Marianne Kirk is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies at the University of Copenhagen. She holds a BA and an MA in Comparative Literature and a BA in German Studies, with a particular emphasis on memory studies and post-Soviet immigrant literature.
In her Ph.D. project, she turns toward Danish memory culture, investigating the action plan against antisemitism from 2022, in which the Danish government decided to make Holocaust education mandatory in Danish schools. Despite the Europeanization of Holocaust memory, the dominant historical discourses about World War II in Denmark center on the resistance movement and the extraordinary rescue of Danish Jews in October 1943. Considering this, the project examines, through ethnographic research in Danish history classrooms, the administrative efforts to incorporate the Holocaust into a national Danish memory culture and how the Holocaust is perceived and engaged with by teachers and young adults in schools.