The 2026 Annual Holocaust Memorial Day Lecture

Professor Ruth Mandel will delivery this year's Holocaust Memorial Day Lecture titled: By whom, for whom? Ways of remembering the Holocaust

Lecture Summary:

German artist Gunter Demnig’s memorial project, Stolpersteine (stumbling-stones), is Europe’s largest decentralised memorial to Holocaust victims. For the past thirty years, Demnig has created and installed small brass plaques into the pavements in front of homes from which Nazi victims were deported. Extending to over 30 countries, to date more than 130,000 of these memorial plaques have been embossed with names and fates of individual victims.

The stumbling-stones disrupt the visual and embodied experience of urban landscapes. In doing so, they reinforce uncomfortable narratives of victimhood and national memory ownership. The talk raises issues concerning the ethics of memorialisation and the diverse responses to the stumbling stones. Why are they requested, supported, and cherished in some places, but banned and vandalised in others? Additionally, the talk addresses how the wide range of invented rituals at the individual installation ceremonies reflects local understandings of the past, along with thorny issues such as denial, complicity, resistance and reparations.

Biography:

Professor Ruth Mandel, University College London, received her PhD from the University of Chicago, Department of Anthropology. Her early work focused on migration between Turkey, Greece, and Germany, and her prize-winning book, Cosmopolitan Anxieties: Turkish challenges to citizenship and belonging in Germany was based on this research. Her subsequent research in Kazakhstan focused on media and development, and migration. Her current research, collaborating with Dr Rachel Lehr, addresses Holocaust memory and commemoration in Europe, specifically on artist Gunter Demnig’s Stolperstein project; they are writing a book stemming from this research.

In 2023 she was a Visiting Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University, and in 2024, was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. She was a Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, a Kennan Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D. C., and has received numerous research grants including Fulbright, DAAD, ESRC, AHRC, among others.

Free tickets can be booked here.

Stolpersteine image by Boudewijn Huysmans via Unsplash.