Outside the German Bundestag, the flags fly part of the staff, and inside, the crowns have been placed on the speaker desk. Many members of the Parliament are dressed in black, just like many guests. The dignitaries pronounce speeches, which are won with devout applause.
Every year since 1996, the victims of the Nazis have been commemorated in the Bundestag on January 27, a date that is found in the whole family as the day of the Holocaust memory. Auschwitz fields, and commemoration is in the center of the “culture of memory” of Germany.
There are more than three hundred commemorative sites and Nazi documentation centers across Germany. Schoolchildren be informed national socialism in history lessons. Some of them also former concentration camps, where commemorative monuments teach them the atrocities committed through the Nazis.
As a nation, Germany has experienced large -scale war crimes, such as Auschwitz’s judgments. German tracked its own ancient participation in Nazi crimes. Even to this day, the major guards in the Matar Nazis centers are still in trial.
Holocaust Remembrance Day is a reminder of the darkest bankruptcy in German history. Nazi Germany provoked World War II, with its many millions of deaths, and was guilty of the systematic murder of 6 million European Jews, as well as a lot of thousands of other victims of Nazi terror: Schi and Roma signed up as did political opponents, homosexuals and disabled people.
“The culture of reminiscence is a collective wisdom, and a reminiscence of the past,” said Saba -nur Chema, political scientist and journalist. “In the case of Germany, the reminiscence of the Holocaust is central, as well as an examination of nationalism. ” Other issues have more and more vital in recent years, such as the postwar dictatorship of East of Germany and the role of Germany as a colonial power.
Young people might think that Germany always cultivated a culture of remembrance. However, the attorney general who brought the criminal acts in Auschwitz to trial in Frankfurt in the face of great resistance, Fritz Bauer, is reputed to have said in the 1960s: “Enemy territory begins when I leave my office.” Bauer was Jewish. He only survived the Nazi era by fleeing to Sweden.
Holocaust Souvenir Day for the sick of National Socialism was only instituted in Germany in 1996. It was never named the holidays.
The commemoration of Nazi crimes has been directed to hostility, in specific through the right end and the correct wing populists in Germany. Jens-Christian Wagner, director of Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorial, a former Nazi concentration camp near Weimar, took a transparent position opposite to the election of Germany (AFD) in Thuringia. In the past, Wagner has accused the game of containing elements from afar, and wrote in X that he won threats.
“Almost all memorial sites face vandalism and Holocaust denial. But you also see the debate intensifying locally,” said Veronika Hager of the Foundation for Remembrance, Responsibility and Future (EVZ), whose project is to maintain the reminiscence of the nationalist Socialist persecution Alive Alive. “Statements that we would have dismissed 10 years ago as excessive in society as a total are now much more popular. “
AfD co-leader Alice Weidel recently made the following statement during a TV interview: “There is no doubt that Adolf Hitler was an antisemitic socialist — and antisemitism is primarily left-wing.” That aligns with earlier statements made by AfD colleagues, such as former head Alexander Gauland, who famously played down the Nazi era as simply “bird poop in history.”
“The objective is to melt the situation, so that we end up without talking about what happened. The danger is that the risk raised through the right -wing nationalist teams can then be intangible and more concrete,” said Chema declared.
Michel Friedman is one of the many new studies that for years attract attention to the expansion of anti -Semitism and racism. It is very critical of the “existing memory culture”.
“If we had done our task, this shameless and brutal hatred towards the Jews would be endemic,” Mag der Spiegel said in an interview.
For him, as for Jewish organizations and associations in Germany, the “culture of memory” is too ritualized, too rooted in the past.
“As vital as it is to confront the dead Jews, our duty will have to remain with the living Jews. And life in Germany is not smart for them,” he said.
In recent years, the number of incidents and attacks attributed as antisemitic have risen in Germany. For some, this proves that this nation’s “culture of remembrance” has failed.
The country’s culture of remembrance and the protection of Jewish life are often considered intrinsically linked: lessons from the past are meant to produce responsibility today. However, Joseph Wilson, an antisemitism expert at the EVZ Foundation, said such an assumption expects the culture of remembrance to produce something it cannot.
“A culture of memory is not the same as preventing and fighting anti -Semitism,” Wilson said. Codes and conspiracy theories in society.
“Instead, we have to realize that our antisemitism prevention concepts have failed in parts,” he said.
Many aspects of Germany’s culture of remembrance have been discussed and debated by historians and in the media, with some disputing the singularity of Nazi crimes, for example. The massacre by Hamas on October 7, 2023, and the ensuing war on Gaza, with its tens of thousands of deaths, represent another schism — and exposed a fracture in German society.
For example, the explanation “never be now” may have radically different meanings in Germany today. The slogan was sometimes used to make explicit the feeling that Nazi crimes deserve never to happen again, and many others interpret it as an explanation of solidarity with Jews and Israel. However, this same slogan was also shouted in solidarity with Palestinian pro-Palestinian demonstrations since the war in Gaza began more than 15 months.
Since former Chancellor Angela Merkel’s noted speech to the Israeli parliament in 2008, when she said that Israel’s security was “a state explanation for why for Germany,” aid to Israel has been a component of Germany’s duty: a component of its culture of remembrance. For some in Germany in Germany in Germany in Germany in Germany. , this means that their culture of remembrance is not inclusive and is not designed for today’s blended immigrant society. But journalist Cheema disagrees.
“I would not say that it was not designed for this. Because civil society itself shapes a culture of memory,” he said. However, in general from Germany to Israel in the Gaza War, which justified with its own history, was strongly criticized, “even through many young immigrants. ” Cheema said they were asking consultations such as: “Why are Palestinians now?” In fact, “this is not a bad consultation to ask,” he added.
She believes the slogan, “Free Palestine from German guilt!”, often chanted at protests, is primarily a political message and not an attack on the culture of remembrance. The Research and Information Center on Antisemitism in Berlin, on the other hand, assessed the slogan in a report as a “desire to draw a line under the Nazi past.”
Discussions like these are perhaps a sign that there are many “cultures of remembrance” in Germany — not just one.
Veronika Hager from the EVZ Foundation suggests one way to move forward.
“There are so many things we can specifically examine in our daily environment. For instance, company trainees could review their own firm’s activities during the Nazi era, or one could find out which residents in specific houses were murdered. Such activities could be undertaken with young people, whether they have an international background, or not,” she said.
What is little discussed in Germany are the biographies of the authors of their own family. The journalist Friedman, who is Jewish, said one day: “You know, there are millions of fresh witnesses! Look what your grandparents have done, super dye and dye!”
Possibly it would be the next step to emerge the culture of German reminiscence. “I never need to get to the point where we say:” So now we have the best culture of reminiscence, “and put a payment next door,” Hager said. “For me, it is anything discursive that moves and develops. “
This article was originally written in German.