Holocaust Memory and Racial Amnesia

This paper explores the shift in German and European memory discourse after the fall of the Soviet empire with particular attention to the reframing of the Holocaust and the Second World War as it affects the nation’s Muslim minority. I argue that Germany affirms its arrival in the center of Europe and the containment of its genocidal past through a public and policy focus on anti-Semitism among second-generation “migrant” youths. This positions Jews and Muslims as antagonists, with majority Germans and the state standing in as mediators educating and controlling Muslims. This discursively erases the similarities in the racing of religion directed at both groups as non-Christian minorities and hides the fact that the majority of anti-Semitic acts (and arguably anti-Semitic sentiment) can be traced to majoritarian Germans simultaneously holding anti-Semitic, racist and Islamophobic beliefs – all of which are on the rise in Europe. Instead of addressing the increasing normalization of these beliefs and acts across the continent, the crisis of (neo)liberal multiculturalism is thus localized among populations already made most vulnerable by it through economic marginalization and political disempowerment. The paper is part of a larger project on post-1989 European memory discourse and the processes of repression (or racial amnesia) it produces. I ask how racialized bodies are made to carry particular spatio-temporal meanings in their representation of the socialist/colonial past, a practice which in turn allows their exclusion from the postcolonial/postsocialist present – and in the case explored here, the projection of Europe’s fascist past onto them.