Since World War II, Germany has been uniquely shaped by atoning for the Holocaust. This is reflected in its categorisation of criticism of Israel as antisemitic and its minimal national security.
Yeah, very real german atonement when students were like “my opa did what? this judge was the who? This general did the what?” till the 70s-80s. The book seems to have the same smugness of “look how we learned from our mistakes” with a dash of catholic mindset
germans just invented another national supremacist ideology for themselves. Except this time it’s not based on their “arian blood” but on their supposed superior moral character. They yearn for the fuhrer
The German Erinnerungskultur would better be translated with memorial or remembrance culture. There’s a lot of talk about the shoa (that frequently leaves out the persecution of communists, queers, Sinti and Roma people, sex workers, the homeless, disabled people etc.), there’s memorials being built, Weimar and the Hitlerist regime are a major topic in German education, but all of that only started 20, 30, 40 years after the end of the war and there were next to no actual, practical steps towards denazification.
And even when we stick to just the discourse around the shoa, it is severely lacking in spite of its central placement in German historiography. The horseshoe revisionists that were long favored by German conservatives, people like Ernst Nolte who seriously tried to trivialize the shoa by describing it as a reaction to the Stalinist cleansings, at least lost traction by the late 1980s, but the other side of that debate was largely dominated by people like Jürgen Habermas who postulated a singularity of the Holocaust that robbed it of its historic context and leads to a blindsiding towards the colonialist, conservative and imperialist continuities that enabled it.
In fact, part of the recent shifts in how this discourse is handled is not only a completely uncritical support of zionism, but also an open condemnation of postcolonialism as “holocaust trivializing”. The political mainstream has, much to the joy of the far right, embraced an attempt to atone with an incredibly bizarre mixture of racism, philosemitism, victimization hierarchies and chauvinistic claims to national superiority. At the same time, it is increasingly ignorant of conspiracy theories that are very clearly antisemitic in structure, especially when these are wielded against trans people. Like, you have unhinged zionist pundits like Jan Feddersen who will in one article spout racist, revisionist talking points against people protesting the genocide in Gaza and in the very next article parrot transphobic antisemites who paint “gender ideology” as a Jewish plot led by Judith Butler to destroy the West. And then this shit gets reposted by zionists on the lemmyverse. It’s fucking terrifying to live here, but my friends and me honestly have no idea where else we should go given how shitty the situation is for trans people in most places.
Espercially for the judicial system there has been literally nothing done ever as of now and there is basically 0 awareness for how it shapes the country
Yeah, very real german atonement when students were like “my opa did what? this judge was the who? This general did the what?” till the 70s-80s. The book seems to have the same smugness of “look how we learned from our mistakes” with a dash of catholic mindset
germans just invented another national supremacist ideology for themselves. Except this time it’s not based on their “arian blood” but on their supposed superior moral character. They yearn for the fuhrer
The German Erinnerungskultur would better be translated with memorial or remembrance culture. There’s a lot of talk about the shoa (that frequently leaves out the persecution of communists, queers, Sinti and Roma people, sex workers, the homeless, disabled people etc.), there’s memorials being built, Weimar and the Hitlerist regime are a major topic in German education, but all of that only started 20, 30, 40 years after the end of the war and there were next to no actual, practical steps towards denazification.
And even when we stick to just the discourse around the shoa, it is severely lacking in spite of its central placement in German historiography. The horseshoe revisionists that were long favored by German conservatives, people like Ernst Nolte who seriously tried to trivialize the shoa by describing it as a reaction to the Stalinist cleansings, at least lost traction by the late 1980s, but the other side of that debate was largely dominated by people like Jürgen Habermas who postulated a singularity of the Holocaust that robbed it of its historic context and leads to a blindsiding towards the colonialist, conservative and imperialist continuities that enabled it.
In fact, part of the recent shifts in how this discourse is handled is not only a completely uncritical support of zionism, but also an open condemnation of postcolonialism as “holocaust trivializing”. The political mainstream has, much to the joy of the far right, embraced an attempt to atone with an incredibly bizarre mixture of racism, philosemitism, victimization hierarchies and chauvinistic claims to national superiority. At the same time, it is increasingly ignorant of conspiracy theories that are very clearly antisemitic in structure, especially when these are wielded against trans people. Like, you have unhinged zionist pundits like Jan Feddersen who will in one article spout racist, revisionist talking points against people protesting the genocide in Gaza and in the very next article parrot transphobic antisemites who paint “gender ideology” as a Jewish plot led by Judith Butler to destroy the West. And then this shit gets reposted by zionists on the lemmyverse. It’s fucking terrifying to live here, but my friends and me honestly have no idea where else we should go given how shitty the situation is for trans people in most places.
Espercially for the judicial system there has been literally nothing done ever as of now and there is basically 0 awareness for how it shapes the country
Lmao war crimes investigator Steve Harvey, someone make this now