Post-Colonial and Post-Shoah Readings: The Conundrums of Memory Politics and Historiography

In April of 2020, a huge controversy unfolded in Germany on the relation between Postcolonial and Holocaust Studies. Previously, in 2012, Judith Butler, on the occasion of her acceptance of the Adorno Prize, was assailed for her criticism of the State of Israel and her support of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. This time, the philosopher Achille Mbembe, from Cameroon, the former German colony, who works on issues of restitution, reparation, and reconciliation, was accused of antisemitism. His criticism of the occupation of Palestine and the comparison of the State of Israel with the apartheid system in South Africa is condemned for allegedly relativizing the Holocaust and questioning the Israeli state’s right to exist. Beyond the “Mbembe case”, the greater challenge is how to think together Jewish Studies and Postcolonial Studies. More recently, the Australian historian Dirk Moses has provoked fierce rebuttals by German colleagues when he qualified the broad consensus held by Germans about their self-critical memorialization of the Nazi past and the Holocaust as a self-serving ‘catechism’ made up of sacrosanct truths and taboo zones.

Room: GER/0007/U