for reflection on what the historical destruction of Jewish culture means today. The exhibition speaks to the causes and costs to a people of the annihilation of its culture. This annihilation was labeled "vandalism" by Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term "genocide" and oversaw its legal institutionalization via the UN's Genocide Convention. Along with "barbarism" or physical destruction, vandalism was for Lemkin one of the two main ways in which the genocide of a people could be accomplished. "Vandalism" has become a matter of national concern in the wake of the 2015 release of the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, which identifies Canada's Indian Residential School system as responsible for cultural genocide.

We will explore the issue of cultural violence critically and in greater depth in our symposium which is being hosted by the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation. It will bring together leading and emerging figures in Holocaust and Indigenous Studies to discuss the effects of cultural destruction on the persistence of group life. Currently, Holocaust and Indigenous scholars have very little to do with one another intellectually. This estrangement has led Holocaust scholar Dorota Glowacka to argue for the "urgent need to 'decolonize' Holocaust Studies as a discipline, that is, to challenge the inherent presumptions and biases that stem from its Eurocentric conceptual frameworks." A richer reading of the Holocaust would also benefit Indigenous Studies scholars, who typically reference the Nazi genocide only in passing, with insufficient regard for the many ways in which cultural destruction shattered Jewish and other community life, leaving victims traumatized, isolated, and for the most part unable to marshal collective resistance to the forces bent on their extermination.

Both exhibition and symposium connect closely to Canada's 150th anniversary since the comparisons they invite, and the public discussion and scholarly debates they will inspire, are intended to contribute to making better sense of Canada's history and identity, and the role played by genocidal violence in shaping both. By drawing parallels with the causes and effects of racialized cultural violence in Nazi Germany, the exhibition and symposium together will shed new light on the specifics of Canadian settler colonialism, and in the process will assist Canadians in coming to terms with, and redressing, Canada's own legacies of genocide and cultural annihilation.

In progress: Views of Violence. Representing the Second World War in Museums and Memorials. Ed. Joerg Echternkamp and Stephan Jaeger. Preliminary accepted in Series Spektrum: Publications from the German Studies Association, New York: Berghahn Books.

Views of Violence analyzes the representational and commemoration strategies in 21st-century museums and memorials to understand the most recent views on the violent past of the Second World War in the German, Austrian and European context. It presents the first collection on the English-speaking market that targets the specific media/genres of museums and memorials in the wider context of European memory culture. Whereas the Anglo-American discussion strongly focuses on Holocaust representation, this volume highlights the complex relationship of the Second World War, the Holocaust, and other discourses, of suffering and commemoration. It analyzes how permanent and temporary museum exhibitions, cemeteries, memorials, and other remembrance discourses verbalize, visualize, and mediate the Second World War for today's European audiences between experience, commemoration, and historical knowledge. The volume focuses on German and Austrian representations, supplemented by the contemporary representations in the UK, France, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Poland, the Soviet Union (and Canada). Its comparative approach centering around the German and Austrian memory allows to avoid the difficulty of other collections that seem mostly assemble individual case-studies, and develop comparative answers to most recent representation and commemoration techniques in the German and European landscape of remembering the Second World War. The volume highlights the use and framing of different visualization and narrativization techniques used by museums and memorials such as photography, film, and multi-media installations, the relationships of victims and perpetrators, as well as the temporal and spatial layers of memory with their cognitive, ethic, and aesthetic implications.

This book project derives from the activities of the GSA Interdisciplinary Network War and Violence (co-coordinated by Joerg Echternkamp, Stephan Jaeger, and Susanne Vees-Gulani). It brings together researchers from academic institutions and from museums and assembles selected papers from the panel series "Museums, Memorials, and War" at the 39th Annual Conference of the German Studies Association in Arlington, VA. in October 2015, supplemented with several articles solicited by other experts in the field.