The future of remembering

A conversation between Carola Lentz, German social anthropologist and president of the Goethe-Institute (2020-2024), sociologist Teresa Koloma Beck and philosopher Omri Boehm.

Carola Lentz: The three of us have different disciplinary backgrounds and we have lived and researched in different societies. I would like to use these experiences to look at the German debate around the ‘culture of remembrance’ ‘from the outside’, in comparison with other countries.

I suggest we focus on forms of remembrance that take place in the public sphere and are organized by state actors or subsidized by state funds. This remembrance is, first of all, an activity, or more precisely a cluster of diverse practices characterized by different degrees of solidification/consolidation and organization. The spectrum ranges from memorials carved in granite, museums and archives, statutory public holidays, commemorative rituals and canonized textbooks, all the way to more ephemeral forms of remembrance in podcasts, television series, plays and occasional newspaper articles.

These diverse media can convey different messages and create polyphony, but also dissonance. They are the work of a variety of actors who sometimes cooperate but sometimes compete for limited resources. Remembrance is necessarily selective; it goes hand in hand with forgetting and silence. It takes place in fields structured by power relations and evolves in response to new political and social challenges.

So, we are dealing with a wide range of actors, practices and contexts. But what about the variety of communities of memory in whose names all this is undertaken? Who is the ‘we’ in ‘our remembrance’? How are nationally organized forms of remembrance influenced by smaller, sub-national memory collectives, like migrant and exile communities, or by local or regional memories? And what is the significance of the nation-state’s transnational ties, for example in the European community or in the historical context of imperialism and colonialism? To what extent do members of formerly colonized societies belong to national communities of memory and what role should they play in shaping corresponding narratives?

Teresa Koloma Beck: Looking at the situation in Germany today, it seems relevant that there is a certain discrepancy between what is presented as a community of memory, and the actual demographic makeup of society. The culture of remembrance, as it is known in Germany, is a major and hard-won achievement. What is now a shared state and public self-image was brought into being through the activism of civil society organizations, for example in the history workshop movement in the 1980s. They campaigned tirelessly to keep the memory of National Socialism’s crimes alive and insisted that the German people needed to take responsibility because they had been guilty. It was a great achievement, and it should not be squandered.

These days, however, one in five people in Germany have a history of migration. Among young people, that figure rises to one in three. In other words, there are an increasing number of people who live in Germany and are German citizens but do not share the German perpetrator experience around which our culture of remembrance is built. The importance of creating points of connection for people with other histories has long been recognized in memorial centres. But the wider public debate is still dominated by a narrative structured around the perpetrator experience.

The challenge is to develop this narrative so that it does justice to the plurality of society. Otherwise, there is a danger that the institutionalized national remembrance of National Socialism’s violent history could promote an ethnonationalist image of German society. It is not uncommon to hear nowadays that ‘we in Germany’, because of ‘our’ historical responsibility, cannot take any other position on such and such a question. There may be good reasons for this. But when expressed in these terms, it also implicitly defines the German ‘we’ in a way that excludes all those whose families played no part in Germany’s perpetrator past.

Omri Boehm: I think that the concept of ‘German guilt’ must be expanded in several ways, beyond the question of who has what background. Even people from so-called families of German descent are becoming increasingly removed from the feeling of guilt as the years go by. A feeling of guilt, or the expectation of it, can certainly relate to what one’s own parents or grandparents did – but at some point, it ceases to do so, for example, if one no longer knows the perpetrators or has any kind of relationship with them. For that reason, the challenge we are dealing with here is bigger than just the opposition between ‘ethnic Germans’ and ‘everyone else’. The key, in my view, is to differentiate between guilt and responsibility. The German people are responsible for their past, without necessarily being guilty or personally concerned. The almost absurd limit of this line of thought is the idea that even someone like me, as a German citizen, could share the responsibility of all German citizens, even though my grandparents only narrowly escaped the Holocaust and their parents did not survive it.

We need to embrace the concept of responsibility, as opposed to guilt, if we want to maintain a meaningful relationship with memory. And when we do, the subjects of responsibility immediately change. That doesn’t mean that certain German perspectives must be completely lost, or that the German state must support the individual perspectives of everyone who comes to Germany in exactly the same way. I don’t think that is the case. But because German people can also be German Jews, German Muslims, and so on, the ways in which Germans remember their past must change. This change of perspective is the best way – indeed the only way – to take responsibility for the German past. As far back as the Historikerstreit, it was already the logical consequence of Habermas’s insistence on constitutional patriotism and the singularity of the Holocaust – although this connection is often overlooked, including perhaps by Habermas himself. All too often, talk of German guilt becomes a way to prevent this transformation, instead strengthening the German national identity and celebrating guilt at the expense of taking responsibility.

As for the practice of remembrance in Israel, there are essentially three different spheres in which remembrance operates. The first is the Holocaust. The second is symbolized by Yom HaZikaron, the day for commemorating the fallen Israeli soldiers who lost their lives in the conflict around the establishment of the State of Israel or later on while serving in the Israeli armed forces. For Israelis, this national holiday is just as important as the Holocaust commemorations, partly because so many people in Israel have a personal connection to it, and partly because the focus on Jewish action and heroism instead of victimhood is very powerful. The third sphere of remembrance is the encouraged forgetting of the Nakba, the Arabic word for ‘catastrophe’, which recalls the mass expulsion and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab Israeli War. The significance of this destruction of memory, in a state so heavily predicated on memory, cannot be overstated.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Holocaust commemoration in Israel is how late it began. The memory of the Holocaust was for a long time not seen as something to unite Israelis. It was used to differentiate people, not to bring them together. For one thing, it was a private memory belonging to those who had come from Europe and was not shared by the country’s many Sephardic Jews. For another, it was a memory that aroused shame, because it did not fit into the heroic narratives of Israeli society. Yom HaZikaron is a kind of alternative that balances out the Holocaust memorials. Today it is common to connect Zionism and the State of Israel with the Holocaust. But the early Zionists rejected this association, and therefore also Holocaust commemoration practices. Ben-Gurion, the primary national founder of the state of Israel, once said that pogroms and the Holocaust were not part of Jewish history, because before the establishment of Israel there was no Jewish nation to have a history.

Ben-Gurion turned this principle on its head during the Eichmann trial, however.1 It is well documented that one of the reasons the public hearing was held in Beit Ha’am – the ‘People’s House’, a converted community theatre that could accommodate hundreds of spectators – was to make sure that everyone would care about the Holocaust. Since the middle of the 1960s, all of us in Israel have had to act as if we had escaped Auschwitz. Even my Iranian Jewish mother does, although her father did not. Of course, this ‘all of us’ excludes anyone who does not belong: in other words, Palestinians, who were not allowed to take part in the official Holocaust commemorations and who even, to a certain extent, were portrayed as the heirs of Nazism and antisemitism. For that reason, as I argued in Haifa Republic,2 the Palestinian representatives who participate in the Holocaust commemorations are not just doing the decent, human thing, but actually doing something radical and transformative.

Carola Lentz: That brings us to an important question: What are the implications for the politics of remembrance, which is usually oriented towards community and nation building, when the founding narrative focusses on a state crime or a perpetrator narrative, or conversely on a victim narrative? What does it mean to put violence at the centre rather than liberation and the achievement of positive ideals?

At this point, it might be instructive to turn our gaze to some African countries. The first that comes to mind is Rwanda, where an atrocious genocide took place thirty years ago. At the level of state commemorative practices, there is almost a prohibition against remembering the ethnic dimension of the genocide, because ethnicity is no longer supposed to play a role in the new nation-building process. In some West African states, the mobilization of idioms of ethnic identity played an important role during decolonization when it came to distributing resources. Nation building in all these contexts, therefore, always meant first and foremost strengthening the state. The state was expected to provide, and by focusing on the present and a good future, divisive memory work could – to a certain extent – be halted. The attitude was: ‘What happened, happened. Now we are all citizens of this country looking to the future together; the past must no longer divide us’. Second, nationalizing memory practices were introduced, such as independence celebrations rotating through the countries’ different regions and including multicultural events. The aim was to make sure every region and ethnic group felt represented, with its traditional clothing, music and dances, without creating political volatility.

Where this might differ from Germany is that African examples involve different population groups with a long, intertwined history, albeit one punctuated by conflict. How does this transfer to, for example, immigrants of Turkish origin who have lived in Germany for two, or at most three generations? I am not sure whether the length of time groups have lived together makes a difference in the debate around shared memory work.

Omri Boehm: And I am not even sure whether commemoration has any intrinsic value at all. In contrast to history, remembrance is not just cognitive, but conative. It takes the form of a first rather than third-person description, and it is always connected with a task. Memory demands something from us. What it demands is not part of factual memory, however. It is open to interpretation, misuse, criticism and challenge. What do we remember, and what does memory command us to do? Some of the most sensible reflections on this question such as political scientist Benedict Anderson’s discussion of nineteenth-century scholar Ernest Renan’s depiction of memory and nation sound almost offensive to German ears, because they suggest that remembrance is important insofar as it allows us to forget. Forgetting is essential to a civil concept of citizenship. Everything that is publicly remembered can also be set aside, and we must be able to set memories aside in order to come together.

Detail of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. Image by Slaunger via Wikimedia Commons

When a nation is conceived as a civic idea, a liberal idea, a structure held together by citizenship rather than blood, language or even guilt, then national cohesion depends less on the memories people share than on the act of forgetting. If you believe that German identity must be transformed from a German national consciousness into a concept of citizenship – I am thinking with Habermas of a kind of constitutional patriotism – then intense public remembrance of an event like the Holocaust actually opens up space for other memories. I think this is hard for German people to accept, and it must be handled carefully. The current opposition to the opening up of German remembrance is, at best, related to the fact that Holocaust commemorations cannot be taken for granted. Many people still remember what a belated achievement it was for German society to remember – an achievement that is still at risk and must be preserved. But in the worst case, such opposition is connected with a desire to use remembrance to build a final instance of German national consciousness – a consciousness that cannot belong to non-ethnic Germans. I fear that in the current climate, the possibility of opening up will be undermined by this misuse.

In the Israeli context, commemoration of the Nakba is not illegal, but it is suppressed by the state. Those who commemorate the Nakba in certain ways are either fined or excluded from all possible kinds of government funding. That does not mean that we do not remember the Nakba. On the contrary, it means that we cannot forget it. If we had publicly commemorated the Nakba, we could also set it aside.

I think that this dialectical question must also be raised in Germany – although there are good reasons for doing so very carefully. We can also see how certain commemorative practices allow us to move forwards. I was once asked: can you go for a walk in Germany without constantly thinking about the Holocaust? And my answer was: ‘yes’. I think more about the Holocaust than you might be able to imagine, but I do not think about it all the time, otherwise I would not be able to share my life here with my child. Among the things that make this possible are, for example, the Stolpersteine.3 The fact that the Holocaust is remembered everywhere – that the Stolpersteine trip me up – allows me to keep going. Memory is externalized. If this were not the case, I would not be able to live my life without constantly thinking about German history.

Teresa Koloma Beck: I would like to add that remembrance is also present in practices that have nothing to do with remembrance. Last week I visited the Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial with some students. Many of them were shocked when they heard that the concentration camp was used for many years after the war as a prison. In recent years there has been a discussion in many cities about the accommodation of refugees in buildings or on sites that formerly belonged to concentration camps. This kind of reuse expresses a relationship to the past. The Neuengamme prison was not relocated until 2003, and the site of the former concentration camp was only turned into a memorial in 2005, not least thanks to the dedicated efforts of citizens’ groups. Our relationship to the past is not just reflected in memorials, days of remembrance, commemorative speeches and so forth, but also in banal, everyday structures.

Carola Lentz: So far during our conversation we have assumed that the nation-state is a given or obvious remembering community. But I am not at all sure whether it should be the relevant community. Do we not also need a European community of memory? Or a community of memory that includes, for example, former German colonies like Tanzania, Cameroon or Papua New Guinea?

On a related note, I wonder whether we need a national ‘basic narrative’, a term used by the sociologist Trutz von Trutha to refer to the necessary common reference points of a society’s self-narrative. This basic narrative is imparted as a body of knowledge to everyone who should belong to the community of memory, and it must always be consolidated with the help of a cluster of practices. What is the German basic narrative? How does a basic narrative, which takes on the character of a myth, fit with historical knowledge? The fact is that in history, past relationships are always ambivalent. There are hardly any unambiguous victim-perpetrator dichotomies; most often, we must deal instead with complex configurations of actors. The more we know about history, the harder it seems to be to construct powerful myths that can also move people emotionally. What are your thoughts? Do we need myths? Do we need more historical knowledge? Do we need plurality? Or do we need a standardization of narratives?

Omri Boehm: We definitely do not need myths. Remembrance is important, and myth is a way to corrupt it. Unfortunately, commemoration of the Holocaust is increasingly bound up in myth. Criticism must put a stop to this. I am not one of those who express outrage when people question the singularity of the Holocaust. They do not even always understand all the terms of the debate. Is the Holocaust a unique event or not? I think in many respects it obviously is, but in other respects not. The debate around the uniqueness of the Holocaust often seems to me to be based, from the outset, on a myth: the two sides are more similar to each other than they realize. Scholars discuss the uniqueness of the Holocaust like scholastic theologians arguing over the attributes of God. And if someone on either side takes the wrong view – for example insisting on the uniqueness of the Holocaust – then some people think they are saying something very dangerous.

In my view, there are good reasons for talking about the Holocaust as a unique event. But the uniqueness theory, and its relationship to law, taboo and authority in this country, must be willing to face criticism. The many advocates of the theory who resist criticism are not really promoting it at all but rather encouraging its misuse and the corruption of a very important memory. Again: what does the uniqueness theory mean? In Germany it is inseparable from the rule of law. As it happens, the idea that the Basic Law is founded on human dignity, rather than German national sovereignty, is the perfect way to understand the German crime. Is it, for some reason, no longer enough? Do we need a principle external to the constitution, a ‘reason of state’, a doctrine which, if I understand correctly, cannot be part of the constitution and which stipulates that ‘never again’ refers to German responsibility for the Jews, even if Israel is accused of serious war crimes? That is the real question we should be addressing. In the absence of criticism, remembrance degrades into the manipulation of a national myth. And with this myth, remembrance will undermine the very reasons why it is so important in this country. It will be attacked and destroyed.

Carola Lentz: Just to be clear, would you say that we do not need any unifying myths?

Omri Boehm: Definitely not.

Teresa Koloma Beck: I agree, and I would also add that a look at history shows that myths that are supposed to create unity and agreement tend to cause harm. Behind the question is an assumption that a cohesive society requires narratives shared by all its members. This relates to the idea that cohesion is based on shared norms and values, which is why it is important to establish and enforce norms. Just how difficult this is can be seen in various fields. But sociology offers another angle on this question. It emphasizes that cohesion can be created through praxis. Working jointly on something – a concrete problem or project – brings people together and connects them. This even applies under conditions of difference. My colleague Tanja Bogusz calls this ‘heterogenous collaboration’. The more plural the society, the harder it is to build cohesion based on a differentiated set of norms. Naturally, there are some basic norms that people do have to agree on. But they cannot produce the emphatic interconnectedness evoked by the concept of cohesion. That requires praxis. I would frame the problem of national remembrance as a question of its practice rather than the culture of remembrance.

Carola Lentz: That is one of the reasons I titled our conversation ‘the future of our remembrance’ – to draw attention to the practice of remembrance rather than a strictly defined culture of remembrance. What both of you have said aligns with what I have observed in my research on memories of independence in African societies.4 For example, Namibia or South Africa have a founding myth that the independent nation was born out of the fight for independence, out of a liberation struggle. For that reason, in the years following independence the Namibian Head of State, Sam Nujoma, was always depicted in monuments with a Kalashnikov in his hand, even though, as all Namibians know, he did not actually fight in the armed forces but worked abroad as a diplomat to support and negotiate Namibian independence. The dominant memory of the ‘liberation struggle’ is strong, however, not least because it can bridge ethnic differences. The same can be seen in South Africa: it is not about Black or white, Zulu, Xhosa and others but the nation united in the fight against apartheid.

But this basic narrative poses problems. For example, the question arose of how to deal with civilians. In Namibia and elsewhere, the politics of remembrance is connected to access to resources. Recognized war veterans receive a pension, access to housing and other benefits. This leads to debate around whether the definition of ‘freedom fighter’ can be extended to include civilians who supported armed fighters, whether by offering them food or local knowledge, hiding them, etc. Of course, symbolic recognition was also at stake. This, at least, has expanded over the decades, and unarmed support of the struggle for independence is now discursively acknowledged. But this inclusion did not and does not apply to the victims of the independence movement itself, which eliminated ‘traitors’, and especially not to those who collaborated with the South African occupier. The liberation-struggle founding myth also becomes a problem for the next generation, the ‘Born Frees’, who can no longer fully relate to the heroic narrative. With time, therefore, the cluster of memory practices is changing. Newer monuments show Sam Nujoma holding a constitution instead of a Kalashnikov. The earlier monuments are still standing but no longer in the central square.

Despite the dynamic nature of remembrance practices, though, I still wonder if there is not a need for central bodies of knowledge that everyone can remember together in various rituals. Even with all the plurality and the focus on shared praxis: do we not still need a narrative core, at least if we want to hold onto the concept of a nation?

Omri Boehm: We need these stories, but they must remain open. They must not be allowed to become myth. Regarding our own historical responsibility, we must rethink the concept of sovereignty and citizenship. We must do away with concepts of national sovereignty that rely on a narrow understanding of citizenship defined by ethnic or national identity. To overcome these limitations, we need remembrance, or as Teresa says, other forms of remembering. To prevent war of all against all, we do not need a nationalist revival or a national symbol but precisely the opposite. That does not mean that this constitutional transformation does not have to be led by remembrance. Rather, this recognition is a form of remembrance.

In a certain sense, this is exactly what the first Historikerstreit was about. Habermas and others argued that, precisely because of the German past, we needed to move beyond a specific concept of ethnonationalist citizenship. The debate was not primarily about the uniqueness of the Holocaust but about the idea that Germany, because of its historical crime, ought to replace national consciousness with constitutional patriotism. Memory, or remembrance, was invoked against national identity, not for it. That is why conservatives were opposed to Habermas at the time. By the time of the second Historikerstreit, however, the situation was the exact opposite. National memory, presented as the last legitimate form of German national consciousness, is now invoked against constitutional patriotism; we need, so the argument goes, a basic memory or narrative that remains unique and closed. But in my view, this story and Germany’s particular responsibility can only be protected when they remain open.

There is unquestionably a relationship between the Holocaust and the existence of the State of Israel. And because history, unlike myth, is not a closed fact, the discovery that the existence of the State of Israel is part of the history of the Holocaust also means that the history of the Nakba is likewise part of that history. This does not mean that the crimes are alike: they are not. But it means that they are causally related to each other. And if the German people want to understand the Holocaust not as myth, but as history, they must take this fact into account. How, for example, does this relate to what has been happening in Gaza? History breathes, but myth does not, and for that reason I believe it poses a grave danger for liberal democracy and for citizenship.

Teresa Koloma Beck: I think this needs to be emphasized. In my view, at the heart of the debate around the culture of remembrance is the question of how to organize a community under conditions of plurality. And this debate has been raging in Germany since before the war in Gaza. Germany has a long history of both demographic pluralization due to migration and the pluralization of lifestyles. German society is in many ways intensely entwined with the world. Its transformation is inexorable. All this places pressure on concepts of the nation.

A central, if not always explicit, issue in the current conflict around the culture of remembrance is the question of the relevance of ethnonationalism in contemporary society. There are some political actors who want to reinstate the primacy of ethnonationalist belonging. There is also significant opposition to this idea. It is important to understand that adherence to a culture of remembrance, focussed on the experience of the descendants of Nazi perpetrators, can also contain ethnonationalist concepts of society, even if this is mostly unintentional.

The real question at issue is how an internally plural society can be organized politically, and how it relates to the rest of the world. I still vividly remember the period of the EU’s eastern enlargement in the early 2000s, when it was possible to witness states and societies reorganizing themselves. It was a moment of hope, at times even outright euphoria, especially among young people like me who had grown up east of the Iron Curtain. The confidence we felt then did not come from the idea that a new European state would simply replace nation-states but from the promise of openness and plurality.

Carola Lentz: Social cohesion certainly does not depend exclusively, and possibly not even primarily, on remembrance narratives. But the positions our state policies of commemoration or remembrance take regarding Germany’s colonial crimes, the Holocaust and the history of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) are certainly relevant to the question of how we can come together. What role does forgetting play in social cohesion, and how important are visions of the future?

What’s more, different remembrance practices also structure the assumption of historical responsibility or forgetting, the appeal to a shared narrative or the various perspectives on history in different ways. I am thinking of Ghana, where a whole array of historical content is packed into the annual independence celebrations. Every year, right in time for the public holiday, newspapers and television programmes are full of discussions of where we are now, after 60 years of independence, and where we should be by the 75^th anniversary – and the very next day, the focus is back on ordinary political and social conflicts, on managing the present and building the future. Public holidays thus provide a temporal structure for the occasional bringing together and then dispersal of memories. The same thing could be said of the outsourcing of remembrance to physical symbols such as the Stolpersteine Omri mentioned.

Where is remembrance in Germany headed? Can we achieve both: openness to the plurality of different origin stories and a minimal shared historical consciousness?

Omri Boehm: The fact that both Kyiv and Tel Aviv appeal to Germany as a nation certainly plays a role in the current debate. Without the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the study of post-national constitutional patriotism might have gone in a different direction. The question of remembrance in a place like Germany is also crucial because remembrance is inseparable from the question of who has the right to be or become a citizen, to be part of society, to have other rights that must be protected. If the question of remembrance is not handled responsibly, citizenship will look completely different. When we start to say that certain groups of people cannot be citizens, the question of their social rights becomes irrelevant. It is easy to forget but must be emphasized that when we discuss the question of citizenship for newcomers or foreigners, we are also asking about the nature of citizenship for everyone living here in Germany. Do the German people view their affiliation in terms of German citizenship, or do they see themselves as part of the German nation?

The issues we are discussing here have gained greater urgency since events in Ukraine and Israel. But the debate was already underway before them. In my opinion, one of the reasons the Israeli question became so pressing was the end of the two-state solution. Germany’s understanding was that it should advocate for a Jewish, democratic state. But several developments made it clear that support for a Jewish, democratic state is patently impossible without a two-state solution, because there can be no pretence of establishing a democracy in a Jewish state with an Arab majority. As for why so many people still cling to the mantra of a two-state solution, even though it is hopeless: they are unable and unwilling to look beyond the model of the Jewish state, however irrational it is, and whatever the consequences may be – including for Israel. I also think that many people who defend Israel in the media and fight against anti-Semitism in the German population do not actually care that much about Israel and anti-Semitism. Some do, of course, but not all. Rather, they care deeply about how German national consciousness and national identity can be more narrowly rearticulated in opposition to the project to open them up.

Teresa Koloma Beck: The culture of remembrance is very relevant to the discussion of social cohesion. After all, remembrance shapes politics, both domestically and in foreign affairs. This is by no means a trivial point. The culture and politics of remembrance have victims – to put it slightly dramatically. It is not just about the empirical heterogeneity of society but, above all, about acknowledging that heterogeneity. Even in the 1970s, society in both West and East Germany was much more heterogenous than it presented itself to be. The fact that it is now possible to discuss plurality is in itself a great triumph of democratization.

Would the current debate around the culture of remembrance have taken place without the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East? I am sure it would. After all, many of the issues now being discussed have a long prior history. The controversy around Achille Mbembe at the 2020 Ruhrtriennale,5 or around the fifteenth edition of the documenta exhibition,6 were important milestones.

Nevertheless, I am intrigued by the mention of the war in Ukraine because it hints at a significant void in the culture of remembrance in Germany as a whole, which we have also neglected to discuss today: East Germany’s historical experience, which does not feature in dominant West German remembrance narratives. This is especially clear when we look at the war in Ukraine. If East Germans’ experiences were included in the Federal Republic’s culture of remembrance, the political discussion of the war would follow a different course.

What might the future look like? Coming back to the history workshops, my impression is that work on the culture of remembrance is always most innovative and transformative when it is conceived and undertaken as a civil society project. This might be a good starting point.

This conversation took place in Berlin on 13 May 2024. It was organized by the Goethe-Institut to mark its then president’s 70^th birthday.