Reckoning with the Past in Germany and the United States: The Case for Thinking Comparatively about Reparative Justice
Oct 08, 2026 | 5pm PT
2026 Feldman Lecture at Alumni House Berkeley | Speaker: Rita Chin (University of Michigan)
German atonement for the Holocaust has been widely hailed by the international community as a paragon of national reckoning, and over the last decade, African American intellectuals such as Ta-Nehisi Coates have explicitly invoked Germany as a useful model in their calls for Americans to confront the legacy of slavery and other forms of state-sanctioned racism.
In this lecture, Rita Chin, will trace the complicated, fraught 80-year process by which Germans have dealt with the Nazi past, focusing on developments and debates in the Federal Republic. She will consider the specific ways in which the German case is instructive for Americans seeking to pursue redress but also explore how Germany’s vaunted memory culture has become fossilized such that it has sometimes become a stumbling block for a German society struggling to respond to contemporary challenges. Thinking comparatively about how to reckon with legacies of state-sanctioned racial harm, oppression, and violence not only presents Americans with a concrete template for imagining what reparative justice might look like, Chin suggests, it may also help Germans acknowledge the shape-shifting aspects of racism and perhaps even rethink some of the outdated aspects of their memory culture.
If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) or information about campus mobility access features in order to fully participate in this event, please contact ies@berkeley.edu with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days before the event.
Contact Info: eclarke@berkeley.edu
Access Coordinator: Institute of European Studies, ies@berkeley.edu, 510-642-4555
About the speaker
Rita Chin, Louise A. Tilly Collegiate Professor of European History and Associate Dean of Social Sciences of the Rackham Graduate School at the University of Michigan, is a historian of modern Europe with particular expertise in immigration and human mobility, race and ethnicity, and colonialism and post-colonialism. Trained in European cultural and intellectual history, she has sought to apply these modes of inquiry to her ongoing interest in how difference and diversity have shaped the very terms of modern Germany and Europe more generally. Her research and writing have been supported by the SSRC, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the ACLS Burkhardt Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.