An event in the framework of Shaping the Past

Join us for a conversation about “Approaching Reconciliation, or the Discomfort of Remembrance” between Shaping the Past Fellow Patrick Weems, Executive Director of the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, Berlin-based American philosopher Susan Neiman, author of Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil, artist Glenn North, Co-Liaison of the Community Remembrance Project Missouri in Kansas City, and Dave Tell, Co-Director of the Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Kansas.

The conversation will touch on two places of remembrance for victims of lynching—Levi Harrington in Kansas City, MO and Emmett Till in the Mississippi Delta—whose horrific deaths are commemorated through site-specific markers, performative actions, educational programs, and more. Our speakers will discuss the various approaches to memorialization in both cases, the regular attacks on these memorials, and how these acts of racial terror in the past and their memorialization in the present continue to shape these communities and our society as a whole.

Joining from both sides of the Atlantic, our speakers will talk about approaches to memorialization and reconciliation and why this can often be a long-term and painful process, both in Germany and the US. They will also explore what Germans and Americans can learn from each other through this process of facing and (re)shaping the past.   Leading up to this panel discussion, we also invite you to join us for an online screening of the documentary The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till by Keith Beauchamp, which will be available to stream between November 27-29.

Shaping the Past is a partnership of the Goethe-Institut, Monument Lab, and the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (Federal Agency for Civic Education). The project connects to the activist and artistic work of local, national, and transnational movements as a reflection of memory culture and discusses new perspectives on forms of memory.

Image: Left: Vandalized Emmett Till Marker © Ashleigh Coleman | Right: Vandalized Levi Harrington Marker © Jutta Behnen