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Holocaust remembrance: haven't we done enough in Germany?
Photo: Stefan Boness / Ipon / imago images / IPON
Is it okay to inherit wealth from a German grandpa?
A current feature section debate asks about the Nazi dividend, from which many white Germans still benefit today.
Accordingly, we can deal with countless continuities from the twelve years of National Socialist terror.
Because these are continuities that are still very effective today.
The question arises: How do we deal with (the immanent aftermath) of German history?
And with what ulterior motive do we do this?
To the author
Photo:
M. Heinke
Mohamed Amjahid
, born in 1988, is a freelance journalist and book author.
His current book »The White Spot.
A guide to anti-racist thinking «has been published by Piper Verlag.
It is more casual observations that slowly made me understand that something is wrong with German commemorative culture: White Germans smile at the camera on social media while cleaning stumbling blocks, white Germans cut out a printed paper kippa from the »image« , put them on and think that they could use it to perform solidarity, white Germans talk about their Nazi parents and grandparents and are somehow proud of the fact that they should have overcome "hatred once and for all."
Is it now supposed to be wrong to live a culture of remembrance publicly and to be proud of it?
I cannot judge what is wrong and what is right.
Neither can I speak for descendants and communities who have to live with the consequences of the crimes of National Socialism to this day.
This text wants to deal primarily with the actions and speaking of white Germans and with the positioning of some descendants of the perpetrators.
I am particularly interested in two specific questions: Why do people think in Germany?
And how is this commemoration carried out to the outside world, i.e. towards supposedly foreign groups?
It is impossible to write about a person's or a society's intention with absolute certainty.
I can't look inside heads.
And yet I often ask myself whether there is an ulterior motive in preserving, in living the actually important and correct German culture of remembrance.
For example with this little story:
A Syrian woman arrived in Germany in 2015, severely traumatized by the war in her country.
A short time later she was in a German course.
The woman told me how after a few weeks her teacher had the idea of taking her class on a trip to a concentration camp memorial.
The Syrian did not know what she was getting into unprepared.
In the memorial, she told me, she collapsed mentally during the tour.
She tried hard not to let it show that the white-German teacher was simply too happy and proud of herself to be able to enlighten a few ignorant refugees.
The trauma of the refugee woman got a terrible update as a result.
And she no longer felt safe in Germany, which for her suddenly became the country of perpetrators.
The sociologist Y. Michal Bodemann invented a practical term: memory theater.
According to this, many white Germans with their culture of remembrance are not concerned with the reminder itself, but with their own compensation: Look here, I'm bringing Syrian refugees to the concentration camp memorial (to perhaps show off to friends), I clean stumbling blocks (because I I am a politician, there will be elections soon and there are good pictures), I wear a kippah in public (although I opposed Jewish practices during the circumcision debate or on the subject of the slaughtering of farm animals) or I talk extensively about my grandpa, who was responsible in the Waffen-SS for people being deported and exterminated, and all of that somehow makes me a better person.
Most of the time I just watched, fascinated, until someone asked me why I was so quiet and I replied, "My grandpa wasn't a Nazi."
Broadly speaking, this theater of remembrance often gives rise to pro-German marketing: Look, we've been the ultimate bad guys in history.
But because we have worked through that today, we are now the super-good guys and can give instructions to everyone else.
I call this phenomenon: memory superiority.
The CDU member of the Bundestag Philipp Amthor suggested in an interview on the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp that anti-Semitism is currently primarily a migrant (and therefore not a white-German) problem.
He said: "You shouldn't forget that anti-Semitism is particularly strong in Muslim cultures." These words were spoken a few weeks after the Halle assassination attempt in which a white German right-wing extremist tried to shoot dozens of Jews in a synagogue and had the plan to kill Muslims too.
Memory superiority becomes the ultimate mechanism of exclusion from other vulnerable minorities.
Undisputed, there is also anti-Semitism among Muslims.
But Philipp Amthor could show a little more humility on sensitive anniversaries.
Politically, his party also implemented the opposite of what good memory work should do: On January 30, 2020, the coalition of CDU / CSU and SPD blocked a change in the law with their majority in the Bundestag, the descendants of the Jews who were expatriated during the Nazi era * Jews would return German citizenship.
A new law creates "less legal certainty", Amthor justifies the negative attitude of his group.
It is important to talk about the German memory superiority in order to clarify the discrepancy between memory theater and concrete action.
However, many oppose a critical evaluation of the processing of German history.
Another example: the coming to terms with German colonialism, the genocide in Namibia, for example.
I have published about this several times in the past.
Then I received angry letters and sometimes outraged monologues at readings.
The tenor: haven't we done enough in Germany?
Can't we draw a line?
We already worked through the Holocaust, now also colonialism?
There are also continuities between German colonialism and the Nazi era that we absolutely have to talk about.
In the past few years I have sat at many tables having lunch or dinner with white friends or colleagues.
After a few glasses of wine, some white Germans at the tables started talking about their Nazi family background.
They encouraged and praised each other for what they learned today.
Most of the time I just watched, fascinated, until someone asked me why I was so quiet, and I replied, "My grandpa wasn't a Nazi."
This sentence always acts like a disturbance.
But it also raises the question: How do we deal with memory in a multicultural society?
I believe that only a multicultural society can give good answers to this, purely white perspectives at least lead astray, if not worse.
Some of the people at the table then tell me how their children rebel against taking responsibility for German history at all or simply commemorating it.
Something is really wrong with the way we remember and admonish in Germany.
I experienced a moment that really made me shudder in the presence of a white, award-winning, supposedly left-wing liberal author.
He said to me: “I will never understand how one could live in Germany in 1933 and join the National Socialists.
I would definitely have joined the resistance! «This statement made it clear to me that many white Germans (with a Nazi family history) did not understand that misanthropic ideologies are more powerful than an idealized self-image.
It may well be that the author in question would have ended up as an editor at »Stürmer« in 1933 or at least would have been an inclined reader.
At the time, an alarming number of Germans were behind the regime, which translated a historically grown misanthropy into genocide politics.
To recognize the manipulative dangers of misanthropic ideologies with political humility and less self-centered memory superiority - from my point of view that is a basic requirement in order to really learn something from history.
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