Abstract:

The expulsion of at least 800,000 Palestinians in 1947/1948 (called Nakba in Arabic) is still not remembered and mourned as part of European history, but excluded from collective memory and public discourse. The connection with the history of National Socialism is usually made only one-sided: through the representation of Palestine as a safe haven for surviving European Jews. The trauma of the Nakba is perceived as threatening because it disturbs the belief in the exclusivity of guilt for the Shoah and thus the desire for reparation and restituted innocence. This allows the systematic displacement of Palestinians to continue to this day. The lecture shows how Palestinians of different generations in Germany and Switzerland deal with the tabooisation of their experience of violence. It is based on El-Bulbeisi's book Taboo, Trauma and Identity. Subject constructions of Palestinians in Germany and Switzerland, 1960–2015 (2020), which combines (auto-)ethnographic with psychoanalytic methods.

Bio:

Sarah El-Bulbeisi studied at the University of Zurich. She worked as a research assistant at the Institute for Near and Middle East Studies at the Ludwig Maximilians University (LMU) in Munich and headed the DAAD project "Violence, Forced Migration and Exile: Trauma in the Arab World and in Germany", a university dialogue between Palestinian and Lebanese universities and the LMU Munich. After completing her PhD (LMU Munich) she started working as a research assistant at the Orient-Institut Beirut.

https://www.ici-berlin.org/events/sarah-el-bulbeisi/