How the German translation of Multidirectional Memory helped spark a national debate
MICHAEL ROTHBERG
Photo of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Free for commercial use. Via Pixabay.
A German version of this article was originally published in Berliner Zeitung. Posted with permission.
One year ago my book Multidirectional Memory » was published in German translation, twelve years after it appeared in English. In 2009 the book was received by scholars around the world as part of what Astrid Erll called the “third phase” of memory studies. Scholars in this third phase sought to revise understandings of collective memory inherited from the influential work of the first two phases. Scholars in the third phase saw memory as dynamic: as transnational, transcultural, and pluralistic. Multidirectional Memory, which pursued the interplay of memories of the Holocaust, colonialism, and slavery across a transnational space that linked Black people and Jews, quickly became a standard reference point in scholarship on collective memory.
The reception of the book in Germany in 2021 was completely different and, indeed, unprecedented. Instead of being part of an international scholarly discussion of the nature of collective remembrance, Multidirectional Memory found itself in the middle of fierce conflicts in the German public sphere about the Holocaust’s uniqueness, the nature of antisemitism, and the critique of Israeli policy. The translation triggered a new round of debate in an ongoing cycle of controversies. The “multidirectional memory” debate built on the previous year’s “Mbembe affair,” in which the prominent Cameroonian intellectual Achille Mbembe was accused—unfairly, in my opinion—of antisemitism and Holocaust relativization based on cherry-picked citations from his writings on apartheid and Israel. The German edition of Multidirectional Memory led, in turn, to increased discussion of the relationship between the Nazi genocide of Jews and European colonialism. Critics of Multidirectional Memory used the opportunity of the translation to revive a debate about historian Jürgen Zimmerer’s work on the relation between Germany’s colonial genocide of the Herrero and Nama and the Holocaust.
As all of these different contested aspects of the German past and present were converging, a sharply critical essay for the Swiss blog Geschichte der Gegenwart by the US-based Australian historian Dirk Moses appeared. Moses identified key tenets of what he saw as a German civil religion that had become illiberal or even authoritarian: the absolute uniqueness of the Holocaust, the absolute distinction of antisemitism from other forms of racism, and the close connection between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. After Moses’s essay received lively and nuanced discussion in English, the debate was picked up by the German press where the tone changed radically. Now, prominent senior historians and well-placed journalists responded harshly and dismissively to Moses’s critique.
Instead of relitigating the question of the Holocaust’s uniqueness, I want to consider these controversies from a different angle. It is clear that the assertion that Germany’s much vaunted Holocaust memory culture has developed significant, even anti-democratic, flaws has touched a nerve.
