Susan Slyomovics

(University of California, Los Angeles)

The Afterlives of Wiedergutmachung: Algerian Jews and Palestinian Refugees

In a landmark process that transformed global redress after the Holocaust, Germany created the largest sustained program of Wiedergutmachung. My book, How to Accept German Reparations (2014), discusses my grandmother and mother, Czechoslovakian Jewish survivors of Auschwitz, Plaszow, and Markkleeberg camps, who disagreed about taking reparations. Acknowledging reparations claims allows for victim recognition, yet indemnifications provoke difficult questions about measuring suffering: How much or what kind of violence merits compensation? How to account for variation in German reparations and French restitution directed solely at Algerian Jewry for Vichy-era losses? Do crimes of colonialism merit reparations? How might reparations models apply to the modern-day conflict in Israel and Palestine?

The lecture will be held in English.