REMEMBRANCE
AND RECONCILIATION
This piece was originally published in the 2018 FASPE Journal. Much has changed since then, both in the United States and in Germany. As of 2023, Waco now hosts a historical marker detailing and denouncing the lynching of Jesse Washington. This public marker was the culmination of seven years of advocacy by the Community Race Relations Coalition of Waco, and for many people this memorial has become a beacon of hope that past wrongs can be brought to light. While there is still work to be done toward racial reconciliation, this was a significant step in the right direction.
Julia Butler, FASPE
Around the world, however, the past few years have also revealed the truly political, and at times deeply divisive, nature of memory and memorialization. As discussed in this paper, public memorializations can be a double-edge sword–they can serve to mend broken relationships, or they can further exacerbate the divide. In Germany, for instance, some argue that self-critical memorializations do a disservice to the country and its history. The Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has sparked renewed public debate about the role of memorials in that country. The comments and actions of AfD politicians like Björn Höcke of Thuringia, a former history teacher accused of making Nazi salutes and whitewashing the NSDAP’s crimes, have led Germany’s social and cultural institutions to respond to these demands to interrogate the ways remembrance and reconciliation relate to memorialization. Some, like German-Jewish writer Max Czollek, contend that monuments are no longer enough, that the situation is too dire, while others maintain that they remain a vital part of standing against hate. Similarly in the US, while memorials like the one commemorating Jesse Washington’s lynching have become more common, some continue to question the helpfulness of such acts of memorialization.
My piece does not and cannot reckon properly with these new developments. As such, I have left my piece unaltered, so that we might reflect on how matters appeared in 2018 and how they appear today. My hope is that, as we consider the social changes, we might recognize, anew, the truly political nature of memory and memorialization. My concurrent hope is that our sober reflections on these changes might allow us to contribute meaningfully to this ongoing conversation, especially as we celebrate the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
In the decades directly following World War II, Germany faced a complex challenge: deciding whether and how to remember victims of the conflict and the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazi state. Immediately after the war ended, questions emerged about whether to destroy or preserve sites that marked Nazi terror, whether to forget or to remember. The complexity of this question was compounded by further considerations, such as whose perspective should be represented if public memorializations were to occur. This collective post-war struggle to remember— honestly and publicly—Germany’s history revealed a potent truth: that there is
a politics to memory.
Although Germany lends itself as a case study of the politics of memory in post-conflict societies, such complexities are not unique to that country. Most post-conflict societies, including the United States with its history of racial discrimination and violence, face similar challenges: should we remember past atrocities? If so, how? How do we reconcile the differing narratives that may emerge? Is it possible to present
a faithful—or unified—account of past events when historical accounts emerge phenomenologically in the subjective experience of individuals and groups? While simple answers to these questions may not exist, one can look to the German experience post-WWII to better understand the complexity of memory as well as the need for public remembrance.
The Politics of Memory in Germany after World War II
After the war ended, German society had to decide what to do with the physical remains of the Nazi regime—those buildings and sites constructed or used by the Nazis that still stood after the Reich fell—as well as what to do with the vacant spaces that the victims once filled. The question of memorialization became two-fold: What should be torn down and what should be built up? Should concentration camps remain standing as a reminder of the atrocities perpetrated by the state, or should that symbol of dehumanization, torture, and death be destroyed? Should monuments be erected to remember the lives that were taken during the Holocaust? If so, how do you remember in a way that is sensitive and beneficial to survivors and their families while also taking into account social cohesion?
The balance between collectively remembering and collectively forgetting is, as professor and critic Ann Rigney writes, “fraught with more moral, emotive, and political difficulties than the optimistic belief in a clean transition might suggest.”1 Given the usually twin, but not necessarily coinciding, goals of attempting to offer recognition or even healing to the victims (or their surviving kin) and preserving national cohesion, societies emerging from conflict try to find a balance between which past events they acknowledge in the present and which they relegate to the past. Public memorialization can be a double-edged sword in its ability to both mend broken relationships through communal acknowledgment and remembrance and further solidify divisions by making the memory of abuse and division eternal2.
For the first few decades after the war most of German society chose collective amnesia.
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