Michael Rothberg

By taking migrants seriously as subjects of national and transnational memory, this essay picks up where Haacke’s project leaves off. It re-envisions the ‘population’ parallax as an active bearer of memory, rather than as merely a passive object of commemoration. Such a perspective uncovers the multidirectional and transcultural memory work of the population at large: it draws attention in particular to the formation of as-yet under-recognized archives of migrant engagement with the German national past, with a history and memory of which they are ostensibly not

Multidirectional Memory brings together Holocaust studies and postcolonial studies for the first time. Employing a comparative and interdisciplinary approach, the book makes a twofold argument about Holocaust memory in a global age by situating it in the unexpected context of decolonization. On the one hand, it demonstrates how the Holocaust has enabled the articulation of other histories of victimization at the same time that it has been declared "unique" among human-perpetrated horrors.