The Holocaust in Public Memory Culture

Recorded march 22, 202. 'The 'German Catechism' Revisited: The Holocaust in Public Memory Culture' a talk by Professor A. Dirk Moses (Chapel Hill, USA) as part of the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies Research Seminar Series in association with Trinity Long Room Hub. Whether an orthodoxy about historical remembrance exists in Germany is hotly contested, not least by members of the intelligentsia and the political class who enforce it. In a short article in April 2021, I called this orthodoxy a “catechism” watched over by “priests” who conduct de facto heresy trials against those who violate any of its five articles of faith. While this provocative framing succeeded in (re)stirring debate about Holocaust memory, it failed to prevent excommunications of artists and journalists from polite society or the cowing of academics. This paper looks back over 12 months of fraught discussion about German Erinnerungskultur to analyse the creeping illiberalism in modern Germany. A. Dirk Moses is Frank Porter Graham Distinguished Professor of Global Human Rights History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His first book, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past (2007) reconstructed postwar West German debates about its republican democracy and coming to terms with the legacy of National Sociaism. His second book, The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression (2021), is a genealogy of the genocide concept. He is senior editor of the Journal of Genocide Research and is working on a book called Genocide and the Terror of History. Learn more at: https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/