Bulletin of the Institute for Western Affairs, ed. 22 (477): Not only Namibia. Germany facing politics of memory challenges

Bulletin of the Institute for Western Affairs, ed. 22 (477)/2020: Bogumił Rudawski „ Not only Namibia. Germany facing politics of memory challenges”

The centerpiece of Germany’s historical memory is the Holocaust. The country’s admission of responsibility for the crimes of the Third Reich has been among the key points of moral, political and social convergence in today’s Germany. However, rows about the colonial past increasingly put that very tenet into question. The paradigm of German politics of memory is transforming into, as Michael Rothberg put it, a “multidirectional memory” whose social canon is becoming increasingly democratic, supplemented with, inter alia, references to the colonial past.