Networking Memory: Germany's Holocaust Memorials to Romani, Jewish, and Gay Victims

This paper argues that so-called competitions of victimhood inform rather than impede the memory-making process and the public’s engagement with histories of violence. I analyze how Germany’s national Holocaust memorials—and the memory narratives they embody—have taken form through a process of conflict as well as exchange with one another. I argue that the dominant status of the Jewish Holocaust in Germany’s historical narrative has helped to bring about recognition of the genocide of the Roma people. Likewise, I demonstrate how the commemorative activities of the Roma—a minority generally excluded from dominant accounts of Holocaust memory—have also influenced how Germany remembers the genocide of the Jews.

            The empirical focus of this paper is Berlin’s Memorial to the Sinti and Roma of Europe Murdered Under National Socialism. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, I situate this analysis in the context of Germany’s two other national Holocaust memorials, dedicated to Jewish and gay victims. While the development phase of each memorial was rife with debate about victim hierarchies, my research reveals a memorial landscape that, although imbalanced, also signals the gradual formation of a common space of memory. I show how individual victim-group experiences are scattered across Berlin’s memorial landscape in detached structures, yet are brought together in what I call memorial networks—a configuration that connects memorials through administrative, pedagogical, research, touristic, and commemorative activities. I concluded that this concept of memorial networks provides new ways of thinking about the relationship between hegemonic and marginalized representations of suffering.