Lived multidirectionality: “Historikerstreit 2.0” and the politics of Holocaust memory

Abstract

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.

Against Exceptionalism

“…Palestine is our past, present, and future. Michael Rothberg's multidirectional approach problematizes the view that "the Holocaust was unique in world history and it cannot be described as a colonial crime" (Rothberg 2021; see also Rothberg 2022). Putting the Holocaust in dialogue with "memories of colonialism and slavery does not 'relativize' or minimize the Shoah or vice versa" (Rothberg 2021).…”

“…Critiques of the eliminatory logic of Israeli settler colonialism have, time and time again, been rebuffed by allegations that they are "relativizing" the Holocaust, as if attention to the genocide of Palestinians (speaking, writing, and marching against Israel's genocidal war on Gaza) can only come at the expense of Jews, as if recognition that Palestinian lives matter (that civilian lives are legally protected by international law and that collective punishment is legally and ethically prohibited by any system bound by universalist principles) must invalidate the lives of Jews (Gessen 2023;Rothberg 2022). What Zionists, fearful of the global examples of solidarity movements with Palestine, see in them is tragically and ironically a projection of their own logic onto Palestinians and those who actively stand with them.…”

Near and far: Tracing memory and reframing presence in pandemic-era Argentina

“…Indeed, contestation of memory has been an important framework for thinking through how societies navigate the past. We see this in Michael Rothberg's recent work on the Holocaust memory debates in Germany, where he notes that the "dissonant narratives of migration and contemporary conflict challenge the truisms of German memory" (Rothberg, 2022(Rothberg, : 1318. The value of such dissonance and other forms of memory wars and politics has become an important way of analyzing how societies not only come to terms with the past, but also demonstrate how communities and nations are defining and redefining their sense of citizenship and belonging.…”