2024-04-27 09:28:22
Culture German culture of remembrance
Claudia Roth’s “system break” is becoming increasingly clear
Status: 27.04.2024 | Reading time: 4 minutes
Claudia Roth in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp memorial
Source: picture alliance / AA/photothek.de
The Green Minister of State for Culture wants to reorganize the way we deal with German history. However, experts from the memorial sites are not consulted about this, or not openly. Now the CDU/CSU parliamentary group is criticizing the process – and is calling for a restart.
Minister of State for Culture Claudia Roth (Greens) had announced a discussion “with important civil society actors” – that was on February 25, 2024. Two months later, not even the “circle of participants” is in place for a “round table” about the “new concept the federal memorial concept and other questions relating to the culture of remembrance. This emerges from the meager hundred or so words with which Roth, who is responsible for cultural policy in the traffic light government, “answered” three precise questions from the CDU/CSU parliamentary group.
The draft for the “new concept” of the national memorial sites, which became known in a WELT article, aims at a change in the German culture of remembrance. The importance of the crimes of the Nazi and SED regimes for commemoration is duly emphasized. However, the “remembrance of the German colonial injustice system and its reappraisal” should also be added. Both represent a “necessary new cultural remembrance task”.
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However, firstly, Germany’s role in the overall context of European colonialism is not marginal, but rather small. In any case, the relevance of colonialism for the German culture of remembrance lies far below the turning point of National Socialism and the 44-year dictatorship in almost a third of Germany.
Secondly, representatives of “postcolonial studies” have so far attracted attention primarily through a more or less open relativization of the Holocaust and, currently, through activist anti-Semitism. In any case, their worldview is based on a fairly simple, empty image of the regions colonized between the 16th and 20th centuries. Accordingly, everything was fine in Africa and other parts of the “Global South” before the Europeans arrived. This is an idea of “noble savages” that has nothing in common with historical reality.
Claudia Roth and her colleagues could have found out about this if they had spoken to experts in remembrance policy before writing the draft. But whether such an exchange even took place is at least questionable. In response to the CDU/CSU parliamentary group’s question, the Minister of State for Culture refuses to name the names of those “personalities from the fields of science and culture of remembrance” whose “expertise” she claims to have drawn on “when preparing the draft”: “These personalities were assured of confidentiality during the discussions.”
All institutions criticize Claudia Roth
It would be very exciting to know who the Department for Culture and Media attached to the Federal Chancellery, usually known as “BKM”, actually talked to. All associations dealing with the topic of remembrance policy have strongly condemned the 43-page paper. Your “Statement on the Draft Framework for Remembrance Culture” from April 3, which WELT has received, is a barely concealed slap in the face for Roth. The signatories, including the working groups of the concentration camp memorials in Germany and the memorials to the dictatorship in the Soviet Zone and the GDR, the Association of Memorials in Germany and others, together represent practically all of the Federal Republic’s well over 350 past political institutions.
And they reject the concept outright. Its “defects” are “so serious” that the “present draft should not be pursued further”. There was a lack of “clear guidelines”, there were “deficiencies in the structure, indeterminacies in the objectives, and even a certain character of the merely appellative”. The “topics outlined in the draft” seemed “arbitrary”. Since many of these institutions are directly or indirectly dependent on funding from Roth’s department, such clarity is noteworthy.
“The framework concept was obviously developed without the usual discussion formats and professional expertise,” says Christiane Schenderlein, spokesperson for culture and media in the CDU/CSU parliamentary group, to WELT: “The system break in the culture of remembrance planned by Claudia Roth has “There is no broad consensus.”
Either the representatives of the relevant institutions were not even included in the considerations for a revised memorial concept. Or conversations were held, but under false pretenses. This is suggested by another sentence in Claudia Roth’s letter to Christiane Schenderlein: “The discussions did not always take place specifically under the topic of ‘Framework concept of remembrance culture’.”
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Two heads of important historical-political institutions, mostly paid for by the federal government, confirmed the WELT independently of each other. Both were interviewed by BKM representatives on the sidelines of regular discussions such as foundation board meetings or similar about topics that were then incorporated into the draft dated February 1, 2024.
Schenderlein, who has a doctorate in political science herself and has been a member of the Bundestag for Saxony since 2021, is surprised: “The answer basically refers to ‘pseudo-talks’, deliberately without any specific reference to the framework concept. This reveals either an unexpected arrogance or an ideologically motivated solo effort from above.” The “outcry in the remembrance culture scene” is therefore not “surprising, but unprecedented,” says Schenderlein: “It needs a new start in the usual procedure and with the involvement of all affected institutions and also the German Bundestag.”
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