East/West divide; the colonial past; the reality of
migration; and far-right mobilization. While in the
last couple of decades the Holocaust has come to
function as a founding continent-wide, “negative”
memory, this fact has also opened up a field of
tensions. First, it unleashed a new post-Cold War
East/West conflict concerning the questions of how
to remember World War II and how to calibrate
Stolperstein at Verlegestelle Antwerpener Straße 32, Köln,
2018 | [email protected]
memories of Nazism and Soviet Communism.
Second, it raised uncomfortable questions about
histories of racism and violence that predated—
some would argue, fed into—the Holocaust and that
of all immigrants and minorities, we find very continue into the present: colonialism, slavery, and
creative—sometimes multidirectional—acts of their afterlives. The reality of racialization, produced
memory that open up what has become a ritualized in no small measure out of the history of colonialism
and moralized Holocaust memory in Germany. and slavery, also shapes the European reception of
Ultimately, we believe, these acts of memory are also migrants and refugees, who are persistently marked
democratic forms of “memory citizenship,” that as other, as not belonging, as unintegratable. Various
is, contestations of the paradigms of belonging and scholars, including Rita Chin and Fatima El-Tayeb
participation that determine who gets a say about in the German context and Françoise Vergès in
the character and constitution of contemporary the French context, have been drawing attention
German society. I think this focus on migrant to the racialized notion of Europeanness, but in
archives and memory citizenship has implications public life as well as in much scholarly writing, race
that go well beyond Germany. goes unmarked and unspoken. This unspeakability
has untold effects on European memory—for the
memories of both those who consider themselves
5. How would you describe the policies on
memory and remembrance that the EU has
carried out so far? What would be the main
challenges faced by the EU in this sense?
unproblematically European and those migrants who
are also European (among other things), but are not
recognized as such.
My hypothesis would be that all of these
difficulties then converge in the rise of the far right.
I don’t usually focus on memory at the institutional Of course there is much more than memory politics
level, so I don’t really have much to say about the at stake, but I think the failures to adequately
EU as such. However, I can say something about address these various tensions within public
European memory as a heterogeneous social remembrance—unevenness within Europe, colonial
formation. Certainly, all of the projects I have legacies, histories of race and migration—constitute
described above—the books on multidirectional the backdrop for the current political crisis. I have no
memory, the implicated subject, and migrant magic solution to solve this crisis—I wish someone
memories—have implications for thinking about did!—but I suspect that the cultivation of a greater
remembrance in Europe as a whole. sense of implication for Europeans in histories of
Europe faces many challenges and many
colonialism and race would be a step in the right
of them—though certainly not all!—do involve direction. That’s a project that will demand broad
questions of memory. My own work on the Holocaust forms of education and democratized cultures of
leads me to highlight four interlinked issues that memory that include multidirectional sensibilities
intersect with memory of the war and genocide: the and migrant perspectives.
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