What Is Autocritical Memory?

Memory has become one of the most popular subjects of historical and social enquiry over the last few decades, partly due to scholars’ realisation of the impacts of its politicisation. The coining of the term ‘collective memory’ dates to 1925, to the work of the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs. A student of Durkheim, Halbwachs argued that societies shaped the way individuals understood the world and therefore also defined what they understood and remembered.Footnote ⁵ This tension has since existed between individual memory, which remains a physio-psychological process in the individual human brain, and the understanding of collective memory, where the word itself psychologises society and assumes society can operate as a coherent ‘body’. This was particularly apparent in theories that tried to assert how societies ‘decide’ what is worth ‘remembering’ and what not. The philosopher Paul Ricoeur, for example, compared social processes of selection to the way individuals rely on the natural qualities of forgetfulness: as people cannot possibly retain all memories, forgetfulness protects the human mind, clearing whatever is considered either unimportant or traumatising.Footnote ⁶ This reflection built on the Freudian concept of Deckerinnerung, or ‘screen memory’, where a child’s banal everyday memories substitute painful recollections in the person’s consciousness.Footnote ⁷

The focus on collective memory as a psychologising process ignores the fact that societies cannot ‘remember’ like the brain. Collective memory is a political process of transmission, omission and interpretation, where different public actors, whom Nancy Wood calls ‘vectors of memory’,Footnote ⁸ articulate narratives that explain why the past matters to contemporary societies. These actors mobilise history for different reasons that often have little to do with the actual past. They appeal to audiences’ emotions to make a case for why society should not only know about what happened in the past but also care about it.Footnote ⁹

While many early theoreticians of memory – like the unavoidable Pierre Nora and his Lieux de mémoire (places of memory) – assumed the politics of memory was about appealing to collective emotions of pride for the sake of an articulation of a national narrative, this focus changed with the rise of trauma theories in the 1990s and particularly the phenomenon Lea David called ‘moral remembrance’.Footnote ¹⁰ As an increasing number of political and scholarly commentators addressed the longevity and salience of past trauma in the aftermath of conflict, memory became imbued with a moral rationale. Most importantly, interventions became concerned with finding the ‘proper’ kind of memory that would serve as a vehicle for the articulation of justice for victims. One such theory was Michael Rothberg’s influential ‘multidirectional memory’ that concerned itself at first with the relation between the remembrance of the Holocaust and colonialism.Footnote ¹¹ Rothberg condemned the logic of ‘real estate’ according to which these two memories stood in competition to one another as there was not enough space to address both histories of oppression in the public sphere. To suggest an ‘alternative’ for ‘justice’, then, Rothberg assessed different examples of actors that engaged with the past for their ‘multidirectionality’. The latter term represented these actors’ readiness to create a ‘proper’ memory that remembered victims of the Holocaust and colonial history in unison and through inspiration rather than conflict. While the theory ticked all moral boxes, its focus on often marginal artistic production as examples of ‘proper’ memory ignored the actual political landscape in which people mobilised the past for various – and not always noble – priorities. The inspiration between different activists and memory vectors, that Rothberg claimed was a recipe for justice, was often conflictual and violent. More importantly, these exchanges resulted in forms of remembrance that did not suit any model of justice, or ‘good’ remembrance, yet cannot be de-prioritised by memory scholarship.

Instead of seeking any ‘proper’ way to remember, this Element is interested in the way memory has become a part of the political discourse for better and for worse. Its main focus is the political rationale of autocritical memory, or the imperative to remember – and reckon with – ‘one’s own’ crimes. In other words, autocritical memory is the establishment of a political process that calls on a polity to integrate its own ‘dark past’ into its national narrative. As any kind of memory, it involves various levels of narrative formation. Firstly, it relies on a public debate in the form of intellectuals, activists or other political actors, who articulate why it is important for the ‘nation’ to remember its dark past. Simultaneously, it concerns the ensemble of mechanisms that underpin and perpetuate collective narratives: official commemorations and government pronouncements, continuous public debate, artistic production, education programmes and others.

The specificity of autocritical memory in comparison to other theorisations of remembrance of violence lies in the focus on perpetrators rather than victims. The novelty in the emergence of West German memory culture after the Second World War was not only the desire to ‘heal’ German society and democratise it through remembering the horrors of the war and the Holocaust but also mainly the articulation of a rationale of ‘coming to terms’ with one’s own crimes. This rationale required two elements. The first was a large-scale acceptance of a shared legacy of and national continuity between perpetrators and the new Federal German Republic, rather than continued search of other perpetrators in the form of foreign actors, minority communities or rival political groups. The second was the future-oriented desire to ‘move on’ and reinvent the identity of former perpetrators. While proponents of autocritical memory shared much of the psychologising and moral approaches that have been described by theorists of multidirectionality or what Lea David calls ‘moral remembrance’, not least the desire to ‘heal’ societies, their main preoccupation was not with universality or solidarity with victims. This difference is not only semantic but also explains the social power of early autocritical memory narratives as well as their intellectual horizons. In the same vein, the emergence of autocritical memory as a phenomenon required both widespread intellectual engagement with the necessity of self-introspection and political will to adopt these. In so doing, political actors have inevitably flattened and altered the intellectual meaning assigned to autocriticism.

By addressing the particularity of autocritical memory, this Element explores the intellectual and political trajectories of the concept as well as its transformations. While the memory of glorious victors and of noble victims had always been a part of political processes everywhere, the kind of remembrance that shaped the moral narratives that underpin the current understanding of memory was new. This imperative to ‘deal’ with one’s own crimes began in West Germany after the Second World War. The long process of articulating what ‘guilt’ and ‘responsibility’ meant for a West German population that was eager to move on and reintegrate in a new European project coalesced into a political rationale and a model that others then perceived as a success story. The global circulation of this model contributed greatly to the idea of memory as a tool to ‘heal’ societies rather than just a mechanism that forged identities and belonging. In fact, this model travelled through new international projects of democratisation that perceived German ‘success’ as a project of reconciliation rather than as a mechanism of internal transformation. In so doing, actors who mobilised remembrance elsewhere claimed to focus on victims and their stories. And yet, remembrance of other people’s suffering has never been enough for engagement with moral questions in the societies of perpetrators.Footnote ¹²

The historical engagement with autocritical memory is thus necessary to complement recent interventions that have questioned the normative acceptance of memory as a tool for ‘healing’ societies, or what Lea David calls ‘moral remembrance’.Footnote ¹³ David in particular questions the inclusion of a victim-centred approach into the toolkit of human rights discourses. Gensburger and Lefranc, simultaneously, argue for rethinking of progressive memory politics beyond ‘simple reminding of past’, as they provide evidence that learning about crimes did not result in popular identification with victims or with greater acceptance of democratic values.Footnote ¹⁴ While this Element shares these critiques’ main observations and arguments, its main question is how contemporary memory politics have developed from the starting point of autocritical memory, embraced some of its characteristics and changed others.

The German ‘model’ inspired new actors to embrace ‘memory’ as a recipe for healing in vastly different contexts, but also as a new political rationale to challenge governments and demand ‘dealing with the past’ in order to address (and sometimes fix) long-standing issues in contemporary societies, from nationalism to postcolonial racism. In so doing, these actors averted their focus away from understanding perpetrators to centring victim narratives. Yet the questions autocritical memory raises are different than those raised by the moral identification with the victims. Indeed, mobilising the past in Germany after the Second World War or Serbia after the Yugoslav Wars requires facing responsibility for crimes, but also the continuities of social phenomena that enabled these crimes in the first place, whether racism or nationalism. For other actors who then wish to mobilise the past to make demands of descendants of perpetrators to face the crimes of their forebears, it becomes crucial to understand the mechanism of autocritical memory just as much, if not more than that of victim-centred one. Trying to refocus on the meaning of autorictical memory, then, is an attempt to move beyond justified critique of the failings of contemporary memory culture, and instead take stock of its emergence. Returning to the specificities of autocritical memory is an exercise in reassessing what can be salvaged from existing trajectories of memory politics as contemporary societies are facing challenges that require rearticulation of popular narratives and reinvention of memory cultures.

Between National and Global: A European History in Global Perspective

Following autocritical memory entails the tracing of the emergence of discourses about responsibility and guilt, as intellectuals, politicians, artists and other public actors tried to make sense of the role of the past for the constitution of contemporary identities. As national state actors appropriated and instrumentalised these discourses, the political rationale of autocritical memory travelled between states and political contexts. However, autocriticism was never the only memory rationale available to actors, who could still choose to interpret history through other approaches: from silence or uninterest in a dark past (which some would then call ‘forgetting’) to victimhood or straightforward glorification.Footnote ¹⁵ This Element thus focuses on instances in which actors translated autocritical memory to fit their own political priorities in the present, whether to create more inclusive political identities through Holocaust remembrance or to challenge the state racism through focus on the need to remember colonial history.

Autocritical memory is a ‘soft’ concept. Nobody has ever claimed to be engaging in autocritical remembrance. Many, however, have used similar sets of arguments to ‘deal with the past’ through critical self-reflection and often returned to the same success story of the German model, where Germans supposedly had succeeded in ‘coming to terms’ with their Nazi past. The articulation of what ‘dealing with the past’ meant in any given place did not occur on a single level of society. While intellectuals formulated narratives about the meaning of history and memory, activists borrowed from academic and intellectual works in their demands for social change, and high-political actors sought to translate these into tangible policy. The interaction between these different actors defined the political uses of the past in any given context. Similarly, actors across national borders addressed similar questions through borrowing from other ‘memory actors’.

The concept of autocritical memory thus travelled internationally, but was often articulated on the national level to address national identities and transformations. As memory was an integral part in sustaining the Andersonian ‘imagined community’ through media attention to national characteristics, autocritical memory became a vehicle for the articulation of new national identities.Footnote ¹⁶ Writing a history of autocritical memory, even a global one, needs to focus on national cases and on national actors who appropriated this concept differently. In the German inception of autocritical memory, for example, intellectuals and politicians addressed ‘dealing with the past’ as a way to create a new West German identity based on national acceptance of responsibility and the healing power of facing one’s own crimes. Even later, critics of Germany’s memory culture would target the autocritical model for its lack of inclusiveness and supposed role in hindering the crystallisation of a more globalised German identity (which was, nonetheless, a German identity).

Simultaneously, the concept of autocritical memory has mainly travelled in societies of the Global North, as discourse on national responsibility and coming to terms with crimes became ever more identified with crimes of colonialism and enslavement, in which not only national identities but also broader fields such as ‘Europe’ or ‘the West’ are negotiated. For this reason, this Element focuses on the history of autocritical memory on the European continent. For issues of time, scope and coherence, it focuses on national case studies from Europe, whether Germany, France, Serbia, Belgium or the UK, as different actors reappropriated the same concept to address different crimes, whether the Holocaust, the Genocide against Bosniaks or colonial crimes.

The focus on Europe, however, does not assume that Europe was the intellectual centre of such conversations. While responsibility to crimes of the Second World War and colonialism was indeed a European question, the motivation to address issues of responsibility did not always emerge from Europe. Similarly, even as the development of ideas of autocritical memory may have begun in Germany, these quickly developed globally. Ideas of ‘transnational justice’ that produced trials in the aftermath of the Yugoslav Wars were articulated internationally based on examples not only of Germany but also Argentina and South Africa. Their (non)implementation was also result of outside pressure. Similarly, when national activists in the UK, Germany or Belgium addressed the memory of colonialism in their own countries, they did so through contact with American intellectual literature and activists from the Global South. This Element demonstrates that when European actors engaged in autocritical remembrance, they did so through borrowing and inspiration from other parts of the world and demonstrated that Europe was just one region in a globalised intellectual environment. Focusing on Europe highlights the global dimensions of memory politics with Europe as an interconnected global region. Even as memory debates happened at national level, the ‘Andersonian’ rationale of defining the nation through shared references borrowed from global debates and interrogations of supranational identities. Actors questioned not only ‘who we are as a people’ but also ‘what does being a global citizen mean’. In other words, what happened in Europe was about European specificities just as much as it related to a global conversation.

The Element’s structure represents three phases in the development of autocritical memory. Section 1 examines the gestation of the concept in two national European contexts in the aftermath of the Second World War. Both in West Germany and in France, political actors developed a national culture of ‘coming to terms’ with crimes that were now considered as an ‘ultimate evil’. In both cases, the gestation of the autocritical model was not in any way given in the direct aftermath of the war, but developed through political struggles. In Germany in particular, however, this model was in no way ‘universal’, but focused heavily on the rearticulation of German identities after the war. As the memory of the Holocaust quickly became a subject of international interest in the 1990s, however, the so-called German model developed into an example of ‘successful dealing with the past’.

This is where Section 2 continues and examines the use of memory within processes of democratisation in Central and Eastern Europe in the 1990s and 2000s following the third wave of democratisation. It begins with the inclusion of memory into the toolkit of ‘transitional justice’, as international political theorists and decision makers transposed the German ‘success’ onto a supposedly universal model to successfully deal with transitions into democracy. With the genocidal violence of the 1990s in Rwanda and former Yugoslavia, these same actors then rearticulated the model of transition to adapt it to ‘coming to terms’ with state crimes through a series of justice mechanisms. The two cases studies of Serbia and Poland thus represent two different Eastern European states that had very different experiences of addressing the past in the process of transition into democracy. In the case of Serbia, this was an immediate post-conflict transition where internal dealing with the memory of the Yugoslav Wars clashed with international demands for change. In the case of Poland, the Jedwabne Debate became a stress test of democratic norms through adoption of autocritical narratives. In both cases, the challenges of autocritical memory and its failure to take a permanent hold reflected the power of narratives of victimisation and the uneasy relationship between dealing with a difficult past and the articulation of future-oriented identities.

Section 3 returns to Western Europe and demonstrates how activists and politicians were able to harness the political rationale of autocritical memory to demand remembering other neglected pasts, and most notably countries’ colonial past. While French actors still focused on a French national narrative, however, actors elsewhere redefined memory as a tool for achieving racial justice. Borrowing from debates in the anglophone world and the Global South, they demanded remembrance no longer for the sake of shaping a national consciousness but for the name of transnational fights against racism. The cases of North-Western European postcolonial activists reflect the challenges of reshaping autocritical narratives to include voices of victims.

1.1 Vergangenheitsbewältigung: Out of the Ashes of the War – Immediate Reckoning with the Past in West Germany

Much has been written about the ‘German model’ of dealing with the past,Footnote ¹⁷ sometimes as a success story, and at times as a disappointment. Beyond German ‘successes’ and ‘failures’ of memory to fight antisemitism and racism, (West) Germany was the laboratory for the articulation of autocritical memory after the defeat in the Second World War. This section will examine the gestation of West German memory culture from debates about guilt and introspection in the late 1940s and 1950s and up to the political articulation of the concept of ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ (best translated as ‘dealing with the past’) as one of the pillars of (West) German contemporary identity.Footnote ¹⁸

While the ‘German model’ would later turn into a byword for successful dealing with the past, Germany’s immediate post-war circumstance did not seem propitious for critical engagement with the scale of German crimes. Judging by Hannah Arendt’s report from the ruins of Berlin in 1950, there was little chance of Germany rising from the ashes of destruction and self-pity, neither as a revived economic powerhouse nor through dealing with the country’s past. The exiled Jewish political philosopher returned to the country of her birth from the US and discovered a landscape that was not only in physical ruins but also people who did not offer any sympathy to Jewish suffering beyond the ‘deluge of stories about how Germans have suffered’.Footnote ¹⁹ Arendt’s impressions contradict the narrative of 1945 as a ‘Stunde Null’, or ‘hour zero’, which incited a reinvention of Germany and Germanness,Footnote ²⁰ and suggest there was little popular readiness to assume any responsibility for Nazi crimes. The intellectual and political landscapes of the period also offered some support for Arendt’s observations. Intellectuals and politicians created a narrative of ‘poor Germany’, as they complained that Germans were now turning into ‘double victims’ of National Socialist takeover and Allied persecution alike.Footnote ²¹ Nonetheless, probably the most defining feature of popular engagement with the immediate past was the desire to ignore it and focus on the immediate tasks of reconstruction. The Allies’ politics of reconstruction contributed here to the popular engagement – or lack thereof – with the immediate crimes of the Second World War and the Holocaust.

One aspect of reconstruction involved the creation of German polities out of the four Allies’ zones of occupation. While the British, French and US zones would merge into the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG, or West Germany), the Soviet occupation zone became the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany). The very logic of the zones of occupation was born out of the desire to never again allow Germany to rise again and commit comparable crimes. For this goal, any new German polity would have to be ‘de-Nazified’ in the process of regaining independence. As Arendt commented in that same report from 1950, however, there was no good way to devise an effective system to uproot Nazism from German society.

To deal with the elite of the Nazi party and administration, the Allies turned to the courts. They instituted the Military International Tribunal that prosecuted twenty-one surviving important Nazi leaders and functionaries. These so-called Nuremberg Trials relied on a redrafted charter of legislation to include a new definition of Crimes against Humanity to face the gravity of the crimes of the Holocaust.Footnote ²² These trials were devised to demonstrate the responsibility of the German leadership for the war and particularly the crime of genocide. The latter was also a new definition, articulated by the legal scholar Rafael Lemkin following the seemingly unprecedented scale of the Holocaust’s atrocities. Yet the very scope of the crime of genocide, which required mass participation on all levels beyond the leadership, made trials of the leadership insufficient for any social ‘denazification’. The latter would have required dealing not only with individuals who perpetrated crimes but also with those who benefitted from them silently and supported the ideology that enabled them.

Denazification therefore needed to address the moral responsibility of German population to mass atrocities. In the immediate aftermath of liberation, Allied occupying forces that liberated concentration camps on German soil tried to confront ordinary people with the scale of these crimes, whether through forcing local population to bury bodies left in the camps or through erecting roadside signs with images of emaciated victims and the inscription ‘These shameful atrocities: your guilt!’.Footnote ²³ As Arendt noted, however, this ‘finger pointing’ mainly led to popular resentment at the occupiers’ desire for ‘revenge’ rather than any introspection about collective guilt, or indeed moral indignation at the crimes these signs exposed.

Similarly, the Allies’ plans for systemic denazification faced a contradiction from their very inception. On the one hand, occupation administrations needed to ascertain individuals’ level of involvement with the National Socialist regime and ideology. On the other hand, however, they were confronted with the challenge of rebuilding functioning systems of governance and economy. The skilled workforce that was needed for these activities had operated mostly under the twelve years of Nazi dictatorship, where a requirement for work had been membership in the National Socialist Workers’ Party (NSDAP).Footnote ²⁴ As a result, the system of mass interviews designed to screen the population and categorise them based on their level of ideological complicity did not amount to confronting ordinary Germans with the meaning of crimes committed by the many degrees of their participation. Most people approached denazification committees as hurdles imposed by occupiers to be overcome so that they could move on with their lives. Arendt notes how people treated the certificate required for integration into the workforce as a ’Persilschein’, or laundry certificate, that washed its holder of the stain of Nazi association and allowed them to bury the immediate past behind them.Footnote ²⁵ The systems devised by the occupying forces faced the barriers of local intransigence and resentment at their imposition from the outside. If Germany later emerged as a laboratory for the politics of autocritical memory, the immediate transition into the post-war era did not provide many signs for this development. These early days presented a conflict that would later be described by theorists of transitional justice as a paucity of ‘domestic norm adopters’, or Germans who wanted to deal with the Nazi past for their own sake rather than just to appease Allies.Footnote ²⁶ To address questions of guilt and responsibility, German actors needed to establish a political rationale that tied these to ways of reinventing German society after the total defeat in the World War.

One exception to German popular and intellectual unwillingness to address immediate past was Hannah Arendt’s friend and fellow philosopher Karl Jaspers. Unlike many German intellectuals – most notably Arendt’s former lover Martin Heidegger – who aligned with and even supported the Nazi regime or who – like Arendt herself – left Germany, Jaspers spent the dictatorship years in Heidelberg, banned from publishing and awaiting deportation with his Jewish wife. After the ‘liberation’Footnote ²⁷ of Germany, Jaspers regained his university position and addressed students in a bombed lecture hall in Heidelberg for a lecture that would quickly be published as The Question of German Guilt.Footnote ²⁸ Addressing the necessity to come to terms with Germany’s place after its ‘total’ defeat, Jaspers suggested that a reckoning with guilt was not necessary because of the winners’ demands, but to ‘learn to talk with one another’, to get ‘spiritual bearings’ and find ‘common ground’ in a society that had emerged out of a twelve-year dictatorship that had poisoned people’s bearing of reality and interpersonal relations.Footnote ²⁹ Jaspers then followed with definitions of guilt according to different types and its relevance to different sense of German individuals and collective – from the individual ‘Criminal Guilt’ to a ‘Political Guilt’ that affects political subjects through responsibility (Haftung), ‘Moral Guilt’ and lastly a ‘Metaphysical Guilt’ that affects all for simply having been present in a place where unspeakable crimes happened. Jaspers devised his ‘methodological’ analysis of guilt to address all levels of German society and counter any individual ‘excuses’ to avoid engagement with the question of guilt. While introducing categories of guilt that affected all, the philosopher insisted that guilt could not be collective in nature. He posited that every person needed to engage with guilt individually for the sake of future ‘purification’ that would enable Germans to overcome Nazi rule.Footnote ³⁰

Jaspers did not write a political manual for ‘coming to terms’ with the immediate past, but delivered a philosophical manifesto that aimed at a future ‘healing’ of society. While he began his reflection on guilt from the desire to ‘cleanse’ German society, he did not do it from an abstract-moral perspective, nor did he perceive German society as a uniform collective of perpetrators. He articulated his categories of guilt to demonstrate that Germans needed to face their defeat – and their responsibility for it – if they wanted to rebuild a polity from the victory of the Allies. Jaspers’ approach was an ‘autocritical’ one on the level of the individual (when speaking of guilt) and on the level of the political collective (when speaking of ‘accountability’ or ‘responsibility’).

In the same vein, the most important character of Jaspers’ call for introspection was his focus on perpetrators rather than victims. For all later talk about German memory culture as a model for ‘reconciliation’, it is important to remember it emerged as an inter-German (and particularly West German) conversation that did not involve Jews, who often were absent from inter-German conversations. Post-war West Germany housed only a few surviving Jews, and these rarely sought to remain in the ‘land of the perpetrators’, let alone think of ‘reconciliation’.Footnote ³¹ The earliest engagement with the question of ‘Wiedergutmachung’, or reparations to Jewish victims, did not occur as an inter-German debate, but on the state level. The Adenauer government signed the Luxemburg Agreement with David Ben Gurion’s Israeli government and the Jewish Claims Conference with US support in 1952 despite popular resistance on the street and in the Bundestag.Footnote ³² For Jaspers, finding a way to move on then became a ‘German’ question that needed to be embraced by Germans themselves.

For all of Jaspers’ engagement with the best way to face German guilt, he did not speak of memory. Jaspers’ question of guilt addressed the connection between people’s actions and the reshaping of a German polity in a period in which these actions were not yet confined to a time that was clearly past. As the Federal Republic regained its independence in the 1950s, perpetrators with different levels of involvement were inevitably integrated into society and state mechanisms. Here, the government and the public often avoided any large-scale political engagement with the legacies of crimes in the name of ‘moving on’ and ensuring peace though prosperity and the West German ‘economic miracle’.Footnote ³³ The past was therefore something that needed to be overcome, rather than revisited. Two decades later, when the so-called 1968 generation initiated ever louder debates about their parents’ crimes, they did so also for the sake of ‘moving on’, just with a different interpretation of what it meant.

1.2 The Road to 1968 and the Institutionalisation of Memory

While the 1950s did not showcase any large-scale memory debates in the Federal Republic, towards the end of the decade different intellectuals began claiming German society needed to face its ‘past’ in order to move on. One of the most influential of these interventions, which became a key moment in the gestation of the term ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’, was Theodor Adorno’s publication of his lecture Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit (often translated as ‘The Meaning of Working through the Past’) in 1959. Adorno addressed the ‘processing’ of the past in a period of political calm. This occurred just after the big controversies about the reinsertion of people ‘burdened’ with NS affiliations, but before the Eichmann Trial and other events brought back the NS past to the fore.Footnote ³⁴ The Economic Miracle was in full swing, and rising prosperity only strengthened the general tendency to look away from the past.

Adorno, a voice of German moral introspection whose most well-known quote was about the barbarism of ‘writing poetry after Auschwitz’,Footnote ³⁵ focused his intervention on the fragility of the newly established West German democracy. Fresh and lacking in traditional foundation, the philosopher claimed, democracy was in danger without a concerted effort to self-critically work through the past. Adorno did not yet foresee the politicisation of memory. For him, working through the past was the work of educators and psychologists, who needed to root out the moral foundations of Nazism in the psyche of the generation of perpetrators and their children, who would be exposed to these at home. Moreover, the philosopher contrasted the psychologised and individual ‘moral dealing with the past’ with a material, or ‘objective’ solution, which for him could only emerge through the demise of capitalism and the National Socialist material base. It is therefore noteworthy that autocritical introspection for Adorno was detached from what he considered as the ‘political’. His moral stance became increasingly influential in the years leading to the 1968 student protests, in which ideas about working through the past crystallised into a new generational identity.

Adorno’s intervention attracted growing visibility through the march of current events. These included the attack on Cologne’s newly opened synagogue on Christmas Eve of 1959 by members of the Nazi grouping Deutsche Reichspartei (German Reich Party, DRP). The attack prompted the then Chancellor Konrad Adenauer to react directly to the event a few days later in his speech at the commemoration of the liberation of the concentration camp Bergen Belsen with a call to assure that National Socialist crimes could never be repeated.Footnote ³⁶ The televised trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961Footnote ³⁷ and then the Auschwitz Trials in Frankfurt between 1963 and 1965Footnote ³⁸ returned Nazi crimes and perpetrators to the headlines. Much has been written about how the staging of the Eichmann Trial through the testimonies of survivors initiated what Annette Wieviorka named the ‘era of the witness’ with a specific focus on victims’ testimonies.Footnote ³⁹ Yet it also confronted the world – and not least German society – with what Hannah Arendt defined the ‘banality of evil’Footnote ⁴⁰: the very ordinary face of the technocratic perpetrator. What Adorno called on his fellow Germans to ‘process’, and the things that would occupy German memory over the next few decades, did not focus on the victims and their stories. Instead, it involved facing the ubiquity of legacies of ordinary perpetrators in Germany. Interest in the identities and ubiquity of perpetrators trickled down to popular culture as well. One example was Günther Grass’ first book Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum) from 1959, which portrayed German history as that of petty passivity and collaboration. Simultaneously, the 1960s also saw the publication of works like Rolf Hochhuth’s play Der Stellvertreter (The Deputy, 1963) on the Catholic Church’s relationship with National Socialism, or Peter Weiss’ play Die Ermittlung. Oratorium in elf Gesängen (The Investigation, 1965) about the Auschwitz Processes. These works reflected growing public attention to the broad German involvement in the Nazi machine and challenged narratives that portrayed the majority population as ‘following orders’, unaware of crimes committed in their name.

These strands of ‘facing the past’ crystallised into a coherent identity through the 1968 student movement. Just as in other European countries, whether France, Italy or even Denmark, the ‘1968 movement’ was not always a coherent movement, but emerged from growing student activism that reacted to issues as diverse as conservative government structures (in the case of West Germany the Grand Coalition that came to power in 1966 after the long Adenauer era), the Vietnam War, grievances with university hierarchies and a sense of generational change and resentment to the ‘old guard’. The latter, with such popular slogans like ‘trust no-one over 30’, produced a cohesive mythology even after the movements that encapsulated the 1968 moment had dissipated.Footnote ⁴¹ Disparate student mobilisations gave birth to a mythology of the ‘1968 generation’ that had ‘confronted their parents’ about their participation in Nazi crimes.Footnote ⁴²

Nonetheless, the coherence of the ‘1968 generation’ was a retrospective projection rather than reality on the ground. Different historians like Norbert Frei, Kurt Sontheimer and Hermann Lübbe all spent the better part of the 2000s discussing the actual engagement of the student movement with the idea of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, and often reached the conclusion that this had been often largely exaggerated.Footnote ⁴³ Much student engagement with the ‘past’ indeed amounted to mere discursive strategies. These included the use of the epithet ‘fascist’ to attack their adversaries – of any political colours – in the contemporary Federal Republic rather than remembering the past. One such example was the comparison of the 1968 Grand Coalition’s Emergency Act to a ‘second 1933’ or the constant comparison of the Conservative party the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) to National Socialist bodies.Footnote ⁴⁴

Nonetheless, these discursive strategies reflected two elements that were key in the later understanding of what German memory was. The first was considering the rejection of fascism as a new – and in this case generational – identity of the German left. The second was the acknowledgement of the actual continuities of National Socialist world views in West German society. Here, student engagement also addressed the presence of former Nazi members in German institutions, most visibly through debates about Kurt Georg Kiesinger, the Grand Coalition chancellor and the only ever former member of the National Socialist Workers’ Party to have been elected chancellor in West Germany. Much of the symbolism of the 1968 student movement’s addressing the past can be perceived through the slapping of Kiesinger by the journalist Beate Klarsfeld (who was not a member of the ‘68 student movement) at the CDU party conference in Berlin in 1967. Klarsfeld later described her action as a desire to show the world that ‘a part of German society […]rebels against the fact that a Nazi now stands at the helm of the Federal Government’.Footnote ⁴⁵ For Klarsfeld, just as for others of the ’68 generation, confronting the past made sense as a way to prove – often to other nations – that young Germans who had not experienced the war personally had indeed moved away from the crimes of their parents’ generation. This element was particularly important in the motivation to ‘move on’ in moral debates about coming to terms with the past, as a way to regain standing as equals in post-war Europe.

If ‘68ers addressed the past as a matter of identity, their actions did not amount to an institutional ‘memory’ of it. Many ‘68ers demonstrated a contradiction between open protest against their parents’ generation and a difficulty to articulate what confronting the past would mean to them. Here, many activists returned to Adorno’s focus on psychology as a way to address the past, often relying on a new popular text by the Freudian psychoanalysts Margarete and Alexander Mitscherlich, Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern (The Inability to Mourn, Reference Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich1967).Footnote ⁴⁶ For the Mitscherlichs, the only way to move on required confronting the memories of the past that had been transmitted from the parents’ generation. However, the psychologisation of the process did not facilitate calls for any political process that would enable this ‘dealing with the past’. A few years later, however, a spontaneous gesture by the chancellor Willy Brandt in Warsaw became the symbol of an institutional adoption of individual introspection of the past.

Brandt, a Social Democrat who had been foreign minister under the Grand Coalition (1966–9) and the then chancellor (1969–74), became a symbol of ‘new politics’ with a call for ‘daring more democracy’.Footnote ⁴⁷ This daring, for Brandt, included articulating politics through confrontation with the Nazi past, which stood in stark contrast with Adenauer’s policy of minimal engagement with the Nazi past to avoid challenges to West Germany’s fragile democracy.Footnote ⁴⁸ Brandt’s signature Ostpolitik, rapprochement with Eastern Europe, relied on his understanding of the need to fight mistrust of Germany fuelled by its politics of silence. In his 1968 book, he acknowledged: ‘I do not ever forget that it was Hitler’s “Greater Germany” above all that brought so much unspeakable suffering to Eastern Europe’.Footnote ⁴⁹ In December 1970, as a part of the thaw between Bonn and its eastern neighbours, Brandt visited Warsaw to sign a contract that initiated the ‘normalisation’ of relations between Poland and the Federal Republic. On a visit to the memorial of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, in front of many cameras present, Brandt suddenly went on his knees and lowered his head in silence. The spontaneous and emotional gesture, which was captured on cameras and then circulated around the world, soon became a symbol of German contrition and willingness to face the past. The kneeling’s sense of authentic emotion in front of a memorial coupled with Brandt’s status as chancellor created an image that applied the myth of ‘68ers’ ‘facing the past’ with the institution of the Federal Republic. The kneeling became a ‘memory site’, or a moment that fostered a new West German identity as a willingness to lower one’s head to acknowledge the weight of the past. For the creation of this memorial identity, the actual immediate reactions to the gesture mattered less. Brandt’s gesture was not met with unanimous approval back home at the time, nor did it impress all the Polish hosts, who would have preferred a show of emotion in front of a more national site rather than a Jewish one.Footnote ⁵⁰ What did matter was the symbol of a German chancellor adopting the emotional charge of debates that had hitherto taken place on different levels, but never gained the state’s stamp of approval.

The aftermath of Brandt’s kneeling provided the context for the model of autocritical memory, which cemented over the two subsequent decades. It was most visible in the speech of the West German President, Richard von Weizsäker, on 8 May Reference Von Weizsäker1985, which commemorated the fortieth anniversary of the ‘liberation’ of Germany from its own Nazi rule.Footnote ⁵¹ The underlying rationale for the concept coalesced out of debates about the best way to establish a democratic (West) Germany that ‘moved on’ from the burdens of Nazi association. The importance of ‘memory’ emerged in the case of generations of Germans who, to use Karl Jaspers’ definition, bore no ‘criminal guilt’ for having perpetrated crimes, but needed to come to terms with the ‘political guilt’, or the accountability associated with belonging to the political entity in whose name these crimes had been committed. Acknowledging the specificity of German crimes became a cornerstone of the articulation of a new West German identity that needed to articulate a new German democratic culture. The importance of the concept Vergangenheitsbewältigung to West German self-perception then became even more pronounced in the Historikerstreit, or historians’ dispute, in 1986–9. The dispute saw right-wing and left-wing intellectuals appear on television and in newspapers to debate the ‘singularity’ of both the crimes of the Holocaust and German history, and mostly how the past should impact German national identity.Footnote ⁵² It was here that the ‘68er philosopher Jürgen Habermas, while condemning right-wing historians’ ‘revisionist’ tendencies, lambasted the very idea of German pride after the crimes of the Second World War. New German patriotism, he suggested, should come from an identity anchored in European cooperation and a democratic German constitution.Footnote ⁵³ Habermas’ call for ‘constitutional patriotism’ echoed the idea that any kind of German identity needed to first and foremost be based on self-criticism facing remembrance of the very German character of Nazi crimes. The success of equating ‘dealing with the past’ with a new German national identity became all too visible thirty years later, as journalists and politicians began discussing jokingly Germany’s status as a ‘world champion in dealing with the past’ in the run-up to the European Football Championship in 2012.Footnote ⁵⁴ This sense of irony reflected the understanding that German identity in the 2000s had become closely entwined with the concept of remembering its own dark past, so much so that ‘dealing with the past’ had morphed into a new kind of national pride.

Simultaneously, as autocritical memory had become a component of national identity in Germany, it remained mostly a subject of inner-German conversations rather than a dialogue with descendants of victims. One of the motivations of addressing Germany’s dark past was often related to a German desire to ‘normalise’ the country’s image internationally, as German investment in massive programmes of exchanges with France, Poland and Israel suggest.Footnote ⁵⁵ Jewish or Polish actors, however, were mostly absent from debates in Germany, which remained focused on Karl Jaspers’ opening premise in The Question of Guilt: that Germans needed to relearn ‘how to speak with one another’.Footnote ⁵⁶ In this vein, the adoption of a ‘memory culture’ in Germany opened up conversations about the kind of democracy Germans wanted to create (and sustain). The guidelines of memory in Germany became ever more visible in the construction of museums and memorials, whether the Documentation Centre at the Nazi Party Rally Grounds in Nurnberg (2001) or the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin (2005). School curricula became ever more focused on the National Socialist past and the question of German responsibility – including to the State of Israel – in the present. In the third generation, beginning in the 1990s, a number of young Germans interrogated their family history and the transmission of stories about grandparents’ Nazi past, most notable through the successful book Opa war kein Nazi (Grandfather was not a Nazi, 2002).Footnote ⁵⁷ These remained conversations post-war Germans had with themselves in a country that was no longer home to its pre-war Jewish community.

The so-called German model relied on a set of contradictions. For outside observers, Germany’s culture of autocritical memory made sense in the context of the country’s transformation: after twelve years of Nazi rule and a war of annihilation, Germans unexpectedly refocused their energy on rebuilding what seemed to be a peaceful polity. The prosperity of the Federal Republic, which was dependent on the European project and international export, relied on an image of a repentant West German state where governments ‘wrote the checks’ for others. Many would later come to suggest that it was Germany’s memory culture that enabled reconstruction, prosperity and re-integration in Europe. However, it was the prosperity that paved the way for the emergence of a German memory culture in the second and third generations after the war. While the establishment of autocritical memory in Germany became a marker of successful addressing of responsibility in public and in the political sphere, the very inner-German character of these debates meant that it had never been a tool for fighting racism, achieving reconciliation or even fostering conversations with descendants of victims.

1.3 A Duty to Remember: Autocritical Memory in France

While the ‘German Model’ is often used as reference for successful ‘dealing with the past’, another autocritical model of remembering the Holocaust developed in France in parallel, and often through observation of developments across the River Rhein in Germany. Just as in Germany, the French model of the ‘Devoir de mémoire’ (Duty to remember) had become a political rationale for state actors. Simultaneously, it emerged from demands of victims and their descendants rather than as a pure Franco-French debate.

French and West German societies were not confronted with the exact same challenge when facing the memory of the Second World War. Germans needed to face Germany’s responsibility for the war; French society needed to face the legacies of occupation. The main fault line that divided society was the distinction between categories of ‘resistance’ and ‘collaboration’ with German occupiers and the collaborationist Vichy regime.Footnote ⁵⁸ In the immediate post-war period, purges of collaborators made way for amnesty laws that reintegrated collaborationists into society and the Gaullist government’s formulation of what the historian Henry Rousso called the ‘resistentialist myth’.Footnote ⁵⁹ To ‘move on’, rebuild and unite fractured society in the aftermath of the war, Gaullist governments crafted a narrative of a ‘resisting France’, which portrayed collaboration as inherently un-French.

As in Germany, however, the Gaullist compromise came under fire during the student and worker mobilisation of May 1968. Yet the specificities of the Second World War played a less prominent role in France than in Germany’s intergenerational strife. Crimes of the parents’ generation served as a way of framing conservative leaders or bosses, as in French student gatherings participants lambasted their adversaries as ‘collabos’ (collaborators) and ‘tortionnaires’ (torturers, alluding to the practice of torture in the Algerian War of Independence) interchangeably. Here, students marked a generational fault line in the same way as in Germany, but focused less on its historical specificity and far more on resentment to French conservative hierarchies. Historical references in the ’68 movement were even less coherent than in Germany, as ‘dealing with the past’ remained lower on students’ and workers’ priorities than protesting de Gaulle as a representative of conservative hierarchies. Despite the president’s authoritarian streak, de Gaulle was still the symbol of French external resistance and the man who negotiated the end of French presence in Algeria, and therefore not a coherent target for condemning Vichyite nostalgia.Footnote ⁶⁰ With all its lack of cohesion and failure to topple de Gaulle, ’68 nonetheless ushered cultural change in France, which enabled some public engagement with the Vichy past in the early 1970s. One trigger for this increased public attention was the publication of American historian Robert Paxton’s book Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order (Reference Paxton1972, translated into French in 1973), which claimed the collaboration was the fruit of French choice.Footnote ⁶¹ The so-called Paxtonian Revolution, which Henry Rousso later described as a phase of forced French introspection, followed the release of Marcel Ophuls’ film Le Chagrin et la pitié (The Sorrow and the Pity, 1972). The documentary, which consisted in interviews with ordinary people, demonstrated the extent of voluntary collaboration. Both works shattered the image of a French society that was supposedly united by the spirit of resistance, or at least pushed to collaboration by lack of choice and fear of the consequences of refusal. Another element of novelty in the debates in 1973 was the increasing focus on the persecution of Jews as one main aspect of collaboration, particularly one that transcended some of the grey zones between collaboration and resistance.

The fate of Jews in France had not been central to most debates about the war in the immediate post-war years. Annette Wieviorka posited that for the left, the story of Jewish deportees had been subsumed under the ‘greater’ overarching story of Communist and resistant deportees.Footnote ⁶² Simultaneously, the resistentialist myth did not leave much space to discuss the particularity of the German persecution of Jews – compared to other French citizens – or the responsibility of French individuals, organisations (such as the police) and the Vichy regime for the deportation of Jews. Some Jewish actors, like the group Amicale des anciens déportés Juifs de France (The Friends of Former French Jewish Deportees, AADFJ), demanded their stories be recognised by French politicians, while France’s main representative Jewish organisations created their own memory routines. The most notable of these was the annual commemoration of the Vél D’hiv Roundup (or the Winter Velodrome Roundup), when French police officers had rounded up around 13,000 Parisian Jews to be sent to death on 16 July 1942.Footnote ⁶³ Nonetheless, broader interest in Jewish victims first crystallised in the 1960s, after the witness testimonies of the Eichmann Trial in 1961 and later Jewish resentment towards what they perceived as a betrayal of the French state due to its reaction to the Six Day War between Israel and the Arab States in 1967.Footnote ⁶⁴ By the thirtieth commemoration of the Vél d’Hiv Roundup in 1972, the very specific targeting of Jews by French institutions during the war had become a special component of debates about collaboration.

The most important actors in the emergence of a public memory of the Holocaust in France were Jewish movements, and a growing number of memory associations, which became increasingly active during the 1970s. These activists embraced the voices of witnesses and addressed the need to remember the Holocaust, but with very specific goals in the present day. They linked the rise of Holocaust denial in the present with the impunity of Vichy criminals, who could not be brought to trial because of amnesty laws from the 1950s. Remembering the specific fate of Jewish victims, then, required a special focus on the French state’s responsibility in the persecution of its own Jewish citizens, whether by the Vichy state or institutions like the Paris police that operated under German occupation. Jewish activists thus demanded the French state to take their voice into account as French citizens.

One of the most visible Jewish militants for the memory of the Holocaust was the lawyer Serge Klarsfeld, who took the public stage together with his German wife Beate Klarsfeld, who was remembered in Germany for slapping the President Kiesinger. The couple published the list of Jewish deportees to Auschwitz in 1978 under the title Mémorial de la déportation des Juifs de France, fought for compensation for Jewish survivors through the association Fils et filles des déportés juifs de France (Sons and Daughters of French Jewish Deportees, founded in 1979) and were key actors in new attempts to bring Vichy officials to justice. In 1983, the Klarsfelds located the German war criminal Klaus Barbie in Bolivia and played a key part in his extradition and then trial in France in 1987, when he was found guilty of Crimes against humanity.Footnote ⁶⁵ These different actions reflected the ways Jewish actors interpreted memorial justice in the 1970s, which, for them, needed to be delivered by the state.

In the 1980s, the French dimension of the ShoahFootnote ⁶⁶ became increasingly visible in mainstream French cultural production with the publication of historical works, whether the French translation of Raul Hillberg’s work or Henry Rousso’s The Vichy Syndrome (1984) and feature films, such as Louis Malle’s autobiographical Au Revoir les Enfants (1987). Nonetheless, even with the rise of François Mitterrand’s left-wing governments, the state did not answer Jewish calls to acknowledge the republic’s responsibility for collaboration and deportation of French Jews. For President Mitterrand, as he memorably stated in a television interview in 1992 when asked about his position on a demand issued by the group Comité Vel d’Hiv 42, ‘one should not ask for accountability from the republic’, as the republic was not responsible for any actions of the Vichy government.Footnote ⁶⁷ In this period, however, Jewish actors began formulating demands for memorial accountability by the state through the vocabulary of ‘Devoir de mémoire’, or Duty to remember. At first, that ‘Duty to remember’ could just as well be interpreted as the state’s Duty to remember those who had given their lives for the state, as was the case in speeches of Ministers of Veterans in the 1980s.Footnote ⁶⁸ As of the early 1990s, however, Jewish organisations and politicians began using the formula to address the state’s obligation to remember its own victims, or in this case Jews who had been rounded up by French policemen and deported through the actions of French collaborators. In 1995, the then newly elected president Jacques Chirac earned the nickname of the ‘Devoir de Mémoire President’,Footnote ⁶⁹ as he stated the Duty to remember as a republican rationale as he attended the Vél d’Hiv commemoration and recognised the French state’s responsibility for collaborating with the ’occupant’s criminal folly’.Footnote ⁷⁰

In Chirac’s speech, which has since become one of the most quoted speeches of the French Fifth Republic, the French head of state articulated a concept of autocritical memory. Unlike the German model, which relied much more on social introspection and recognition of crimes, in France the state played an active role in the ‘Duty to remember’. The state’s duty to actively remember its own crimes would then become a permanent fixture of French politics (see Section 3), as it informed an increased political engagement with memory. ‘Remembering’ the crimes – and thus the responsibility – of the French state became a part of school curricula, political debates and speeches and other memorial actions such as the construction of physical memorials in France. Another difference to the German model that has been mentioned previously was the active role of French Jews in the articulation of this memorial model. Here victims and their descendants were key players in the creation of a memory discourse. Yet, for the French intellectuals and activists who participated in debates about the need to acknowledge the crimes of the French state, memory – and with it the focus on the French state’s responsibility – was a way to address their belonging as French citizens who had been failed by the state. Jewish actors articulated their demands to the state through the vocabulary of citizenship and duty rather than that of ‘reconciliation’, which assumed a psychological process. Jewish actors participated in the creation of an autocritical memory model, in which confronting the crimes of the past for the sake of present-day state responsibility mattered more than foregrounding victims’ voices in a moral debate.

1.4 Conclusion: Autocritical Memory and Holocaust Remembrance in the 2000s

Over the second half of the twentieth century, two models of autocritical memory developed in parallel in West Germany and France. In France in particular, German actors like the student activist Daniel Cohn Bandit and the journalist Beate Klarsfeld participated in the creation of this narrative through borrowing from West German developments. In both cases, changing public debates, intellectual and cultural production, activist mobilisation and political reactions coalesced into a new memory rationale, in which polities addressed their own crimes. In both cases, the establishment of such models, if one can call them so, required a mix of lively public interest and state adoption of the rationale of auto criticism. In both cases, moreover, the acceptance of the need to engage in such autocritical remembrance only materialised with a generational shift. A second generation that had not been personally involved in the war had taken the reins of power and was able to engage with memory politics without any elements of personal responsibility or guilt. Autocritical memory thus offered a way to re-imagine political identities in either polity through focus on self-reflection. Nonetheless, in neither case did the emergence of autocritical memory truly focus on ‘reconciliation’ between victims and perpetrators. This is particularly noteworthy in the German case, where the autocritical nature of West German memory politics never emerged through dialogue with victims and their descendants, but opened up new avenues of thinking about German identities in a society with practically no Jews left.

These two models of autocritical remembrance focused on the role of memory in national debates, structures and identities, at a time when Holocaust memory worldwide was becoming increasingly defined by appeals to universality.Footnote ⁷¹ For example, between 1995 and 2005, the EU Parliament and the UN’s General Assembly both accepted resolutions that reiterated the importance of Holocaust commemoration and education to use lessons from the Second World War for the sake of ‘liberties and human values’Footnote ⁷² and to ‘help prevent future genocides’.Footnote ⁷³ In popular culture, films like Schindler’s List and La Vita è bella became international successes that reflected how the Holocaust became a subject of globalised audiences. The emergence of visible Holocaust museums in places like Washington, DC, in the US, Curritiba in Brazil, Montreal in Canada or Hong Kong, where the Holocaust had not taken place, reflected a growing appeal of the ‘remembering’ the Holocaust with a universalist message of ‘never again’.

Simultaneously, national debates in Germany and France revolved around the polities of former perpetrators. Emerging globalising paradigms of Holocaust memory, meanwhile, stressed the importance of focusing on the voices of victims, rather than the questions of the perpetrators’ motives, strategies and methods. This points out to a contradiction in the examination of autocritical memory. While the so-called German model of introspection quickly became hailed as a success story and formed the base of devising institutional ways of ‘dealing with the past’, that very model emerged from very specific German conditions and as such did not raise any of the universal issues it was used to address. Section 2 therefore examines the development of institutionalised memory politics that sought to build on that ‘German model’ in contexts of democratisation. Section 3 examines the expansion of memory politics to address colonial crimes alongside the Holocaust, and in so doing to mobilise the German model to try and fight racism.

2.1 The Invention of Transitional Justice

Just as the memory of the Holocaust was becoming ever more globalised, international actors began appropriating memory into a model of ‘transition’ into democracy. This section follows the emergence of the concept of ‘transitional justice’ and its elevation into a toolkit for ‘reconciliation’ and ‘healing’. Its gestation, however, also demonstrates its main weakness. Actors borrowed from different case studies that were historically specific and sought to create a ‘best practice’ model of memory that could be implemented anywhere at will. Through the ahistorical mixing and matching, they created a normatively appealing concept of memory, which remained detached from the realities and specificities of each society it was applied to.

In the 1990s, decision makers worldwide began paying attention to a new concept, or at least a newly articulated one. Between 1988 and the mid-1990s, transitional justice became fashionable, then institutional, in international governance networks, human rights groups and NGOs.Footnote ⁷⁶ One of the components of this new concept became the importance of memory in post-conflict societies. It developed a model of what ‘proper’ remembrance of atrocities should look like.Footnote ⁷⁷

In 1988, the US-based Aspen Institute organised a conference in Wye, Maryland, entitled ‘State Crimes: Punishment or Pardon’ that united delegates from places as varied as the US, Argentina, Brazil, Uganda, the Philippines, or South Africa, to discuss the implications of measures devised to expose human rights abuses of previous regimes in transitions to democracy.Footnote ⁷⁸ This became the first of four international conferences between 1988 and 1995 that articulated the concept of transitional justice. Each conference reflected the changing priorities of transnational justice activists, as the 1992 conference in Salzburg debated the Central and Eastern European cases after the collapse of the Iron Curtain and the 1994 conference in Cape Town discussed the South African case. The first conference, however, was dominated by the case of Argentina, which informed much of the early thinking on transitional justice and memory.

The Argentinian case foregrounded the role of ‘coming to terms with the past’ in legitimating a democratic regime that replaced a dictatorship. As the military Junta collapsed in 1983 following the Falklands War, the new democratically elected government led by Raul Alfonsín faced the necessity to legitimate itself and delegitimate the dictatorship.Footnote ⁷⁹ It needed to create mechanisms to ‘move on’; yet targeting of ‘collaborators’ would risk the new regime’s stability. Unlike in Nurnberg and the process of denazification, the new government was not a foreign victor, but required popular support. It also relied on a judiciary that had not been purged since the Junta. It thus opted for limited prosecution of the latter’s leaders, who were later pardoned, while initiating a public debate on their regime’s crimes. The debate was saturated with references to Nazi crimes not only due to the use of concentration camps but also for the many parallels in ideology between the Junta and Nazi Germany.Footnote ⁸⁰ However, one of the challenges facing Argentinian institutions was the old regime’s methods of disposing of bodies, thus leaving no physical evidence or witnesses. To document the crimes and victims, the desaparecidos (the Disappeared), the most notable memorial action of the new regime, was the report Nunca Más (Never Again, published in 1983). The report’s name established a link to Holocaust memory, while the body of the report contained many references and comparisons to the Holocaust and Nazi crimes. Methodologically, however, the report functioned as one of the first ‘truth commissions’ that denounced crimes rather than trying to find legal evidence. Using hundreds of individual testimonies to paint a picture of the Junta’s state terror, the report prepared Argentinians for the eventual Junta trials. Like the Eichmann Trial two decades earlier, it established the importance of the witness for the paradigm of verdad-memoria-justicia (truth-memory-justice) that would be the hallmark of Argentinian ‘coming to terms with the past’.Footnote ⁸¹

The 1988 conference used the Argentinian example as a success story of transition from dictatorship into democracy, to provide evidence for regimes in neighbouring countries and beyond, including Brazil, Uruguay, Chile and the Philippines. It thus began a process of creating a model for ‘transitions’ into democracy in a period in which a growing number of international institutions perceived establishing democratic cultures worldwide as a shared political goal. The people who formulated this model – who participated in the 1988 and further conferences and published what became the key texts on the subject – were a mixed group of political scientists like John Herz, Neil Kritz or Ruti Teitel; democracy activists and dissidents such as Adam Michnik, Joachin Gauck or José Zalaquett; and self-proclaimed ‘social entrepreneurs’ like Timothy Phillips.Footnote ⁸² The absence of historians was notable. Participants approached case studies without a sense of historical specificities, but rather through the search of ‘best practice’ models for universal action. Starting with the Argentinian and German examples, participants identified a set of measures that would come to characterise transitional justice: prosecutions, truth-telling, restitution and reparation.

Over the following years, the understanding of these ‘measures’ developed, as activists and academics rearticulated the purpose of ‘transition’ to address shifts in international attention to world events. While the first conference focused on fragile transitions into democracy following regime changes in South America, the 1992 Salzburg conference participants perceived transition as an inevitable tide of history. The fall of communism had ushered in triumphalism. One of the focuses of the conference was the German case, in which transition meant the GDR’s incorporation into the Federal Republic. German participants, most of whom were West German except for the East German dissident Joachim Gauck, spoke about the necessity to face the oppressive nature of the Stasi and the GDR dictatorship. In 1994, the Cape Town conference focused on the South African case with attention to the role of truth commissions in the transition from Apartheid to democracy. The goal of ‘reconciliation’ was the rationale of public reckoning with the crimes of a former regime. This conference, however, took place just at a time when transitional justice, as the term would be defined after 1995 with the publication of the influential book by Neil Kritz,Footnote ⁸³ shifted its focus onto the post-conflict (and post-genocide) cases of Rwanda and the Western Balkans. In the second half of the 1990s and the early 2000s, international organisations adopted the transitional justice model as ubiquitous guideline – and a moral imperative – to dealing with societies in the aftermath of conflicts.Footnote ⁸⁴ The establishment of international criminal tribunals for those responsible for the perpetration of war crimes, as the ICTY in former Yugoslavia (1993), the ICTR in Rwanda (1994) and the International Criminal Court (ICC, 1998), was a further sign of the impact of the rationale of transitional justice on international actors.

The defining principle of transitional justice was that ‘moving on’ and anchoring democratic principles in newly established democracies required facing the crimes of dictatorships. The conferences and the 1995 volume thus contrasted two European ‘models’. On the one hand stood the Spanish model of ‘pact of silence’ following the Civil War, which did not bring the appeasement and the establishment of a stable democracy.Footnote ⁸⁵ On the other was West Germany’s Vergangenheitsbewältigung, which by the late 1980s seemed like a success story. The purpose of trials, truth commissions, commemorations and reparation measures was to promote social healing and thus reconciliation between perpetrators and victims. The lack of historicisation of the models from which political thinkers borrowed, however, created a set of moral expectations from a model that had never truly succeeded in the conditions of post-conflict transition. The kind of social reconciliation that the Argentinian – and later South African – models promoted was not only internal but also partial at best, while the German model provided no blueprint for reconciliation, as it remained focused on an internal German conversation.Footnote ⁸⁶

In fact, it is particularly in relation to the so-called German model that the contradictions of the systematisation of transitional justice measures became apparent. Firstly, in conversations about harnessing what was perceived as German successes, an idea of a ‘German model’ encompassed three very different transformation processes. The first two, the Franco-German reconciliation and the emergence of West Germany’s autocritical Vergangenheitsbewältigung, had born fruit and considered successful by observers. These two processes were intertwined, as the changing rearticulation of German identity at home facilitated German political investment in reconciliation with its largest neighbour.Footnote ⁸⁷ On the other hand, in the 1990s, the newly reunified German Federal Republic was undergoing a process of integration of the former German Democratic Republic into West German democratic structure. A substantial part of this process consisted in the purging of East German structures and confronting the immediate legacies of the SED dictatorship under the same vocabulary of ‘dealing with the past’.Footnote ⁸⁸ However, just as the new German state demonstrated extreme political will to confront the past as quickly as possible, later assessment of the integration process of the East referred to it as a ‘colonisation’ by the West and a ‘missed opportunity’ due to Western triumphalism and exclusion of East German voices from the new reconstruction.Footnote ⁸⁹ Consequently, as actors spoke of ‘German successes’ in international discussions over transitional justice, it became unclear which ‘successes’ they were drawing on. The high involvement of GDR dissidents like Joachim Gauck in transitional justice meetings highlighted a process occurring both in Germany and in international organisations: as policymakers were confronted with numerous global challenges of transition and democratisation, they sought to create quick blueprints for action that could be imposed from the top-down. In Germany, the desire to quickly implement a memory transformation of the East resulted in a popular backlash of the emergence of a narrative of nostalgia to East Germany as resistance to West German control of the new state.Footnote ⁹⁰ Most notably, Western imposition of memorial structures that aimed at delegitimising the oppressive structures of the GDR did not allow space or time for the emergence of autocritical East German memory based on a narrative of introspection.

In the same vein, as international organisations sought to create a blueprint for ‘best practice’ to transform national narratives, they overlooked the main ‘inconvenience’ of the gestation and establishment of Germany’s culture of autocritical memory: the rationale for ‘remembering’ the past had taken a long time to emerge through internal, national conversations. It was first articulated by intellectuals, and only later adopted by political actors in a way that was neither linear nor easily reproduced. Moreover, German memory’s relation to international pressure was contradictory at best. On the one hand, (West) German intellectuals confronted the issue of ‘dealing with the past’ as an injunction to reintegrate a new Germany in a new international order and addressed how the eyes of the world were set on Germany. They predicated the relationship with the exterior world, however, on the acceptance of Germany’s complete defeat in the Second World War, making it impossible for the new polity to make intellectual demands of the victors. On the other hand, conversations about the necessity to reinvent German democracy were internal in nature and did not involve international actors, but rather intellectual conversations about German democratisation and reinvention. The desire of international actors to ‘streamline’ the lengthy and non-linear internal processes into a set of actions that could be imposed from the top – and the outside – ignored the process of autocritical memory articulation for the goal of a desired outcome. Lea David has defined this type of outcome as ‘moral remembrance’, which prescribed focus on victims’ narratives for the sake of social reconciliation and an evolving discourse of human rights, which underpinned transition and democratisation.Footnote ⁹¹

In David’s definition of ‘moral remembrance’, she has critiqued the focus on victims in the search for justice. The first question transitional justice professionals were confronted with was how to define ‘victims’. While the UN General Assembly’s definition of a victim from 1985 opted for an inclusive category of persons who ‘individually or collectively, have suffered harm […] through acts or omissions that are in violation of criminal law’,Footnote ⁹² memorialisation mechanisms created hierarchies of victims. Even as victims had different stories – and different ways of dealing with suffering, whether through choice to address suffering or desire to remain silent to not relive painful memories – the creation of a formulaic narrative of remembrance relied on ‘representative’ stories. While crimes could be generalised into a story of general responsibilities, creating a ‘representative victim’ inevitably flattened the experiences of victims. This created a competition between victims to claim the moral authority to speak as a ‘pure victim’.Footnote ⁹³ The moral imperative of victim-centred memorialisation thus created incentives for victims to engage in ongoing competition for official recognition. This contradicted the principle of memory as a healing mechanism in post-conflict societies. Moreover, while the focus on victims emerged from a moral desire for justice and reparation, it left less space to engage with the meaning of crimes for descendants of perpetrators.

The victim-focus therefore transformed the nuts and bolts of memory. Commemoration – and debates about history – turned to focus on the moral uprightness of victims rather than the perpetrators’ crimes. Victims competed to show they were morally ‘deserving’ of a place in commemorative discourses. But in this process debates on memory lost sight of the fact that victims were commemorated not because of their specific moral goodness but because of crimes done to them by others. Moreover, the mixed borrowing from different ‘models’ into the transitional justice rationale only accentuated the contradictions of victim-focused commemorations in international settings. Transitional justice borrowed the moral argument for renewal from the German case, but the victim-focused public interaction from the Argentinian and South African cases. However, while confrontations between victims and perpetrators in Argentina and South Africa had been a national affair, in the case of German atrocities, victims and perpetrators (and their descendants) lived in separate states, where international mechanisms would have been more relevant for dialogue and reconciliation. In this one case, however, international coercion had been as good as absent. These contradictions fed into the articulation of the necessity to adopt ad-hoc mechanisms for international dialogue, which ignored the autocritical factor that had underlined the lengthy creation of German ‘memory culture’. This lack of attention to autocritical memory became visible in the first European test case of transitional justice, as international organisations sought to implement the principles of transitional justice for the sake of peace and reconciliation in the Balkans after the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s.

The next section explores the failure of transitional justice in Serbia as one of the ‘test cases’ of the new desire to create an actionable and global ‘memory model’. The rise of memory as a concept that was detached from the historical specificities and material condition of its success and rearticulated into an abstract model of moral righteousness could not be introduced into any other national context. In Serbia as elsewhere, material conditions and historical specificities made it impossible to introduce a top-down model of memory that had neither the time to develop nor the anchoring in cultural and political elites to survive. The focus on abstract and victim-centred models also shifted the focus away from the original autocritical rationale.

2.2 The Case of Serbia: The Failure of the Memory Model

In the midst of much of the ‘end of history’ triumphalism of the 1990s, the Yugoslav Wars represented a challenge for international structures in bringing peace after the return of genocidal violence to the heart of Europe. From the breakaway of Slovenia, Macedonia (now North Macedonia) and Croatia from Yugoslavia in 1991 until NATO’s intervention in 1995, the war ravaged the territories of the multi-ethnic south-eastern European state. It ended by an international agreement that ensured the emergence of new states defined by ethno-national definitions, most notably Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina (that the Dayton Agreement divided into the Bosniak-Croat Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina [BiH] and the Serb Republika Srpska [RS]) and the state of Serbia and Montenegro, which would later see the breakaway of Montenegro.Footnote ⁹⁴ The cessation of hostilities did not mean a return to peace and stability, however, as the new polities had been marked by the brutalisation of the war, and in the case of Bosnia a division into two antagonising entities. While all sides participated in the war, the war’s violence did not affect all warring sides equally. Most of the fighting took place in Bosnia and parts of Croatia and involved numerous war crimes and acts of ethnic cleansing, the most staggering of which were the systemic killings and rape of Bosniak Muslims by Bosnian Serb and Serbian troops. Serbian war crimes in Bosnia included the siege of Sarajevo and the use of camps, some for the internment and rape of Bosnian women. The most well-known crime was the massacre of over 8,000 Bosniak men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995, which the International Court in the Hague characterised as an act of genocide in 2004 and again in 2007.Footnote ⁹⁵ The new toolkit of international justice became key in the management of the new polities and their democratisation. International actors sought to include memory mechanisms into politics of dialogue and reconciliation between the newly created states and recently separated ethnic groups.

The issue of ‘memory’, however, was just one component in the new system of transitional justice that was foreseen through some of the mechanisms of the Dayton Agreement, and which sought to engineer peaceful democratisation. International organisations sought to support democratic state building through a mix of incentives. These included peacebuilding programmes on the ground, sticks in the forms of pressures to comply with international demands of upholding democratic standards and a commitment to a process of ‘Europeanisation’ with possible EU membership as the ultimate carrot. As the notion of ‘justice for victims’ was so heavily intertwined with the objective of ‘moving on’, generously funded NGOs on the ground engaged in programmes of dialogue and reconciliation, while the newly founded International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY) was meant to deliver justice to the victims by putting war criminals on trial.Footnote ⁹⁶

These programmes attempted to quickly create the infrastructure for reconciliation through transitional justice’s focus on ‘best practice’. Simultaneously, however, they neglected the intellectual processes of narrative creation that underpinned the very meaning of memory. As former Yugoslavia separated into different states, each ethno-national community developed its own narrative of the war – and indeed of its relationship to pre-war Yugoslavia – to legitimise the new nationalist state structures.Footnote ⁹⁷ Out of these new states, the case of Serbia was most relevant for the intersection between autocritical memory and the new mechanisms of transitional justice. Not only was Serbia (or the State of Serbia of Montenegro) the main belligerent state that sought to hold Yugoslavia together and carried the responsibility for the gravest war crimes during the Yugoslav Wars (if by no means all crimes), these crimes were committed in the name of ‘Greater Serbia’.Footnote ⁹⁸ Creating narratives and structures of Serbian statehood thus required dealing with the role of Serbian perpetrators, and in so doing also with notions of ‘responsibility’ and ‘accountability’ on a greater scale. Here, and to a much greater degree than was the case in Germany, debates about Serbia’s role in the war intersected with international pressures. The construction of a post-war Serbian identity became entangled with ideas of ‘compliance’ and ‘resistance’ to outside pressure.

While international actors’ desire to support democratisation in the Balkans and in Serbia was attached to the recent formulation of transitional justice principles that translated into top-down mechanisms, the energy for articulation of ‘responsibility’ required internal social and intellectual autocritical engagement. In the 1990s, as the country remained under the full control of its wartime leader Slobodan Milošević, Serbian society did not experience a moment of full rupture from former governments like in Germany or Argentina. Similarly, it did not experience the growth of home-grown structures that needed to legitimise radical transitions. Skirting around this contradiction, the main issue that became a marker of all new states’ compliance with top-down international measures of justice thus quickly became governments’ readiness to cooperate with the ICTY. International aid and support followed Serbian willingness to deliver war criminals to justice in the Hague. Under Milošević, cooperation between Serbian authorities and the ICTY was scarce to non-existent. Only after his ousting in 2000, which opened the door for the promise of rewards from the US and EU, did subsequent Serbian governments begin a process of engagement with the ICTY’s demands.Footnote ⁹⁹ For the process of engagement with the past – or with Serbian identity for that matter – Milošević’s ousting did not entail a process of transformation of the country’s ruling elite and structures, and did not usher an elite desire to legitimate a new Serbian and Montenegrin state in opposition to the crimes of the former. Instead, the political transition was framed as a bare necessity to comply with international pressures. This foresaw a dynamic of cat and mouse between international organisations and Serbian governments.

As Subotić points out, international organisations did not have a consistent policy towards Serbia other than expecting war criminals to be sent to the Hague, while Serbian governments tried to stall as much as possible in delivering war criminals to the ICTY.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In dealing with international actors, Serbian governments’ willingness to comply depended on the carrot and stick available to them. In the catastrophic financial state Serbia found itself after the Milošević years, the main carrots on offer were the release of well-needed financial aid or the possibility of accession to the EU or the Council of Europe. Despite any expectations that Serbian governments would embrace transition – and the jurisdiction of the international court – as a way to demarcate a clear rupture with the Milošević era, this did not occur. Patchy Serbian compliance reflected a desire to only go after Serbian war criminals when there was no other choice available.

One example for the relationship between international coercion, Serbian half-measures and the presumed goal of Serbian introspection was the ongoing back-and-forth on the arrest and extradition of the Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadžić, who had become one of Europe’s best-known fugitives from justice for charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes against the non-Serb population of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Consecutive Serbian governments continuously claimed they had no information of his whereabouts and used various stalling tactics – including the delivery of less prominent war criminals – to try and appease international demands to deliver Karadžić as proof of facing the country’s own crimes. It was only in 2008, with a change of Serbian government and increased international pressures, that Karadžić, by then reincarnated as a spiritual healer in a suburb of Belgrade after thirteen years in hiding, was captured on a Belgrade commuter bus and extradited to the Hague. The government’s explanation for finally arresting Karadžić, however, did not address any of the rationales of autocritical memory. Instead of an opportunity to incite a debate about the meaning of war crimes for Serbian identity in the present, the government addressed the arrest as, in the words of Serbia’s defence minister, ‘a step towards European integration’, or compliance with ‘foreign’ western demands.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Simultaneously, for the internal Serbian debate, extraditions of war criminals had become a main political fault line. Here again, debates about cooperation with the ICTY did not reflect a social engagement with responsibility to Serbian crimes, but rather a desire to protect the Serbian nation from external threats. Any expectation that new governments would just enthusiastically embrace autocritical ‘facing the past’ without any heavy social contestation was naïve and did not square with any previous experiences, particularly as discussions of war crimes affected the immediate experiences of the war generation, rather than the German or French examples of a second generation that confronted their parents’ record. Moreover, the Serbian political elite remained roughly the same as in the Milošević years. Serbian political decision makers did not face transition as an opportunity – and a need – to delegitimate the previous regime to establish clear distinction and articulate new political identities, unlike the West German or Argentinian examples. The issue of extraditions quickly became a marker of political identities and fights in Serbia, as conservative actors like President Vojislav Koštunica (president 2000–3, prime minister 2004–7) articulated a narrative of defending Serbian ‘heroes’ against international demands of the Hague. For a while, the reformist Prime Minister Zoran Đinđić (prime minister 2000–3) represented a Serbian ‘Europeanised’ identity through his extradition of Milošević to ‘increase Serbia’s international prestige’.Footnote ¹⁰² This focus on international compliance was instrumental at best and did not reflect a desire to engage with Serbian responsibility. And yet, even Đinđić’s openness to practical cooperation with the Hague, and the potential for more enthusiastic cooperation that could have further emerged, was quickly nipped in the bud. His assassination in 2003 by the group Red Berets in an operation called ‘Stop the Hague’, paved the way for the establishment of nationalist politicians in Serbia’s political elite.

For Serbian society therefore, the continuous handwringing over trials in the Hague made it impossible for trials to become what transitional justice actors intended them to be: markers of consensus over a specific responsibility of the Serbian leadership for the crimes of the Yugoslav wars. Instead, the constant conflict paved the way for the strengthening of a narrative of Serbian victimhood facing international pressures. While it was comparable to the ‘poor Germany’ narrative that transpired much of the public conversation in West Germany of the 1950s, the Serbian elite’s active resistance to international pressures contributed to the creation of an additional layer of this narrative, as nationalist actors mobilised an image of Serbian ‘heroes of the nation’ against international targeting of Serbia. Serbian governments did not avoid dealing with the past like post-war governments in Germany, but mobilised the conflict with international institutions to create of a narrative of victimisation. Furthermore, many Serbian intellectuals, like the international award-winning film-maker Emir Kosturica or the novelist Momo Kapor, began articulating nationalist narratives about Serbian heroism facing international oppression.Footnote ¹⁰³ The alignment of prominent intellectuals with the Serbian state reflected another narrative of national cohesion against international actors, which weakened further actors in Serbia who called for facing Serbian responsibility.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Beyond handwringing about trials, the government’s control of much of the Serbian narrative became evident, however, in debates about the genocide in Srebrenica and particularly in the Serbian tape affair. In 2005, the prosecution in Slobodan Milošević’s case uncovered a video tape that showed Serbian sparatroopers from Serbia proper torturing and executing six young Bosniak men, while a Serbian Orthodox priest was giving his blessing to the paramilitaries. The shock value of the video evidence elicited emotional condemnations in the media and the police arrested the perpetrators identified on the tape. The emotional outrage lasted only a few days, however, as government officials were quick to provide counter-narratives to prevent any national reckoning with Srebrenica as a specifically Serbian crime. These included a focus on the individual perpetrators as deranged, or in the words of the Serbian minister of the interior Dragan Jočić ‘infantile’,Footnote ¹⁰⁵ dismissals of Serbia’s responsibility for events in Bosnia (despite the tape’s portrayal of Serbians rather than Bosnian Serbs), calls to place Srebrenica in a context in which all sides had committed war crimes and lastly, claiming that the focus on Srebrenica was exaggerated and only reflected an international hatred of Serbia. The state of the public debate showed that popular sentiment in Serbia was not ready to, in the words of Nenad Dimitrijević, ‘publicly acknowledge facts that were privately known’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Debating the past in Serbia did not initiate popular reckoning with Serbian responsibility, but ended in political affirmation of Serbian victimisation against belligerent international institutions. Unlike the cases of West Germany and France, where the decades after the Second World War were characterised by silence, failed international attempts to hold Serbia responsible did not foster an autocritical culture that gained popular support to challenge elite nationalist discourse. The conflict between international pressure and national resistance did not diminish over time.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

The Serbian case demonstrates the limits of the political processes that leverage international pressure to shape processes of reckoning on a national level. The prescriptive policies of international courts and memory activists who wished to implement ‘tried and tested’ ways to incite public debates failed to engage Serbian elites and the society at large. While policies offered institutional backing, these did not offer alternatives for a reinvention of Serbian identity. Despite the best wishes to engage Serbia in international ‘dialogue’, debates about the meaning of the war were framed by national questions. Lea David thus points out that while the many NGOs that emerged through generous international backing for the sake of creating encounters and micro-solidarity programmes engaged in numerous exchanges between Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs of all ages, these made a very small dent in national discourse and were ‘hijacked by the state’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

The Serbian case marks a failure to establish dominant autocritical narratives in the aftermath of conflict. On the one hand, this is not surprising, as autocritical memory was not a ‘natural’ model. The Serbian difficulties of prioritising narratives of ‘responsibility’ or ‘coming to terms with the past’ so shortly after the end of the Yugoslav Wars were not entirely specific for Serbia, as even West Germany of the 1950s did not yet offer fertile grounds for engagement with autocriticism. On the other hand, however, the Serbian case is important as one of the first post-conflict cases of international pressures on states to democratise through mechanisms of transitional justice, including focus on memory.

The Serbian case shows that even as international actors began believing in the universality of values like ‘coming to terms with the past’, these did not automatically translate into national contexts through the toolkit of transitional justice. To some extent, this was the result of the inability to translate a supposedly universalist model into a regional context with its own specificities. In this case, nationalist groups remained dominant in the new Serbian state and were not interested in legitimising a new democratic state through the discrediting of the Milošević regime.

Moreover, inconsistent and unfocused international pressures became a hindrance to the creation of autocritical memory narratives they sought to support. Firstly, the focus on trials as the main, if not only, component of ‘dealing with the past’ neglected the importance of internal intellectual engagement with the meaning of responsibility for Serbia. The lack of state and high-ranking intellectual desire to promote democratisation through responsibility could not be compensated by small-scale grassroots attempts to foster empathy with victims. International hopes for change through grassroots ‘encounters’ did not establish any counter-narrative either, as participants who connected to one another on an individual level returned to the safety of their homes and had no alternative autocritical discourse that allowed them to rearticulate their political identities. Secondly, and just as importantly, international pressures engendered resistance of national elites – both political and intellectual – who doubled down on a narrative of national victimisation, which they promoted through the power of the state and media. With a lack of focus on any reason to accept responsibility as perpetrators, Serbian intellectuals and decision makers turned to narratives of victimisation to articulate nationalist Serbian identities following the breakup of Yugoslavia. Ultimately, the Serbian case demonstrates David’s, Gensburger’s and Lefranc’s arguments that the focus on the suffering of victims does not in itself support the creation of a moral or empathic memory.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Neglecting the focus on the transformation of perpetrators made it even more difficult to create any autocritical memory as a base of new democratic renewal.

2.3 The Jedwabne Debate: Transitioning into Europe?

While commentators have characterised Serbia’s transition into democracy as problematic at best, observers by the end of the first decade of the 2000s celebrated Poland as a democratic success story in Eastern-Central Europe.Footnote ¹¹⁰ These observations held at least until the return of the far-right populist party Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (Law and Justice, PiS) to power in 2015, as new governments harnessed the power of the state to undermine liberal-democratic institutions and norms.Footnote ¹¹¹ The Jedwabne debate that raged in Poland in the early 2000s reflected the role of autocritical memory in the articulation of Polish identities as a European liberal-democratic polity.

In 2000, the Polish American (and Jewish) author Jan Tomasz Gross published a short book called Neighbours. The book described the massacre of the quasi entirety of the Jewish population of one small town in the east of Poland, Jedwabne, by their Polish neighbours in 1941.Footnote ¹¹² Just over a decade after the fall of communism, the publication of the book triggered the biggest public debate to date in democratic Poland that tied ‘facing the past’ with the articulation of new cosmopolitan Polish identities in a transition into democracy. The debate involved numerous actors and contrasted two different kinds of memory: a victimised Polish national memory with an autocritical narrative. The clash between nationalist narratives of Polish victimhood and an autocritical narrative of ‘moving on’ reflected two sides in Poland’s transition into a democracy in the heart of the European Union (EU). Contestations of memory narratives about the role of Poles during the Second World War became entangled with reinvention and rearticulation of Polish identities in Europe.

The main theme that Neighbours raised was that of Polish crimes against Jews during the Holocaust, and thus Polish responsibility. It was not the first time that Polish intellectuals addressed the issue of Polish animosity to Jews and complicity in the Nazi genocide, or in the words of Jan Błoński, ‘insufficient concern’ for the fate of their Jewish neighbours.Footnote ¹¹³ Gross’ book, however, described a case that entirely challenged national narratives about Polish righteous suffering in the Second World War. Using testimonies of one of the only survivors from Jedwabne together with further archival material, Gross revealed how the Polish inhabitants of an ordinary town massacred the near totality of their Jewish neighbours. More shockingly to readers, they did so without any orders or even persuasion from German occupiers in what was a series of such massacres in eastern Polish towns.

The publication of Neighbours triggered a relentless two-year long debate on the pages of all Polish media outlets that involved the entirety of the country’s political, intellectual and religious elite as well as an incessant outpour of letters from ‘ordinary’ Poles who commented Jedwabne and the ongoing debate.Footnote ¹¹⁴ While none could dismiss the fact that Poles had murdered their Jewish neighbours, the debate quickly formed two camps, a nationalist ‘defensive’ camp that rejected any generalisation of guilt beyond individual ‘criminals’, and another calling for national reckoning with the meaning of Jedwabne for contemporary Polish society.Footnote ¹¹⁵

In both cases, the questions of ‘Polish guilt’ and the view of the Polish nation was central to arguments about remembering Jedwabne in the present. Conservative actors aimed to relativise the meaning of the killings through claims of either German involvement or the claims that Jews were no ‘pure victims’, as their supposed collaboration with Soviet forces that had occupied Jedwabne between 1939 and 1941 had made Polish retaliation ‘understandable’. Conservative historians like Bogdan Musiał and Tomasz Strzembosz thus found flaws with Gross’ methodology, argued that his claim of 1,600 Jewish victims was inflated and thus a sign of botched research (which led to a mass exhumation of bodies in Jedwabne), and sought proof of German involvement in the killings.Footnote ¹¹⁶ But the main argument of conservative intellectuals, journalists, clergymen and letters to newspapers was that it was impossible for the ‘glorious’ Polish nation, that had been forged through suffering, to contemplate collective guilt. In so doing, arguments against guilt repeated a narrative of double Polish victimisation and occupation by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, joined by international victimisation through portrayal of Poland as inherently antisemitic.Footnote ¹¹⁷ In so doing, many commentators reproduced an antisemitic narrative of Jewish world domination, as they condemned a supposed international pressure on Poland to apologise as an international Jewish conspiracy and ‘Holocaust business’ that allows Jews to claim victimisation over Poles, thus continuing a supposed Jewish support of Soviet crimes against Poles.

For Polish liberals writing on the pages of newspapers like Gazeta Wyborcza, Rzeczpospolita and Więź, the self-image of Poles as eternal victims was a hindrance to reckoning with the long legacy of Polish antisemitism and the improvement of Polish–Jewish relations. Indeed, Gross’ call on Polish society to finally properly ‘mourn its Jewish victims’ addressed the debate as a moral issue that would lead to possible reconciliation.Footnote ¹¹⁸ The power of the Jedwabne debate for Polish liberal journalists and intellectuals like Joanna Tokarska-Bakir or Adam Michnik, however, also emerged from the idea of using autocritical memory as a tool for transition into a mature, non-nationalist European democracy, as one editorial entitled ‘Standing on the Side of Truth’ in the influential left-leaning newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza claimed:

Interpreting the ability to ‘deal with the past’ as a sign of pride in a new Polish identity reflected the role of the Jedwabne debate in Polish internal debates about transition and delegitimisation of the Communist past as a period with no ‘mature’ and free public sphere. Linking Jedwabne with debates about the shape of Poland new democracy served to explain some of the force and acrimony of public engagement with this issue in this exact period. In a period of stabilisation after the economic hardship of the 1990s, a greater number of actors became concerned with a Europeanisation of Polish society, access to the EU and the reshaping of Polish identities. For liberals in Poland, then, autocritical memory became a sign of fighting against an ‘old’ spectre of Polish nationalism for the sake of creating pride in an ‘open’, European identity. The then liberal Polish government mobilised the image of autocritical Poles in international settings, like the speech the Polish Foreign Minister Władysław Bartoszewski held in front of the World Jewish Congress in the US in 2001, where he described the Jedwabne debate as an opportunity for the Polish state to face its own past for the sake of future reconciliation.Footnote ¹²⁰

As the then president Aleksander Kwaśniewski went to apologise in a highly mediatised ceremony in Jedwabne in July 2001, it seemed that autocritical memory had become a new Polish state principle. In the following years, however, new governments and debates showed that the Jedwabne debate had not ended with an autocritical consensus. New conservative and far-right actors in Poland, amongst which were the recurrently ruling party Law and Justice (PiS) or the far-right League of Polish Families with its conservative Catholic radio station Radio Maryja, mobilised the narrative of Polish victimisation and resistance to supposed international pressure to adopt a Western European identity that included reckoning with Polish crimes. Particularly after the reelection of PiS in 2015, Polish memorial politics became even more belligerent, focusing on Polish resistance to the double occupation by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The Polish state controlled public media and right-wing tabloids repeatedly accused German actors – and particularly those seen as liberal like the conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel or the EU politician Ursula von der Leyen – as revictimising Poland, as they portrayed European criticism of the Polish government’s attacks on the rule of law and separation of powers as a culture war between left-wing Europe and the Polish nation.Footnote ¹²¹ PiS governments thus repeatedly accused international actors for wanting to ‘falsify’ history through expectations Poland reckoned with its past. In so doing, right-wing political elites mobilised memory politics again, as they claimed international actors were using the term ‘Polish concentration camps’ not as a geographical description of camps that had been built by the Nazis in Poland, but as means to attack Polish reputation and accuse Poles of responsibility for the Holocaust. In 2018, the Polish government mobilised the debate on Polish concentration camps to criminalise any public statements ascribing the Polish nation collective responsibility for Holocaust related crimes.Footnote ¹²²

Between the Jedwabne debate and the 2018 law that outlawed critical reflection about Polish responsibility for crimes in the Holocaust, Polish society continuously engaged with autocritical memory as a component in the construction of Polish democracy. While the Jedwabne debate was an internal Polish debate that confronted various actors in Poland with Polish responsibility for crimes against Polish Jews, both the debate and its aftermath reflected an understanding of autocritical memory as an international expectation, and thus became a bone of contention in imagining Poland’s position in the world. Just like in Serbia, right-wing actors portrayed resistance to auto criticism as resistance to international imposition, even though no international mechanisms pressurised Polish governments to come to terms with its past. For liberal actors, autocritical memory reflected compliance with international norms of ‘proper’ remembrance and a way to forge a European identity through transition. As these two world views got increasingly entrenched, the recurrent and acrimonious debates about reckoning with Poland’s dark past reflected both the power of international expectations to ‘remember’ the past and their potential to ignite nationalist backlash.

2.4 Conclusion: Memory, Justice and Democratisation

In the 1990s, following the third wave of democratisation and with the transition of Eastern European states into democracy, both international and national actors sought mechanisms to manage polities’ transitions. In a globalised environment shaped by the atrocities of the twentieth century, democracy became increasingly viewed as a solution to hinder the repetition of these crimes. Based on the success of post-war German democracy amongst others, international actors viewed ‘dealing with the past’ as a formula that would foster democratic values through ‘proper’ remembrance of the past. Yet, while trying to create universal models based on the logic of crimes against humanity, international actors were confronted with the contradictions between universal abstract rejection of atrocities and the historical specificities of their gestation. In so doing, they formulated ‘best practice’ mechanisms that were based on ahistorical understanding of ‘success stories’ that sought to bring justice through healing and reconciliation. For the long-term functioning of justice, justice and truth telling mechanisms sought the creation of the ‘proper’ kind of memory, which would confront the societies of perpetrators with crimes committed in their name and lead to autocritical reflections. Even more importantly, through recognition of the long-standing collective ‘wounds’ and trauma that remained in victim societies, these mechanisms sought to elevate the voices of victims to confront perpetrators’ societies through demands for understanding and empathy.

While each and every one of these principles is laudable in and of itself, transitional justice mechanisms and the many incentives to prioritise ‘proper’ remembrance have not delivered the results memory actors of the 1990s hoped for. These models’ focus on the universality of moral demands – often based on the elevation of victims and their voices – clashed with regional and national specificities, where different actors mobilised memory for their own objectives. The cases of Serbia and Poland demonstrate how actors in both countries were aware of memory’s ascendancy on the international stage, as Serbian actors reacted to actual international pressures, or as Polish liberals referred to Europeans’ eyes set on the Jedwabne debate.

In both cases, however, awareness to the world did not necessarily translate to embracing either David’s ‘moral remembrance’ or clear autocritical narratives. In both cases, memory debates became tools in internal struggles to define national narratives in moments of transition. As autocritical narratives required acknowledging and discrediting national complicity with previous crimes, they served actors whose intent was to legitimise new identities rather than continuities. In this vein, Serbian state structures hijacked memorial debates about crimes of the war and replaced them with national narratives about Serbian victimisation. In Poland, conservative actors mobilised narratives of national victimisation to portray a continuity with an ‘eternal Poland’, while liberal actors harnessed the promise of autocritical memory to paint a picture of a European Poland that reinvented for the sake of ‘moving on’. In both cases, autocritical memory’s failure to create a consensus reflected the lack of consensus about what ‘moving on’ meant and what kind of future actors promised their constituencies.

3.1 From a Duty to Remember to Memory Wars in France

3.2 Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Multi-ethnic Germany: What to Do with Germany’s Colonial Past?

This section explores the transformations of memory debates in Germany in the 2000s, as different actors began questioning the usefulness of Germany’s memory culture, represented by the now ubiquitous political rationale of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (see Section 1). As the reunited Federal Republic became a European multi-ethnic state despite the intentions of West German governments’ citizenship policies, intellectuals and antiracist activists called on state and society to rearticulate German identity to fit with its new realities. In this process, public debates increasingly focused on the supposed ‘success’ of Germany’s memory culture in creating a more inclusive identity and to fight racism. To do so, they borrowed from global debates about colonialism and race to demand greater visibility of German colonial history in Germany’s memory culture, but also raised the question of whether German remembrance was fit for purpose in the twenty-first century.

3.3 Conclusion

As European postcolonial societies struggled to redefine themselves and articulate new and inclusive identities for citizens with origins in the Global South, memory became a battleground for new debates. It allowed politicians and activists to articulate new identities in battles about race and national identity (not least by questioning the place of European identities in an increasingly globalised and Americanised world). The near-simultaneous perfect storm of debates about memory in nearly all Western European polities – with different colonial and postcolonial trajectories – demonstrated the strength of circulation of ideas about memory in Europe and beyond. Everywhere in Europe, academics and antiracist activists turned to memory to explain colonial continuities into the present in a moment of democratic crisis, a rising far-right and necessity to articulate the sense of multi-ethnic European societies. After debates about ‘immigration’ and multiculturalism in the 1990s, the rise of visible Islamophobia in the early 2000s after the US’s so-called War on Terror and through the rise of inequalities after the global economic crisis of 2008, antiracist actors in Europe searched for a new language to explain the role of race and salience of racism in European societies. Colonial history and existing memory models, whether through successful autocritical models, the rise of what Lea David calls ‘moral remembrance’, or Natan Sznaider’s rationale of ‘never again’, provided a vocabulary to address frustration with the long-standing exclusion of racialised minorities in democratic polities. These actors borrowed from exiting memory rationales as well as from global conversations about race, resistance and activism.

Autocritical memory was particularly important in the gestation of these debates. In countries that had already established a political rationale of autocritical memory as a defining element of national identities that had been reinvented after the Second World War, like France and Germany, this political rationale offered inroads for antiracist activists to demand another reinvention. Actors in France and Germany called on the political elite and society to address histories of colonial oppression to explain the connection between postcolonial immigrants and their home societies, and create more ‘inclusive’ identities.

Antiracist activists expanded the autocritical imperative to include colonial history through challenging existing rationales as oppressive, but also as failures to fight against racism. They borrowed much more from two decades of global debates about moral remembrance than from national trajectories where autocritical debates had emerged. If Vergangenheitsbewältigung emerged from the very immediate continuity with family history and responsibility, claiming that it can be harnessed as an abstract common good to fight racism required a reinterpretation of memory as a universalist moral imperative. This, however, also points out to the limits of memory. If the use of autocritical memory was helpful in opening up new debates about the present, there is no evidence for how remembering the past can fix these same issues.