Interpreting Germany

Since returning to my country of birth last year after nearly 20 years away, I have become acutely aware not only of how I have changed, but also how the country has changed. So now, in addition to catching up with the sites and topics that I am responsible for managing and interpreting, I am also catching up with the country’s thinking about its identity and its heritage while I was gone – both key factors in any work with heritage.

One development that I’ve stumbled across quite quickly has been the formulation of an official Erinnerungskultur, or ‘memory culture’, and so I’ve recently read a book about that [1]. The term was coined during the 1990s, the decade I left Germany. It does not, as you might think, denote a particularly thriving culture based on memories. Rather, it focuses on the memory of the Holocaust as the (negative) foundation myth of modern Germany. In this it is slightly different from the cosmopolitan memory of the Holocaust which is shared between ‘the heirs of the victims, the perpetrators and bystanders’ as a ‘memory of a shared past’ [2]. In the current German Erinnerungskultur, the engagement with the responsibility for the Holocaust is a normative framework for the present and a key factor in defining Germany.

The book I’ve read also examines how Erinnerungskultur is now being challenged due to other developments, such as Germany changing its status to a country of immigration. Critiques ask for example how migrants are expected to treat this Erinnerungskultur: Are they to buy into it and adopt the unique responsibility as perpetrators? But is this not assimilatory, requiring them to leave behind their own identity and heritage? And yet, if we don’t ask them to opt into ‘German responsibility’, are we then not suggesting that there is something ethnic about being German, i.e. the very thing that Erinnerungskultur wants to challenge?

Other critiques focus on the change of generations and globalisation.  Each time a new generation has come into adulthood, it has changed how Germany has related to the Holocaust: must it not change now, too, as younger Germans increasingly identify as Europeans and global citizens? And what place has a special German Erinnerungskultur  in a globally connected world where cultural identities blur? Does Germany not need a more positive foundation now of who it is and who it wants to be, not the least after decades of commitment to, and evidence of a strong German democracy?

The book also cites critiques of the taboos that Erinnerungskultur has created, a type of Political Correctness that deems alternative narratives morally questionable, an approach that some political theorists have suggested may engender the very (narrow-minded) nationalistic mindsets that something like Erinnerungskultur actually tries to dissuade.

As an interpreter and heritage researcher, all of this is of course immensely intriguing. This latter critique is interesting too, because it points to Erinnerungskultur as an authorizing discourse that judges and prunes other memories and the expression of other heritages, much like Laurajane Smith’s Authorized Heritage Discourse [3]. I’m wondering if this may also have something to do with the large number of museums founded and run by civic groups as Heimatmuseen, which may most appropriately be translated as ‘(local) heritage museums’. I’ve noticed that there seems to be an occasional rift between museums and clubs referencing ‘Heimat’ on one hand, and the professionals in the sector on the other, with a suspicion and rejection of the term ‘Heimat’ that Erinnerungskultur may be able to explain.

There is such depth to German heritage, and such complex connections to German identity across groups and generations, which makes interpreting German heritage really interesting. My only concern at the moment is that Erinnerungskultur as an official discourse is (still) so strong as to make it impossible to critically explore and represent all the diverse dimensions of Germans’ heritage values. I’ve never believed in interpretation being a mouthpiece for any singular view, no matter how morally justifiable. I’d rather not be forced to make it so now.

Notes

[1] Assmann, A., 2013. Das neue Unbehagen an der Erinnerungskultur. Eine Intervention. 2nd ed. (2016). München: C.H.Beck. All of what I’m writing about Erinnerungskultur in this post is based on this book.

[2] Levy, D. and Sznaider, N., 2005. ‘Memory Unbound. The Holocaust and the Formation of Cosmopolitan Memory.’ European Journal of Social Theory 5(1), pp.87-106, p.103.

[3] Smith, L., 2006. The Uses of Heritage. London and New York: Routledge.