Politics - Germany

Suspecting that the Germans care about the monuments of Nazism because they reflect a promise of greatness that unconsciously serves as a consolation to the perpetrators, Katharina Volckmer, a young German writer living in London, reminds us that Nazism was utterly abject. That no monuments to Hitler’s wet fantasies should be maintained; that no one needs them to remember German crimes. They only serve to make life in Germany unbearable for those who see their true purpose: to allow Germans to say to themselves that, after all, “it looked good”.

While anti-Semitism is rampant throughout the world, the Holocaust memory is increasingly interrogated in the name of post-colonial ideas. The latest attack is signed by the Australian historian Dirk Moses. The great historian of the Holocaust Saul Friedländer, in an article originally published in Die Zeit, counters: “‘Auschwitz’ was something completely different from the colonial atrocities of the West.

A certain postcolonial thinking is diametrically opposed to what can be considered left-wing politics and would be structurally anti-Jewish argues the great art historian Horst Bredekamp, one of the founders of the Humboldt Forum, in an op-ed published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) last March. This text had a considerable impact on the German and English-speaking intellectual and media scene. We take it up in K., putting it in context: within a controversy about the ‘decolonization’ of art and museums.

Does the Holocauste constitute a unique crime that marks a turning point in European history? Or should we count it just as another crime that is not extraordinary in itself?…