Grandad was not a settler

The workshop deals with colonial entanglements and colonial suffering inscribed in family histories, visible for example in missionary work, plantation ownership in the German colonies or settler colonial emigration to the Americas. The aim is to bring these very personal colonial histories to light and to reflect on what this means for one's own identity, commitment and culture of remembrance. How is your liberation bound up with mine?

The examination of one's own family involvement in colonial rule has so far been a blank space in educational work. While Nazi perpetration is now widely reflected upon and concepts such as biography work, archive studies, memorial site education or transgenerational processing of trauma for war children and war grandchildren are available for this purpose, a similarly critical approach to colonial family history has hardly been observed to date. One way of making these buried memories visible again and approaching historical responsibility is to reappraise stories of emigration to Canada and the USA. It is important to examine who emigrated in one's own family tree and to what extent the supposed success story of the proverbial "uncle from America" was also linked to the appropriation and commodification of land, the destruction of ecosystems through colonisation, agriculture and hunting, and the further advancement of colonisation through infrastructure projects such as railway construction.
The workshop invites participants to engage with their own colonial family history. Based on the comic story "It all runs in the family", research strategies, narrative formats and ways of coming to terms with the past will be presented. Participants will be invited to work on their biographies and conduct their own research using various exchange formats.