Abstract
In this article, we apply Michael Rothberg’s concept of “multidirectional memory” to an empirical setting, by analyzing qualitative interviews with 124 educators in the field of memory work, such as museum and memorial site employees, teachers, volunteers of non-governmental organizations, and civil society initiatives. We analyzed where they come across memory conflicts and commonality, and what the respective “enabling conditions” were, that is, the influencing factors that promoted or prevented developments toward multidirectionality in the sense of a “differentiated solidarity.” We found only a few examples of this kind of multidirectional memory in educational settings. It was fostered by four factors: personal autobiographical experiences, political positions, structural/institutional aspects, and certain pedagogical principles. By contrast, different forms of competitive memory were dominant: first, “Conflicting Memory” characterized by differing politics; second, “Divided Memory” characterized by a perception of resource competition; and third, “Fragmented Memory,” consisting of a form of sympathetic ignorance by which memories of other groups or events are tolerated, but not actively interlinked. Central topics that emerge within memory conflicts and entanglements are the history of National Socialism, World War II and the Shoah, the history of the state of Israel and the Israel-Palestinian conflict, the Armenian Genocide, the history of the Ottoman Empire and—to a lesser extent—the history of colonialism. We argue that much can be gained by applying Rothberg’s concept to contemporary empirical settings, both in order to understand its current implications but also to help flesh out its underlying theoretical notions. These are regarding possible “negative” forms of multidirectional memory, as well as the implications and ethics of historical comparisons.
German memory culture is on the move. In recent years, struggles for visibility of marginalized historical events have intensified: civil society initiatives recalled the history of colonialism and pointed to continuities of antisemitic and racist violence, to which more than 200 people have fallen victim in Germany since 1990. 1 The Black Lives Matter movement asked about the representation of Black history in Germany and debates arose about the restitution of property looted in the colonies. Victim groups of National Socialism, long forgotten in the national culture of remembrance—such as Roma and Sinti, homosexuals and, in West Germany, communists—continue to struggle for visibility and memory, as do almost invisible groups such as people labeled “asocials.” Moreover, migrants internationalize memory practices; for example, in Berlin, a city with a large Turkish community, a memorial will be erected to commemorate the state-organized mass executions of 1937/1938 in the eastern Anatolian city of Dersim. Forms of “wild remembrance” can also be found here, with memorials erected clandestinely for victims of, for example, racist police violence. In addition, memorial campaigns have been launched by victims and their supporters—and were also taken up by state actors on the local, state, and federal level—after a series of murders by the right-wing terror cell Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund (National Socialist Underground, NSU), which killed nine migrants and a policewoman between 2000 and 2007 (McGowan, 2014), as well as after the antisemitic, racist, and misogynist attacks of Halle 2019 and Hanau 2020, joining artistic-activist interventions on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of German reunification (Lierke and Perinelli, 2019). All of these marginalized perspectives question previous national narratives in the field of memory politics (Özyürek, 2019), and they represent a fundamental shift in the perception of migration and belonging: after large parts of German society attempted for a long time to prevent a self-image as a country of immigration, based on a völkisch notion of citizenship and belonging, slow but steady changes toward a “postmigrant” reality (Foroutan, 2019) can be observed since the beginning of the millennium. This includes the increased visibility and representation of migrants in politics and media, the addressing of racism, but also coming to terms with Germany’s colonial past.
Related, fundamental axioms of the German culture of remembrance, both at the level of the state and civil society, are being discussed and questioned from different directions. Right-wing initiatives and parties such as the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, AfD), in national parliament since 2017, attempted to initiate a “180 degree turn in remembrance policy,” as the prominent AfD politician and former history teacher Björn Höcke demanded in 2017 (authors’ translation, Zeit, 2017). In 2018, the leader of the AfD parliamentary group, Alexander Gauland, played down the Nazi era as nothing but “bird shit” in Germany’s more than 1000 year heroic history (authors’ translation, AfD, 2016).
From another perspective, in pointing to the continuities of right-wing violence since 1945, civil society initiatives question the narrative of a German democratic success story after the end of World War II. According to them, the memory of the Nazi regime has become a ritual that is used for national image-building and has “lost its subversive potential” (authors’ translation, Jureit, 2008: 94). They emphasize that it was due to the long, difficult struggles by Holocaust survivors, as well as liberal and left-wing activists, in combination with some initial pressure from the Allies, that the memory of National Socialism became anchored in the German culture of remembrance over the past two decades. For many years, state authorities in particular did not want to acknowledge the Zivilisationsbruch (rupture in civilization) that Auschwitz marked. And even today, the general population is defensive when it comes to remembering the Shoah (Salzborn, 2020). This, these initiatives point out, is evident from opinion polls with high approval ratings of “secondary antisemitism,” that is, a form of antisemitism based on a deflection of Holocaust guilt and a defensiveness against its memory (Decker and Brähler, 2020: 39).
Postcolonial civil society initiatives and authors bring forward a different critique of German memory culture, namely that it lacks the power for integrating other histories, especially those of the victims of colonialism. Moreover, they claim, a taboo in German memory culture in drawing comparisons between Nazi rule and colonialist regimes allegedly obscures the memory of colonialism (Rothberg, 2020; Zimmerer and Rothberg, 2021). In 2020, some observers—triggered by a debate on antisemitism surrounding the planned appearance of the Cameroonian historian Achille Mbembe at a German cultural festival—even conjured up a Historikerstreit 2.0. (Delius, 2020). This was a reference to the “historians’ dispute” of 1986/1987, a central historical controversy of the German postwar period in which conservative historians described National Socialism as a reaction to Bolshevism, an “Asiatic deed,” whereas liberal and left-wing historians emphasized the singularity of Nazi extermination (Herbert, 2003). In the new “historians’ dispute,” a clear classification according to political camps is no longer possible: on the one hand, there are liberal and left-wing historians who see themselves as committed to postcolonial theory and who question the thesis of the Shoah’s singularity. They argue that colonialism and National Socialism have strong similarities, and that colonial practices of violence must be seen as precursors of National Socialism. On the other hand, liberal, conservative, and left-wing critics emphasize the significant differences between antisemitism and racism, between National Socialist and colonial rule, and point to the Shoah as a unique and unprecedented event. They follow different lines of argumentation, with the majority emphasizing that the Shoah was neither mystically removed from history nor that its comparison is impossible, but rather that it meant, as Yehuda Bauer described it, the combination of “two elements: planned total annihilation of a national or ethnic group, and the quasi-religious, apocalyptic ideology that motivated the murder” (cf. Rosenberg, 1987: 152)—an ideology that Saul Friedländer (1997) adequately called “redemptive antisemitism.”
This debate boiled over in 2021 on the occasion of the German translation of Michael Rothberg’s book Multidirectional Memory. Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. In his work, originally published in 2009, Rothberg considers marginalized traditions of memory, for example, in films and texts from France in the early 1960s, or in the writings of Aimé Césaire or W. E. B. Du Bois, in which memories of the Holocaust and colonialism became intertwined and subsequently mutually inspired by and enforcing of one another (Rothberg, 2009, 2021). Using these “archives of memory,” he looks at the “interaction of different historical memories” (Rothberg, 2009: 3) and the “dynamic transfers that take place between diverse places and times” (Rothberg, 2009: 9). Multidirectional Memory, Rothberg argues, is “subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing” (Rothberg, 2009: 3) and recognizes “the productive interplay of disparate acts of remembrance” (Rothberg, 2009: 309). He considers this “process in which transfers take place between events that have come to seem separate from each other” (Rothberg, 2009: 197) as an alternative to memory competition, understood as a “zero-sum struggle over scarce resources” (Rothberg, 2009: 3).
Rothberg paraphrases his central concept rather than straightforwardly defining it, yet in a chapter in his 2019 book The Implicated Subject (based on a revised text from 2011), he offers an orientation scheme for multidirectional comparisons. These are guided, first, by an “axis of comparison”: Comparisons can be found on “a continuum stretching from equation to differentiation” (Rothberg, 2019: 124). Political affect, on a second axis, can be “defined by a continuum stretching from solidarity to competition” (p. 124). Rothberg (2019) ends up with four-part distinction, or “map of multidirectional memory” (p. 133), which can be found in any of the quadrants. For example, forms of equation motivated by solidarity can produce “a form of liberal universalism with multicultural accents” (Rothberg, 2019: 134) whereby past evils are portrayed and remembered as all similarly horrible. By contrast, equation motivated by competition can result in revisionist, “disturbing” (Rothberg, 2021: 21) or “troubling cases of multidirectionality” (Rothberg, 2011: 524). An example is the German extreme right seemingly sharing the need to commemorate the Shoah, only to relativize it by comparing two sites where “the horror condensed—in Auschwitz the murder of the Jews, in Dresden the destruction of German cities” (Amann and Kubitschek, 2017; authors’ translation). This quote from extreme right-wing publisher Götz Kubitschek illustrates how the memory of the Holocaust is merely a well-calculated lip service to criticize the British-American aerial bombing attacks of the town of Dresden, labeled the Bombenholocaust (“Holocaust by bombs”) in the language of the far-right, and thereby contributes to a myth of German victimhood. Even recently, Rothberg mentions these kinds of “disturbing” forms of multidirectional memory as something he has not yet paid enough attention to (Rothberg, 2021: 21). Rather, he has focused on “radically democratic politics of memory” (Rothberg, 2019: 124) which “include a differentiated empirical history, moral solidarity with victims of diverse injustices, and an ethics of comparison that coordinates the asymmetrical claims of those victims” (Rothberg, 2019: 124). This positive form of “differentiated solidarity” (Rothberg, 2019: 26), is, in fact, how Multidirectional Memory is mostly perceived both in academic and public discourse.
In academia, the concept has been taken up most notably in literary and linguistic studies (Cenedese, 2018; Günay-Erkol and Şenol-Sert, 2017; Zapata, 2015), sporadically in social and cultural studies (Baer and Sznaider, 2015; Hollis-Touré, 2016; Jurgens, 2013) and educational studies (Strong-Wilson et al., 2014), while it has received little attention in the field of historical studies (Kushner, 2017; Van der Vlies, 2016). While it has been interpreted rather differently within this scholarship over the past decade, the positive potential stands out in all these works. By contrast, numerous recent critiques of Rothberg’s conception have been published in Germany mostly in op-eds, online newspapers and blogs, pointing to the dangers of hasty equations and competition (Elbe, 2020; Epple, 2021; Gerber, 2021; Klävers, 2019; Schmid, 2021; Seidl, 2021).
Nevertheless, public and academic discourse usually focuses on the positive potential of Multidirectional Memory; in fact, the term has almost become synonymous with a kind of “differentiated solidarity.” Moreover, Rothberg himself uses it this way in his 2009 book. For these two reasons, in the following, we will also focus on the “radically democratic” forms of memory discourses.
Widening the perspective
The interconnectedness of different acts of remembrance has been a point of academic discussion for some years, especially in the context of global history, which is always also an entangled history. Different terms are being used, among them “cosmopolitan memory cultures” (Levy and Sznaider, 2002), “traveling memory” (Erll, 2011), “historical dialogue” (Barkan, 2001), “co-memoration” (Henke and Vanassche, 2020), or “bridging narratives” (Pappe and Hilat, 2010). 2 Likewise, research on collective memory has grown in historiography and other disciplines (Gerhards et al., 2017: 17); already in 2008, Jeffrey K. Olick (2008) spoke of a “metastatic growth of work on, about, related to or employing the concept of ‘collective memory’” (p. 26). All these approaches build on past debates about collective remembering or memory in history, cultural studies, and social sciences, as well as the work of authors such as Maurice Halbwachs (1939), Jan Assmann (1997), and Aleida Assmann (1999).
While Michael Rothberg mainly analyses examples from France and the United States, and some of the texts mentioned above deal with Turkey, Spain, Canada, Great Britain, and South Africa, so far there are hardly any empirical analyses from the German context. This is surprising, given the particularity of the German case: since the beginning of the twenty-first century, as Barak Ben-Aroia and Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann (2021) note, “Holocaust memory became a master paradigm of remembering collective violence and atrocities.” And in a post-National Socialist society, the debate about the specificity and singularity of the Shoah is carried out not only among historians, but also in the public sphere. One would thus expect a far-reaching interest in the relation of Holocaust memory to other forms of collective remembering. Yet here, in the country of perpetrators and their descendants, there also seems to consist the greater threat that a “universalization” of Holocaust memory (cf. Levy and Sznaider, 2006) may replace the specifics of German historical responsibility. 3 And at the same time—and not to be separated from the völkisch past—it was only in the last two decades that the perception of Germany as a migration society prevailed, making the critical addressing of the colonial past or more recent episodes of racism a relatively new phenomenon both in public and academic discourses.
These aspects form the background for this article and the few others that empirically analyze Multidirectional Memory in Germany. Rothberg and Yasemin Yildiz refer to a specific educational and cultural project in the Berlin district of Neukölln, the Stadtteilmütter Neukölln (“Neighborhood Mothers”) and its engagement with National Socialism (Rothberg and Yildiz, 2011). Rothberg (2018) also refers to the cooperation between the post-migrant rap band Microphone Mafia and the Jewish Holocaust survivor Esther Bejarano. Randi Marselis (2017) uses the term Multidirectional Memory to analyze a Berlin-based photography project for refugee youths, and Ben-Aroia and Ebbrecht-Hartmann (2021) look at memorials for victims of extremist-right violence. The concept has also been introduced into artistic and activist debates in recent years, for example, regarding the memory of the fall of the Berlin Wall from Jewish and migrant perspectives (Lierke and Perinelli, 2019: 14f.). Moreover, in historical-political education, it has become increasingly clear that the histories of immigrants and their descendants—who make up more than a quarter of the population—must be included (Barricelli, 2018). Accordingly, the concept has also inspired educational projects. 4 Michael Rothberg assumes that Multidirectional Memory is already recognizable in many situations in Germany. 5 In the following, we want to put this thesis to the test and for the first time conduct a more comprehensive empirical analysis of the German context. We inquire about the conditions of historical memory practices, especially in educational contexts. In order to operationalize Rothberg’s concept, in the following we define as multidirectional those forms of memory where at least two historical events are brought into relation with each other in a form that is productive, i.e. “creating new links between seemingly unconnected histories” (Rothberg, 2019: 175) and providing insight into one event by way of the memory of another.
Our article is based on qualitative, guided interviews as well as expert interviews (Gläser and Laudel, 2004) with 124 practitioners and disseminators in the field of history, that is, educators from memorial sites and museums, history teachers, textbook and digital educational media authors, as well as volunteers and employees of non-governmental, civil society, or activist initiatives focusing on history. The interviews were conducted between 2016 and 2020 in three different research projects. 6 The aim was thus to include in the sample both institutionally anchored actors—from small non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to large state museums and state education authorities—as well as less formalized projects, which are sometimes just as important for learners. According to theoretical sampling (Glaser and Strauss, 1998), the choice of interviewees was adapted throughout the course of the research process in all three projects. What all interviewees have in common is that they are not only opinion makers and disseminators of knowledge, but also persons who have been dealing with remembrance and narratives in and about the German society of migration for several years. Thirty-one respondents also have a migration history themselves and/or are persons of color. Evidently, our data are not representative. Yet they provide qualitative insight into a specific group that has a wider social influence due to its members’ function as practitioners and disseminators of historical topics. The relatively large number of interviews additionally allows us to carefully point to some emerging patterns in the qualitative data, which we coded using MAXQDA.
In the interviews, practitioners were not directly asked about (multidirectional) forms of remembering. The aim was rather to capture the respondents’ subjective relevance structures, that is, what are the topics and perspectives that they themselves bring into the discussion (Jovchelovitch and Bauer, 2000), based on their practical experience in educational institutions. Moreover, we did not want to bring a specific catchphrase into the conversation, which we feared would steer the conversation away from the content to the concept or its author. Rather, we aimed to see how—according to the abovementioned definition—connections are perceived. To this end, we analyzed the interviews with regard to the ways by which these (civil) educators encounter common and unifying elements in their learning environments—in other words, where they come across multidirectionality. We also asked where competition and divisions appear. Subsequently, we wanted to understand the specific enabling conditions for various forms of memory: We examined the factors of influence that promote or prevent developments toward multidirectionality or competition.
Empirical results: productive potentials
What all interviewees had in common was an awareness of the heterogeneity of memory politics in Germany as a result of migration. They know the country is a migration society, and particularly those from immigrant families point to diversity and transnational life worlds as normality. Most of them accept and welcome this—only a small part longs for past memory politics or wants to ward off migration. But even though some interviewees showed a great sensitivity for different terms from the German debate, such as Migrationsgesellschaft (migration society) or postmigrantische Gesellschaft (post-migrant society), the term “multidirectional memory” was not brought into the conversation. As a concrete concept, it was not a point of reference. Obviously, the fact that the concept was not brought up was not necessarily a sign that practitioners did not think or act multidirectionally. We therefore looked beyond the usage of the actual term, but nevertheless found that when interviewees reflected upon experiences in educational contexts, they mainly did not observe memory dynamics that fulfill the criteria for “multidirectionality.”
There are, however, some examples in which interweavings, transmissions, and mutual reinforcement of memory were observed. An employee of a Jewish museum, for example, observed how the Jewish minority experience on display there offered some migrant visitors points of identification. It helps in articulating their own minority experience and promotes empathy toward the Jewish experience (BII23: 15). Similarly, an employee of a concentration camp memorial described, in regard to guided tours with refugees, that there is a “great emotional closeness to the prisoners. And also such a personal dismay about stories where they see connections to their own, whether it’s during persecution or often afterwards, where many people also experienced forced migration” (BII8: 75, similar C2: 46, C6: 91). Another educator made similar observations about Arab refugees who arrived between 2015 and 2016: Many of those who came to Germany were also arrested, put in prison several times, and some were also tortured. Of course, this feeling came up when you walked through the memorial, when you saw the rooms. Many of them felt reminded of their experiences and simply understood much better than I could, for example, what it meant to live through that. [. . .] But you did notice that people were always talking about their own experience from the impressions of the memorial. (C6: 87)
It is therefore the confrontation with past events that makes it possible to also address one’s own experiences of more recent events—an apt illustration of the productive potential of multidirectionality.
In the interviews, links were also made between escaping the GDR and German emigration in the nineteenth century, on the one hand, and today’s (forced) migration movements to Germany, on the other. Some Syrian interviewees drew connections between events in German history and their personal experience of war, religious conflicts, migration, or reconstruction: “[T]he 30 years of war, 7 religious conflicts is [sic!] for me something very relevant. Migration in the 19th century. And of course, the rebuilding of Germany after the Second World War [. . .]” (C57).
As in these examples, multidirectional transfers in the interviews generally referred to the recent past, rather than making links between two events in the distant past. The central event of historical reference and relation is the exclusion of European Jews and its culmination in the Holocaust.
Enabling multidirectionality: four conditions
Michael Rothberg (2009) acknowledges that it is often “difficult to tell whether a given act of memory is more likely to produce competition or mutual understanding” (p. 11). In other words, it is not clear what the enabling conditions for Multidirectional Memory actually are. In the interviews, four levels emerged as enabling conditions in educational settings: personal experiences, political positions, structural aspects, and pedagogical principles. 8 These levels are partly interwoven, the categories should be seen as analytical tools rather than clear-cut divisions. While the data at hand are qualitative, some types of answers nevertheless emerge more often and are worth pointing out.
Personal experiences: Fourteen interview partners observed that interest in other memories and the willingness to change perspectives were more pronounced among participants when they can relate autobiographically. The educators describe Syrian refugees visiting a concentration camp memorial and relating their personal experiences of forced migration, imprisonment or torture; the experiences of German Muslim youths with regard to everyday exclusion and racism which triggered understandings of homophobic discrimination; or some Russian-speaking Jews remembering their own migration to Germany and initially living in collective housing, which inspired them to become supportive of Arab refugees. Personal encounters with “others” or personal global experiences—such as staying abroad—can also contribute to a change in perspective. One Syrian interview partner, for example, reported that after fleeing to Germany and being confronted with the country’s history, he has “less tolerance for people who don’t believe in the Holocaust” (C1: 30).
Political positions promote multidirectionality: for example, a fundamental criticism of the homogenization of groups, a universalist position that considers any form of collective violence under certain criteria as worth combating, or an essentially anti-racist position which also sensitizes people to past racisms. Particularly noteworthy here is the relevance of rejecting a national perspective: in order to promote multilayered memory, according to some interview partners’ observations, history has to be thought less as national history. Instead of referring to a nation, common history would rather refer to a specific region (BIII10: 17). In particular, the teaching of history is seen as too “Europe-centered” or “Western-centered,” with focus placed on Germany (BIII6: 6), rather than looking at world history (BIII3: 38). The importance of this political position becomes all the more apparent when one considers the central influencing factors for “Conflicting Memory” which we will discuss in more detail below: a positive reference to the nation-state is the most central reason for memory conflicts, as mentioned by 19 interviewees.
There are also structural aspects that can promote a movement toward Multidirectional Memory. “Structural” here refers to the social system with its legal norms, dominant discourses, political and economic structures, as well as institutions (schools, police, administration, etc.): their organizational structure, their established and guiding values. 9 Interviewees point to the need for making marginalized perspectives visible in the first place, both socially and in pedagogical settings—for example, pointing to the lives of Black Germans under National Socialism, Muslim rescuers of Jews, or more current experiences of racism. This includes listening to “voices from the migration society, the voices of migrants” (BIII3: 38). Obviously, these structural changes are informed by some of the political positions mentioned above as influencing factors (anti-racism or moving away from a “Europe-centered” history). Yet these political positions have an additional impact when infused into the material realities of social institutions and structures. Regarding the institutional role of schools, for example, some interviewees emphasized the need to question the reasons for the marginalization of migrants’ and POC perspectives here. One was inquiring, for example, “to what extent structural racism is behind it, if only German-German youngsters are given the opportunity to understand history from their perspective” (A3: 47). 10
Finally, various interviewees named numerous pedagogical principles that open the way for incorporating different memories in educational settings. These include allowing controversy, oral history approaches, narrative methods, fear-free and non-hierarchical spaces, participatory approaches, and the explicit inclusion of multiperspectivity in relation to historical events. This is also linked to soft skills, such as taking the other seriously, showing respect, listening, and above all, the development of empathy, which facilitates a change of perspective.
Memory competition in pedagogical practice
While the interviewees speak little about forms of multidirectional memory in the abovementioned sense, other forms predominate. Rothberg’s terminology offers little by way of capturing these. He does delineate multidirectional from other forms of memory, but hardly explicates them. With reference to Maurice Halbwachs (1939), he introduces the basic concept of “collective memory” (Rothberg, 2009: 14f.) and, with reference to Avishai Margalit (2002), divides this into two sub-forms: on the one hand, a “common memory” in which individual memories of all those who have experienced a historical episode or event are bundled. On the other hand, there is also “shared memory” which is “not a simple aggregate of individual memories,” but rather “integrates and calibrates the different perspectives of those who remember the episode [. . .] into one version” (Margalit, 2002: 51f.). This is a form of memory which, according to Rothberg (2009), “may have been initiated by individuals but that has been mediated through networks of communication, institutions of the state, and the social groupings of civil society” (p. 15). Multidirectional Memory is a form of “shared memory”—and thus also a form of “collective memory”—but goes beyond it “because it highlights the inevitable displacements and contingencies that mark all remembrance” (Rothberg, 2009: 15f.) At the same time, Rothberg (2011) asserts, every form of public memory has always been “structurally multidirectional” because it is “marked by transcultural borrowing, exchange, and adaptation” (p. 524).
By contrast, “competitive memory” refers to the assumption that the memory of a particular event would “prevent the recollection and articulation of other stories” or “erase it from the public sphere” (Rothberg, 2021: 11). This assumption is based on a notion of memory as a “zero-sum struggle over scarce resources” (Rothberg, 2009: 3), as well as on the idea that memory is linked to a certain, fixed (group) identity and constitutes “a form of ethnic property" (Rothberg and Yildiz, 2011: 36). To complicate matters even more, in his later work, Rothberg also acknowledges that Multidirectional Memory can, in fact, be motivated by competition (Rothberg, 2011: 525f.). Yet in Multidirectional Memory, “competitive memory” functions as the central and negative contrast to a positive, productive form of multidirectionality. Our empirical research showed that this needs to be further differentiated: three different forms of competitive memory emerged, which we refer to as “Conflicting,” “Divided,” and “Fragmented” memory. These working definitions can be understood as merely analytical separations—empirically and theoretically, there are fluid transitions between them.
Conflicting memory: differing politics
In “Conflicting Memory,” the memorial politics regarding one event or historical epoch is criticized and rejected on the grounds of one’s personal political and moral notions. It is not necessarily different historical events that are brought into relation with each other. Rather, this memorial politics aims at disrupting given practices of remembering and creating a counter-memory toward one specific historical case or period. In some cases, remembering an event is even outright rejected. Narratives, anniversaries, memorial sites, or museum exhibitions are contested.
A “classic topic,” as one teacher remarks, is the Holocaust and its denial. She remembers, “I once had a student who asked me: ‘Well, what is actually going on with the evidence [for the Holocaust]?’ Because she had seen this and that on the Internet. ‘What is that actually like?’” I then reacted by printing out something from the Federal Agency for Civic Education, which basically listed the classic arguments of Holocaust denial, and I brought it along and said: “You know, it’s best if we look at this together” (BI22: 72). In illustrating conflicting memory, she claims that “[t]hat would be a case where different narratives—that is probably the classic example—come up.”
A conflict is also illustrated by the reactions of two Holocaust memorial site employees to a quote by AfD politician Björn Höcke, prominent member of the party’s extreme right-wing. Referring to the Germans and their nation, Höcke (2017) states, “We have to become ourselves again. We will have ourselves again only if we rebuild a positive relationship with our history” (Höcke, 2017; authors’ translation). For the AfD, this means remembering German history as a heroic story of liberation and freedom, be it in relation to the Hambach Festival in 1832, the alleged Splendor of Prussia, or outright mystical references such as the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest or the Barbarossa saga (Hoffstadt and Sturm, 2021). Interview partners are aware of the AfD’s political aims, one of them mentions how the party wants to replace Germany’s “dark years,” that is, the reference to National Socialism, with the image of a country of “poets and thinkers”—a popular German nationalistic self-description (BII14: 45). The disseminators, however, do want to remember the history of National Socialism. By contrast, they do not aim at publicly remembering, for example, the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, let alone the Barbarossa myth. Their memorial aims stand in conflict to the party’s narratives and its “positive historical culture, in which Nazi crimes should no longer play a role,” as one Holocaust memorial employee put it (BII15: 59). He stated that “someone like Björn Höcke does not want a multi-perspective historical narrative. He only wants the one. And insofar there is also [. . .] such a counter-narrative, which builds on diversity, it is a counter-narrative to what he is striving for” (BII15: 77). The other historical educator put it even more succinctly: “So he says ‘Germany’ and I’m out!” (BII14: 61).
In the interviews, “Conflicting Memory” is the most frequently mentioned form of remembering. The interviewees most often perceived memory conflicts according to the following themes: the history of the state of Israel and the Israel–Palestinian conflict, the history of National Socialism and World War II, the Armenian Genocide, the history of the Ottoman Empire, and the history of colonialism. The history of colonialism was perceived as a central conflict by two interviewees working on this topic, but otherwise only mentioned once in two other interviews. This is surprising in view of the visibility that German colonialism—as mentioned at the beginning—has recently received in controversial public debates. Especially, teachers observed the Armenian Genocide and the history of the Ottoman Empire as topics for memory conflicts. One of them points to Turkish nationalist self-identifications which contribute to historical re-transferences, that is, projecting oneself into earlier historical periods. He remembers a German-Turkish student in class claiming, “that if the Turks had won before Vienna in 1689 [sic!], that all this would then be ours” (BI27: 133), referring to the Ottoman Empire’s attempt to take Vienna in 1683. The student pitted this positive image against the unspoken historical norm of an Occidental “we” and an unspoken negative image of Ottoman/Turkish rule.
This points to the fact that among the enabling conditions, one phenomenon again stands out: interviewees observed the positive reference to the nation-state as the central influencing factor for promoting memory conflicts. On the one hand, “the other’s nationalism” is a theme: white teachers in particular locate nationalism especially among students of Turkish origin, such as those who “get their information from the [Turkish fascist organization] ‘Grey Wolves’” (BI3: 79). On the other hand, conflicts also ignite around positive references to Germany. One memorial site employee, for example, criticized German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier for wanting to build a purified “national identity” through the memory of National Socialism (BII16: 67).
Other enabling conditions for “Conflicting Memory” mentioned in the interviews were a general inability to endure (historical) ambiguities as well as the role of contemporary witnesses, whose observations and memories often contradict empirical research.
Divided memory: quantity and quality
Unlike “Conflicting Memory,” “Divided Memory” does not challenge the “what” of commemoration—people agree that a certain event should be remembered. It challenges, however, the “how,” including the “how much.” And unlike with “Conflicting Memory,” the actors share fundamental political positions—for example, that National Socialism should never be repeated, that colonialism was a crime, or a general rejection of wars.
Conflicts in “Divided Memory” thus arise not so much from political or moral differences, but rather from perceived or real competition for resources, be they economic or regarding public attention for a certain event. In the interviews, a teacher talked about his attempts in class to address the persecution of homosexuals during National Socialism. To this, his colleagues reacted by saying, My God, do you have to address the gays in National Socialism as well? Enough already. We already cover the Jews and we already do, well, we already do the Jews and the Communists, and now you come with the gays and then the Sinti and Roma. We do nothing but National Socialism all day long. (BI18: 115)
Memory is here divided, first, according to preferred victim groups (remembering “the Jews” vs “the gays,” etc.), and second according to how much attention an event is allocated within the school curriculum (remembering National Socialism vs other time periods). Another interviewee expressed concern that due to prominent media debates regarding refugees and migration, the situation of Black Germans is not sufficiently addressed: the issue of Blacks in Germany, who have always, or at least, had their centre of life here, this is pushed away a bit by this migration debate. But I think that it is up to us, so to speak, to make it clear that these issues belong together. (BIII2: 34)
Resource competition is also expressed in the report of a schoolbook author who remembers past controversies around Napoleon’s role in designing joint German-Polish high school textbooks: [I]f you look at a German history book, if he appears at all, Napoleon takes up two to four pages in a textbook, let’s say for the 7th or 8th grade. Four would be a lot. In the German-Polish history book, however, there are twelve or thirteen pages in the second volume, because the Polish side insisted that Napoleon be presented in detail. Why? Because Napoleon is considered the forerunner of the Polish nation [. . .]. And there was a long dispute about it and the German side had to cede more and more pages [. . .]. (BIV7: 64)
We also looked at factors contributing to memory divisions, that is, enabling conditions for “Divided Memory.” Again, the positive reference to one’s nation is central. A teacher remembers a classroom discussion about the Armenian Genocide in 1915/1916 in which “the majority were German students and a minority were Turkish students. And the German students found it very interesting, while the Turkish students at the beginning thought it was totally out of line and an insult to Turkey” (BI10: 407). What started as conflicted memory—whether or not the Armenian genocide should be addressed and remembered at all—turned into a mere division: In response to the teacher’s comment that in class they were simply looking at historical sources, students with Turkish backgrounds objected by claiming that these sources were German and thus ill-informed. When the teacher directly addressed this nationalist way of thinking, some of them reconsidered “and then said, yes, it [i.e. the Armenian genocide] also seems to be a problem. So let’s engage with it” (BI10: 411). They were willing to step out of their national narrative and into a reasoned debate about the genocide’s history and memory. What turned out to be important in countering nationalism in educational settings was to put into question alleged “German” or “Turkish” memory practices.
Enabling conditions for “Divided Memory” also include personal experiences and family histories, as well as structural aspects such as institutional racism. An interview partner who organizes educational tours to the Auschwitz memorial site for young German Muslims—almost all of whom have parents that migrated to Germany—reflects upon a participant’s statement: A. told us how he returned to history class after [the educational trip to] Auschwitz and wanted to talk about his experience. And the teacher said to him, “Why were you of all people, a Palestinian, in Auschwitz?” What happens again and again is that the boys who join our trips are perceived as Germans for the very first time. You know in Germany, they are never addressed as Germans. But because they are in Auschwitz and speak German, they are directly marked as German by the other groups. [. . .] And after the experience with the teacher, he told us, “Look, I’m dealing with their history and I’m still not recognized as a German.” (A50)
On the surface, this example simply shows the teacher’s stereotypical thinking. But this is only one of many situations where young people of color experience being marked as other, particularly in school settings and in other state institutions. And memories toward certain events are allocated according to ethnic background, due to an underlying “taken-for-granted link between collective memory and group identity,” a central characteristic of competitive memory for Rothberg (2011: 524).
In the interviews, “Divided Memory” and resource-based competition are linked to the topics of different victim groups in National Socialism, but also to the relationship between the memory of National Socialism and German colonialism. Interviewees held the view that there is less knowledge and commemoration of the latter. Finally, they contrasted West and East German perspectives on German history and criticized ignorance toward Eastern views and experiences.
Fragmented memory: sympathetic ignorance
In a third form of competitive memory, some memories are shared between groups and based on similar political attitudes. Sometimes these common memory practices even overlap, yet often they remain unconnected. In what we would call “Fragmented Memory,” different references to history stand side by side without any interplay; there is no “interaction of different historical memories” (Rothberg, 2009: 3). In contrast to “Conflicting Memory,” however, this is not motivated by a political critique, a proclaimed “counter-remembering,” or a conscious ignorance toward certain events. In contrast to “Divided Memory,” this lack of connection and dialogue is not based on a perceived competition in a strict sense. Rather, the reason lies in the non-prioritization of a historical event, a collective narrowing of perspective, which can extend to an unconscious ignorance of the experiences of other groups. “Fragmented Memory” thus is a kind of “side-by-side remembering.”
A historical example is the demonstration “Kein 10. Opfer” (“No 10th victim”), which migrant communities in Kassel carried out in 2006. 11 They commemorated nine migrants murdered between 2000 and 2007 and raised suspicion about possible radical right, racist motives. They held up photos of the victims and demanded that the murderer(s) be found. It was not until 5 years later that it became public that these murders were committed by the NSU. For years, German security authorities and media instead spoke of “Döner Killings.” In referring to the popular Turkish dish, the investigations focused on alleged conflicts among migrant communities and the organized crime of “foreign gangs.” And even anti-fascist and anti-racist groups, whose civil society activism includes memorializing and denouncing right-wing violence, did not realize what was clear to migrant victims and their families: that these murders were part of a racist wave of terror. There was simply too little cooperation between these anti-fascist activists who were mostly white and non-migrant, on the one hand, and migrants and people of color targeted by the murderers, on the other. While the white anti-racists in theory would have been sympathetic to the migrants’ plight and fears, they were simply not connected enough to listen to the targeted communities’ “situated migrant knowledge” (Güleç and Schaffer, 2017). White anti-racist activists were involved in other forms of remembering and, while following similar political goals, remained oblivious and unconnected to this visionary migrant demonstration. Anti-racist memory therefore remained fragmented along migrant/non-migrant lines.
The enabling conditions of “Fragmented Memory” are located at the same levels as other forms of competitive memory: political positions and personal experiences are mentioned most frequently, followed by pedagogical principles. In addition, “Fragmented Memory” is also motivated by differing interests: one interviewee, for example, remembered the enthusiasm that recently arose in an East German village about a mosque which stood there a century prior. Yet the enthusiasm did not result from an embrace of multiculturalism, but rather from the possible touristic enhancement of the area. Common memory practices between municipal employees and the interviewee did emerge, but not necessarily motivated by the common goal of strengthening the memory of diverse histories. Among the topics of “Fragmented Memory,” the history of National Socialism and the Shoah again stand out.
“Fragmented Memory” does not yet illustrate practical interconnections but demonstrates the potential to be a precursor to forms of common memory. This is illustrated by the example of an Alevi community which offers its premises to other minorities. One member reported how this resulted from both the experience of persecution and the political positioning of the Alevis: “So we know this history quite well. Therefore, we sympathize with people who are treated badly because of their religion, origin, or nationality. We stand shoulder to shoulder with them” (A54). This indicates a preliminary stage for realizing joint memory practices that mutually reinforce the work of groups against exclusion both in the past and in the present—from standing “shoulder to shoulder” to one day standing “hand in hand,” so to speak.
Conclusions: empirical connections and historical comparisons
In their analysis of the (multidirectional) memorialization of Francoism in Spain, Alejandro Baer and Natan Sznaider (2015) note that “the translation from theory to politics is still a challenge for memory activists and researchers alike” (p. 339). This challenge applies not only to a translation into the political sphere, but more generally to translation into the empirical realm. In this article, we have attempted to translate Michael Rothberg’s concept of Multidirectional Memory to an empirical context, namely to educational memory work in Germany.
In interviews with 124 educational disseminators, it became apparent that despite some examples, multidirectionality is still an exception in educational settings. This not only refers to the educators’ relation to Rothberg’s actual concept, but more generally to the role of interconnections, cross-references, and mutual borrowing between memories of different events or groups. In the case that there was multidirectionality, it was enabled by four factors: personal experiences, political positions, structural aspects, and pedagogical principles. Two aspects stand out in particular. First, it is personal experiences—of racism and exclusion, among others—that foster the capacity for reference, transference, and empathy. This is also articulated in the fact that the 31 practitioners with personal experiences of migration and/or racism often reflected upon their own ethnic background and how it plays a role in their pedagogical interventions. This is less so the case for white educators or those that do not come from immigrant families. 12 For example, when asked how they came to do historical education work in NGOs or activist initiatives, people of color and/or migrants talk more about their own experience of racism or the desire to learn more about their own community. Non-migrants and/or white people often mention a general political interest, reflected in statements such as “It was basically more of a coincidence and a first step into professional life” (BIII19: 3). As the interview material shows, the possibility of articulating grievances and for talking about experiences of exclusion is a basic prerequisite for opening up to other (hi)stories. German society has long been silent regarding the reality of racism which also meant that the voices of people of color and plural perspectives have long been marginalized.
Second, overcoming thinking in nation-based categories contributes to non-competitive, multidirectional memory. Nation-states produce homogenizing inclusions and exclusions in the present, but also in relation to the past. Further research should therefore empirically conceptualize how forms of “postnational” memory might be shaped (Arnold et al., 2019; Arnold and König, 2018: 167). At the same time, this continues to be defective and helpless if post-national or cosmopolitan memory cultures are not able to influence the actual politics of inclusion and exclusion along national markers as well. Out of this contradiction, the nationalist right can in turn repeatedly gain momentum (Kansteiner, 2020).
Since in the present multidirectional memory seems not to be the rule in German educational settings, we deducted from the empirical material three forms of competitive memory—“Conflicting,” “Divided,” and “Fragmented.” Each of these have different underlying conditions: first differing politics, second resource competition and differing estimates regarding the quantity and quality of acts of remembrance, and third a form of sympathetic ignorance.
At the same time, it became clear that the concept of Multidirectional Memory needs to be theoretically fleshed out, particularly in regard to the question of historical comparison and its scale. A debate about the benefits, limits, and theoretical implications of comparisons has been central in historical scholarship internationally for at least 50 years; today one can speak of the third wave of comparative historical work. Historian and spokesperson of the Collaborative Research Centre “Practices of Comparing,” Angelika Epple, addresses this aspect of the recent debate on Rothberg’s translation in more detail (Epple, 2021). In April 2021, she analyzed an article by Rothberg and the historian Jürgen Zimmerer in the popular German weekly Die Zeit, under the title “De-tabooing the comparison” (Zimmerer and Rothberg, 2021). After first arguing that the comparison taboo conceded to German society is a myth, Epple then develops a series of questions for historical comparisons which revolve around the tailoring of the objects of comparison, the construction performance of the comparisons, and specifics that are eclipsed by the latter. Although Rothberg and Zimmerer use historical comparisons in their argumentation, she argues, they do not provide answers to these questions. Consequently, Epple remarks that such comparisons produce judgments “that are either so general that they would receive approval even without the comparison, or that are so associative that they remain vague and, in the worst case, lead to false insights” (Epple, 2021; authors’ translation).
But what does this mean for the concept of Multidirectional Memory? Michael Rothberg’s focus is not so much on history itself, but on the comparison of memory in public space—of the Shoah and colonialism, for example. But at the same time, such a comparison necessarily contains statements about what is remembered, that is, about the historical events themselves. A comparison of memory therefore cannot be disentangled from a comparison of historical realities—and therefore from criteria for the validity of historical narratives. As much as these may in themselves be contested in historical scholarship, certain similarities, differences, and specifics of historical events are a necessary learning outcome also of memory processes. Skewed comparisons between Nazi persecution and regulations for the containment of the Corona pandemic, or Israeli military actions in Gaza, may meet the criteria for Multidirectional Memory. Yet their respective claims to historical validity would be so tenuous that even the learning outcome regarding specifics and differences would likely be limited. In an interview preceding the German edition of Multidirectional Memory, Rothberg also calls for the development of a “nuanced [. . .] ethics of comparison” and a “solid empirical knowledge of different histories” in light of recent skewed comparisons of Covid pandemic policies and Nazi practices (Rothberg, 2021: 11; authors’ translation); in The Implicated Subject he requests a “differentiated empirical history” as a basis for any “radically democratic politics of memory” (Rothberg, 2019: 124).
Taking up the insights of the science of historical comparison and at the same time developing this kind of “solid empirical knowledge” about National Socialism, colonialism, and other events would thus be necessary for countering the danger that, instead of specific memories, “a universally draped moralizing discourse about indiscriminate victimhood” emerges, as Dan Diner has described it (Diner, 2007: 9; authors’ translation). 13 It would be fruitful for further research to draw on the insights of historical comparative studies in order to address not only commonalities but also differences in historical events, and to consider “the epistemological limits of multidirectional memory” (Judaken, 2011: 495). It remains to be seen whether the concept also promotes the study and memorialization of National Socialism or whether it contributes to a modernized refusal to accept guilt and responsibility toward this history particularly in Germany. In any case, a specification of the concept of Multidirectional Memory will be helpful so as to employ it as an instrument against competition and for the entanglement and strengthening of different memories. Or, in the words of a museum employee, for “a kind of solidarity in our [memory] work, a togetherness, and not these unfortunate competitions” (BII22: 49). Confronting the concept with empirical case studies can contribute to this aim.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Joseph Wilson and Mert Erdemir for their assistance.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
