Substitution and Sacrifice in the Ritual Logic of German Memory Culture

This paper engages the work of Esra Özyürek, A. Dirk Moses, and others in order to delineate a logic of substitution and sacrifice within German Holocaust remembrance. Rather than seeking to compare genocides, this paper argues that the understanding of mass violence must be mediated by robust frameworks with the capacity to hold multiple instances in view at once in order to help reveal, not obscure, both their interdependence and their distinctiveness. It makes a case for enlarging the depth of field, so that not only colonialism, but also medieval and early modern blood libels, witch hunts, and other pretenses for divinely sanctioned violence may be similarly understood in terms of their sacrificial and substitutional logics.