Monumental Memory, Moral Superiority, and Contemporary Disconnects: Racisms and Noncitizens in Europe, then and Now

My investigation is located in Germany, and even more specifically, in Berlin. Germany is significant to the extent that it (at least symbolically) continues to immediately conjure up images not only of BMWs, Mercedes, Audis, and Porches, but also of genocide and its memorialization. While Germany continues to be thought of as an exceptional case, putting Predʼs articulation of apparent surprise (i.e., “even in Sweden”) in reverse, I argue that Germany is emblematic of the break that allows European nation-states and Europe as a whole to insist on moral superiority that requires forgetting the links between genocide, colonialism, racisms, and conquest, as if the danger of European perpetration resides only in the past. Colonialism and conquest are more often than not represented in an ambivalent way (obliquely in terms of a civilizing mission), if remembered at all. The monumentality of the remembering of genocide in Europe, though, takes theplace of further reflection, as if the past could be mastered and require no further intervention from new (unanticipated) subjects.