Public Lecture Series  ::  Spring 2024

Max Czollek: "Memorials Won't Help Us Now! Memory Culture and the Rise of the Radical Right in Germany"

German poet Max Czollek, who writes about contemporary Jewish life in Germany, argues that German memory culture created a “symbolic Jew” as a counterfigure to a German “we.” According to him, Germany is mistaking remembrance for reconciliation, with the recent rise of racist and anti-Semitic violence and right-wing populism as a consequence. For Czollek, a functioning and productive culture of memory must confront its “fantasies of homogeneity,” question concepts of national greatness, and include contemporary minority voices into its
discourse.

Dr. Max Czollek was born in East Berlin. He studied political science at the Freie Universität
Berlin and received his PhD from the Centre for Research on Antisemitism at the Technische
Universität Berlin. Czollek’s works are distinguished by their multimediality: from poetry to
theater, political non-fiction to museum exhibitions, the range of his expressive forms reflects the
staggering spectrum of historical and present-day violence. Central to Czollek’s project are
questions of the tension between aesthetic practice and cultural critique—the overlap between
artistic freedom and social responsibility. In addition to Versöhnungstheater [Theater of
Reconciliation] (2023), De-Integrate! A Jewish Survival Guide for the 21st Century (2023,
translated by Jon Cho-Polizzi) and Gegenwartsbewältigung [Overcoming the Present] (2020), he
is the author of three volumes of poetry published by Verlagshaus Berlin: Druckkammern (2012),
Jubeljahre (2015), and Grenzwerte (2019).

Co-sponsored by German Studies, the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies, and the Simpson Center
for the Humanities.