The “Historikerstreit” 30 Years Later – From a Responsible Way to Remember to a Dogmatic Standardization of Facing the Past (original) (raw)
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1 The Future of Memory of World War II in Germany – Ethical Challenge and Burden
In Germany, World War II and the Shoa are obviously present: in educational programs, media and public monuments. By that, it's not predetermined how the "younger generation" of people living in Germany will relate to the events of the World War II and the Shoa: each generations has to build their own way of remembering, but also has to deal with possibilities and necessities of forgetting, given the conditions under which they are living. The group I refer to with "younger generation" cannot merely be defined with regard to age. I count those to the younger generation, whose relation to World War II is not based on personal experience. In this sense I may not even be part of the younger generation as I my grandparents told me about their personals experiences. I have vivid images in my had from my grandmother observing the burning city of Osnabrück after being bombed and have an idea about the personality of the French prisoner of war, who was forced to work at her farm. My grandfather told me, as his direct male descendants, about his baptism of fire at the eastern front. I want to discuss the consequences of feeling personally more remote to the World War II and the Shoa, while remembering it is becoming a tradition that manifests itself in everyday life: People in Germany run across memorials, they learn about it at school, their government finances memorials at places where German troops committed mass murders and their president speaks at inauguration. Besides the growing temporal remoteness, it also has to be regarded that memory is located in a global, multi-cultural community that is not only rooted in a community defined by a national tradition. In what follows, I discuss, how a way of remembering Word War II and the Shoa can be build, under conditions of temporal remoteness and pluralization of society in Germany. I. More than politically organized memory My, our ancestors remembered under different conditions: Speaking for West-Germany, the generation that actively participated in the war mostly repressed the memory, which seemed easy, given the opportunities for a joyful life the German Wirtschaftswunder gave them. Some of their children developed different ways of dealing with the deeds of their parents. Along with the activities of people such as the state attorney Fritz Bauer, who brought to court officers in charge in Auschwitz, they established the memory culture in Germany. Some explored the meaning of the memory of the Second-World-War by taking responsibility and initiating dialogue with the victims. This memory culture has become a tradition that influences younger generations. It has been established in the educational and political system. Consider two examples: Policemen and generation in Germany remembering World War II and the Shoa means to change the view on ones own biography by becoming aware of connections to this past and of current tendencies of violence.
Lived multidirectionality: "Historikerstreit 2.0" and the politics of Holocaust memory
Memory Studies, 2022
This essay assesses the acrimonious debates about Holocaust memory that took place in Germany in 2020-2021 and that have come to be known as Historikerstreit 2.0. These debates call up older controversies, especially the 1986 Historikerstreit (Historians' Debate) in which Jürgen Habermas took on conservative historians who sought to relativize the Nazi genocide. The Historikerstreit concerned the relation between Nazi and Stalinist crimes and the question of German responsibility for the Holocaust; today's controversies involve instead the relation between colonialism and the Holocaust and racism and antisemitism as well as the ongoing crisis in Israel/Palestine. As the current debates reveal, the dominant Holocaust memory regime in Germany is based on an absolutist understanding of the Holocaust's uniqueness and a rejection of multidirectional approaches to the genocide. While that memory regime represented a major societal accomplishment of the 1980s and 1990s, it has reached its limits in Germany's "postmigrant" present. Yet, as an example of migrant engagement with the Holocaust illustrates, German society already includes alternative practices of memory that could transform the German model of coming to terms with the past in productive ways.
History, Memory and Forgetting: Political Implications*
RCCS Annual Review, 2009
Researchers have raised questions about recovering traumatic situations such as the Holocaust, the bombing of Hiroshima, the Vietnam war or the fratricidal massacres in Yugoslavia. Although some classic studies have identified important aspects relating to history and memory, there are several ways of dealing with the past, all of which involve interests, power and exclusion. The politics of just memory with regard to crimes committed in the past, a debate in which various academic areas as well as society in general have been involved, depends on processes of selection and also on elements which extend beyond the scope of human reason. It is necessary to find a balance between an obsession with the past and attempts to impose forgetting. Our aim, therefore, is to extend our understanding of history, memory and forgetting, emphasizing their limits as well as their ethical and moral implications.
Legacies of Divided Memory for German Debates about the Holocaust in the 1990s
German Politics & Society, 1999
The legacies of almost a half-century of divided memory continue toinfluence commemoration of the Holocaust in unified Germany.Because these practices were decisively shaped by the multiplerestorations of past political traditions in the early postwar period, Iwill comment on the commemorations of the first two postwardecades in East and West Germany and conclude with brief remarksabout how past legacies influence recent practices. I will examinethe significance of the Holocaust in these events compared to theattention given to the suffering of Nazi Germany’s non-Jewish victims.I will also consider the extent to which distinctions were madeamong the various victims of Nazi Germany, the kind of hierarchiesthat were established among them, and the use of commemorationfor political purposes.
Journal of Contemporary History, 2008
The study of memory has enjoyed great popularity in the last two decades. German social psychologist Harald Welzer is not the only one to note that memory has become a new meta-concept, if not a paradigm for cultural analysis. 1 The fascination with the concept throughout the humanities and social sciences most certainly stems from its potential to address questions which are at the very core of these disciplines. For instance, the study of memory can examine how socially predominant acts of retrospection and memories of individuals are related. This approach goes back to the works of Maurice Halbwachs, who famously claimed that individual memory is shaped by, if not reduced altogether to, a mere function of collective memory. 2 However, the notion has been challenged in recent research. 3 Anna Green, for instance, has criticized lately that most research in the tradition of Halbwachs tends to:
Memorialization, Remembrance, and Acts of Commemoration in Postwar Germany
AICGSGERMAN-AMERICANISSUES DEALING WITH THE PAST IN SPACES, PLACES, ACTIONS, AND INSTITUTIONS OF MEMORY: A COMPARATIVE REFLECTION ON EUROPEAN EXPERIENCES, 2016
This paper explores various avenues remembrance and commemoration of the Holocaust and Nazi Crimes have found in Germany. An untranslatable German term was coined after the horrendous crimes committed during the Nazi era: Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or dealing with the past. But other than the word “dealing” in English, “Bewältigung” actually means to suggest that one can confront, work through, cope with, and eventually “settle” the past. This was of course naïve, wishful thinking or, as the writer and lawyer Bernhard Schlink suggested, a “longing for the impossible.” The sister-word coined in this context, the equally untranslatable Wiedergutmachung (literally “to make good again” or repair), which referred to the actions and measures taken after the destruction of the "Third Reich" to address the consequences of its crimes, is equally naïve. But of course the past is irreversible and the enormous and horrendous crimes committed—in particular the crimes committed against Jews in Europe, which have since been referred to by the rather inaccurate Greek term for a sacrificial burning “Holocaust” or the Hebrew term “Shoah”—have become universally synonymous with a breach of the norms of civilization without precedent in modern times and beyond repair: the murder of approximately 6 million people and the destruction of an entire culture and civilization, in particular in Central and Eastern Europe.