German Cultural Memory at Stake. On the Shift to the Right of the “Never Again” Discourse and the November 2024 Bundestag Resolution on Antisemitism

Abstract

Something is not working properly in German memory culture those days. There is no question about the fact that Germany has long been internationally recognised as a role model when it comes to coming to terms with its Nazi past. Hardly any other country invests so many resources in dealing with the most painful times in its own history, reminding people of the crimes of National Socialism and commemorating the victims. However, critics have long warned that the established, institutionalised culture of remembrance has failed in its current form. Indeed, times are changing, and German society is changing. In parallel, its relationship to the past and traditional perspectives on history are also changing. On one side, due to migration and globalisation, Germany is much more diverse today than it was in the 1980s or 1990s. This has lead some specialists in German history to believe that a purely institutionalised form of remembrance that placed the Holocaust at its center is no longer self-evident, and that the German memory culture should indeed undergo a reorientation towards a pluralistic, more diverse form that includes all parts of its postmigration society, taking into account particular origins and memories.

At the same time, the rise of the far right, undeniable at the latest since 2017 and the electoral successes of the AfD [Alternative für Deutschland], has been accompanied by a massive offensive against the “official” memory. The AfD openly and directly  attacked the fundamental values of the German „Erinnerungskultur“  for diametrically opposed reasons. For a brief but crucial moment, the main target of the attacks by the far right was the  “culture of repentance”—what one of the party's most radical figures, Björn Höcke, has once called the “culture of shame” [“Kultur der Schande”] allegedly cultivated by Germany, and symbolized by the Holocaust Memorial inaugurated in the center of Berlin in May 2005.

The following article is based on the worrying observation that a new political shift might already be underway. This seems clearly evident in the Bundestag resolution entitled “Never again is now. Protecting, preserving, and strengthening Jewish life in Germany”, also known as the Bundestag resolution on antisemitism of November 2024. The thesis defended here is that this ongoing evolution is characterized by an anti-immigrant radicalization of that pillar of German political identity that is the fight against anti-Semitism and the discourse of “Never again.” For several decades now, the culture of remembrance had increasingly become a means of political self-assurance. In a powerful paradox and one of those reversals of meaning that are so common at the moment, the rhetoric of “Never again,” the traditional slogan of the anti-fascist struggle, anti-totalitarian vigilance, and post-war pacifism in Germany, seems now compatible with the security, anti-migration and islamophobic  obsessions of the far right. It seems that the democratic tradition of the “Never again” discourse can now be suitable for  the interests of the AfD, provided that the main target of German memory culture, once despised as a form of self-hatred, is now people from immigrant backgrounds. In the context of post-October 7, 2023 this shift, which is reminiscent of the European far right's recent and overwhelming support for Israel in its war of destruction against Gaza, takes place at the cost of a blatant distortion of the past and the forgetting of the historical anti-Semitism of the far right. All this did not prevent the strange political convergence ranging from the Greens to the AfD that took place on the occasion of the Bundestag resolution of November 2024. This was only possible thanks to the political use (or misuse) of the positive label of the „Erinnerungskultur“ and the hazardous instrumentalization of the fight against anti-Semitism. In other words, and this is the second thesis of the current article, radical history and dogmatic distortion of the past can not only be observed in radical parties, but are also promoted more or less consciously by the traditional parties, and what Germans often refer to as the “center of society”, so-called “Mitte der Gesellschaft”. The following article therefore makes three methodological choices: 1) to focus less on parties usually classified as “populist” or “radical” and more on an overall dynamic encompassing all political forces; 2) to examine the shift in German memory culture from an instrument for the formation of a democratic culture to a divisive, prescriptive, and dogmatic tool; 3) finally, to present a dense discourse analysis devoted to the text of the “Never Again is now” resolution itself.