Episode 123: An Expanding German Memory Culture
Eric Langenbacher
Senior Fellow; Director, Society, Culture & Politics Program
Dr. Eric Langenbacher is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Society, Culture & Politics Program at AICGS.
Dr. Langenbacher studied in Canada before completing his PhD in Georgetown University’s Government Department in 2002. His research interests include collective memory, political culture, and electoral politics in Germany and Europe. Recent publications include the edited volumes Twilight of the Merkel Era: Power and Politics in Germany after the 2017 Bundestag Election (2019), The Merkel Republic: The 2013 Bundestag Election and its Consequences (2015), Dynamics of Memory and Identity in Contemporary Europe (co-edited with Ruth Wittlinger and Bill Niven, 2013), Power and the Past: Collective Memory and International Relations (co-edited with Yossi Shain, 2010), and From the Bonn to the Berlin Republic: Germany at the Twentieth Anniversary of Unification (co-edited with Jeffrey J. Anderson, 2010). With David Conradt, he is also the author of The German Polity, 10th and 11th edition (2013, 2017).
Dr. Langenbacher remains affiliated with Georgetown University as Teaching Professor and Director of the Honors Program in the Department of Government. He has also taught at George Washington University, Washington College, The University of Navarre, and the Universidad Nacional de General San Martin in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and has given talks across the world. He was selected Faculty Member of the Year by the School of Foreign Service in 2009 and was awarded a Fulbright grant in 1999-2000 and the Hopper Memorial Fellowship at Georgetown in 2000-2001. Since 2005, he has also been Managing Editor of German Politics and Society, which is housed in Georgetown’s BMW Center for German and European Studies. Dr. Langenbacher has also planned and run dozens of short programs for groups from abroad, as well as for the U.S. Departments of State and Defense on a variety of topics pertaining to American and comparative politics, business, culture, and public policy.
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Jeff Rathke
President of AGI
Jeffrey Rathke is the President of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies at the Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC.
Prior to joining AICGS, Jeff was a senior fellow and deputy director of the Europe Program at CSIS, where his work focused on transatlantic relations and U.S. security and defense policy. Jeff joined CSIS in 2015 from the State Department, after a 24-year career as a Foreign Service Officer, dedicated primarily to U.S. relations with Europe. He was director of the State Department Press Office from 2014 to 2015, briefing the State Department press corps and managing the Department's engagement with U.S. print and electronic media. Jeff led the political section of the U.S. Embassy in Kuala Lumpur from 2011 to 2014. Prior to that, he was deputy chief of staff to the NATO Secretary General in Brussels. He also served in Berlin as minister-counselor for political affairs (2006–2009), his second tour of duty in Germany. His Washington assignments have included deputy director of the Office of European Security and Political Affairs and duty officer in the White House Situation Room and State Department Operations Center.
Mr. Rathke was a Weinberg Fellow at Princeton University (2003–2004), winning the Master’s in Public Policy Prize. He also served at U.S. Embassies in Dublin, Moscow, and Riga, which he helped open after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Mr. Rathke has been awarded national honors by Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, as well as several State Department awards. He holds an M.P.P. degree from Princeton University and B.A. and B.S. degrees from Cornell University. He speaks German, Russian, and Latvian.
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Priscilla Layne
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Dr. Priscilla Layne is professor of German, adjunct associate professor of African and Afro-American Studies, and director of the Center for European Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of two books. White Rebels in Black: German Appropriation of Black Popular Culture examines how, following WWII, German artists often associated white, rebellious male characters with black popular culture, because black culture functioned as a metaphor for rebellion. Her second book, Out of this World: Afro-German Afrofuturism, focuses on Afro-German authors’ use of Afrofuturist concepts in literature and theater. She received her PhD in German studies from the University of California at Berkeley.
For decades, memory culture in Germany has largely focused on coming to terms with and memorializing the Holocaust. In recent years, however, memory discourses have expanded to include, among others, Germany’s colonial history, particularly crimes committed in the territory of contemporary Namibia. Dr. Priscilla Layne discusses how German memory culture is evolving, how analogies can aid in understanding atrocities, and how the arts can bring awareness to overlooked histories.
Host
Jeff Rathke, President, AGI
Guests
Priscilla Layne, Professor of German, Adjunct Associate Professor of African and Afro-American Studies, and Director of the Center for European Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Eric Langenbacher, AGI Senior Fellow; Director, Society, Culture & Politics Program
Transcript
Jeff Rathke
I want to welcome all of our listeners to this episode of The Zeitgeist, and we are really proud to have with us today Professor Priscilla Layne. Professor Layne, welcome.
Priscilla Layne
Thank you. I’m happy to be here today.
Jeff Rathke
And I am joined by my colleague Eric Langenbacher, who is the director of our Society, Culture & Politics Program at AGI. Good morning, Eric.
Eric Langenbacher
Good morning, Jeff.
Jeff Rathke
So today’s topic is the changing memory culture in Germany, which is a topic we’ve touched on a number of times in this podcast, so listeners may be familiar with it. But just a word at the start. This is a follow-up to a conference that AGI co-hosted recently, which was under the title of a “Mnemonic Zeitenwende in Germany.” In other words, how is Germany’s memory culture and how is its memory politics changing as the aperture on Germany’s history widens. This is a really exciting development in this area of studies. I’m really glad we have the chance to talk about this today with two great experts, Eric and Priscilla. Eric, let me just hand it over to you, and we can get started.
Eric Langenbacher
Thanks, Jeff. Yes, we’re so pleased to be speaking with Dr. Priscilla Layne today, who is a professor of German at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, as well as an adjunct associate professor of African and Afro American Studies and the director of the Center for European Studies. She’s a very widely published academic; I might just highlight two books. Her first book was entitled White Rebels in Black: German Appropriation of Black Popular Culture that came out in 2018. She has a new book that has come out very recently called Out of this World: Afro-German Afrofuturism. She’s also interested in many other topics such as German national identity, conceptions of race and self/other in Germany, cross-racial empathy, postcolonialism, and rebellion.
I thought that we might start with just a little bit of context behind today’s podcast. German memory culture is very well-established. I have argued, as have many other people, that what I call “Holocaust-centered memory” has been hegemonic for several decades now. But as is always the case, this sometimes becomes a little contested—maybe contested is a little strong—but there’s been a critique the last couple of years that some people call the German catechism debate that was unleashed by a mutual colleague of ours, Dirk Moses. Many other academics, like Michael Rothberg, have gotten involved in the whole thing as well. It’s obviously a very complex debate and I don’t want to oversimplify it too much, but I think gist of it is that the current hegemony of Holocaust-centered memory has made it difficult for other important mnemonic discourses to find space and voice within German memory culture writ large. In particular, the memory of German colonialism and German colonial crimes has struggled to gain this legitimacy or visibility within German memory culture, and that’s why I’m so happy that we have Dr. Layne to speak with us today because I think that her research really goes to the heart of what’s going on in Germany—maybe what ought to be going on in Germany. Welcome, Priscilla.
Priscilla Layne
Thank you. Thanks again for the invitation to have this conversation with you.
Eric Langenbacher
I’ll start with a question that goes right back to your research as well as the presentation that you gave at our conference about six weeks ago. You’ve done a lot of work on analogies when it comes to German culture and German memory culture in particular. So maybe you could talk a little bit about what you mean by analogies and what role analogies play in regard to memory dynamics in Germany as well as perhaps in other contexts.
Priscilla Layne
Well, I would say that analogies have been useful to me in teaching and research, primarily when it comes to thinking about the Black German experience. I mentioned in previous work that making analogies, historical analogies, has been an important tool for the Black diaspora for a long time. When I’m teaching, say, undergraduate students at UNC about Black German history, Black German culture, analogies can be really helpful. Because a lot of these students, first of all, never thought of the fact that there are Black Germans, right? Unfortunately, a lot of American students think of Europe as this kind of homogeneous White space. But when you talk about Black Germans, Black French, Afro Swedes, that’s just a new concept to them. So on the one hand, you want to be able to introduce this history in a way that’s relatable to them. At the same time, you want to be careful to not have them think that, say, the experience of African Americans and Black Germans is the same, one-to-one. I’ve encountered that problem with students where we might be reading a novel or an autobiography by a Black German author and students will say in their essay, “the African-American author.” I say, “no, that’s an American concept, identity. This person is not African American.” So I think there’s often this tendency in the U.S. to see our terms, our experiences, as very universal and then apply it or impose it on other spaces. And I try to help students learn not to do that.
On the other hand, analogies can be helpful for them, making sense of, say, the Black German experience. And this is something a Black German scholar [Leroy Hopkins], who started writing essays about the Black German experience very early on, and he talked about the analogy of the slave narrative: What the slave narrative meant for African Americans, this narrative of liberation, emancipation, coming into your identity and how you could possibly read that vis-a-vis the autobiographies by Black Germans like Ika Hügel-Marshall, for example. So I would say from the start of when American scholars became interested in Black German history, that those kind of analogies have been made since the eighties. And so when I write about Black German novels, Black German films, and theater, on the one hand, I do try to think about, okay, what kind of experiences can you compare? Take something like police brutality. We saw that in 2020, especially after the killing of George Floyd, with all of the protests happening in Germany in solidarity with Floyd’s community, we saw that that event resonated for a lot of Black people in Germany, other people of color, White allies, that they recognized something in their own community that this police brutality, police oppression happens there. I do think that there are certain topics like racialization, the way that Black men and women can be hyper sexualized, can be stereotyped, those things happen both in Germany and the United States, and you can definitely draw analogies there.
But you also have to be careful with your analogies. So as a scholar Michelle Wright pointed out, when it comes to the African American history, the transatlantic slave trade is so central to that narrative, whereas for a lot of Black Europeans, it doesn’t play a role. If you think of the history of Black Germans, some Black German people are descended from former colonial subjects from Cameroon who came to Germany as students, as apprentices. If we look at post-1945, there are students who came from places like Nigeria or Ghana to study in West Germany or people from Mozambique, from Angola, who went to East Germany as apprentices to learn different skills. That is a completely different trajectory than the transatlantic slave trade. In the case of Black Europeans, you’re often talking about Black people who move to Europe voluntarily seeking opportunity versus being enslaved, being forcibly brought to North America. So I do find that analogies can be helpful. They can help people empathize, put themselves in the position of others. But at the same time, you have to be responsible with them. You can’t make too loose an analogy. You have to be grounded in some kind of historical context.
Eric Langenbacher
To follow up on that, it seems to me that in the cultural and memory debates going on in Germany today, that there are certain defenders of, let’s say, the status quo, who seem really uncomfortable with these kinds of analogies. For a long time, in my opinion at least, have been several supportive discourses that go along with Holocaust-centered memory. One of which is the uniqueness discourse that the Holocaust was such a heinous and unique crime that it can’t be compared or perhaps even analogized to anything else. And I think that a lot of the vehement pushback on Moses and others may have been motivated by some of those discourses. How do you respond to some of these critical voices that think that the use of analogies—not comparisons but analogies—is disrespectful to the crime of the Holocaust?
Priscilla Layne
I’m more aligned, I’d say, with someone like Michael Rothberg that I think to think of the Holocaust as a singularly unique event that cannot be compared to other instances of genocide is not helpful. On the other hand, I understand that for the Jewish community, it could be seen as the singular event for them personally, but I think in terms of world history, in terms of people around the world, all of us have been touched by this history, right? We all learn about it and World War II because it was such a horrific moment in human history. But I think other communities have experienced their own kinds of genocide. You think of the Balkans. You think of South Asia. You think of Rwanda. That unfortunately this issue of genocide since World War II has continued to happen, and for that reason I do think it can be very helpful to be able to draw those comparisons between genocides. I think part of drawing the comparisons is also learning the warning signs. What do these events, though they may be unique to their individual contexts, what do they have in common and how can we learn, okay, when we see XYZ things happening, we understand where this could be going and we can reverse course. I’ve seen online, I think it’s ten stages of genocide, is a list that I’ve seen on some Holocaust museum websites, and for me, that’s an example of something that’s a useful way to take the Holocaust as a singular event and then draw what lessons we can from it so that we can be vigilant about the future.
When I was thinking about, you know, I’m not Jewish, so I can’t speak from that positionality and to what extent the Holocaust can be considered a singular event for the Jewish community. When I think of the African American community, I find it interesting, I think when it comes to slavery, we are less—what’s the word?—less critical when people do these analogies. And part of that could be a historical thing, right? Slavery ended in, I think, 1865. The Holocaust, World War II ended in 1945. You do have a huge historical gap there, and that also changes to what extent are there people who survive, alive today, who experience slavery versus the Holocaust? To what extent do people identify as children or grandchildren of survivors? But I think of some of the ways that transatlantic slavery has been treated as an analogy. Something that came to mind was that theories on, I think it was HBO’s Lovecraft Country was this kind of sci-fi horror way of drawing an analogy between Black people in the sixties and slavery. There are ways that analogies get drawn between Jim Crow and today, like the that documentary 13th. I would say for the Black community, those analogies can be helpful to think about, how far have we come? Technically, slavery is not legal, although in the 13th the director is saying if we look at the way prisoners are treated, that’s not entirely true. But if on paper, this terrible thing may not exist, but there may be remnants of it in our society, which is something that people who ascribe to Afropessimism would argue this idea that we’re living in the afterlife of slavery. So from the position of an African American, these analogies keep us on our toes, keep us thinking, keep us assessing. Where are we in society? And we try not to be lulled into a sense of security that everything is better. Because unfortunately we do see some past problems reoccur. We see that with anti-Black racism; we see that with anti-Semitism. From my personal viewpoint, I like to try to be as aware as possible to what extent these issues still are around so that I’m not surprised, unfortunately, when it happens in the media, an assault or something.
Eric Langenbacher
You were speaking about the ten steps to genocide and comparing, analogizing different genocides. I’d like to turn for a moment to another genocide that Germans perpetrated in their history, which was the genocide of the Herero and Nama people in German South West Africa in the early twentieth century, this is contemporary Namibia. This is one of the memories that I think has struggled to find visibility, although perhaps it’s starting to find some voice today. I know that you’ve done some research on some of the representations of this particular crime. In particular, there’s a film that came out last year or maybe the year before, called Der vermessene Mensch, or Measures of Men. It would be great if you could share some thoughts on how you see this historical crime portrayed in this film and how this might affect German memory culture.
Priscilla Layne
When I heard the film was being made, I was really shocked just because I felt like this part of German history had never really been treated in a mainstream film, so it did feel like something major. And based on the reviews I’ve read for the film, that has been some of the praise, people said, this is a moment in German history that many Germans don’t know, unfortunately. A lot of Germans don’t know much about their colonial history, the colonization of different African cultures. Some have praised the film for just centering this event, basically raising awareness, exposing people to this, not only to the genocide of the Nama and Herero, but the theft of the skulls and the fact that museums still have these skulls in their possession. I would say that prior to this film, this moment in time, yes, historians wrote about it. There are a few literary treatments. Uwe Timms has a text called Morenga. There’s also a text called—I can’t remember the author’s name—that focuses on one of the Herero leaders. Personally, I’ve taught Morenga, and I really enjoy that novel. And I felt like Timms’ approach, he has this kind of postmodern approach where he’s got letters and historical documents and different perspectives, and kind of like an anti-hero. And I felt like he was trying his best to show how complex this history is without ventriloquizing for the Black victims. But there’s always the question of how many people does that reach, right? How many people are going to read a 400-page novel about this versus go to the theater and watch a two-hour melodrama? I do think a film like Measures of Men can do important work by exposing the issue to more people.
Generally, unfortunately, I think there are a lot of reasons why this colonial past hadn’t gotten much exposure until now. There have been scholars who have written about Germany’s post-colonial moment and one book that comes to mind is Monika Albrecht’s book Europa ist nicht die Welt, or Europe Is Not the World, which I found very useful when I was writing my first book. But at the same time, I remember, there’s a short film done by this activist art group Kanak Attak, and the film is called Recolonize Cologne. It’s from 2005. It’s about 20 or 30 minutes, and I’ve shown that in class before. It’s this culmination of an art installation. So basically, a group of activists go to the center of Cologne and set up a boundary, and they’re carrying this Black man who they say, I think, is the King of Cameroon or something. And he says he’s going to colonize this section of Cologne and give amnesty to any Germans who want to live in his territory. It’s a parody of colonization, like a reverse colonization. And those scenes are interspersed with telling the history of German colonialism, starting with the Berlin Conference and Bismarck using Playmobil figures. And then there are also these first-person accounts with African people who have emigrated to Germany. And one of the things that really stands out in that video is they do a few man-on-the-street segments where they go up to random White German people and they say, “What do you know about German colonialism?” And sadly the responses are, “Huh, what do you mean?” or, “We had colonies in Africa, I didn’t know.” Or the patriarchal, “Oh, I’m sure they benefited from us being there.” I always think of that video as showing us the general education or feelings about this moment among Germans for a long time. Hopefully this has shifted since Measures of Men came out. I hope that people have a better understanding of the real brutality and exploitation that was going on.
I would also say that for Black Germans this is probably a long time coming or too little, too late, because they’ve also been fighting for more recognition of this moment to look at the monuments in Germany that still exist, monuments to colonialism. And I think part of the impetus for this activism, you mentioned the central place that the Holocaust has had, Holocaust memory, Vergangenheitsbewältigung, I think for a long time, Germans have kind of pat themselves on the back about how great they were about dealing with Holocaust memory and confronting crimes and the thoughts that led to those crimes. Especially when Susan Neiman’s book came out, Learning from the Germans, that there was a point where Black Germans were like, wait a second, enough patting yourselves on the back. There’s this other important moment that is also connected to the Holocaust that you all are not talking about. So that’s how I see all of these different moments being connected and tied up in German memory culture.
Eric Langenbacher
We are rapidly running out of time, but I did want to talk a little bit more about where you see German memory culture or German culture more generally headed in the future. I personally think that maybe things are starting to change. I know that there, as you mentioned, Bismarck monuments have been controversial in several communities, I think Hamburg in particular. There were also several communities where streets were named after generals or soldiers who had committed crimes during the period of German colonialism, and there’s an effort to change those names. Do you think things are starting to change? Do you think that these other memories, and I mean the memory of German colonial crime is just one of many others—we could talk about the memory of East Germany, there’s a lot of memory, right? Do you think that that things are changing, or where do you see things headed?
Priscilla Layne
If I’m optimistic, I do think things are changing. I think part of it is as Black Germans have more space in the public conversation in terms of their theater; I talked about several of these performances in my new book. Simone Dede Ayivi is a Black German performance artist or theater maker who addresses the colonial past a lot in her work. Through novels like Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Adas Raum that got a lot of positive critical response.
This kind of work, it’s a combination of activism, work in the museums—Natasha Kelly worked with the Dresden’s Hygiene Museum to make their exhibit on race more critical, more comprehensive. I see this happening on many different fronts, street names being changed, etc. And I hope that this continues. I have to say, as an American, I’m also wary of how fast change happens and how it happens. Because I know that, as I observed the blowback to DEI, sometimes there are articles about name changes happening in California, for example. When the change happens, when for the mainstream, it feels too fast, there can be a lot of blowback. As much as I feel like the change is already too late, part of me wonders if this organic, grassroots, slow change from place to place will help protect those changes so that we don’t have this massive, you know, someone doesn’t decide tomorrow, “you know what all of this change is bad, and let’s go back to before.” Because unfortunately that’s a very real possibility. That would be my main concern.
Eric Langenbacher
That brings our time to an end, but thank you so much for such an insightful podcast today, and I look forward to seeing you at conferences in the future.
Priscilla Layne
Thank you. Thanks for the wonderful questions.
Jeff Rathke
And I want to add my thanks as well and for our listeners who might have had their interest sparked by this discussion, both in our podcast and in other work that we have published here at AGI, you’ll find a number of threads to pick up on, including the question of restitution of colonial artworks that were seized during the German colonial period in Africa, we have a conversation with State Secretary from the Foreign Office Katja Keul. We’ve also had a conversation with Uwe Becker, who is the commissioner for the fight against anti-Semitism in the state of Hesse. As well as a webinar, you can find the video of our conversation with Armand Zorn, who is a member of the Bundestag from the Social Democratic Party. And—I don’t know if he is the only one—a politician with roots in Africa, originally from Cameroon, who is now an elected member of the Bundestag. So a number of the things that we’ve heard today you can find further expansion in our work and we encourage you to visit our website and look for those and other things including some of our more extensive contributions on memory culture.
Thanks to you, Priscilla Layne, for spending time with us. Thanks, Eric, for leading this conversation, and we look forward to having all of our listeners with us again on the next episode of the Zeitgeist.
