Hands off our Erinnerungskultur!

Should Germany's official remembrance of the past just be focused on 20th dictatorships, or should it be broadened?

Photo by Terence Burke on Unsplash

Dear Reader,

Since 2018 at the latest, we have known how sensitive appeals to widen the lens of Germany’s historical remembrance can be.

That was the year when former AfD leader Alexander Gauland shrugged off the Nazi era as “only a bird poo in 1,000 years of German history.”

In deploying that now infamous phrase, Gauland was attempting to argue that Germany should remember the “heroes” of its past, from Charlemagne and Bismarck, rather than fixing its gaze solely on the 12 years of Nazi terror between 1933 and 1945.

“Precisely because we have taken responsibility for those 12 years, we have every right to admire the Hohenstaufen Emperor Frederick II, the Bamberg Horseman, and the founder figures of Naumburg Cathedral,” Gauland argued.

Only by acknowledging the good parts of German history “will we have the strength to shape our future,” he added.

Much of the outcry in the aftermath focused on Gauland’s choice of the phrase “bird poo” to describe Hitler. Prosecutors even opened a hate crime probe against him before concluding a few months later that his comments were protected by freedom of speech laws.

Whether the extent of the indignation over that phrase was justified or not, the more significant aspect of his speech appeared to be drowned out.

Gauland was apparently alluding to the fact that Germany’s so-called Erinnerungskultur (remembrance culture) is primarily focused on the Nazi era.

While one could counter that the Bamberg Horseman and the Naumburg Cathedral are both in pretty good nick and attract millions of tourists every year, it is true that the federal government only funds historical sites linked to the two 20th-century dictatorships that began in 1933 and ended in 1990.

Thus, the concentration camps at Bergen Belsen and Dachau receive federal funding, but monuments that remember the Prussian victory over Napoleon, for example, don’t.

This policy has come to be known as an official Erinnerungskultur, in which Germany takes an unsparing look at the darkest chapters of its past.

For liberals in the UK and the US, this willingness to look unflinchingly at the skeletons in one’s closet is something to be emulated - they see it as a way of addressing past wrongs in order to heal the wounds of the present.

But, for a certain type of conservative in Germany, it is a sign that the country is paralysed by a guilt that is stopping it from acting in its own interests in the present day.

In truth, the Erinnerungskultur never started out as intentional government policy - at least not in West Germany - and what has come to be known as such is an accident of history more than anything.

But more on that later.

What matters is that there is a widely-held belief that there is some intentional policy of using the sites of Nazis crimes as a tool to shape the modern German consciousness.

As far as the AfD see it, the intention is to make Germans feel constantly guilty - a Schuldkult, as they call it. AfD figurehead Björn Höcke has controversially called for a “180-degree change in our culture of remembrance” and lamented the fact that Germany has erected a “monument of shame” (a reference to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe) in the middle of its capital city.

For the historians who run memorials at concentration camps, this kind of language is deeply worrying. Behind the calls for more positivity they detect a more sinister attempt to forget, or even deny, the horrors of Nazi crimes. Indeed, for years the AfD have sought to block funding to new places of Nazi remembrance.

For a while, the battle lines in German politics on this issue seemed pretty clear. All the mainstream parties accepted the orthodoxy that federal funding should be reserved for Nazi and Stasi sites. This was based on the principle that these were sites of state-orchestrated crimes on an industrial scale - any attempt to widen the sphere of remembrance would necessarily relativize those crimes.

Only the AfD wanted to tinker with that consensus... until in recent months they have been joined by a rather unexpected bedfellow.

Claudia Roth, a grandee of the Green party, is the polar opposite of an AfD politician. With her dazzlingly colourful fashion sense and unabashed one-worldism, she makes conservatives caught in a 10-kilometre exclusion zone break out in an instant rash.

Roth has carefully styled herself for decades as a standard bearer for anti-fascism.

But, in her current role as Minister of Culture, she too has incited the ire of the directors of Holocaust memorial sites. In language strikingly similar to that used to criticize the AfD, dozens of memorial directors signed a letter accusing Roth of a "historical revisionism” that “trivializes Nazi crimes.”

The cause of their anger was a policy paper Roth published at the beginning of this year in which she called for a new Erinnerungskultur in which the federal state would fund memorials for events far beyond the eras of the Nazis and the Stasi.

In Roth’s view, the Erinnerungskultur needs to be brought up to date to reflect the needs of Germany’s modern multi-ethnic society. “A modern Erinnerungskultur in our immigrant society offers the opportunity for a shared historical understanding and points the way to integration,” she argued.

And, as luck would have it, Roth knows exactly what historical events would foster such societal harmony. She appealed for new memorials that recall “the trauma immigrants have endured both abroad and in Germany.”

These would include a memorial to the crimes of the NSU, a neo-Nazi terror trio who murdered close to a dozen migrants in the early years of the 21st century. Far-left and Islamist crimes, on the other hand, didn’t crop up in her proposal.

In other words, by instrumentalizing the Erinnerungskultur - or "unfurling the future-shaping power of remembrance" as she puts it - Roth wants to pull the same trick that Gauland advocated of using state-sanctioned history as a form of Volkserziehung.

Unfortunately for her, the historians who manage the national memorials, whose support she is dependent on, were having none of it.

Roth's plan would “introduce a historical-political paradigm shift that would lead to a fundamental weakening of the culture of remembrance,” the memorial directors thundered in their joint letter. “It departs from the long-standing consensus that National Socialist crimes must not be relativised and GDR injustice must not be trivialised.”

After the national press also joined in to describe the culture minister's plans as “a fatal confusion” and "not worth the paper it was written on," her plans now seem dead in the water.

Nonetheless, these controversies raise interesting questions about just what the point of the Erinnerungskultur is. Is the aim expressly to remind Germans of the sins of their own past? If that is the case, we should hardly be surprised that over-zealous politicians from both the left and the right see an opportunity to meddle with it.

Indeed, Roth might be well-advised to take a closer look at where the modern policy of giving federal funding to Nazi memorials actually comes from.

The Erinnerungskultur as we know it today is a relatively recent invention: West Germany never gave any federal funding to Holocaust monuments. That came much later when reunification posed the question of what to do with the concentration camps at Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald that had been managed by the East German state.

Unlike the government in Bonn, the communists in the East set up a centralised Erinnerungskultur soon after the war. The communist remembrance was overtly political: by portraying itself at such memorials as the child of the anti-Nazi resistance movement, the GDR could wash its hands of the Nazi crimes while using the sites to ram home the idea that socialism was the only bulwark against fascism.

That approach to remembrance wasn’t just historically dubious, it was at best ineffective, at worst counterproductive. By the late 1980s, neo-Nazi subcultures were popping up all across East Germany.

Many of the murders and attacks on migrants that have been seen in the decades since - the type of murders Roth wants to counteract via a politicised remembrance culture - can be traced back to the counterculture that emerged in that period.

I would suggest that the culture of remembrance of the Nazis is more important than the parochial concerns of German politics. 

As the last people connected to the Nazi era die off, it is ever less plausible to argue that modern Germans bear a particular responsibility for the crimes of the past. But they do unquestionably bear the responsibility of maintaining the sites of those crimes as a reminder for all of humanity of what took place there.

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