Tracing Paths of Transcultural Memory: The Usage of Monuments in Guided Tours by Refugees

This chapter examines how refugee tour guides in Berlin use memorials to mediate and represent the trails of collective memory from other places and times, and place themselves within the ongoing history of movement and migration inherent to Berlin. The chapter argues that in the context of Germany’s ambivalent hospitality towards refugees, these tours act as a transcultural memory activism that allows refugees to interlace their memories into the host society’s shared collective memory to negotiate their inclusion. This memory activism deploys memory-mixing to open up a space of recognition and interchange, offers potentials of hybridity and assigns new meanings to dominant memory narratives. Hence, the tours also suggest the potential of opening up memorials as a resource for protesting suffering and injustices and disrupting notions of cultural purity.