How do the empires of the past continue to exist today? And what is forgotten when bygone empires are so adamantly remembered? For the past five-and-a-half years, the Max Planck Research Group, “Empires of Memory: The Cultural Politics of Historicity in Former Habsburg and Ottoman Cities,” has investigated these questions by examining the cities of central Europe, the Balkans, Anatolia, and beyond. The “In Dialogue” event “Sanitizing Imperial Pasts” will present selected results from this research in order to explore how bygone empires continue to shape our world today. Sanitizing the past occurs when we approach complex historical legacies from the presuppositions of present values. As the collective work of the research group has illustrated, imperial pasts are especially prone to sanitization in the current era. In this discussion, we will highlight the sanitization of Habsburg and Ottoman pasts, but our aspirations are broader. We aim to grasp the common features of sanitized imperial pasts, from the Roman and Aztec to British and Soviet. Several themes and questions will organize our conversation: What are the prominent genres and media through which imperial pasts are sanitized as collective memories? What are the political consequences of sanitizing imperial pasts? And what alternative forms of counter-memory challenge this sanitization?

The on-going corona pandemic appears to have ultimately ushered in a caesura in the understanding of governance and politics, fundamentally questioning free movement. In the same line of thought, Adrian Favell, one of the leading social and political theorists on migration, integration and citizenship at University of Leeds and fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, critically reviews what he calls “optimistic post-national forms of governance”. In this panel discussion, Steven Vertovec, Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, and Christine Lang, former MPI MMG researcher and currently at the Institute of Geography and the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies (IMIS) at Osnabrück University, discuss the past and presence of nation states and their migration/integration policies, and whether migration research should indeed be reoriented by detaching itself from the nation-state. The discussion is moderated by Karen Schönwälder, research group leader at MPI-MMG.