Place, Nationality and Identity

Place, Nationality and Identity
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This discussion activity will have three parts. Please make sure you answer each part, hitting the minimum word count listed for each question.

Part I: You just read the debate about German identity and the site of the former SS and Gestapo HQ. In your own words, describe the two competing visions of place in the debate and what they each said about German identity. Which side of the debate do you support? Why? (250 word minimum)

Part II: Germans decided to confront their Nazi past through place by creating the Topography of Terror. In the US we also have shameful historic events. Please list a minimum of three shameful historic events/sites in the US that you think should be memorialized on the landscape so people never forget (like was done in Germany). (No minimum word count)

Part III: Let’s consider the events of January 6th, the day Congress was raided by Trump supporters. My guess is at some point a memorial will be set up to remember this day. What that memorial will look like however, will largely depend on what groups have the power to create the memorial and fix the memory of that day for future generations. As a thought experiment, answer the two following questions:

What might a memorial to January 6th look like if Democrats were in charge of creating it?
Conversely, what might a memorial to January 6th look like if Trump himself were in power to create it?
These are obviously hypothetical so there is no right or wrong answer. I just want you think about how an event can be memorialized or remembered in very different ways depending on who has the power to create the memory in place (250 word minimum).