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Well over 50 million human lives were extinguished because of Nazi rule in Europe. More than 80 years later, Germany's memory culture is now lauded globally as a guide for navigating national histories of moral catastrophe, and the myths which led to these - but it also faces new challenges as the country's national identity is increasingly shaped by debates over immigration, Israel and colonialism. As the number of eyewitnesses to the Holocaust declines, the culture of remembrance will not disappear, but it will be set on a new course by generational and demographic change.
This important new book by a leading historian of the Holocaust argues that modern Germany's reckoning with its inherited burden must always recognise the singularity of the Nazi atrocities, because confronting these forms the very core of its democracy. However, it cannot calcify into complacency if it is to serve its people well.
Neglecting legacies of the GDR and Germany's colonial past, which can stem from good intentions to avoid drawing harmful symmetries, will impoverish its democratic future. The Holocaust rightly remains in our memory as a portent of how resentment and fabricated grievances against a minority can end in murder. But all efforts to research and understand the Holocaust are in vain if other groups are stigmatized instead of - or alongside - the Jews. And self-congratulatory staged gestures and selective engagement erode, little by little, the enlightened democracy which allows the flourishing of justice and freedom.
This important new book by a leading historian of the Holocaust argues that modern Germany's reckoning with its inherited burden must always recognise the singularity of the Nazi atrocities, because confronting these forms the very core of its democracy. However, it cannot calcify into complacency if it is to serve its people well.
Neglecting legacies of the GDR and Germany's colonial past, which can stem from good intentions to avoid drawing harmful symmetries, will impoverish its democratic future. The Holocaust rightly remains in our memory as a portent of how resentment and fabricated grievances against a minority can end in murder. But all efforts to research and understand the Holocaust are in vain if other groups are stigmatized instead of - or alongside - the Jews. And self-congratulatory staged gestures and selective engagement erode, little by little, the enlightened democracy which allows the flourishing of justice and freedom.