Cultivating Memory in an Age of Forgetting

How can “historical reckoning” be conducted elsewhere, otherwise, and perhaps better? This collection of essays comparatively internationalizes the debate about the successes and failures of German “memory culture” and the challenge of commemorating state-sanctioned atrocity. Taking their cues from Susan Neiman’s Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (2019) and Left is not Woke (2023), US and German historians, literary, cultural, and media scholars, philosophers, political scientists as well as journalists join the debate. Neiman herself, in an interview and a long essay, engages her critics and extends the arguments of both books.Beyond Germany moves past inner-German debates to ask how, for example, the Holocaust can be remembered in today’s more multi-ethnic Germany; how lessons learned might apply to dispossessed Cherokee or to the longstanding practice of racial apartheid in the US; and what we are to make of competing memory narratives – including colonial nostalgia – in Namibia, or of war-time France or post-Wende Croatia? What about the pre-war German Wehrmacht as well as post-war expellees from the East? At a time when memory culture is under fire in both Germany and the US, this volume expands our understanding of the phenomenon and advocates for its good use.