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The Holocaust in the 21st Century - Coggle Diagram
The Holocaust in the 21st Century
Themes:
How is the Holocaust mobilized in 21st century political, moral, and aesthetic debates?
What are the stakes of uniqueness vs comparison, and how do these shape policies, protest, and culture today?
Case Studies:
Catechism debate / Historikerstreit 2.0
Holocaust memory and the Gaza War
The populist Right and Holocaust memory
New representations: The Zone of Interest
Catechism debate / Historikerstreit 2.0
Dirk Moses, The German Catechism (2021)
The Holocaust is unique because it was the ultimate destruction of Jews for the sake of extermination
It was thus a civilizational rupture and the moral foundation of the nation
German has a special responsibility to Jews in Germany, and a special loyalty to Israel: Israel's security is part of Germany's reason of state.
Anti-semitism is a distinct prejudice - and was a distinctly German one. It shouldn't be confused with racism.
Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism
Catechism established itself around 2000, after and as a result of:
The rise of Holocaust 'uniqueness' in the 1980s
Historikerstreit
Goldhagen's book impact
The Wehrmacht exhibition
Multiculturalism
Holocaust Memorial in Berlin
Replaced 'old' dominant narrative about the Nazis as an accident in German history
Now it is the foundation of the legitimacy of the Federal Republic and path to national redemption
Unquestioning support for Israel is State reason
2019 all-party Bundestag resolution condemning BDS
Mbembe controversy
Rothberg's Multidirectional Memory
Pushback:
Initiative GG 5.3 Weltoffenheit: statement about freedom of expression and a right to criticise Israeli policy
Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism v IHRA definition
Second-generation Germans
Young generations
Postcolonialism
The Holocaust and Colonialism
Overlap between racism and antisemitism in Enlightenment debates
Influence of racism on modern antisemitism
Multidirectionality and multiple obligations (Hereo)
The Holocaust as Colonialism
The Nazis killed Jews for reasons similar to those of other perpetrators of other genocides (permanent security)
Lebensraum was the colonial project
Holocaust Memory and the Gaza War
Holocaust's place in Germany's 'reason of state' tested to the limit during the war in Gaza.
'There is only one place for Germany. That is the side of Israel. That's what we mean when we say 'Israel's security is Germany's reason of state'' (Olaf Scholz, Bundestag, 2023)
Where do you stand if Israel violates international law in pursuit of its security interests: do you follow the reason of state or international law?
Holocaust memory and the populist right
All this in a context, German, where Afd leaders have mocked remembrance culture as 'guilt cult', minimised Nazi crimes and courted scandal
Maximilian Krah, AfD candidate for 20244 European elections: 'One million soldiers wore the SS uniform. Can you really say that because someone was an officer in the Waffen-SS, they were a criminal?'
2018: AfD co-leader Alexander Gauland defined the Nazi era as a 'speck of bird poop' in a thousand years of successful German history
2017: Björn Höcke, AfD's state leader in Thuringia: 'Germans are the only people in the world who plant a monument of shame in the heart of the capital.'
AfD returned 20.85 percent of votes of the 2025 Bundestag elections, main party in the former East.
New Representations: The Zone of Interest
The morality of (non) representation
The film refuses to show the camp
Viewers hear atrocities that are left off-screen
Sounds as narrative engine
Two films: the one you see and the one you hear
The film's meaning and ethical message arrives primarily through listening
Domestic idyll and insdustial murder
Höss family tidy garden, bourgeois dreams and ambitions show the banality and normalisation of genocide
The banality of evil for contemporary audiences
Reception as battleground for conflict
Multidirectional memory
To come full circle, when the film won the Oscar for best international film, Jonathan Glazer said in the acceptance speech: 'Our film shows where dehumanisation leads at its worst. It's shaped all of our past and present. Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack in Gaza, all the victims of dehumanisation, how do we resist?'