Battlefield of history politics | What about reasons of state?

The destruction of Nazism and its roots is our motto. The construction of a new world of peace and freedom is our goal." This was the inscription on a memorial stone commemorating the victims of the death march from the Buchenwald concentration camp near the town of Sonneberg. Recently, the word "Nazism" was crossed out, and above it, someone wrote "Zionism" in large letters. This is by no means an isolated incident: Employees of Nazi memorial sites in Germany report increasingly frequent graffiti, desecration, destruction, as well as personal threats and attacks. Stumbling stones are being defaced with red paint, and memorial sites no longer display guest books because they are filled with anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist hate speech. "Free yourself from the guilt cult" and "Free Palestine! End Israeli Occupation" were already written on stickers that Nazis affixed to several memorial plaques at the Ahlem Nazi Memorial in Lower Saxony in October 2023.

The memorial is located on the site of a former Jewish horticultural school, which the Nazis used as a detention and execution site, as well as a collection point for the deportation of Jews to the extermination camps. The stickers were from the neo-Nazi group Junge Nationalisten (Young Nationalists), whose parent party, Die Heimat (formerly the NPD), had hung a Palestinian flag and a large banner bearing the slogan "Israel is our misfortune!" in Dortmund on October 10 – a reminiscence of Heinrich von Treitschke's phrase "The Jews are our misfortune," which became the slogan of the anti-Semitic tabloid "Der Stürmer" under the Nazis.

The absolute majority of attacks on the Holocaust memorial continue to come from right-wing groups – at the same time, since October 7, 2023, supposedly left-wing and progressive actors have also been implicitly or explicitly attacking the memorial sites. For example, left-wing groups announced protests on the memorial site in advance of the commemoration ceremony at the former Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The planned protest was justified in a statement by the "Jewish Voice for Just Peace in the Middle East" with, among other things, a planned appearance by Israeli Ambassador Ron Prosor. A few weeks earlier, there had been a public dispute between the management of the Buchenwald Memorial and the Israeli Embassy over the invitation of philosopher Omri Boehm, to which the Jewish Voice's protests referred.

Even if the pressure exerted by the embassy here can be criticized, this does not justify a protest rally on the anniversary of the liberation of a former concentration camp. Fortunately, in the case of the commemoration in Bergen-Belsen, there were no protests, and the survivors and their families were able to enjoy a dignified commemoration. After all, that is what these commemorations are for. Meanwhile, at the Buchenwald Concentration Camp Memorial, an incident occurred in April at the commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the camp's liberation. A young Spanish speaker from an international youth project, who spoke after the 92-year-old survivor Naftali Fürst, ended her speech with the words "Stop the genocide in Gaza" and "No pasaran." The director of the memorial, Jens-Christian Wagner, criticized the unacceptable form of equation she insinuated.

Demand for universalization

These protests are guided by the memory culture demand for the universalization of remembrance, that is, the stronger inclusion of other historical forms of violence in German memory culture. This reproduces the "Historikerstreit 2.0," in which the relationship between the Shoah and colonialism is bitterly debated . At its core, the question is whether the Shoah should be understood as singular or unprecedented, or whether it should be placed within a universal history of violent crimes. This discussion may be meaningful from a historical and memory-policy perspective. If the "universalization thesis" leads to the primary task of Nazi memorial sites being seen as positioning themselves vis-à-vis Israel/Palestine and not remembering the crimes committed there by Germans and their European allies, there is a danger of leveling off differences and relativizing history. In Gaza, there is no Treblinka, no Sobibor, no Majdanek.

Universalization is often accompanied by the demand for a "final conclusion" in the politics of remembrance. For example, Hanno Hauenstein criticized German remembrance culture in "Freitag," saying that it is largely based on "phrases that neither stand up to the crimes of our past – nor to those of the present, in which Germany is actively participating. " Yossi Bartal went even further in "nd": He demanded that, in light of the "now more than 300 memorials to Nazi victims in German territory and 80 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, in a world in which its remembrance is being exploited by politicians from the Green Party to Putin and Netanyahu as a free pass for further crimes, we should rethink our relationship with the past, gradually let the dead bury their dead, and thus make room for a better new world.

The status quo of the places of remembrance is by no means secure, not even the major memorial sites.

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Anyone who views the processing of Nazi crimes in this way polemically homogenizes "the culture of remembrance," places false expectations on it, and undermines those who have fought for it since 1945 against ignorance and resistance. The processing, compensation, and remembrance of Nazi terror have always been contested and remain so today. The perpetrators generally went unpunished, the survivors received little compensation, and many Shoah survivors in Germany still live in poverty and fight—like the Dutch author Salo Muller, whose parents were deported to their deaths in Auschwitz by rail—for compensation that has always been denied.

The status quo of memorial sites is by no means secure, even at the larger memorials. To this day, work continues in many places under precarious conditions. Staffing levels are generally understaffed, highly qualified staff are poorly paid, and the sites are generally underfunded given the demands placed on them. A look at history shows that most Nazi memorial sites in Germany were created and developed through persistent and protracted struggles by survivors, activists, and committed historians. These were not institutions desired and supported by the state from the outset—quite the opposite. For decades, post-National Socialist societies in West Germany, and within the familial context also in East Germany and Austria, were characterized by the desire to suppress, forget, and rehabilitate the perpetrators.

Survivors of Nazi crimes, as well as their descendants, mostly lived alone with their traumas, the physical and economic consequences of imprisonment and persecution—if they were even able and willing to return to Germany. Even though the way National Socialism was dealt with differed fundamentally in both German states until 1990, a profound examination of antisemitism, Nazi crimes, and the Holocaust never took place in either the FRG or the GDR. This was precisely what was repeatedly criticized by initiatives and individuals involved in remembrance work, including staff at Nazi memorial sites, who instead pursued "history from below" in grassroots organizations.

Germany, world champion of memories ?

In the 1960s and 1970s, a social reappraisal of the Nazi past and the Holocaust slowly began in the Federal Republic of Germany, sparked by initiatives by individual activists, the VVN-BDA (Association of German Reconciliation), the Action Reconciliation Service (Aktion Sühnezeichen), critical lawyers like Fritz Bauer, and sections of the extra-parliamentary left. At the same time, the widespread belief that "the '68ers" had reappraised Nazi history must be countered by the fact that, from the very beginning, the majority of student movements were not concerned with addressing Nazi antisemitism and the Holocaust, but rather with addressing Nazi elites and continuities.

At the height of the movement, this inward-looking "coming to terms with the past" no longer played a role; the focus of political interest was instead – as in the GDR – the anti-imperialist struggle and thus "fascism" in other countries: the USA, South Africa, Rhodesia, and Israel. Many German leftists, unable to mourn the victims of the Shoah and preferring to absolve themselves of responsibility for their own family members, began to relieve themselves of responsibility by identifying with the Palestinians in the 1970s. Instead of considering the significance of the Jewish state for Holocaust survivors, it now became, in the eyes of many leftists, solely a "perpetrator." Dieter Kunzelmann, whose planned bomb attack on the Jewish Community Center in Berlin on November 9, 1969, with the group Tupamaros West Berlin (TW), failed, declared shortly afterwards: "Palestine is to the Federal Republic of Germany and Europe what Vietnam is to the Americans. The left hasn't yet grasped that. Why? The Jewish scam."

Germany's Nazi past and the discourse about Israel/Palestine are undoubtedly discursively intertwined. Half of the Holocaust survivors still alive today live in Israel, which, partly because of the Holocaust, has great – also symbolic – significance for Jews worldwide. This significance exists regardless of the fact that the Israeli right discredits criticism of the occupation and inhumane warfare as antisemitic. And this fundamental significance of an Israeli state for many Jewish people worldwide, but especially in the German context, cannot be ignored. The German context includes, on the one hand, all those people living in Germany with a familial Nazi background. This includes the great-grandchildren of German perpetrators as well as the descendants of Spanish and Italian fascists.

The German context also includes the places and institutions that shape our daily lives. The Aryanized apartment building, the university "cleansed" of Jewish professors and students, the student scholarship co-financed by supervisory board fees of large German companies, the boat canal built by forced laborers, etc. – the traces of Nazism are omnipresent in Germany. This specifically German past and its current recuperation affect all people living in Germany, whether with or without a migration history, whether with or without a family history of Nazism or Nazi support. The slogan "Free Palestine from German guilt" – whether spread by left-wing students in solidarity with Palestine at universities or at a peace demonstration by right-wing conspiracy ideologists at the Brandenburg Gate – stems from the desire to reconcile with this past or encourages this motif deeply rooted in German society.

There is no doubt that right-wing and conservative political groups repeatedly exploit the fight against antisemitism for their anti-immigration agenda. The right-wing and conservative political camps, in particular, currently narrow antisemitism down to two manifestations: antisemitism in a left-wing context and antisemitism in the context of migrant communities. In the first case, the political agenda is turned against the left in terms of extremism theory; in the second, the racist card is used to enforce law-and-order policies and a deportation regime. This can be illustrated by the example of German Chancellor Friedrich Merz: When asked what he was doing in his country to curb antisemitism, Merz replied in an interview with the US broadcaster Fox News that there was "a kind of imported antisemitism with this large number of migrants." This same Friedrich Merz refuses to publicly confront his grandfather, Josef Paul Sauvigny, who was a member of the Nazi Party and the SA.

All of this is worthy of criticism. However, when supposed solidarity with Palestinians is accompanied by attacks on the culture of remembrance of National Socialism, the political left should be wary of joining in this chorus. Such a dismissal of German history legitimizes and fuels the growing anti-Semitism and racism in German society and helps no one except the far-right, which is no longer a fringe. A supposedly progressive movement that gains strength precisely because of this becomes part of this problem affecting society as a whole.

The authors are active in the field of remembrance culture and against anti-Semitism, racism and right-wing terror.