Beyond Erinnerungsmania and white blindness
A radical entanglement approach to Germany’s Erinnerungskultur
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12905656 |
|---|---|
| Authors | J Toscano (0000-0001-8317-8311, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Publication date | 2025-12-31 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Memory Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1750-6980 • E-ISSN: 1750-6999 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/17506980251397849 |
| OpenAlex | W7117644848 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 29 |
Germany’s Erinnerungskultur —long praised as a model for confronting historical violence—has reached a critical impasse in the face of Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza (2023–2025). While originally developed to reckon with the crimes of the Holocaust, this memorial framework now reveals deep historiographic, epistemic, and ethical limitations. This article presents Erinnerungskultur as a form of state-directed memoro-politics , exposing its reliance on selective narratives and its complicity in legitimizing current forms of oppression. In response, the article proposes a radical entanglement approach to memory culture: one that challenges hegemonic structures and explores instead subjugated bodies of experiences and memories, bringing to the fore previously excluded or disqualified mnemonic perspectives. Rather than isolating historical traumas, this approach highlights their structural continuities and points of convergence—whether between the Holocaust and the Nakba, or among other entangled histories of violence, displacement, and resistance. In doing so, it seeks to contribute to reshape German Erinnerungskultur in particular, and memory culture in general, as a space for critical self-understanding, transhistorical solidarity, and empathetic political engagement
Complicity · Exceptionalism · Hegemony · Narrative · Politics · Quantum entanglement · Representation (politics · The Holocaust · White (mutation · German History and Society · Memory, History, Trauma, Identity · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration
The Implicated Subject
Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit
History and Memory after Auschwitz
The German Predicament
Der Kampf um die europäische Erinnerung
The Holocaust and the Nakba
Trauma and the Memory of Politics
German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past
On Collective Memory
Rewriting the Soul
Das kulturelle Gedächtnis
Toward a Foucaultian Epistemology of Resistance
Memory as a means of governmentality
Resistant pasts versus mnemonic hegemony
What Do We Talk About When We Talk about Antisemitism in Germany
Multidirectional Memory
Between Memory and History
Telling about Germany
The Two Gaze Directly into One Another's Face
Neither Settler nor Native
Institutionalized anti-anti-Semitism in Germany and its aporias
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |