Abstract

Historical references to the Holocaust are ubiquitous in Germany’s contemporary political and public discourse while the country’s ever-changing postmigrant society newly arriving migrants should be educated in Holocaust history became audible and eventually culminated in a revised curriculum for the integration courses. Based on the assumption that Holocaust memory and education can convey core values of German society, this new curriculum aims at historical literacy for the purpose of igniting amongst the newcomers a sense of national identification and responsibility for their new society. Simultaneously, so this article shows, the curriculum is designed to prevent (historical) comparison by declaring it contradictory to, on the one hand, respect this historical responsibility while, on the other hand, bringing issues of contemporary injustices into the conversation on the Holocaust. We will argue that such memory politics risk to exclude people from the national-culture by neglecting responses to Holocaust history that might look different to the ones expected by mainstream society. By drawing from ongoing ethnographic research into different memory-educational programs for refugees in Germany. This way, the article will provide new insights into a very specific discursive constellation in which the still emerging nexus between a normative national memory and Germany’s politics of integration is being constructed as well as contested.