The Southern Poverty Law Center on Wednesday continued its “Critical Memory Tour” in Montgomery with a panel discussion on how America and Germany remember their difficult pasts.
Dr. Andreas Etges from Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich and Dr. Pia Knigge from Montgomery’s Auburn University led the talk exploring how marginalized experiences have been silenced, distorted and now face the risk of being erased altogether.
The Critical Memory Tour is the flip side of a project that began earlier this year, with delegates from the U.S. traveling to Germany to observe how the country grapples with reflecting on the historically dark Nazi regime. The U.S. leg has German delegates touring the U.S. to see how the country paints its history of slavery and the Confederacy.
Etges explained it as an exploration of the United States’ “memory culture.”
“I would define memory culture as the way societies have tried to tell their history— and that can be in school curricula and history books, that can be in museums whether on the local or state or national level,” Etges said. “That doesn’t have to mean everyone’s telling the exact same history, but if you look at maybe the larger way a country has told, in this case here, the history of slavery or segregation—or Germany, the history of Nazi Germany or the Holocaust.”
The panel discussed how different state school curricula treats Black history and how the South in particular has minimized or sanitized aspects of that history.
Knigge recalled touring a concentration camp as part of her schooling in Germany—as most students there do—and lamented that American schools do not seem to similarly emphasize sending students to similar sites to understand the past.
On Friday, Oct. 10, the SPLC will head to Birmingham to host a panel discussion with SPLC interim President Bryan Fair, former Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley and former U.S. Attorney Doug Jones to recount their efforts to hold the 16th Street Baptist Church bombers accountable decades after the crime. A second panel will explore the long-term impacts of the bombing on survivors and families.
These events are free and open to the public.
The multicity tour takes place October 6-12, with additional stops at historic sites in Atlanta and Washington, D.C. The Critical Memory Tour blends visits to historic landmarks, public teach-ins, community conversations, testimonies from social justice activists and calls to action for policy change and education reform.
