The German culture of memory, or Germany's attitude towards its own past, has for decades been considered at the international level a benchmark for dealing with the dark past and for remembering the victims of Nazi rule.
However, pressure has been growing for some time to integrate the German colonial past as well as the history of migration into the German culture of memory.
When Olaf Scholz's government came to power in 2021, the coalition agreement stipulated that the culture of memory should be reformed, to include colonial history as well as the history of people who immigrated to Germany. In February, the office of the federal commissioner for culture, Claudia Roth (Greens), published a draft with proposals for reform. Title: "Framework concept for the culture of memory". According to this draft, reformed memory should in the future cover five areas, namely the history of National Socialism, the history of the unjust regime of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) in the GDR era, the colonial past, the history of democracy and immigration.
However, when word got out about this draft, criticism became louder. In particular, the leadership of memorial centers devoted to the Holocaust criticized Claudia Roth's plans.
"Competition of victims" should be avoided
Representatives of these institutions signed a letter stating that the new framework will initiate a "paradigm change that will lead to a fundamental weakening of the culture of memory" and that it will "depart from the long-standing consensus that National Socialist crimes must not be relativized".
For the signatories of the letter, Claudia Roth's suggestions do not clarify the central importance of "crimes against humanity, the Shoah" for Germany and therefore could be "understood as historical-revisionist in the sense of trivializing Nazi crimes". The criticism was so strong that the government commissioner's office removed the text of the draft from its website.
Tahir Dela is a spokesperson for the Initiative Blacks in Germany (ISD), a non-governmental organization that represents the interests of blacks in Germany and was invited by the Federal Office for Culture to comment on the first proposals.
Della welcomed the inclusion of colonial history in the wider culture of memory, but emphasized that it was not a "competition of victims". His initiative wants to be part of the exchange between Holocaust memorial centers, monuments for Sinti and Roma and institutions that remind of the injustice of the East German regime, in order to clearly show "that historical experiences, stories of persecution, and certain historical epochs should and should be seen as intertwined stories".
"It's about talking about colonial continuity that extends beyond the colonial period into the Nazi era, that there were precursors, so to speak, before Germany even officially became a colonial power, that Germany was involved in colonial crimes and enslavement ", Dela told DW.
Dela sees the current challenges of climate change, migration, displacement, persistent economic inequalities and racism, including anti-black intolerance, as direct consequences of the European colonial period. "I'm afraid that this reaction is partly due to the fact that we have to 'process' a history that is not particularly positive for German historiography and for the German self-image. Many citizens have a hard time understanding those aspects of German history," adds Della.
The culture of memory in a globalized world
Sebastian Konrad, professor of global and postcolonial history at the Free University of Berlin, also sees no trivialization of the Nazi era in the Federal Office for Culture's proposals.
"I don't share the premise of the criticism, which leads to the conclusion that as soon as we think of something else, we relativize it," he told DW. For Konrad, the debate about the culture of memory reflects wider social issues; especially the issue of migration to Germany since 2015. In his opinion, this must also be discussed at the level of memory politics, because how we remember the past changes with the constant changes in German society.
"Every year new Germans come, new Germans are born, new Germans come to the country, so it simply wouldn't be realistic to think that memory is something stable and fixed around which everything is agreed upon and around which there is a consensus that remains," he says. he.
"The globalized world we live in has a long history, and that history is one in which colonialism played a crucial role," Konrad adds. "So if we want to understand how we got to our globalized present, we also need to understand the history of imperialism, empires and colonialism."
The past that is still present
Henning Melber, a German-Namibian political scientist, anti-colonial activist and author of a forthcoming book on the legacy of German colonial rule, describes the reaction to the culture commissioner's proposals as "deplorable".
"It seems to be almost a reflex reaction, because it is feared that adding two more pillars in addition to the Holocaust and the GDR regime would take away attention and perhaps funding for their activities," he told DW.
The Holocaust is often described as a "civilization break". But postcolonial criticism claims that European colonial powers, even before the Holocaust, established racist and violent rule, including genocide, in the name of civilization. Germany's violent colonial history includes the genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples (1904-1908) in present-day Namibia.
"All those who demand an adequate confrontation with colonial crimes have never questioned that the Holocaust culminated in a unique form of planned, systematic, industrial mass extermination of a certain group or groups," says Melber.
While Germany is often praised for its culture of Holocaust remembrance, when it comes to the violent history of the German Empire in the colonies it has, according to Melber, "completely failed". Partly because, he says, former colonial powers are still beneficiaries of a system based on exploitation, subjugation and oppression.
"If we are willing to acknowledge history and its consequences for us as users and for those who experienced it, a huge moral problem arises," says Melber. "How can we really deal with that past in the present, because it's not the past, it's the present. Basically, it means: How much are we willing to give up?"
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