Contested Transnational Memory Space of “Comfort Women”: The Korean Diaspora’s Civic Engagement in Germany

Abstract

On December 14, 2011, the first P’yŏnghwaŭi Sonyŏsang, also known as the “Statue of a Girl for Peace,” was built in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, South Korea. Since then, replicas have been installed in global cities such as Berlin, New York, Shanghai, Sydney, and Toronto. The bronze memorial represents Korean “comfort women” — a euphemism referring to Japanese military sexual slavery during the Second World War — and serves as a mnemonic platform. In Germany, the “comfort women” memorial was erected and exhibited in multiple cities, primarily due to the Korean diaspora through its activities earning the solidarity of local communities on this issue. Seeking to install these memorials has led diverse actors to collaborate both locally and transnationally, meanwhile meeting with resistance from the Japanese government. Based on interviews with the individuals who established the memorials as well as German and Korean newspaper sources, I investigate how the Korean diaspora worked together with the German local community to shift the “comfort women” issue into a global memory space. I argue that this solidarity was based on universal and particular identifications with the memorial in question, highlighting the potential for transnational memory to be shared beyond ethnic and national boundaries and contributing to the extraterritorial quality of cosmopolitan memory.