Bill Niven is Emeritus Professor for Contemporary German History at Nottingham Trent University in England. He is the author and editor of many books relating to Germany’s efforts to come to terms with the National Socialist and GDR pasts, including Facing the Nazi Past (Routledge 2001), The Buchenwald Child (Camden House, 2009) and Jud Süβ: das lange Leben eines Propagandafilms (Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 2022). In collaboration with Dr. Amy Williams, Niven has also been researching the Kindertransport, and their joint book Memory of the Kindertransport in National and Transnational Perspective was published in 2023 (Camden House). They are currently writing a transnational history of the Kindertransport for Yale University Press. Niven’s most recent publication is Du bleibst da: ein abschied (Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 2024), in which he reflects on his wife’s long illness with multiple sclerosis, and her death in 2022.

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Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field?

Memory studies – broadly speaking, the field in which I have been working over the last 30 years – has developed significantly in my lifetime. When I began researching German memory of National Socialism for my book Facing the Nazi Past (2001), scholars were still thinking in national terms: how did memory of a particular event or history evolve within the “container” of the nation state? But this has changed since, as we have become more aware of the interconnectedness not just of nations, but of any form of collectivity. Transnational memory, which examines memory flows across borders, and transcultural memory, which acknowledges movement across cultures more generally, have probably been the most important research developments for me personally; cosmopolitan memory, a concept introduced by Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, is particularly important in the study of Holocaust memory, because it uses the example of the transmission of that memory over borders to illustrate a process of “internal globalization”. Michael Rothberg’s theory of multidirectional memory, which highlights how memories can collaborate in solidarity rather than operate antagonistically, has been crucial to recent developments in memory studies, as has the notion of “agonistic memory” (Anna Cento Bull and Hans Lauge Hansen), which likewise seeks to leave behind the antagonistic memory frameworks that often characterised the Cold War and replace them with approaches which acknowledge the need to remember perpetration as well as victimhood. Even more recently, as the “slow memory” project pioneered by Jenny Wüstenberg shows, issues of temporality and spatiality have become more and more central to memory studies, or to the whole issue of the role of memory in the age of the anthropocene: in looking towards the very real dangers of global extinction, in anticipating an end point, we remember the future before it has happened, an aporia, perhaps, but one we cannot ignore.

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

As I think the thoughts above demonstrate, learning to think more globally when speaking and writing of memory has been a significant factor for me. Together with my colleague and friend Amy Williams, I recently published a book (National and Transnational Memory of the Kindertransport: Exhibitions, Memorials and Commemorations) which explores the transnational memory of the Kindertransport – in 1938 and 1939, some 10,000 refugees, mainly Jewish, were rescued to Great Britain, but many of these then moved on to the USA, Canada and Australia, and indeed in some cases went there directly. That book will be followed by a new book on the transnational history of the Kindertransport itself which we are working on for Yale University Press; too often it is assumed it was only Britain which took in children, but many went to Belgium, Holland, France, Scandinavia and Switzerland, or indeed transited several countries on the route to safety (if the Nazis did not catch up with them). Overall, I would say it was the work of Levy and Sznaider on cosmopolitan memory which influenced me the most, because it helped to guide me in exploring the relationship between national and transnational memory. Far from suggesting transnational memory replaces national memory, these scholars show how one interacts with the other, inflecting each other yet at the same time being inflected by each other. But have we been too optimistic? Cosmopolitan memory suggests a transnational memory that supports human rights, but currently far-right thinking is also crossing borders with the effect of mutual reinforcement. Ironically, it is the very international collaboration between sections of the European right that is encouraging racist nationalism and views of national history expunged of all that is negative.

What is the “German national identity” after Nazi rule, and how has Nazi memory affected it? Can this national identity exist outside the concept of 'Erinnerungskultur' (memory culture)?

I am not sure there was a German national identity after Nazi rule. After all, the German nation, as a physical entity, ceased to exist, de facto after the establishment of West and East Germany in 1949. In East Germany, identity was built on socialism, or at least in theory. This enabled East German citizens to imagine that their state had emerged not from Nazism, but from antifascism, and as a result of this, they bore limited responsibility for the crimes of the Nazi past. West Germany did not develop such a clear political identity, rather it was an economic one, based on the supposed virtues of reconstruction, and the initial nominal commitment of West Germans to democracy was as it were “bought” by the West German state’s preparedness to turn a blind eye to the sins of the past. At least that is what we often read, and at the same time West Germans, by accusing the GDR of being a totalitarian state, told themselves that Nazism had........

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