Jennifer Evans, Associate Professor, Graduate Chair, Dept of History, Carleton
Remembering Pink Triangle Victims: Making Space for Queer Place in 21st Century Berlin
My paper looks at the acrimonious debates that led up to the 2008 building of the memorial to queer victims of National Socialism in Berlin. Instead of thinking of this battle over definitions of persecution (which pitted gays against feminists and lesbians over whose history should be encapsulated in the monument) as an example of the corrosiveness of identity politics, I argue it might be more useful to see it as an exercise in place making, that is, as the process by which memory and history gell and become fixed in actual material space. Efforts to make the memorial speak to everyday oppressions, those both in Germany and abroad, afforded it a more fixed (though no less problematic) meaning as a site of reflection, pilgrimage, and memory. Contemporary Berlin’s importance as a site of 21st century rights struggles is forged in large part because of its location at the intersection of multi-perspectival (often emotionally-charged) narratives of place.