‘Don’t forget those other German crimes’

sister-Actactress Whoopi Goldberg was publicly backed this week and suspended by her broadcaster ABC for saying on a talk show that the Holocaust had nothing to do with race. Then, on another talk show, in which she attempted to apologize, Goldberg said she did not understand how the Holocaust could have anything to do with racism when it was about “white people targeting mostly white people.” “It’s white on white.”

Confusion is not only prevalent on American TV about whether and how the Holocaust can be interpreted in the postcolonial conceptual framework that has become dominant in recent years. Eighty years after the Wannsee Conference, which planned the systematic murder of eleven million European Jews on January 20, 1942, a fierce debate is raging in Germany about how to understand and remember the Holocaust. Just like with the historical street that filled the columns of German newspapers in 1986, it is a question that has major consequences for self-image: was the Holocaust a rupture in civilization, a one-time aberration? Or did it flow logically from the German and European past?

In the 1980s, historian Ernst Nolte took the latter position. He argued that the murder of the Jews was a result of the clash between fascism and Bolshevism, and that the gulags already foreshadowed the Nazi death camps. In a variant on this, a new generation of historians argue that the Holocaust resulted from a European history of imperialism and colonial violence.

Co-causing this ‘Historikerstreit 2.0’ is historian Dirk Moses, professor at the University of North Carolina. In May last year he published a piece entitled “The German Catechism”, in which he accuses the “German elite” of clinging to the “Holocaust as a breach in civilization”.

According to him, this idea has been given the status of an “article of faith (which) forms the moral foundation for the Federal Republic.” According to Moses, Germany is using the Holocaust to hide “other historical crimes” and also to maintain an “uncritical solidarity with the State of Israel.” Moses also writes that the “elites” would panic if the Holocaust “were interpreted as ‘just another’ genocide in history”. That is why, according to Moses, that elite finds it so important to distinguish between German anti-Semitism and racism – an echo of this was echoed by Whoopi Goldberg.

Little eye for other crimes

Supporters of Moses call German memory culture “provincial”. They believe that it focuses too much on the Holocaust and ignores ‘global’ connections and similarities with other cases of European expansionism and genocide.

Take the devastating advance of the Nazis to the east. He had according to historian Jürgen Zimmerer also aimed at creating space for Germans, just like previous colonial campaigns. Moreover, with the focus on the Holocaust alone, there would be too little attention for other German crimes. An important example of this is the German genocide in Namibia, in which eighty thousand Herero and Nama were murdered, also in concentration camps.

In a video conversation from North Carolina, Moses disputes that he puts the Holocaust into perspective by placing it in a different historical context. “I would say that we are making German history harder for the Germans. Because we add colonial crimes to all other German crimes, while someone like Ernst Nolte tried to discount the criminality of the Holocaust.”

Van Nolte, who associated the Holocaust with the Gulag in the 1980s, is often assumed to have interpreted the concentration camps from an anti-communist stance. Moses calls his own perspective “the left.”

Moses does not necessarily see the Holocaust as an aberration. “All colonial powers used violence against indigenous peoples.” And: “I try to get Germans to include colonial crimes in the collective memory as well. That in no way means that we are trying to equalize something. As historians, we see things in chronological order. The colonial genocide in Africa before World War I took place 40 years before the Holocaust, but we see it already pointing to the Holocaust in a sense. The Holocaust is the end of a trajectory and its culmination. Obviously, the Holocaust was bigger.”

Article of Faith

When asked about the “German elites” he refers to, Moses mentions the major newspapers, a number of politicians and a few opinion makers. He sees them as the “high priests” who want to impose on the rest their most important “article of faith”: that the Holocaust is incomparable, and a break with civilization. According to Moses, this is important for the self-image of the Germans he is talking about.

The discussion about how to place the Holocaust comes at a time when educators and institutions are looking for new ways to keep the memory alive. The last survivors of the Holocaust are very old. The knowledge in Germany about the Holocaust according to a recent survey by the World Jewish Congress (WJC) off. According to that survey, 60 percent of those surveyed do not know that six million Jews were murdered, compared to 71 percent among 18-29 year olds. And 40 percent of all respondents think that Jews talk too much about the Holocaust. At the same time, anti-Semitism is on the rise, especially among young people aged 18 to 29. According to the WJC, anti-Semitism is fueled by conspiracy theories about the pandemic, theories often with anti-Semitic components.

Victim Competition

Meron Mendel is professor of pedagogy and history at the University of Frankfurt and director of the Anne Frank Education Center, also in Frankfurt. He finds the link that Moses makes between the historical debate about the interpretation of the Shoah and the German benevolent attitude towards Israel “disastrous”. You can argue whether the Holocaust was a unique event or rooted in our history, he says on the phone. But the answer to that question “should have nothing to do with German policy toward Israel.”

He also disputes the idea that commemoration of the Holocaust would stand in the way of processing and commemorating colonial history. “As if an overdose of Holocaust commemoration would mean that there is no longer any space to commemorate colonialism. A victim competition is being created that is false, which is not there.”

Mendel then points to Michael Rothberg, one of Moses’ allies. In a book from 2009, recently translated into German, he argued for ‘multi-directional memory‘. Rothberg sees this as a way of comparing different historical episodes, and thereby keeping the national memory of them alive.

Mendel agrees with this link. “Studying and commemorating the Holocaust has produced many frameworks for studying and commemorating colonial history as well,” he says.

But in comparative studies it is important to continue to highlight the differences, Mendel believes. He also mentions the concentration camps in Namibia, but then asks: “Which aspects did not exist before the Holocaust? For example, the Nazi ideology that the world would be saved by the complete destruction of the Jewish people and all that was Jewish. Such an ideology was arguably not the basis of other genocides.”

Ninety-year-old Jürgen Habermas, who already took on Ernst Nolte in 1986, also joined the debate last autumn. Habermas wrote that the singularity of the Holocaust, its uniqueness, cannot be tampered with. But he warned in the same breath that “a society should not freeze its memory forms.”

Dirk Moses can blame the Germans for a ‘solidified’ memory culture; the debate about it certainly does not stop.