How the German translation of Multidirectional Memory helped spark a national debate
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.
Although many respondents rejected the religiously-inflected rhetoric of Moses’s intervention—among other aspects of his argument—the responses to Multidirectional Memory, as well as to the work of Mbembe and Zimmerer, confirm many of his central points. Rejecting interpretive frameworks that privilege comparison, interconnection, and relationality in scholarship on the Holocaust and Holocaust memory, those who responded to Moses reasserted the case for the absolute uniqueness of the Holocaust, the special nature of antisemitism, and the centrality of Israel to German Staatsraison. There are real scholarly debates to be had about comparative genocide studies, critical race theory, and Israeli policy, but most of the prominent public voices in Germany have been hostile, dismissive, and unwilling to engage seriously with arguments that challenge any aspect of the dominant view of the Holocaust, antisemitism, and Israel.
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. Such an assertion seems to undermine the massive efforts of both grassroots activists and Holocaust scholars to make responsibility for the Shoah a central and defining feature of what it means to be German. The worry seems to be that “postcolonial” critics are undermining this unprecedented achievement and playing into the hands of the far right. The concern is understandable—and genuine among some, if not all, who articulate it—but it is based on a series of misunderstandings, confusions, and, occasionally, deliberate obfuscations.
highlights how ongoing processes of decolonization and movements for civil rights in the Caribbean, Africa, Europe, the United States, and elsewhere unexpectedly galvanized memory of the Holocaust.
There is, first of all, a frequent confusion of history and memory among the opponents of multidirectional approaches. Naturally, history and memory cannot be entirely separated from each other, but the target of my own work and also of Moses’s catechism essay is public memory, not historical scholarship. Yet, this seems difficult for critics to grasp—as evidenced by the speed with which journalists like Thomas Schmid and Claudius Seidl proceeded from my book about memory dynamics to Zimmerer’s historical arguments concerning colonial genocide and the Holocaust.
Second, many critics continue to deploy the zero-sum logic of what I call “competitive memory,” even as they assert that those of us promoting relational approaches are hostile and antagonistic. The argument of Multidirectional Memory is that memory does not work according to the logic of a zero-sum game; I show that even memory conflict leads to more memory and not less. A perfect example of the reassertion of zero-sum logic can be found in the essay by Dan Diner that closes Ein Verbrechen ohne Namen, a collection of short pieces by prominent historians that seeks to counter Moses’s “German Catechism” essay. Turning from his longstanding philosophical-historical argument about the Holocaust’s “counter-rational” singularity to the current politics of antiracism in the Black Lives Matter moment, Diner suggests that those who draw attention to the racist and colonial beliefs of such World War II heroes as Winston Churchill necessarily erode memory of the Holocaust: “Now Churchill, as a personality of the 19th century, was not free of racist attitudes, just like his contemporaries. But if this is all that is to remain of Churchill, then—so the conclusion suggests itself—Hitler should be erased from historical memory.” The conclusion that “suggests itself” is Diner’s alone. The only explanation for such a tendentious argument would seem to be the zero-sum logic that follows from a quasi-metaphysical commitment to the Holocaust’s singularity—a singularity that, for Diner, must not only be asserted historically but, apparently, must be monumentalized in memory culture.
The confusion of history and memory and the zero-sum approach to memory culture and historical analysis converge in an inability to look with fresh eyes at the memory culture of the present. Yet, the need for a comparative and relational account of the Holocaust and its legacies is everywhere visible in contemporary society and, indeed, in the debate itself.
The refusal to consider the Holocaust in proximity to colonialism that defines the dominant perspective in Germany distorts our understanding of both history and memory. Scholars will continue to debate the precise relation of German colonialism to the Nazi genocide of Jews, but an increasing number of historians, at least outside Germany, now recognize that the Holocaust took place in the context of the Nazis’ drive to colonize Eastern Europe and with Hitler having taken explicit inspiration from the British empire and US westward expansion. In the realm of memory, meanwhile, the fact of the matter is that discussions of colonial legacies are inseparable from discussion of the Shoah’s legacies for at least two reasons: because coming to terms with the Holocaust has in the last few decades become an unavoidable reference point around the globe for thinking about manifold forms of political violence; and because Jewish, Black, and other intellectuals have, since the rise of Nazism, always considered this conjunction fundamental to understanding the history of modernity.
The coincidence in our moment of all of these acrimonious and high-stakes debates—about colonialism, antisemitism, Israel, and the Holocaust—is itself the most significant proof of memory’s multidirectionality and history’s entanglements. German memory culture of the 1980s modeled the self-critical potential of coming to terms with the past; today, however, it has lost that self-critical dimension and come instead to feed illiberal currents. Ultimately, multidirectional approaches stand a better chance of reinvigorating Germany’s hard-won memory culture in an ever-more plural and complex society.
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