Linda Mannheim
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lindamannheim.bsky.social
Linda Mannheim
@lindamannheim.bsky.social
1.5K followers 660 following 120 posts
Words in The Nation, Granta, Sight & Sound, and more. PhD Researcher at the University of Westminster. THIS WAY TO DEPARTURES, stories about leaving the place you're from, was shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize.
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lindamannheim.bsky.social
The first thing I did when I finished reading The Benefactors is read it all over again. Partly I didn't want to let go of the characters, partly I was trying to figure out how @wednesdayerskin.bsky.social did this. So powerful, so original, and so gripping. Lines from it keep coming back to me.
August 8, 2025 at 4:04 PM
lindamannheim.bsky.social
Hey Everyone. My first journal article is out in National Identities.

‘Are you sure that happened here?’: popular memory of Britain’s refugee history

doi.org/10.1080/1460...
ABSTRACT Britain’s refugee history is generally remembered as fair. But was it? As the Second World War began, 70,000 German and Austrian nationals – most of them refugees – were labelled ‘enemy aliens’. And in 1972, the British government resisted admitting Asian Ugandans even though they were British passport holders. These are two cohorts of refugees many refer to when they speak of Britain as a country that ‘used to welcome refugees’ and evoke a mythological ‘golden era’ of refugee history. Refugees fleeing to Britain in the past however faced hostility and hardship similar to that faced by contemporary refugees.
June 20, 2025 at 7:49 AM
lindamannheim.bsky.social
"I drove nearly 2,000 miles in the US ...from DC to New Orleans and tracing, in part, the footsteps of Alexis de Tocqueville. ('It might be our last opportunity to observe democracy in America,' I had said.)"

Alexander Hurst in @theguardian.com

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
Heavy traffic on a US freeway. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images
March 19, 2025 at 7:12 AM
lindamannheim.bsky.social
2. The deportation was done in violation of a court order, according to a plan to undo the rule of law. This means that the action was not only specifically illegal, but designed as a challenge to the rule of law as such. Naturally, the individuals who chose to ignore a court order carefully selected the moment when they would do so. They chose a situation that they could characterize as us against them, the Americans against the foreigners, the regular people against the criminals. They are deliberately associating the law itself with people, the deportees, who they expect to be unpopular. This is a tactic, and historically speaking a very familiar one. In this way they hope to get popular opinion on their side as they ignore a court order. But if they succeed in making an exception once, it becomes the rule.
March 17, 2025 at 2:05 PM
lindamannheim.bsky.social
Excerpt from Kristen Renwick Monroe interview: When we see a stranger, the rescuers see another fellow human being. So when I asked them, “Why did you do this? Why did you risk your life to save Jews or Allied airmen or people you didn’t even know?” They would say things like, “But what else could I do? They were human beings like you and me.” And when I asked the bystanders what they would say, “But what could I do? I was one person alone against the Nazis.” The phrases were so similar: no choice in either case. What could I do? What else could I do? Tony was one of the rescuers. He was very firmly altruistic. And he had no resources at all. He’d been condemned to death. You know, he was in hiding the entire war. He had no home. I have an interview with Tony’s cousin, and she said, “I was very spoiled, because we had servants, and I could go play tennis and squash.” She had a big house, and she said she couldn’t hide anyone in her house during the Nazi era because she had [servants] who might betray her.
January 23, 2025 at 9:27 AM
lindamannheim.bsky.social
Front page of German newspaper Die Tageszeitung (taz) on 19 December 2024, showing Gisèle Pelicot, with the headline ‘Merci’ Photograph: Die Tageszeitung
December 19, 2024 at 12:14 PM
lindamannheim.bsky.social
Had such a good time getting to talk about these.

www.lunate.co.uk/features/bot...
December 10, 2024 at 12:25 PM
lindamannheim.bsky.social
If no one is going to post this, I will post it.
May 31, 2024 at 4:51 PM
lindamannheim.bsky.social
Had a great time talking to Richard Lea for the
Fictionable podcast. You can find it right here.

www.fictionable.world/podcasts/lin...
February 13, 2024 at 1:50 PM
lindamannheim.bsky.social
Really happy to have a story in the new issue of the wonderful Fictionable -- "Those Last Days". It's about New York in the early part of the 21st Century and a final afternoon together on the banks of the Hudson before everything comes apart.

www.fictionable.world/stories/thos...
February 13, 2024 at 10:29 AM
lindamannheim.bsky.social
Dina Nayeri's excellent essay in Fictionable: When fiction shrinks to memoir we all lose out

www.fictionable.world/blogs/dina-n...
January 16, 2024 at 9:23 AM
lindamannheim.bsky.social
"We were very much inspired by Michael Rothberg’s book Multidirectional Memory, which argues against competitive memory' ... [and for] solidarity among different communities. We have spaces in Berlin where [there is a] kind of a kind of solidarity that is unthinkable in Israel-Palestine..."
November 16, 2023 at 2:49 PM
lindamannheim.bsky.social
Their book, The Moral Triangle, "taps into narratives of perpetrators and victims, trauma and its afterlives, responsibility and reconciliation, morality, and memory," wrote Anna E Younes.

www.dukeupress.edu/the-moral-tr...
November 16, 2023 at 2:42 PM
lindamannheim.bsky.social
Here’s the #flowerreport from London. 🌱
October 15, 2023 at 9:00 PM
lindamannheim.bsky.social
On a train.
September 12, 2023 at 12:38 PM
lindamannheim.bsky.social
"If the younger members of a community view the older members as contemptible or suspect or excess, they will never be able to join hands and examine the living memory of the community?"

- Audre Lorde

Just reread Sister Outsider and a lot of it hit me differently than before.
September 11, 2023 at 1:55 PM
lindamannheim.bsky.social
Have I shown you this copy of The Gettysburg Review yet? I've got a short story in it.
September 8, 2023 at 10:04 AM
lindamannheim.bsky.social
Stumbled upon the Polish edition of Monique Roffey's The Mermaid of Black Conch. What a cover.
September 8, 2023 at 9:52 AM
lindamannheim.bsky.social
I’ve landed a copy of @suchmayer.bsky.social’s Truth & Dare!
September 6, 2023 at 4:55 PM
lindamannheim.bsky.social
Evening walk listening to Kerry Hudson's Lowborn. And here are the shadows of street trees on the buildings.
September 5, 2023 at 11:25 AM