The fight for Germany’s ‘memory culture’

On his first visit to Auschwitz, Navid Kermani made a startling discovery. He finally felt German.

Born to Iranian parents in the West German city of Siegen in 1967, Kermani had spent his entire life in the country. He had published dozens of books and essays, gaining widespread admiration as a writer, novelist and public intellectual. He had a German passport. He voted in German elections. He had won German literary prizes. Yet it was only here, at the site of Germany’s greatest crime, where as many as one million Jews were murdered, that Kermani realised he truly belonged.  

After registering for a tour of the concentration camp in German, he was handed a sticker to attach to his clothing: Deutsch. “If there was one single moment in which I became German, without ifs and buts, then it was not my birth in Germany, it was not my naturalisation, it was not the first time I went to vote,” he wrote after his visit in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. It was “when I attached the sticker to my chest, in front of me the barracks, behind me the visitor centre: German. I went to my group and waited silently for our tour guide. At the gate, where it says ‘Arbeit macht frei’, the groups stood one by one for a bizarre photo. Only we were ashamed.”

Kermani’s moment of realisation in Auschwitz — that poignant use of the word “we” — must seem peculiar to non-Germans. Of all the markers of collective identity — flags, feasts, football victories, composers, poets, landscapes — why would the son of immigrants feel a sense of belonging when confronted with the ultimate symbol of the Nazi genocide?

Viewed through a German lens, however, there was a powerful and intuitive logic to Kermani’s reaction. The Holocaust has long been central to modern Germany, shaping its politics and society, its aversions, conventions and instincts; it has defined the country like no other event. But the Holocaust is important also to the very idea of what it means to be German. As Joachim Gauck, a former German president, remarked in a speech to parliament, “There is no German identity without Auschwitz.” 

The question of how Germany relates to its past, and what lessons it should learn from the catastrophe of the Third Reich, has been present from the first days of the Federal Republic. It remains painfully acute today, and arguably more contested than it has been for many decades. At stake is what Germans refer to as their Erinnerungskultur, or memory culture, a collective commitment to remember and face up to the nation’s crimes under Hitler, and to accept Germany’s sole and permanent responsibility for the murder of six million Jews.

That commitment reveals itself in many ways: it is present in the education system, in the meticulous preservation of former concentration camp sites, in books and films and a uniquely dense network of monuments, including the vast Holocaust Memorial in the heart of Berlin. It remains important, too, as a reference point in daily politics, bequeathing to the country’s decision makers a simple yet powerful moral compass: do whatever needs to be done to ensure that Auschwitz is not repeated. The malleability of that imperative — it has guided Berlin towards pacifism on some occasions and military conflict at other times — does not detract from its force, or its centrality. 

Indeed, the Holocaust and Nazi era can at times feel oppressively omnipresent in public life. When critics of the government’s pandemic measures went out into the streets to demonstrate in 2020 and 2021, some showed up wearing yellow stars, inviting comparison with the persecution of Jews under Hitler’s rule. When the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party entered parliament in 2017, warnings about the rise of Nazism were a constant refrain.

When Germany agreed to supply Ukraine with weapons to defend itself against Russia’s invasion in 2022, it did so only after agonised debates in which both supporters and detractors invoked the country’s special historical responsibility. German tanks must never again point their barrels at Russian forces, one side argued. Germany cannot remain on the sidelines when a tyrant seeks to invade a peaceful neighbour, the other side countered. The underlying argument was ultimately the same: because of Hitler and Auschwitz, Germany must.

That imperative remains strong, as does Germans’ commitment to preserving the memory of the Holocaust. Yet some of the central tenets of German memory culture now find themselves under attack as rarely before. The bluntest criticism comes, unsurprisingly, from the resurgent far-right, notably the AfD. Like other German far-right movements, the party despises what it sees as a culture of self-flagellation. Its stance was encapsulated in the notorious remark by one of the AfD’s leaders in 2018, dismissing the Third Reich as a mere “speck of birdshit in more than a thousand years of successful German history”.

There was a time when such a statement would have been career-ending for any elected politician in Germany. Since the rise of the AfD, such things can be said — with impunity — by the leaders of a party that commands the support of around 20 per cent of German voters, according to recent polls. 

But it is not just politicians on the extreme right who have voiced unease at German memory culture. Indeed, some of the most trenchant critics of Erinnerungskultur today — both inside and outside Germany — sit firmly in the progressive camp. They point to, among other things, the dramatic demographic shift the country has undergone since the immediate postwar era, and ask what the Holocaust can and should mean for the millions of Germans who trace their roots back to Turkey, Portugal, Morocco, Russia, Iran or Bosnia?

Kermani’s answer to that question was that they, too, should see the Holocaust as part of their story. But in a country where one in four citizens hails from an immigrant community, can the Holocaust — and Germany’s postwar reaction to the Holocaust — really remain a political guiding light, let alone a component of national identity, for all?

Another line of attack from a new generation of historians and intellectuals takes aim at the notion that the Holocaust was a singular event that defies comparison with other historic crimes. This is intellectually treacherous territory, especially since the notorious 1980s Historikerstreit, or historians’ dispute, in which right-wing historians sought to advance the thesis that the crimes of the Nazis were comparable, and in some ways even a reaction, to the crimes of Stalin. That argument was eventually discredited. Today, it has resurfaced, albeit with a different historical parallel: the crimes of German colonial rule in Africa. 

Some historians see that episode as a prelude to the Nazi genocide, and argue that the Holocaust should be placed in a more global, and indeed colonial, context. That argument has in turn sparked a furious counter-attack from more established scholars, who accuse their counterparts of trying to relativise the Holocaust.  

The debate has gained a sharper edge still in the wake of the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 and the Israeli war in Gaza that followed, amid warnings of both rising antisemitism and growing Islamophobia in Germany. At a time when Israel itself stands accused of genocide in front of the International Court of Justice in The Hague — a case that has sparked fury not just in Israel but also in Germany — the country’s historically strong support for the Jewish state is under intense scrutiny.

One accusation — made not least by progressive Jewish intellectuals such as Susan Neiman and Deborah Feldman — is that German guilt over the Holocaust has made the country blind to the injustices of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians. Criticism of Israel, especially after the October 7 attacks, is indeed often followed by a fierce public backlash.

Last December, for example, the Russian-American writer and essayist Masha Gessen was due to receive the prestigious Hannah Arendt prize. The awards ceremony was abruptly cancelled after they published a piece in the New Yorker comparing the Gaza Strip to the Jewish ghettos in Nazi-occupied eastern Europe, and accusing Israel of “liquidating the ghetto”. (The prize was eventually given to Gessen but only after a barrage of criticism and in a much-reduced ceremony.) At the Berlinale film festival last month, the fact that some of the winners voiced condemnation of Israel’s war in Gaza on stage drew a swift rebuke from the federal government — and a fresh debate over public subsidies to the festival.

I have followed these debates with a keen personal interest. Growing up in Germany in the 1990s, the legacy of the Holocaust and the question of collective German guilt for the crimes of the Nazis were matters of immediate concern both to me and many of my contemporaries. The recent controversies over memory culture played out, moreover, as I was working on a book about the last Holocaust trials in Germany — a belated attempt by German prosecutors and judges to deliver justice to victims of the Nazi regime after decades of shameful neglect.

These trials offered a final opportunity to remaining witnesses, the innocent and the guilty alike, to tell their story in a public forum. Their voices would soon fall silent. Without them, the question of how to remember the Holocaust, and what lessons to draw from it, seemed more poignant still.

Among the German intellectuals wrestling most eloquently with this dilemma is Per Leo, a Berlin-based novelist and essayist who has written extensively about memory culture. Germany today, he argues, needs a new approach to memory culture in part because the country can no longer be understood simply as the successor of the society that brought forth Hitler and Auschwitz. 

“You could make that case in 1978 or in 1988 and maybe even in the early 1990s. But you can’t make that case now,” Leo told me. “First of all, we now have the fourth generation [after Nazism], the generation my daughter belongs to, which is the first generation that is no longer biographically touched and marked. We also have an immensely complex migration society with a very large Arab and Muslim population, and a small but very outspoken Jewish minority that is itself completely diverse. And then we have the former population of the GDR [communist East Germany] that has a very different approach to the history of dictatorship and whose memory in many ways runs counter to Holocaust memory.”

Germany’s memory culture, in other words, was the product of a particular set of circumstances in a particular place and at a particular time. Imposing it on a new generation and on new German citizens whose roots lay elsewhere was both misguided and ultimately futile. 

What pushed Leo towards taking a more critical stance towards Germany’s approach to Holocaust remembrance, he told me, was the rise of the AfD. The emergence of a new far-right party was greeted by many Germans with desperation. Many of its policies and statements were indeed obnoxious. What bothered Leo, however, was the constant use of Nazi imagery and metaphors by the AfD’s critics. Such parallels, he thought, were not only historically inaccurate, but ultimately self-defeating. The AfD thrived on them. The political outrage and the Nazi comparisons did not just fail to scare off its supporters, they reinforced a sense — nourished by populist parties everywhere — that the liberal mainstream had a lock on what could be said and what could not be said, and that the AfD was perfectly entitled to challenge that lock. 

If criticism of Germany’s asylum policy made you a Nazi in the eyes of the political establishment, then perhaps it was the establishment that had lost its way. “We have to stop the new Nazi party so that there is no repeat of a fascist regime — that is bullshit,” Leo told me. “It doesn’t work. You are just making the AfD stronger than it needs to be.”

The response to the AfD was, he concluded, a symptom of a wider problem. The Nazi period and the Holocaust were so dominant in the public discourse that Germans reached for comparisons constantly and reflexively. “The basic claim that our memory culture and Holocaust remembrance is the foundation of our democracy is utter nonsense. That does not mean we should forget the Holocaust, but it does mean that we need to think very carefully about how we remember it,” Leo argued.

Jürgen Zimmerer, a professor of history at the University of Hamburg and the director of an institute dedicated to studying German colonialism and its legacy, is another prominent voice calling for a rethink. His principal concern is that Germany has failed to pay sufficient attention to a lesser-known stain on the country’s 20th-century history — the mass slaughter of the Herero and Nama tribes by German colonial forces in German South West Africa, present-day Namibia, between 1904 and 1908.

Faced with a rebellion against colonial rule by the two tribes, the German military unleashed a brutal campaign of subjugation, forcing parts of the population into the desert without supplies and herding others into concentration camps. Up to 100,000 Herero and Nama were killed, in what is now widely seen as the first genocide of the 20th century.

Zimmerer wants his compatriots to understand the connection between the German genocide in South West Africa and the German genocide in central and eastern Europe less than four decades later. His thesis is summed up in the title of his best-known book: From Windhoek to Auschwitz?. 

“The German military conducted a war of annihilation in Namibia, a genocidal war of annihilation,” he told me. “And this principle of a genocidal war of annihilation we find repeated in the war against the Soviet Union. That is the argument.” The Holocaust itself, Zimmerer continued, could not be detached from that war. 

“Here is a military culture and a bureaucratic culture that within the space of 40 years brings forward genocidal solutions on two occasions. I think this merits a closer look,” he said. In Zimmerer’s mind, ignoring that link was tantamount to minimising German responsibility for the Holocaust, because it presented the Nazi crimes as an aberration: “It is exculpatory because you are decoupling the Holocaust from German history,” he told me. 

German guilt was not an “either/or” in the sense that remembering the Holocaust precluded remembrance of the African genocide, or vice versa. Only by recognising both — and by understanding the connection between the two — could Germany and the world at large draw the right historical lessons.

Looming behind these debates is a sense that there is something ritualised about Germany’s Erinnerungskultur, and that it too often takes on the form of a performative gesture. The remorse and shame that many Germans felt and still feel about the Holocaust is without doubt genuine, as is the political impulse to ensure that the crimes of the Nazis are not repeated. But Germany’s collective sense of shame is at times matched by a collective sense of pride in the fact that the nation feels shame in the first place — and expresses that shame so openly on a daily basis. 

In a remarkable feat of historical jiu-jitsu, Germany over the years has managed to turn a negative into a positive: through remembrance and recognition, the terrible crime of the Holocaust became a new source of moral strength and even of moral superiority. The implied message is: other nations, too, have dark chapters in their histories. Yet none has been so thorough in examining those crimes, and atoning for them. In marketing parlance, Germany’s memory culture has become a unique selling point, an important part of the national brand, admired abroad like one of those precision-engineered luxury cars.

There is indeed much still to admire about Germany’s Erinnerungskultur — the seriousness of debate, the determination to learn from history — especially at a time when other countries continue to view their own history through prisms of glory or victimhood alone. But it also seems clear that, almost eight decades after the end of the war, and with a society increasingly diverse and fragmented, the calls for a new approach will only grow louder. 

“When I say that the Erinnerungskultur will be gone 20 years from now that doesn’t mean that we hopefully won’t still be engaging in many ways, and intelligently, with National Socialism,” Leo told me. That Germany would and should continue to feel responsibility for the victims of the Holocaust was beyond doubt. What flowed from that responsibility in practical and political terms, however, was much less certain. “Of course we need to honour the victims,” he said. “But this cannot be the basis for our politics.”

For all the acrimony and anxiety generated by these latest controversies, there is something reassuring about the heat and fury generated by Germany’s memory wars. They show that — despite the passage of years — the Holocaust remains a live issue, and one that still has the capacity to make the country stop and think. As long as we argue, we won’t forget. 

Tobias Buck is the FT’s managing editor. His book ‘Final Verdict: A Holocaust Trial in the Twenty-first Century’ is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in the UK this week and by Hachette Books in the US on April 30

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