Yesterday was one of those days when memory bundles up into a package – but the pieces hardly fit together. It is the 24th anniversary of the space shuttle crash of 1985. It is also the anniversary of the airing of the final episode of Roots, a television event that arguably transformed America and its historical memory of slavery. Here in Germany, it is the 10th anniversary of the creation of a national day of remembrance for the Holocaust – the day being the anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camp at Auschwitz by the Soviet Army in 1945.

This overlapping has made me very aware of my American identity despite 18 years of life in Germany, a time during which I have come to identify with Germany in various ways. I found I had rather little interest in the various wreath-layings on television and Auschwitz survival stories in the newspaper. Again I had the feeling that it has all been said already. The Holocaust sometimes has some emotional effect on me at sites, but this abstract date left me cold this time.

Not so with Roots. The NPR interview with LeVar Burton, the actor who played the leading role in the 1977 miniseries moved me. I remember watching the scene that NPR played back - the scene where he is whipped until he gives up his dignified African name Kunta Kinte and submits to being called "Toby," the slave. I remember making fun of the scene on the playground - we had all watched the film. That is when all we 10-year-olds suddenly learned about slavery. It had a generational impact on historical memory perhaps comparable to the airing of the mini-series Holocaust in Germany a few years later.