Zimmerer, Jürgen. Germany’s History Wars: Contesting Memory and Identity Today. Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2025.
On November 12, 2025, the German parliament accepted a new framework for German memorial sites (Gedenkstättenkonzeption) which entirely omitted Germany’s colonial history. When originally introduced by the Ministry of Culture under the leadership of Wolfram Weimer (CDU), this framework triggered criticism from historians and memorial practitioners. The head of the Holocaust memorial site at Neuengamme, for instance, spoke out saying that he and other colleagues would like the framework to take colonial history into account, not least because the current government’s coalition agreement explicitly lists this as a goal.
Before this truncated framework was proposed by the Merz government, a more inclusive vision of German memory culture proposed by the previous government had already faced widespread criticism. When in February 2024, Minister of State for Culture Claudia Roth (Greens) published an updated framework for cultural memory (Rahmenkonzept Erinnerungskultur) that added colonialism, immigration, and the history of democracy as three additional pillars to the preexisting focus on National Socialism and the German Democratic Republic, the critique was so vehement that the concept paper was taken down from the ministry’s website. Although the responses to these differing frameworks may appear contradictory, as historian Jürgen Zimmerer puts it in the preface to the volume under review: “In announcing a comprehensive, inclusive concept – only to then strike colonialism, migration and democracy from the agenda – Roth ultimately entrenched the very narrowness she had intended to overcome” (XL).
For anyone following these developments, the title of Zimmerer’s edited collection Erinnerungskämpfe: Neues deutsches Geschichtsbewusstsein (Reclam, 2023), recently translated into English as Germany’s History Wars: Contesting Memory and Identity Today (De Gruyter Brill, 2026), might come to mind. The collection engages with what it calls the “wars” currently permeating German historiography and cultural memory. The choice to title the book “Erinnerungskämpfe” emphasizes not only the contentious nature of these discourses, but the numerous points of contention both historically and currently under discussion. It ultimately echoes the strife and provocations of the so-called “Historikerstreit 2.0” — the renewed controversies ca. 2020 surrounding the singularity of the Holocaust that followed similar debates from the original “Historikerstreit” of 1986 — and foreshadows the memory politics currently playing out in Germany’s Ministry of Culture and beyond.
As Zimmerer states in the opening line of the introduction: “Germany is wrangling with its national identity” (1). From the start, it is clear that there is a connection between historical narratives, cultural memory, and national identity. Scholars such as Fatima El-Tayeb have long pointed out that hegemonic historical narratives of Germany reproduce a (mis)understanding of Germany as an exclusively white and Christian nation. Such a narrative “necessarily produces a tunnel vision by ignoring and suppressing alternative narratives (including those of Europeans descended from the continent’s formerly colonized)” (El-Tayeb, “The Universal Museum,” 74). Zimmerer’s volume takes some steps toward collecting and providing a platform for such “alternative narratives,” including those which highlight the global entanglements of German history and stress the role of German memory culture as a touchstone for memory studies and practices abroad. In stating “It is time to reflect on whether Germany’s efforts to deal with its past have been as successful as German society likes to imagine” (2), Zimmerer challenges the canonized narrative of Germany as the master of memory culture.
The events of October 7 and their aftermath succeeded the publication of the original German edition and thus are only directly addressed by a few of the individual contributions. The English translation, however, features a new 41-page preface by Zimmerer on further developments in German public debate from the last two years. The preface provides an exhaustive account of the German government’s public response to the October 7 attack, Germany’s backing of Israel against ICC allegations of genocide raised by South Africa, as well as the backlash against artists and scholars who have spoken out in support of Palestine. Particularly useful is Zimmerer’s reflection on the concept of “Staatsräson” as used by Angela Merkel in a speech before the Israeli Knesset in 2008. He describes the vaguely defined notion as a “shortcut” (VII) that not only prevents further discussion or criticism on the issue of German support for Israel, but also gives license to anti-Muslim statements from both the mainstream and the margins of German politics; in short, Zimmerer strikingly claims Staatsräson “became völkisch” (VIII). Towards the end of the preface, Zimmerer embeds these developments in German public discourse into what he terms a “transnational right-wing culture war” (XXXIII), drawing connections to right-wing voices in the United States who have even greater platforms in the current Trump administration.
The volume is arranged by historical period into five sections, which cover 1) The German Empire and its Continuities, 2) National Socialism and the Second World War, 3) Holocaust and Multidirectional Memory, 4) East Germany, West Germany, and Reunification, and 5) The Berlin Republic: Marginalizations and New Master Narratives. While the debates engaged with throughout the chapters are wide-ranging, the timing of this volume invites a particular focus on the discussions surrounding German history and cultural memory that have been reignited in the past several years and which have carried on in the wake of its publication and reception.
Section 1: The German Empire and Its Continuities
The first essay authored by historian Christoph Nonn focuses on the image of Bismarck as an “old bogeyman” in contemporary debates about German national history and identity. Despite the historical figure of Bismarck being deeply implicated in the legitimacy and meaning of German unification and a German nation-state dominated by Prussia, Nonn surprisingly observes that the first German chancellor has not featured prominently in many recent memory disputes. For instance, the 200th anniversary of Bismarck’s birth in 2015 occasioned fairly little public attention aside from a handful of new biographies. However, during the global Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests and the subsequent activist campaign to remove colonial monuments and street names across Germany, Bismarck suddenly returned to the center of such debates, in particular the Bismarck monument in Hamburg. By focusing on these protests, debates, and contentious actions regarding the Hamburg monument, Nonn brings greater attention to the local arena of German identity debates that did not always translate to the national media.
In the following chapter on the place of the Herero and Nama genocide in German history, Jürgen Zimmerer begins by analyzing President Frank-Walter Steinmeier’s address at the opening of the Berlin ethnological collection housed in the Humboldt Forum in 2021. The speech was the first time that a German head of state or government acknowledged the criminality of colonialism as well as the colonial state’s responsibility for committing the “first genocide of the twentieth century.” Yet, as Zimmerer points out, the very space where the president’s words were spoken, in a refurbished Prussian palace that displayed objects from Africa and Asia, ultimately served to reinforce the “master narrative” of modern German history. In Steinmeier’s own words: “I am convinced that remembrance of the civilisational rupture of the Shoah is and will remain unique in our national memory. It is part of our identity.” (42). By critically reading the German President’s remarks, and by focusing on questions of causality and continuities from German colonial violence to twentieth-century war and genocide, Zimmerer concludes that, “debate about the colonial legacy is also a debate on the future of remembrance,” which promote a more critical and capacious understanding of the German past, especially the German Empire (59).
In the third chapter, another historian, Eckart Conze, returns anew to one of the defining historiographical debates in West Germany: the Fischer controversy and the question of Imperial Germany’s guilt for the First World War. With the enthusiastic German reception of Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers in 2013, as well as the rise of the radical-right Alternative for Germany Party (AfD), how one interprets the German nation-state founded in 1871 has gained greater political stakes and implications for German national identity since 1990. Conze, by returning to these earlier disputes in light of some of the latest political developments, provides a helpful framework for the other essays in this section that focus, respectively, on the figure of Bismarck, colonial genocide, and the legacies of the Prussian imperial dynasty. He argues that the German Empire, representing a national past seemingly unconnected to the politics of the Weimar Republic or Nazi Germany, “lends itself to affirmative references to history and tradition” for the contemporary political right (64).
The final essay of the first section is by historian Thomas Weber on the disputed connections between the Hohenzollerns, the royal family of Prussia until 1918, and Nazism. Like other debates, this controversy largely unfolded across German print and visual media but had another, arguably more important, dimension in the German courtrooms where various high-profile historians provided expert testimony on the Hohenzollern’s relationship to the Nazi party and state. The basis for the legal case originated with claims by Hohenzollern descendants to seek the restitution of former Prussian monarchical property from the German government. The Hohenzollern dispute further unfolded right on the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic and, subsequently, never evolved into a more general public dispute. Among the smaller constituency of experts and commentators, Weber asserts that the debate surrounding the Hohenzollern controversy, “was – with a few exceptions – very masculine and very German, both in terms of the composition of the antagonists and in tone. Self-criticism and self-reflection were far from the order of the day” (86). Weber explicitly connects the very nature of the debate to a broader fraying of “pre-political values, which are the cornerstones of a liberal democracy” (100). He warns that if future debates continue in this direction, in which participants cannot recognize the legitimacy of their opponents on shared grounds (including recognizing when your debate partners are committed anti-democratic neo-nationalists), then the future of democracy itself in Germany and Europe will be threatened. These four chapters on the German Empire demonstrate, as Conze reminds us, “that the politics of history is also politics proper” (71).
Section 2: National Socialism and the Second World War
The volume’s second section on National Socialism and the memory of the Second World War opens by considering the “forgotten victims” of Nazi Germany, those most often pushed to the margins or made invisible in the mainstream channels of memory culture institutions. This includes, but is by no means limited to, people with LGBTQIA+ identities, disabled people, those deemed “asocial” by the Nazi state, and Roma and Sinti. In a highly effective and wide-ranging chapter, historian Bodie Ashton argues for an intersectional culture of remembrance to contend with those people who were “not simply forgotten but unremembered within the collective memory of a society praised” by many foreign observers, including President Obama (108). If contemporary German society truly seeks to remember and repair the complex realities of persecution in the past, then the present-day remembrance culture requires a greater dynamism and more political courage, for instance as seen in the recent recognition of queer victims of Nazi Germany by the Bundestag in 2023 (122). Yet, Ashton points out, even these developments have often been accompanied by reaction and retrenchment from the German far right. Only by “acknowledg[ing] that these lacunae perpetuate this marginalization” will the German politics of historical memory forge greater solidarities in the present, rather than continue to foster division and polarization (125).
The persistence of “lacunae of remembrance” is picked up again in the subsequent chapter by historian Tatjana Tönsmeyer on the Nazi war of extermination and German occupation of Europe. Despite the celebrated robustness of postwar German memory culture, she argues that “a widespread ignorance about what German occupation meant for those affected during the Second World War” persisted among the German public. Furthermore, “this is a topic that was initially subjected to silence and then subordinated to other events, including the Holocaust, as a result of which it has largely been forgotten” (129). Tönsmeyer continues by tracing the postwar Schlussstrich (historical closure) that enforced strict norms of “sayability” about the Second World War, followed by the grand narratives of liberation marked on May 8th, and ultimately current debates over whether the German government should provide Leopard tanks to Ukraine to defend against Russia’s full-scale war. She concludes that, without duly attending to the European and everyday realities of civilian populations living under German wartime occupation, the present-day culture of remembrance remains ignorant of the ways that most Europeans experienced the Second World War, including the millions of forced laborers and Soviet prisoners of war.
The “blind spots” of Nazi Germany’s war of annihilation in Poland and the Soviet Union are taken up in the last two chapters of this section. On the one hand, Franziska Davies focuses on forgotten sites of mass killing in Eastern Europe, while on the other hand, Dieter Pohl and Thomas Sandkühler explore the promises and limitations of historical comparisons by analyzing the two wars started in 1941 and 2022. By conceptualizing the “forgotten East,” Davies asks why collective memory of the Nazi war of annihilation and the Holocaust persists in ignoring certain sites of mass killing, such as “villages of fire” (Feuerdörfer) where entire civilian populations were targeted by German forces in so-called anti-partisan actions (149). By focusing more explicitly on the ongoing Russian full-scale war against Ukraine begun in 2022, Pohl and Sandkühler contend with recent debates about the nature, methods, and objects of historical comparison. These scholarly disputes, of course, have not taken place without contentious political fights. The authors conclude that, while there are some apparent analogies and parallels between the war from 1941–1945 and the Russia-Ukraine conflict, enormous differences exist, most prominently “the question of legitimacy, which in turn differs with respect to the two antagonists involved. In 1943, the Soviets liberated Ukraine from a mass-murderous – German – occupation regime, albeit at the price of the return of Stalinism. Today, we are dealing with pure neo-imperialism devoid of all legitimacy. Nobody is being liberated here” (180). As the war in Ukraine drags into its fourth year of all-out war, the last three chapters of this section explicitly connect the German public’s understanding of this conflict as importantly mediated through the marginalized memories of Nazi Germany’s radical and genocidal war in Eastern Europe in the 1940s.
Section 3: Holocaust and Multidirectional Memory
At the heart of the collection, the third section includes contributions by several of the central voices of the “Historikerstreit 2.0” debates, including Michael Rothberg, Meron Mendel, and Dirk Moses. Rothberg’s contribution traces the key points of the original “Historikerstreit” of 1986 and the three phases of its more recent iteration: the Mbembe controversy in 2020, the translation of Rothberg’s monograph Multidirectional Memory (2009) into German in 2021, and the publication of Dirk Moses’s provocative essay “The German Catechism” in 2021. Making a case for the necessity of new actors and new forms within German memory culture, Rothberg illustrates how migrants in Germany remember the Holocaust in innovative, multidirectional ways. The following two contributions from Mendel and Moses speak to each other directly. Mendel, currently the director of the Anne Frank Holocaust Education Center responds to “The German Catechism,” taking issue with Moses’s polemic tone and language and arguing that Moses’s critique of Holocaust singularity and of Germany’s relationship to Israel should be addressed separately. Regarding the former, Mendel, citing Omer Bartov, ultimately concludes that the Holocaust was indeed “unique for Germans and Jews” (216), no matter whether this uniqueness extends to world history. Regarding the latter, Mendel concedes that Moses’s critique of Germany’s support of Israel “has some validity” (219), underscoring how “Staatsräson” often functions as a “political platitude” (219). While acknowledging that Germany has historically drawn “a direct line between the Holocaust and support for Israel” (221), Mendel proposes that Germany reevaluate its policy, particularly with the rise of right-wing extremism within the Israeli government. Moses’s contribution outlines five “obsessions” of the recent debates in Germany that underpin what he has called a “catechism,” namely Holocaust uniqueness, German loyalty to Israel, an overemphasis on antisemitism among Muslim and Arab Germans, the conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism, and postcolonialism (227). He cites various publications and statements from Mendel, Mendel’s partner Saba-Nur Cheema, and Nathan Sznaider in order to illustrate how the catechism functions via “obsession managers” (229). In a conclusion updated for the English translation, Moses posits that “[a]n open debate and the resolution of German obsessions should be possible” (243) while also noting how the events of October 7th have only increased the work of obsession managers.
Engaging with many of the statements which circulated as part of the “Historikerstreit 2.0,” Sonja Hegasy’s chapter scrutinizes and critiques the ways Arab and Jewish expressions and actions of solidarity have been discredited, citing examples such as Maxim Biller’s attack on Max Czollek’s “Tagen der jüdisch-muslimischen Leitkultur” in 2020 (263) and the suspension of television journalist Nemi el-Hassan in 2021 (263–4). Hajo Funke’s chapter on “the Mbembe Affair” contextualizes the critique of Cameroonian scholar Achille Mbembe’s work on apartheid regimes that led to his disinvitation to open the 2020 Ruhrtriennale. Funke meticulously examines Felix Klein’s attacks on Mbembe in his role as “Antisemitismusbeauftragter der Bundesregierung” (German government’s antisemitism commissioner) in order to illustrate how Klein’s accusations of antisemitism were unfounded and effectively silenced voices needed to address colonialism and genocide within Germany. Hanno Hauenstein and Eyal Weizman turn their attention to the controversies surrounding the documenta fifteen festival held in Kassel in 2022, delineating the accusations of antisemitism against the Indonesian collective Taring Padi who curated the festival. In doing so, they critique the inability “to consider the intertwined histories of racism, colonialism, antisemitism and genocide within a shared framework” (301), noting how voices from the AfD used the scandal to claim postcolonial ideologies are antisemitic and research and culture associated with them should not be funded by the state.
Section 4: East Germany, West Germany, and Reunification
The four chapters comprising this section pick up on marginalized perspectives of both East and West German historical narratives as well as tensions within the historical reception (and instrumentalization) of the GDR, the Weimar Republic, and the Bonn Republic. In the center of this section are two chapters addressing the histories of contract workers and racialized minorities in the GDR and those of guest workers in the FRG, respectively. Katharina Warda and Patrice Poutrus cite numerous witness testimonies to challenge the prevailing mnemonic narratives of a “Peaceful Revolution” (338) and that of the “Brown East” (338). In doing so, they argue for a more nuanced understanding of reunification that recognizes the anti-immigrant and racist violence intertwined with this period. In some ways a counterpart, Lisa Hassler’s chapter narrates the history of so-called “guest workers” from countries such as Italy, Greece, Spain, Turkey, Morocco, South Korea, and Portugal. Hassler challenges the narrative that Germany is not an “immigration country” (343) and argues for the inclusion of migrant narratives in (West) German historical narratives.
Bookending these two chapters are reflections on how the GDR and the Weimar and Bonn Republics have been re-narrated in contemporary historical scholarship and public discourse more broadly. Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk critiques the increasing tendency to inscribe the GDR with “emancipatory potential” (318) when it comes to women, the education system, and solidarity amongst workers, for instance, arguing that such “reinventions” of the GDR have less to do with historical fact and more to do with the present in which they are being written. Claudia C. Gatzka illustrates how the Weimar Republic, while typically used as an example of a failed democracy from which the authors of the Grundgesetz distanced themselves, has, in conjunction with the popularity of Volker Kutscher’s Gereon Rath novels and their adaptation into the series Babylon Berlin, become more relatable to the Berlin Republic. The Bonn Republic, typically invoked as a stable democracy, as Gatzka argues, should be viewed in a more complicated light in which resistance against the government existed and yet did not threaten the democracy, but rather strengthened it. The section’s parallel focus on East and West Germany offers useful comparisons, if somewhat at the expense of a stronger focus on the GDR as a key German memory site.
Section 5: The Berlin Republic: Marginalizations and New Master Narratives
The first two chapters of section five engage with how Black and Muslim presences in the German nation challenge notions of German identity. Chiedozie Michael Uhuegbu reads Chima Oji’s autobiography Unter die Deutschen gefallen: Erfahrungen eines Afrikaners (1992) as a literary expression of “Black intellectual activism” (378) that challenges the supposed contradiction between being Black and being German. Ozan Zakariya Keskinkiliç engages with debates as to whether Islam and Muslims—often separated from each other for discursively strategic purposes—belong to Germany. He convincingly argues that Muslims in Germany are abstracted to a monolithic figure imagined to be the opposite of German and therefore integral to the identity of Germany, if only as a counter-image.
The third and fourth chapters address the role of right-wing movements in shaping narratives of German history and memory. Sophie Schmalenberger delineates three strategies of the AfD’s “counter-hegemonic culture of remembrance” (416), namely the celebration of German nationalist heroes, the emphasis on victim narratives of white Germans during World War II and into the present, and the framing of critical impulses from left and postcolonial thinkers and activists as extremist attacks against an innocent German nation. In doing so, she argues that the perspectives marginalized by the AfD’s strategies be given more room in German memory culture. Efsun Kizilay picks up on this point, engaging with exactly these marginalized perspectives in her study of right-wing terror as a continuity in post-Reunification Germany. Arguing that both right-wing violence as well as the organization and resistance from affected communities in response to it have been characterized by “non-remembrance” (429) in Germany, Kizilay details the role of “situated, migration-informed knowledge” (435) which has yet to be included in collective narratives of German history and cultural memory. Ending the section is Frank Jacob’s chapter engaging with the ways Germany’s national history, particularly the period of National Socialism and the Holocaust, has played a role in collective European memory and the generally pro-European attitude within Germany. Examining the financial, geopolitical, and migration “crises” (447) that have confronted the European Union since the beginning of the twenty-first century, Jacob argues that a collective European historical narrative is needed for a collective European identity, thereby bringing Germany’s history wars into the broader European context in the final words of the volume.
In sum, Germany’s History Wars not only retraces familiar ground but generatively offers various off-ramps and points toward the many possible futures for German memory culture(s) in its contributions, both on the page and via the series of public discussions that took place with various contributors at the Kampnagel venue in Hamburg between 2023–2024. As the biographies of the contributors to this volume reflect, as well as the continuation of these debates on digital platforms like New Fascism Syllabus, struggles over German historical consciousness remain a transnational effort. Stakeholders (or maybe better rendered as implicated subjects à la Rothberg) in the German past reside all over the world. In our present moment of increasingly securitized territorial borders, retreats back into the framework of the nation-state, and a static official memory culture, it bears remembering and reiterating what exactly the major takeaway from these most recent debates over German memory and history has been: that the German past is not simply a German affair.
While this volume follows others in focusing on National Socialism and the Holocaust as the main sites of debate about German national identity and memory, it also gestures towards additional sites of memory, such as the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, the GDR, and reunified Germany. In that sense, the contributions to the collection as well as the voices behind them are, in many ways, more diverse than those of the German feuilletons or the intra-disciplinary discussions amongst historians.
If the Merz government signals a period of backsliding when it comes to openness about updating German memory culture and which pasts and perspectives should play a role in it, then Germany’s History Wars remains worth reading, not just as a record of pandemic-era debates, but as a resource for a more pluralist vision of German memory and identity.
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