Taboo, Trauma and Identity

Palestinians in Germany and Switzerland, 1960-2015

8. Mai 2023 – Sarah El-Bulbeisi (Orient Institut Beirut) – Online Vortrag 16.00-18.00 Uhr (BerlinZeit)

Although the Nakba is closely intertwined with the history of National Socialism, to this day it is not only not remembered as part of European history, but it is excluded from European collective memory and public discourse, its commemoration is suppressed. In my book, I show how Palestinians in Germany and Switzerland have been dealing with the tabooisation of their experiences of violence. I show how this tabooisation shaped conceptions of the self and the world of different generations of Palestinians and the relationships between them.

Sarah El Bulbeisi is a postdoctoral research associate at the Orient-Institut Beirut (OIB) with a focus on postcolonial studies, gender studies and psychoanalysis. Before joining the OIB, she was a research associate at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) in Munich and coordinator of the DAAD Higher Education Dialogue “Violence, Forced Migration and Exile: Trauma in the Arab World and in Germany” between Palestinian and Lebanese universities as well as the LMU. She did her PhD at LMU Munich and her licentiate degree at the University of Zurich. Among her publications: Tabu, Trauma und Identität (Bielefeld (Transcript) 2020) and “Palestine in the Imagination of the Imperial German Self” (Jerusalem Quarterly, 82, 77).

Teil von The Historicity of Democracy Academic Blog of the HISDEMAB collaborative research project of the Leibniz-Association on the Historicity of Democracy in the Arab and Muslim Worlds.

Literaturhinweis:

Sarah El Bulbeisi: Palestine in the Imagination of the Imperial German Self. Gustav Dalman and the Bavarian War Archive (Jerusalem Quarterly 82, 77ff)