In the panel discussion, Jens-Christian Wagner, Director of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation, and Noa K. Ha, Director of the German Centre for Integration and Migration Research (DeZIM), will discuss the co-opting of remembrance and how memory can become the foundation for solidarity.

The panel discussion is part of the theme day »GEMEINSAM – GEGENWART – GEDENKEN« (TOGETHER – THE PRESENT – REMEMBRANCE) → Overview of the theme day at the festival centre

Dr. Noa K. Ha is a researcher specialising in urban studies, migration and racism. She is the Research Director of the German Centre for Integration and Migration Research (DeZIM). As an urban researcher, she most recently taught at the ‘Weißensee Academy of Fine Arts Berlin’. Prior to that, she conducted research at the Centre for Metropolitan Studies (CMS) at the Technical University of Berlin. She sits on numerous urban advisory boards and advises research projects in the fields of postcolonial memory work and commemorative policy, integration research and the critique of racism, as well as the history of migration in eastern Germany.

Prof. Dr. Jens-Christian Wagner is Director of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation in Weimar and holds the Chair of History in the Media and Public Sphere at the University of Jena. He studied history and Romance philology in Göttingen and Santiago, Chile. After completing his PhD at the University of Göttingen with a thesis on the history of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp (2001) and working on the permanent exhibition at the Peenemünde Historical and Technical Museum (1996–97), he was a visiting researcher in 2000 on the research programme ‘History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society under National Socialism’ in Berlin. From 2001 to 2014, he headed the Mittelbau-Dora Concentration Camp Memorial (Nordhausen) and subsequently the Lower Saxony Memorials Foundation (Celle) and the Bergen-Belsen Memorial.

Nicole Schweiß is a teacher of German, educational studies, drama, literature and art from Cologne, and an advocate for anti-discrimination education. She hosts the podcast ‘Kleine Pause – Begegnungen in der Teeküche’, in which she takes a diversity-sensitive, anti-discrimination and, as far as possible, multi-perspective look at the German school system.