Agnes Mueller’s new book hits close to home. 

In the 1960s, her father spent four years in an East Germany prison for crossing an invisible border—the East-West barrier that would become the Berlin Wall. He was eventually liberated by Amnesty International. 

“He never spoke of the time he was imprisoned, because it was traumatizing. All the things I know about that time, I learned from other people,” she says. 

In her forthcoming book “Holocaust Migration: The Future of Memory,” Mueller explores the way young writers reflect on their own migrations, sharing their experiences in a way her father did not. Now three and four generations after the Holocaust, German-based Jewish writers wrestle with complex national and cultural identities in their fiction. 

“We have reached the end of the lifespans of most survivors, bystanders, perpetrators and liberators, and we now increasingly rely on other forms of memory besides documentary witnessing,” Mueller says. “That is why the future of (Holocaust) memory depends on new, creative, imaginative accounts that engage the documentary styles in fiction, defined by migration stories.” 

Mueller will reconnect with some of these stories in person when she travels to Germany next spring to begin her residency at the American Academy in Berlin. The University of South Carolina professor and German native was selected as a Berlin Prize Fellow, an honor reserved for top America-based scholars and artists. 

“This honor not only recognizes Dr. Mueller’s exceptional scholarship but also the relevance of her work to issues that people are grappling with around the world," says Joel Samuels, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. “Her work exemplifies how faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences strive to contribute to cultural understanding on a global stage. We look forward to the important contributions she will make during her time in Berlin.” 

The fellowship will allow Mueller to finish writing “Holocaust Migration” while joining 11 other academics, historians, artists, educators and political scientists who will live and work for a semester in Germany. The fellows will present their work to audiences via lectures, readings, public discussions, performances and film screenings. 

Mueller, along with her daughter and husband Christian Anderson, a USC professor in the College of Education, will reside with the other fellows in a home which was gifted from a Jewish family with ties to the Holocaust. 

“Holocaust memory is obviously significant for German history and memory, but it also has become so much more important globally, not only since the Hamas attacks of last year, but already before that with rising antisemitism around the world.” 

Highlighting her love of contemporary literature, Mueller emphasizes the importance of reading books in order to gain a new perspective by acknowledging others’ cultures, histories and beliefs. It’s an approach she loves bringing to her students at USC. 

“Literature creates a space to work out conflict in productive ways,” Mueller explains, “and fiction allows painful personal migration stories to create connection, empathy and solidarity.”