Political Influence and German Holocaust Memory: A Historiography

The way the world remembers the Holocaust has been ever-changing since the end of the Second World War. Throughout Holocaust discourse, the word “memory” takes on many different meanings. From cultural memory to public memory, there are many subcategories that break down the meaning of memory and how it functions as a conceptual lens to understand how societies remember their histories. Memory is used for many different roles including serving the past and the present, and for political interests. With such an all-encompassing topic, its scholarship is certainly brimming with information and ideas amongst scholars of various disciplines. Through their work, they have established endless ways in which memory is utilized and defined for individuals, the public, political actors, for commemoration, and memorialization. This essay analyzes the work of scholars of Holocaust memory in Germany who largely focus on the sites and expressions of memory in Germany’s capital city, Berlin. Scholars such as James E. Young, Jeffrey Blustein, Jan Weiner Müller, Mark Callaghan, Aleida Assmann, Siobhan Kattago, and Jennifer Jordon address the connectiveness of German national identity and political involvement. They stress that German collective memory related to the construction of national identity in the postwar era and that the erection of Holocaust memorials in Berlin and throughout the country was an attempt to consolidate and address national guilt. As Germany worked to face Nazi history through memorialization, it becomes abundantly clear that there are many layers of heavy political involvement in shaping German memory on both national and international levels. This article will discuss the work of sixteen books that examine political involvement in memory work in Germany.