From memory wars to memory work : relational remembrance in Pınar Öğrenci’s Aşît [The Avalanche] / Michael Rothberg

Abstract

Over the last five years, a series of acrimonious debates has taken place in Germany about Holocaust memory, antisemitism, and Israel/Palestine. In one of the most visible of those disputes, an enormous scandal rocked the 2022 documenta fifteen international art exhibit in Kassel. This lecture reviews the recent memory wars in Germany and then turns to a work that was displayed at documenta fifteen but was not part of the controversy swirling around the exhibit: Pınar Öğrenci’s film Aşît [The Avalanche]. This film, which concerns the tangled histories of violence directed against Armenians and Kurds in a remote town in eastern Turkey, does not address the terms of the German debate directly. However, as Rothberg argues, in weaving together multiple histories of exile, trauma, and catastrophe, Aşît offers a mode of relational remembrance that suggests alternative possibilities for coming to terms with the past in contemporary Germany - and beyond.