Patriotic History in Postcolonial Germany, Thirty Years After “Reunification”

Abstract

Germany has long been championed for its exemplary Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung: its selfcritical “working through the past.” Centred around the commemoration of the Holocaust as a “breach of civilization” (Zivilisationsbruch), the emphatic rejection of antisemitism, and loyalty to the state of Israel, the country’s official politics of memory and public culture of remembrance allegedly renounce nationalistic interpretations of the past. So intense is the imperative to avoid apologetic gestures and implications of German self-pity that the documentation centre “Flight, Expulsion, Reconciliation,” which opened in June 2021 in Berlin, commemorates the experiences of the millions of Germans expelled from East Central Europe after the Second World War by relating them closely to Nazi terror. Even “happy” memories of recent episodes, notably the so-called reunification of former East and West Germany in 1990, tend to be superseded by the commemoration of the Shoah. At the same time, however, uncritical “patriotic history” is gaining ground. For many observers, patriotic history is mainly associated with the rise of the far right, notably the party Alternative for Germany (AfD), the social movement organization “Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the Occident” (PEGIDA), and the anti-lockdown mobilization of the so-called lateral thinkers (Querdenker) in the course of the Covid-19 pandemic. Propagating nationalist and revisionist readings of the past, such