This article is about contemporary memory politics in Germany, with a special focus on memory education as a function of governmentality. It describes the linkage of the memory of the Holocaust with present-day human rights causes and examines education that is intended to use that memory to create better German citizens. I look into the widely accepted idea that in a democracy, citizens not only have rights but also obligations to behave in accordance with the society's values. By examining the citizen's alleged obligations and how they are characterized by different forms of memorializing historical events, I offer insight into the rationale for injecting a retrospective view into present-day politics and educational efforts that are intended to accomplish that. Contemporary German memory education is to a great extent influenced by global educational programs such as those supported by UNESCO. I come to the conclusion that many of the programs aimed at German citizens include education about the Holocaust and are considered to be "naturally" complementary to promoting human rights. Nevertheless, the German government's proclaimed aim of advancing respect for human rights and thereby creating a more peaceful future carries with it a risk of becoming a stepping stone to the assumption of a morally superior position that will result in new forms of exclusion.
At mid-afternoon on September19, 2008, Brian Sinclair,a45-year-old man of Aboriginal descentw heeled into the emergencyr oom( ER) of the Health Sciences CentreinW innipeg.H einteracted with atriage aide,showed his family physician's letter,then parked his wheelchair in what would be his final resting place. The video footage from securityc ameras shows Mr.S inclair moving around the waiting room with intermittentmoments of rest, and medical staff walking by him in anearly emptywaiting room but no onewhatsoever inquiring if he needed assistance.T wenty-four hours after his arrival, housekeeping was called to attend to abodily fluid discharge in the waiting room -Brian Sinclair's vomit. From 4:37 pm on September 20th to the time of the first attempt at resuscitationat00:51 am the following day, he does not moveaninch, his head slumped forward in what is nowknown to be the position he died in.During his entire stayi nthe ER,Brian Sinclair was invisible to the medical staff, even after he vomited in the waiting room. He spentw hat is more than likely eight hours dead in his wheelchair before anybodya ttempted anyr esuscitation maneuvers on him. Vulnerable and with no advocate, he was considered a"frequentflyer," drug user,and ahomeless First Nations man, and he died while attempting to get help for what he knew was as erious medical condition. Between his arrivaland the certification of his death, Brian Sinclair had neitherbeen triaged nor had anurse seen him in the 34 hours he spentinthe ER,although150 other patients had been processed throughthe department. A visitor eventually made the staff aware thatBrian Sinclair's neck was blue.Rigor mortish ad alreadys et in,with the coroner estimating that he hadd ied hours prior to the first attempt at resuscitation. According to the coroner's report, this death was preventable (Preston, 2014).The inquest into his death, published in 2014, makes clear thathis visit to the ER was only the last station in alife lived under unlivable conditions. In 2004, Sinclair had had abilateral lower leg amputation secondarytofrostbite, suffered after he hadbeen evicted from his apartmentinthe winter.During his hospital admission Mr.Sinclair was assessed by amultitude of medical professionals whoOpen-Access-Publikation im Sinne der CC-Lizenz BY-NC-ND
This article investigates local endeavours for Holocaust memory in post-apartheid South Africa in their relation to global memory imperatives that are, among others, produced by supranational organizations such as UNESCO and the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. Drawing on a larger case-study on globalized memory, I analyse to what extent a generalized mnemonic framework is reflected in South Africa's 2007 curriculum reform, namely its inclusion of the Holocaust and subsequent memory politics. In order to illuminate the coloniality of memorialization, I trace the epistemic location of the narrative that suggests that Holocaust memory nourishes democratic values and human rights—maybe even more so than local memories of violence and oppression such as colonization and apartheid. In this regard, I found that while many activists for Holocaust memory continuously and sometimes uncritically advocate for its global implementation, a decolonial perspective enables us to understand the power dynamics constitutive of universal moral norms around Holocaust memory that tacitly transmit global demands to local contexts. I therefore suggest that, within the global colonial matrix of power, a universally advised practice of memorializing the Holocaust to specific ends can be regarded as a technique of governmentality, because it risks limiting utopian thought beyond the Euro-modern paradigm.
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