Who has the right to be remembered?

Abstract

Migration history is generally a marginalized topic in the identity-shaping national narratives of European societies. Migrants and their histories and memories are no integral part of post-World War II history in Europe. How immigration societies narrate their migration histories, in which ways they construct, reconstruct and negotiate their migration past can - among other things - be concluded from the (non)existence of symbolic places that would point to the recognition of national, regional or local migration histories. In the following I will discuss the right to visible sites of remembrance for marginalized groups of society by using two examples of meaningful places for the younger Austrian migration history. The former train station „Sudbahnhof “ in Vienna was an important place of arrival and departure for migrants from the 1960ies until its demolition in 2010. The Marcus- Omofuma-Stone in Vienna on the other hand is a controversial memorial in remembrance of a Nigerian asylum seeker who was killed during his deportation flight from Austria to Bulgaria in 1999. The investigation is based on episodic-narrative interviews with migrants and the analysis of different textual sources like reports from the media or minutes of the meetings of the Vienna municipal council.