Gilad Margalit

Academic research

German policies and attitudes since 1945 toward the German Gypsies

Margalit started his academic career with a dissertation on German policies and attitudes since 1945 toward a small German minority, the Gypsies (Sinti and Roma). Traditionally, the Gypsies had been rejected by German society; and they had been persecuted and murdered by the Nazis. The study, which later appeared as the book Germany and its Gypsies, demonstrates the extent to which prejudices against Gypsies continued to play a major role in forming the policies toward them after Auschwitz. These include, for example, the reluctance of both postwar Germanies to compensate them for their sufferings during the Nazi period, as well as the authorities' attempts to resume their control over the free movement of itinerants.

Official remembrance ceremonies and memorials for the German war dead

The second major issue with which Margalit has been engaged since 1999 culminated in the 2010 publication of the English edition of his book Guilt, Suffering, and Memory. In this study Margalit discusses the official remembrance ceremonies for the German war dead, the memorials erected to commemorate them, the public discussions of the disparate German cultures (FRG and the GDR), and their treatment in postwar German literature and film. In this book Margalit claims that Germany’s changing historical memory of the Second World War and its aftermath, as reflected in the official and public remembrance of the German war dead, exposes an unresolved tension between a discourse of guilt and a discourse of national suffering and victimization. In Germany, under the auspices of the Allied occupation, memorials honoured the victims of the Nazis and those who had fought against the regime. After the partition of Germany, a new culture emerged, commemorating the fallen German soldiers as well as the civilian dead. Despite the fierce ideological rivalry between East and West Germany, however, certain similarities existed. The political leaderships who shaped these cultures ceased to confront their citizens with the question of guilt; instead, they depicted the German people as victims.

German Turks

Margalit's latest research topic was an oral history project on German Turks. Turkish immigrants started arriving in West Germany in 1960, after an agreement between Turkey and the Federal Republic on supplying Gastarbeiter ("guest workers") for the German labour market. 10 years later, they had become the biggest community of foreigners in the Federal Republic of Germany. His research focused in the Turkish experience of living among Germans, focuses at the religious and cultural difference and otherness of the Turks to their German surroundings, and the prejudices against them, which turns their integration into a complicated and significant challenge. Margalit mainly concentrates on the second and third generation of German Turks and their process of building a clearly defined collective German-Turkish identity. Another aspect in Margalit's research is the Turks attitudes to the German past and to the Holocaust.

Academic positions held

• 2007 Chair of the founding team of the Haifa Center for German and European Studies (HCGES).
• 2007-2012 Haifa Center for German and European Studies, Deputy Director.
• 2008 Bucerius Institute for Research of Contemporary German History and Society, Member of the Academic Steering.

Scholarships and awards

• The Doctoral thesis awarded the ‘Jacob Talmon Prize', 1995.
• DAAD Scholarship at the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Munich, the University of Cologne and Mainz, 2006.
• Guilt, Suffering and Memory. On German Commemoration of the German victims of WWII The University of Haifa Press 2006 (Heb.) 254 pp. was awarded the ‘Bahat Prize’ for the original book, 2007.
• A scholarship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, 2001-2003, 2005,2007,2009.
• A scholarship from the Friedrich Ebert Foundation for an oral history project on German Turks, 2010.