Dirk Moses – 'The End(s) of German Memory Culture and the Catastrophization of Politics'
| Dates: | 8 May 2024 |
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| Times: | 17:30 - 19:30 |
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| What is it: | Lecture |
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| Organiser: | School of Arts, Languages and Cultures |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, Current University students, General public |
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This paper begins with the catastrophization of politics in Germany today, meaning that the present is understood in terms of its catastrophic past: a repetition of impending National Socialist victory and the Holocaust. In the wake of Hamas’s 7 October 2023 terror attack on southern Israeli communities, the German political class has committed itself to the Israeli campaign against Gaza and reaffirmed its imperative to maintain the security of the Jewish community in Germany as the country’s Staatsräson: its historical justification after the Holocaust. To that end, politicians from all major parties and the press have denounced cease-fire marches as “pro-Hamas” and “pro-terror,” indeed as contemporary incarnations of Nazism Serial cancellations of local and international artists and authors, whether Jewish or not, who express Palestine solidarity or criticism of the Israel military campaign as antisemites attest to the aim to enforce the Staatsräson on civil society. Senior politicians even talk about deporting (mainly Arab) protestors and/or conditioning their citizenship status on loyally to Israel. Nonetheless, because of the mass protest movement and a reported spike in antisemitic incidents (usually conflated), some Jews in Germany report feeling abandoned by the state, and are thus considering emigration, thereby vitiating the German state’s self-assigned historical justification. Meanwhile, nearly seven out of ten Germans disapprove of the Israeli campaign and their government's support of it. How and why the country’s vaunted and, till recently, admired memory culture led to this catastrophic and paradoxical situation is the object of the analysis.
A. Dirk Moses is the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor of International Relations at the City College of New York , CUNY
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