Patriotic History in Postcolonial Germany, Thirty Years After "Reunification".

In light of the strange contradiction between the self-critical commemoration of the Holocaust on the one hand and patriotic history regarding colonialism on the other, this contribution maintains the need to transcend simplified notions of allegedly exemplary institutional I Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung i and far-right patriotic history. With regard to both strategies of making patriotic history, conservative and liberal politics of memory are often devious, indicating an intersection between patriotic history and underlying ideological concerns. In fact, in postcolonial and post-reunification Germany, I Aufarbeitung i and state-sponsored patriotic history co-exist in an uneasy tension: while fixated on the Holocaust, large segments of the German political and intellectual elites suffer from "colonial amnesia", as African and Afro-German activists as well as researchers of postcolonial and Black studies observe. Germany has long been championed for its exemplary I Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung i : its self-critical "working through the past."[1] Centred around the commemoration of the Holocaust as a "breach of civilization" ( I Zivilisationsbruch i ),[2] 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. [Extracted from the article]