For the first few decades following the reunification of Germany, the ritualized remembrance of the Holocaust—Erinneringskultur—emerged as a widely celebrated approach to engage the nation’s fraught genocidal past. Genocide studies scholar A. Dirk Moses called this culture “The German Catechism,” which was understood though five features: (1) that the Holocaust is unique because it was the exterminating Jews for the sake of extermination itself, which is different from the limited and pragmatic aims of other genocides; (2) it was a civilizational rupture; (3) Germany has a special responsibility to Jews in Germany and a special loyalty to Israel; (4) antisemitism is a distinct prejudice and it should not be confused with racism; and (5) antizionism is antisemitism. While the catechism served an important function in denazifying the country, the culture has now changed. The papers in this session will explore the politics of this catechism in contemporary German society.
For the German political class, the memory of the Holocaust as a break with civilization and loyalty to the State of Israel constitutes the moral refoundation of the country, indeed its “reason of state.” To question this commitment is tantamount to a heresy that leads to ex communication rituals. Palestinians and progressive Jews have been its principle target. This enforcement of the “catechism,” as I call it, intensified since 10.7. This paper will account for the hold and function of the catechism on German memory culture and politics by tracing its evolution over the part 20 years.
In a brief but pivotal moment during her reporting from the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt
suggested that the fact that there were Germans who resisted provides a condition for the possibility of
morals after the Holocaust. Drawing on this idea of the Good German, this paper examines how this idea
was transformed in recent years to reflect positive assessments of German memory culture by figures
such as Clint Smith and Susan Neiman, who use the image of a Good Germany to criticize the memory of
slavery in the United States. Their enterprise is contrasted in the final section of the paper with the
vitriolic debate around Dirk Moses’ German Catechism, showing the great discrepancy between the
discourse in Germany and outside it.
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.