Observing Memories Issue 3 | Page 34

Arrival of refugees with a special train by Deutsche Bahn from the Austrian/
German border at the station of Cologne/Bonn airport, October 2015
© Raimond Spekking / CC BY-SA 4.0 (via Wikimedia Commons)
bind”: the fact that people identified as racialized refugees in the summer of 2015, which led both to
immigrants were simultaneously told that in order inspiring examples of solidarity and, ultimately, to
to be German they had to “remember” the Holocaust innumerable attacks on people perceived as foreign
and that they could never remember the Holocaust that persist to this day along with the strengthening
because it wasn’t part of their history. The double of the far right in the political sphere through the
bind was summed up well by a Turkish-German rise of the AfD. But, from my somewhat distant
woman who had participated in a civil society perspective in the US, my sense is that the basic
project on National Socialism and the Holocaust parameters of the migrant double bind and the
called the “Neighborhood Mothers.” In reflecting German paradox remain in place. That is to say that
on her experience with the group, she wrote, “We despite increased recognition of the diverse nature
often hear that the topic of National Socialism is of German society, a strongly ethnic definition of
not for us because we’re migrants. Just as often Germanness continues to reign and to have powerful
it’s insinuated that in any case we are too anti- shaping effects on cultural memory, not least
Semitic to be interested in this topic.” Becoming memory of the Holocaust and National Socialism.
aware of the migrant double bind led us to recognize
Our project, however, is not primarily a critique
another powerful social logic that we called the of these discourses about Germans, migrants, and
“German paradox,” which finds expression in Holocaust memory; it is an argument that despite
dominant society. This is the idea that in order to those discourses there has been significant memory
take responsibility for the Holocaust an ethnic notion work across society by minorities, migrants, and
of Germanness has to be preserved, even though postmigrants. We collect and analyze what we call
this very notion of Germanness contributed to the a “migrant archive” of acts of remembrance that
committing of that crime in the first place. includes civil society initiatives, performance and
A lot has changed since we first became
interested in this topic—not least the large influx of
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Observing Memories

ISSUE 3
visual art, music, literature, and theater. While we
don’t claim such remembrance is representative