On the (im)possibility of state apologies for the colonial past in French and German memory politics

Abstract

State apologies and the related expression of emotions, such as guilt and repentance, are seen as an essential part of dealing with atrocious pasts. Against this view, the article analyzes from a postcolonial perspective the impact of emotions in the negotiation of state apologies in postcolonial memory politics. In a transnational comparative discourse analysis, I examine the conditions of the (im)possibility under which state apologies are discussed in public and media debates in 2021, focusing on the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962) in France and the OvaHerero and Nama Genocide (1904–1908) in Germany. In France, public opinion rejects apologies as an act of “repentance.” In Germany, the planned apology becomes impossible because the government equals the “historical and moral responsibility” with development cooperation. Through a transnational comparison that analyzes the structuring effects of emotional discourses in memory politics, the article shows that dealing with the colonial past primarily follows the interests of the European nation-states, thus leaving the postcolonial power imbalances intact.

Introduction

State apologies for the colonial past have recently become more frequent in Europe. At the height of the Black Lives Matter protests in June 2020, Belgium King Philippe expressed his “deepest regrets” for the colonial violence exerted in what was then the Belgian Congo (Anonymous, 2020; El Amouri and Smis, 2023). In 2022, former Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte apologized for the “extreme violence” of Dutch military forces during the Indonesian War of Independence from 1945 to 1949 (Boffey, 2022). More recently, in October 2023, King Charles conveyed “the greatest sorrow and the deepest regret” for the crimes committed in Kenya during the decolonization struggles (Clinton and Kimeu, 2023). Only a month later, in November, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier asked the Tanzanian state “for forgiveness” for “the extent of cruelty” committed against the Maji-Maji who fought for the liberation from German colonial rule between 1905 and 1907 (Bundesregierung, 2023). Do these expressions of “regret,” “sorrow,” and the “plea for forgiveness” suggest a new reckoning with the colonial past by European governments?

In contrast to this one-sided perspective, scholars have pointed out the ambivalence involved in apologizing. On one hand, research assumes that apologies are intended to reconcile societies to “work through” ¹ a burdensome past (Barkan, 2002; Daase, 2010; Howard-Hassmann and Gibney, 2008; Kößler and Melber, 2017; Lind, 2010; Uusihakala, 2019). For an apology to be “successful,” it is decisive that the perpetrator society accepts to have committed a wrong in the past and promises to act differently in the future. On the other hand, research has criticized apologies not only for their “superficial moralization” (Daase, 2010: 20), but also for denying the possibility of social change (Trouillot, 2000; Yeğenoğlu, 2017) or even legitimizing colonial efforts (Bentley, 2015). However, apologies establish a link between the recognition of historical guilt and the promise of symbolic or material reparation. Thus, apologies—or even the prospect of it—open up possibilities for the formerly colonized and their descendants to demand a reappraisal of colonial violence by the former colonial powers. For this reason, much of the scholarship on state apologies still treats them as a necessary tool for reconciliation and reparative justice (see Bentley, 2018 for a critique of this perspective). In doing so, research generally does not consider cases in which apologies “fail” before they are uttered. In contrast, I do not conceive of apologies as conclusive means of reconciliation and analyze them in terms of “successful” or “unsuccessful.” Instead, I make the public and media debates about apologies the object of analysis to highlight their performative effects and how these debates influence postcolonial memory politics (Ahmed, 2004: 114–115).

Furthermore, the literature on apologies considers emotions, such as “sorrow” (Bentley, 2015), “forgiveness” (Daase, 2010: 24), or “guilt” (Barkan, 2001) as immanent prerequisites for the utterance of official apologies. Hence, it seems that the act of apologizing is closely linked to the expression of emotions and the normative values they convey. Consequentially, most definitions of apologies include an admission of guilt, an expression of remorse, and a “plea for forgiveness,” culminating in the willingness to act differently in the future (Daase, 2010: 24; Kößler and Melber, 2017: 119). However, research often does not further explain the meaning or empirical relevance of emotions in apologizing, which is also illustrated by the expression of “colonial sorrow” used by political scientist Tom Bentley (2015) in his article on state apologies to former colonies. This example shows that the constitution of emotions and their influence on postcolonial memory politics are rarely systematically investigated (Assmann, 2015; Sindbæk Andersen and Törnquist-Plewa, 2016). Therefore, it is crucial to examine the production and the discursive effectiveness of emotions in shaping the circumstances making apologies an accepted instrument to work through the colonial past. Especially looking at the effectiveness of emotions allows for a postcolonial critique, since rationality is still privileged over emotionality and is used to delegitimize and control the “other” through their “emotionalization” (Stoler, 2002, 2009). In this article, I critically engage with the production of emotions in Western memory politics from the midst of the “imperial centers” (Bhambra et al., 2018: 2). By highlighting their role in the production of historical knowledge and in the (re)production of dichotomies between the former colonizer and the colonized, I also point to the broader question of how emotions have yet to be “provincialized” (Chakrabarty, 2008[2000]). To do so, I will analyze the public and media debates on apologies for those colonial pasts that are most contested in contemporary French and German societies, namely, the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962) in French memory politics and the OvaHerero and Nama Genocide (1904–1908) in German memory politics.

On January 20, 2021, the historian Benjamin Stora first presented his “Report on questions of remembrance concerning the colonization and the war in Algeria” (Rapport sur les questions mémorielles portant sur la colonization et la guerre d’Algérie) to French President Emmanuel Macron. In May, the German government announced that the negotiations with Namibia on the official recognition of the genocide perpetrated against the OvaHerero and Nama between 1904 and 1908 in the former colony “German Southwest Africa” would reach a conclusion. In the corresponding press release (Federal Foreign Office, 2021), then Foreign Minister Heiko Maas (SPD) declared that “[i]n light of Germany’s historical and moral responsibility [. . .] we [will] ask Namibia and the descendants of the victims for forgiveness.” In contrast to the German position, Stora (2021: 77) doubts in his report that an official apology would achieve a “reconciliation of memories.” Shortly after the publication of the report, the Elysée issued the slogan “no excuse, no repentance” (Goubert, 2021: 1) to emphasize that the French government did not see any need to apologize for the Algerian War. ² In Germany, on the contrary, the descendants of the victims declared that they would reject all apologetic gestures as long as the Federal Republic refuses to consider material compensation for the genocide. In contrast to the French case, where the production of the emotional discourse of repentance makes it impossible for the former colonial power to render an apology, in the German case, the production of emotions creates a context that makes it impossible for the descendants of the victims to accept an apology. Hence, the term (im)possibility used in this article refers to two different, intertwined dimensions: on the one hand, it casts light on the discursive conditions and their effective emotional discourses that facilitate or hinder state apologies. On the other hand, the term underscores the ambivalent character of apologies as a means of memory politics. After all, research has demonstrated that they have not been a satisfactory outcome of a reconciliation process, nor have they dissolved existing power relations (Bentley, 2015, 2018; Escribano Roca and Alonso Fernández, 2023; Uusihakala, 2019). Nevertheless, apologies do transform relations: between the “victims” of colonial violence and their “perpetrators,” ³ and also, more generally, between the former European empires and the countries they colonized on a transnational scale. The term (im)possibility thus underlines the performative character and inconclusiveness of the public debates, and at the same time the transformative potential for postcolonial relations—even beyond apology practices.

By analyzing the discursive production of emotions in negotiating the (im)possibility of official apologies in public debates, I seek to carve out the structuring function of the discursively constituted emotions in French and German postcolonial memory politics. With this perspective, this study also contributes more generally to the understanding of how emotional discourses shape the remembrance of colonialism in contemporary postcolonial societies in Western Europe. However, it requires a comparative perspective to understand the divergent dynamics of how these single nation-states deal with the colonial past. The comparison between France and Germany is particularly insightful as it allows the analysis of moments of simultaneity in postcolonial memory politics against the background of non-simultaneous historical developments. In doing so, the transnational comparative approach offers a novel perspective on the specificity of emotional discourses in negotiating the importance of the colonial past for contemporary postcolonial societies. For the discourse analysis of public debates, I analyzed primarily journal articles, but also official government statements, speeches, and the positions of memory activists in both countries. In France, I chose the period between January and March 2021, from the publication of the Stora report to the official recognition of the assassination of Ali Boumendjel by French paratroopers. In Germany, I focus on media coverage from May to July 2021, designating the period from Maas’s announcement of the “Reconciliation Agreement” to the Namibian Parliament’s refusal to sign the agreement. In addition, I analyzed how the French press reported on German memory politics and how the German media received the Stora report. In the two cases presented, the comparative analysis reveals the different affective mechanisms that hinder the issuance of a state apology. Accordingly, the article shows that the emotional discourses reconstructed in the public debates primarily serve the national memory needs of the former colonial powers, leaving the postcolonial power imbalances intact.

In what follows, I first outline the development of state apologies as a Western instrument of memory politics, and how they are linked to emotions and the power relations they imply. Second, I conceptualize emotional discourses as a tool for analyzing postcolonial memory politics. Following the theoretical section, I will introduce the case studies, and the material analyzed for this article. I will then present my findings on how emotional discourses made it impossible to consider an apology as a legitimate tool of memory politics in the French case and hindered the rendering of an apology in the German case. Finally, I will summarize the findings of this article and elaborate on transnational developments and the (im)possibilities of reckoning with the colonial past in postcolonial memory politics.

A moral duty to apologize? Emotions in postcolonial memory politics

Since the 1990s, universal human rights have become a dominant paradigm in Western cultures (Olick, 2007: 121), making it a moral imperative to reckon with past crimes and remember their victims (Bartolini and Ford, 2024; Bentley, 2015; Levy and Sznaider, 2010; Olick, 2007). Against this background, it is not surprising that state apologies have developed as a “new practice in international relations” (Daase, 2010). At the same time, apologies are primarily Western practices (Howard- Hassmann and Gibney, 2008: 1) that often address pasts that are no longer justiciable—as it is the case with the transatlantic slave trade and most colonial crimes. A key function of state apologies is to acknowledge “guilt” and thus establish a historical narrative that is generally accepted by both the “perpetrators” and the “victims” (Barkan, 2002: 366; Bentley, 2018: 401). Research on apologies has emphasized that the utterance of an apology thus creates a performative moment that has a direct impact on the social world (Ahmed, 2004: 114; Bentley, 2015: 627). Accordingly, apologies convey the prospect of transforming the relationship between the apologizer and the addressee by promising to act differently in the future. Various apologies have been issued in the last 20 years, but they have often remained exclusively symbolic and, in most cases, have even justified the rejection of postcolonial demands for material and/or immaterial reparations (Barkan, 2002; Bentley, 2015, 2018). Cultural studies scholar Meyda Yeğenoğlu (2017: 18) therefore argues that apologies can hardly “subvert their nationalist, colonialist, or Eurocentric predicaments.” For the historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot (2000: 177, 184), writing about state apologies and the supposed affective registers they convey, it is “the emphasis on shared feelings of remorse [that] obscures the reproduction of worldwide structures of inequality.” However, instead of following Trouillot’s conclusion to perceive apologies as “abortive rituals,” I seek to uncover the affective registers behind the “colonialist and Eurocentric predicament” (Yeğenoğlu, 2017) that create and maintain unequal power relations.

The promise of state apologies to establish generally accepted historical “truths” and to act differently in the future can only prevail when it corresponds with society`s established “collective ideals” of morality (Barkan, 2002: 389). The French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1973[1922]: 134) introduced the term “collective ideal” to describe the moral rules agreed upon by a society. Crucially, morality can never be analyzed without considering the power relations at play, as colonial and postcolonial anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler (2009: 101) points out. Therefore, Stoler (2009: 69) closely links morality and affect by arguing that “the harnessing of affect” always had been crucial “in the state’s shaping of what constituted morality and who had the right to assess it.” This means that the moral norms laid down in the collective ideal also define the rules that constitute the moral obligation to work through colonialism and the violence exerted. In this article, I argue that the establishment of moral collective ideals is discursively constituted through emotional discourses that shape the “affective states” of societies (Ahmed, 2004: 116). To analyze these affective states that condition the context of (im)possibility under which state apologies become intelligible or not, I take up the concept of emotional discourses proposed by the anthropologists Abu-Lughod and Lutz (1990: 13). According to them, emotions are social practices produced in discourse and embedded in power relations. Crucial to their understanding is that they have to be understood in relation to the social world and not as the expression of a “veridically referential to some internal state” (Abu-Lughod and Lutz, 1990: 10–11). It follows that the analysis of emotional discourses is less about defining what emotions are than about reconstructing what they do (Ahmed, 2004: 4). Applied to the field of memory studies, this means that emotional discourses structure the ways in which the colonial past becomes meaningful—or not—for contemporary societies. Consequently, emotional discourses describe permanent affective structures that regulate what is recognized as official knowledge about the past and thus rationalized as a “moral duty to remember.”

The constitution of a “moral duty to remember” depends on the knowledge of the colonial past that is available and accepted in a society. Postcolonial critique has emphasized that the production of difference between the former colonizers and the colonized not only persists in time, but also that this difference is rationalized into seemingly “neutral” knowledge (Ziai, 2006: 34). In the same vein, postcolonial studies have also critiqued the location of “rationality” in the West as opposed to “emotionality” in the Global South. It is precisely the Western discourses of rationality, having its origin in the European Enlightenment (Castro Varela and Dhawan, 2015: 87), that construct the “other” as “uncivilized,” “infantile,” and “not guided by reason” (Ziai, 2006: 34). As a result, colonial thought is “rationalized” as accepted knowledge that reproduces the hierarchies between “the West and the Rest” (Hall, 1992). The maintenance of these hierarchies subsequently delegitimizes postcolonial demands for recognition, reparations, restitution, etc. For that reason, cultural scientist Sara Ahmed (2004: 113) has stressed that the act of apologizing has little to do with recognizing of the “suffering of the other.”

Therefore, this article aims to uncover the rationalization processes, mediated by emotions, through which knowledge of the colonial past is normalized and thus remembered or obscured (Ha, 2012). However, the structuring effects of emotional discourses and their moral collective ideals are not only mirrored in the utterance of an apology, but also already in the way German and French society negotiate the conditions of (im)possibility to apologize for colonial violence. For that reason, the article analyzes the different discursive conditions that made apologies (im)possible in 2021 and how the understanding of apologizing for colonialism is aligned with the moral collective ideals of the “perpetrator’s” societies. With this perspective, the article seeks to discard the prevailing normative assumptions of achieving reconciliation and justice through apologies. By making emotions and their role in constituting the “moral duty to remember” the object of analysis, the article contributes to their provincialization in European memory politics.

Postcolonial memory politics in France and Germany: The transnational comparison

Understanding the growing significance of the colonial past for contemporary European societies requires a transnational comparative perspective. However, analyzing the transnational effects does not mean ignoring the different historical experiences inherent to colonialism, since they determine memory politics in the present (De Cesari and Rigney, 2014: 7). From a historical perspective, the Algerian War and the OvaHerero and Nama Genocide took place in very different contexts. In the Algerian War from 1954 to 1962, the Front de Libération National (FLN) waged a war of liberation against the French colonial power. Algeria had been colonized by France in 1830 and considered part of French territory since 1848 (Stora, 2011; Thénault, 2012). The Algerian War was a decisive historical moment for France because it marked the end of the French colonial empire (Shepard, 2006) and led to the end of the Fourth Republic in 1958. At the same time, the signing of the Évian Accords in March 1962 caused the migration of white settlers, the so-called pieds-noirs, and local military forces in support of the French army, the so-called Harkis, to France (Baussant, 2006; Eldridge, 2016; Jansen, 2012). Especially the Harkis, depicted as “traitors” by the FLN, were killed by thousands in the months after the ceasefire had been signed (Ageron, 2000; Eldridge, 2016). As a result of the sweeping amnesty laws passed immediately after the war in 1962, 1966, 1968, and 1982, French mass crimes, such as torture (Branche, 2001) and the disappearance of Algerian independence supporters—as well as the crimes committed by the FLN—remain unpunished to this day (Jansen, 2012: 277–278; Rousso, 2016: 126).

Germany, on the other hand, was hardly influenced by postcolonial migratory flux after 1919 (Jansen, 2012: 291) when German colonialism ended with the signing of the Versailles Peace Treaty after World War I (Kößler and Melber, 2018). However, like French Algeria, “German Southwest Africa” (1884–1915) was also a settler colony, thus characterized by land appropriation, expulsion, and exploitation of the local communities. In 1904, a colonial war broke out in resistance to German colonial expansion. After the “Battle of the Waterberg” in August 1904, the German colonial army forced the survivors into the desert and left them there to die of thirst (Zimmerer, 2011[2004]: 50). Furthermore, the German colonial administration established concentration and labor camps where it interned OvaHerero and Nama until 1908 (Zimmerer, 2011[2004]: 50–55). However, it was not until the 2000s that historians began to reach a publicly accepted consensus on qualifying the events as genocide (Bürger, 2017; Häussler, 2018; Zimmerer, 2011[2004]). Around the same time, the establishment of concentration camps and the collection of human remains for racist anthropological research led to contentious debates in academia and the public about the continuity from “Windhoek to Auschwitz” (Zimmerer, 2007, 2013).

Despite the different historical experiences outlined here, the two cases have in common that both the Algerian state and the Namibian communities are demanding the recognition of colonialism and the mass atrocities committed as “crimes against humanity.” Mass crimes, as defined by the UN Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect, include war crimes, genocide, “ethnic cleansing,” and crimes against humanity (De Gemeaux, 2023; Hering and Stahl, 2022). Crimes against humanity were first defined as a criminal offense in the London Statute of the International Military Tribunal established in 1945 for the Nuremberg trial of the major war criminals of the Nazi regime. They describe the widespread or systematic attack against a civilian population. Crucially, all of these crimes are exempt from the statute of limitations, meaning that, in theory, colonial crimes committed long ago could also be punished (for a critical assessment of the retroactive application of international law to colonial crimes, see Dhawan, 2010; Goldmann, 2020; Theurer, 2023). Because of this, claiming recognition of colonial crimes as crimes against humanity has become a recurrent demand of postcolonial memory actors, going along with their efforts for restitution, reparations, and apologies.

In 2021, when official apologies were discussed almost simultaneously in France and Germany, both countries were also confronted with the demand for recognition of colonial crimes as crimes against humanity. However, the connections between these developments disappear by looking only at the politics of a single nation-state. To understand the dynamics behind the (im)possibility to apologize for colonialism that goes beyond the framework of the nation-state (De Cesari and Rigney, 2014), I apply Werner’s and Zimmermann’s (2006) concept of histoire croisée. This approach understands comparisons as an methodological operation by which researchers actively “entangle” the objects under study to not “merely consider [them] in relation to one another but also through one another” (Werner and Zimmermann, 2006: 38, italics in original). This means reconstructing the emotional discourses and the context-specific moral norms derived from them in the French and German memory politics to demonstrate the conditions of impossibility of a state apology.

Methodology and data collection

For their concept of emotional discourses, Abu-Lughod and Lutz (1990) draw on Michel Foucault (2015[1969]: 74), who understands discourses as a “set of statements” that coagulate through repetition into the truths that structure what can be thought, said—and also felt. Discourses thus represent the knowledge consolidated in a society that constitute the “long-term preconditions for current political action” (Kerchner and Schneider, 2006: 10). By relating the German and French debates on apologies for the colonial past as synchronous events, they can be conceptualized and analyzed as discursive practices (Diaz-Bone, 2006: 81). The synchronic comparison follows the method of decontextualization and recontextualization (Friedman, 2013). In this approach, the object of study is first removed from its original context to finally relocate it within this context. Decontextualization underscores the deconstructive character of the method, as it reveals the postcolonial “self-evidences of knowledge production” (Diaz-Bone, 2006: 78). The operation of recontextualization, in turn, identifies the rules that characterize a discourse, underscoring the discursive specifics of the cases under study (Diaz-Bone, 2006: 79). To reconstruct emotional discourses in the debates over apologies, I have formulated a set of structuring questions following Kathy Charmaz’s (2003: 259) “sensitizing concepts” developed for grounded theory. Sensitizing questions are a self-reflexive tool designed to make the theoretical assumptions explicit with which the researcher approaches the topic. For this article, the sensitizing questions addressed the emotional wordings in the texts, such as shame, remorse, and so on, expressions of (emotional) rules and norms of remembrance, for instance, how people should “feel” about certain pasts. I also looked for the addressees of the text, but even more who is recognized as an actor of memory.

Focusing on emotional discourses in German and French memory politics, I compiled a data set of newspaper articles, government statements, speeches, policy papers, press releases, as well as responses from memory activists, such as OvaHerero and Nama representative groups. For comparative reasons, I chose newspaper articles of the national daily press to systematically integrate print media of the right and left leaning political spectrum in both countries. In the French context, I have included La Croix, Le Monde, l’Humanité, Libération, Le Figaro, and Aujourd’hui en France. In the German context, I integrated the newspapers die tageszeitung—taz, Die WELT, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Frankfurter Rundschau, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and Neues Deutschland. In this article, I focus on the simultaneous debates about state apologies in 2021. For the French context, I investigated the period between January and March 2021 after the Stora report was published until Macron’s official recognition of Ali Boumendjel’s assassination in 1957. In those 3 months alone, 76 articles were published. For the German context, I analyzed 54 newspaper articles between May and August 2021 that reported on the announcement of the German–Namibian “Reconciliation Agreement.” In addition, I analyzed seven articles on the Stora report and the recognition of Boumendjel’s murder that appeared in the German press, and 11 articles on the “Reconciliation Agreement” published by French newspapers. All of the data were stored and coded using the Software MAXQDA, which made it possible to draw connections between different texts and also to code emotion words and sentence structures with emotional connotation.

In what follows, I will first analyze the French case and how the dominant emotional discourse of “repentance” construes an apology to Algeria as an impossible practice of memory. The reason for this, as the analysis will show, is that French memory politics focus exclusively on the Algerian War of 1954–1962, without conceiving it in the broader context of global struggles for decolonization or within the longue durée of French colonialism, which began in North Africa in the 1830s. In a second step, I show how the German government’s equation of the “historical and moral responsibility” for the genocide with development cooperation, reinforced in the “Reconciliation Agreement,” makes the planned apology to Namibia impossible. However, the discourse analysis for both cases also reveals a shift in the moral collective ideals of how to reckon with the colonial past, which underlines the performativity of the given context of (im)possibility.

The French case: “No excuse, no repentance” for the colonization of Algeria

Stora’s (2021) “Report on questions of remembrance concerning the colonization and the war in Algeria” provides an overview of the memory-political developments in France and Algeria since the end of the Algerian War of Independence in 1962. Furthermore, it proposes concrete recommendations, which aim at contributing to “soothe the wounded memories” (apaiser les mémoires blessées) (Stora, 2021: 81). The list of suggestions to overcome the “terrible competitions of memories” (Stora, 2021: 93) points to both domestic politics and the bilateral relationship with Algeria. The handover of the report to French president Emmanuel Macron quickly became a decisive discursive moment in French media reporting due to the divergent demands and positions expressed by French memory activists, French and Algerian politicians as well as Algerian civil society representatives. By the end of January, more than 30 articles dealing with the content of the report appeared in the national daily press within 10 days. From mid-February onwards, the French press focused on the negative media and civil society reception of the report in Algeria. When one recommendation of the report was eventually implemented in early March—the recognition of the murder of lawyer Ali Boumendjel by French paratroopers in 1957—media reporting again skyrocketed. By analyzing newspaper articles from the period between January and March 2021, the following analysis reveals the discursive conditions under which the formulation of an apology to Algeria becomes an impossible means of reconciliation. More specifically, I will examine the ways in which the emotional discourse of repentance prevents a reappraisal of the Algerian War in the context of France’s history of colonial expansion, and, more generally, of colonialism as a crime against humanity.

”Repentance is vanity, recognition is truth”: On the impossibility of apologizing for the French colonization of Algeria

The day after the report was published, most journalists categorically ruled out an apology as the right way to reconcile. An article in the newspaper Le Figaro summarized the general view as follows: “It’s not about apologizing [. . .] Repentance is vanity, recognition is truth. And truth is deeds” (Berdah, 2021: 10). The equation of apology = repentance ⁴ constitutes an emotional framework that makes an official apology to Algeria an impossible instrument to work through the colonial past. Conversely, the emotional framework of recognition = truth is repeatedly invoked in contrast to a “shameful repentance” (Goldnadel, 2021) that would jeopardize the unity of the French nation. The report reflects this dichotomy when Stora places the recognition of “historical facts” in opposition to the formulation of apologies. Official apologies, according to him, are non-consequential symbolic acts as the following quote shows:

I don’t know if another official apology will be enough to soothe the wounded memories and bridge the gap between the two countries. For me, it’s more important to continue to learn about the colonial system, its daily reality and ideological aims, and the Algerian and French resistance to this system of domination. (Interview with Stora and Naoufel El Mili in Le Soir d’Algérie, quoted in the report, Stora, 2021: 82)

Stora (2021: 21) contrasts the “passionate representations of the past” with the “search for historical truth.” Accordingly, apologies are to be understood as a “discourses of ‘repentance’” (Stora, 2021: 91). Although he puts the term in quotation marks, he nevertheless subsumes apologies under the emotional discourse of repentance, arguing that an apology would deepen the frictions between the different “memory lobbies” (Stora, 2021: 93), as the following quote illustrates:

Rather than “repentance,” France should acknowledge the discrimination and deprivation suffered by the Algerian population and present precise facts. Because the excesses of a culture of repentance or the reassuring visions of a history imprisoned by memory lobbies do nothing to calm our relationship with our past. (p. 94)

In his report, Stora makes it clear that only the establishment of historical facts can contribute to reconciliation, while the expression of repentance endangers it. The emotional discourse of repentance thus plays a dominant role in structuring the debates on recognition and apology in working through France’s colonial past in general and the Algerian War of Independence in particular. In the media coverage, apologies and repentance are linked in a way that constructs apologies as an impossible memory-political practice. Correspondingly, newspaper articles assume that the “painful memories” of the Algerian War of Independence have to be “objectified” (dépassionner) to ultimately “pacify” (apaiser) the conflicting memories. Recurring formulations, such as “looking history in the face” (Boiteau, 2021b), “recognize the truth of the facts” (Touaibia, 2021), and “moving towards peace and reconciliation” (Anonymous, 2021b), illustrate a complementary emotional discourse on the required establishment of historical truth. However, the question arises whose “historical truth” should be brought to light and whether memory politics should address “Franco-French” or the Franco-Algerian relations.

French historians, such as Benjamin Stora, Sylvie Thénault, Pascal Blanchard, or Gilles Manceron, who largely influence the debates in France, extend their understanding of the establishment of historical truth to the condemnation of the colonial system. Thénault (2021: 28) asks, for example, in Le Monde:

In the 21st century, how can we still defend the legitimacy of territorial conquest followed by exogenous settlement, officially organized land dispossession, the establishment of an inherently unequal social order, and its maintenance through violence?

In her text, the historian refers to the Algerian context, but formulates her question in such a general way that it can be understood as a reassessment of the entire French colonial project. The historian Marie Verdier (2021: 4) also writes very clearly in La Croix: “As a historian and a citizen, I’m not one to call for repentance or apologies. But today, the French state must recognize the atrocity of colonization.” Although these examples offer a critical reading of French colonialism, they also illustrate the conviction that apologies should be avoided as an expression of an act of repentance. In an interview with the newspaper Aujourd’hui en France, Stora responds to the question of whether an expression of repentance is necessary:

There have already been a number of important speeches, with an astonishing ignorance (méconnaissance stupéfiante). As far as excuses are concerned, it would be enough to read the speeches of the heads of state, Sarkozy, Chirac, Hollande . . . Now it’s time to put them into practice (Alimi and Vernet, 2021: 4).

Stora rejects apologies because, in his view, they describe a purely rhetorical, symbolic act that has no political consequences.

However, the presidential speeches mentioned by Stora simply do not contain apologies. To give an example: During his first visit as French President to Algeria in 2012, François Hollande (2012) “acknowledges the suffering that the colonization has inflicted on the Algerian people.” At the same time, he stated in a press conference that he did not come “to repent and apologize” (Anonymous, 2012). As evidenced, the speeches do not meet the necessary requirements to be qualified as state apologies because they lack both the “recognition of a past violation,” and, even more importantly, “the admission of responsibility and the plea for forgiveness,” as political scientist Christoph Daase (2010: 20) points out. By insisting on the importance of the recognition of a past violation, I do not wish to follow a normative perspective, which would advocate for a French apology to Algeria. Rather, it is about achieving a consensus on a commonly shared understanding of history—within French society and with Algeria. Stora’s elaboration on the precedent méconnaissances thus illustrates that it has not yet been possible to construct “historical truths” that would integrate the various actors into a shared historical narrative. It follows that the reconstructed emotional discourse of repentance regulates that only the French version of the past can be recognized as historical truth. Instead of helping to “soothe” (apaiser) and ”objectify” the history of the Algerian War, it rather contributes to (re)producing the “passions” inherent to memory politics, which are exclusively associated with the War of Independence while ignoring the period of colonization in the 19th century. Consequently, equating state apologies with expressions of repentance not only constructs them as an impossible means of dealing with the war. The emotional discourse of repentance also feeds into the persistent misrecognition of French colonialism as a global regime of domination. This mechanism also becomes evident in the French media’s portrayal of the bilateral relations between Algeria and France as the following section will show.

Colonialism as a crime against humanity? The struggle for “historical truth”

Shortly after the publication of the Stora report, the Algerian government criticized Stora’s rejection of a state apology for the colonial past as a means of reconciliation. French newspaper articles have largely portrayed Algerian memory politics as calling for the qualification of colonialism as a crime against humanity. To this end, French newspapers repeatedly reported that Algerian state officials referred to Macron’s 2017 statement in which he described colonialism as a “crime against humanity” and also promised an apology (Bobin and Faye, 2021: 12; Matarese, 2021). As a result, the Algerian demand for a French apology for the colonization of the country dominates in the analyzed material. At the same time, French media coverage unanimously rejects Algerian demands on the grounds of a lack of reciprocity. Already the day after the Stora report was presented to Macron, government representatives were quoted in Le Monde saying that it is “useless to pounce on [France’s] potential mistakes,” which is justified as follows: “There is no reciprocity [. . .]. The Algerian government is still on the offensive instead of seeking reconciliation” (Bobin and Faye, 2021: 12). According to the French understanding, the recognition of colonial crimes and the condemnation of the colonial system cannot be realized because Algeria is not yet ready to take reconciliation steps with France.

On March 3, 2021, Macron announced that the assassination of the Algerian lawyer Ali Boumendjel by the French army would be officially recognized, as recommended by the Stora report. This was also the first official reaction by the Élysée to the report (Berdah, 2018: 2). In the French conservative press, the recognition of Boumendjel’s assassination led to an intensified demand for reciprocity. Combined with the emotional discourse of repentance, this became a defensive strategy against the recognition of colonial injustice. On March 8, essayist Gilles-William Goldnadel (2021) wrote in Le Figaro:

The recognition of French responsibility for the atrocities committed by France in Algeria, without any spirit of reciprocity for the crimes committed by the FLN, bears the hallmark of a shameful repentance that lacks the courage to admit it. This unjustified repentance is based on an unsuspected intellectual masochism. (Italics added by S.R.)

The quote shows that the emotional discourse of repentance is complemented by the demand for reciprocity to avoid any responsibility or apologetic gestures toward the former colony. In this logic, Goldnadel’s acknowledgment of Boumendjel’s assassination thus corresponds to a “unilateral repentance” expressed by France. Accordingly, an apology for the Algerian War of Independence could only become intelligible under the condition that the Algerian side also admits its “guilt” for the crimes committed during the war. Hence, French newspapers accuse the Algerian government of instrumentalizing the past to reduce Algeria to a “victim of war” (Bobin and Smolar, 2021: 12). An apology to Algeria, justified on the grounds of Algeria’s victim status, is thus considered a “form of repentance” that must necessarily be rejected (Boiteau, 2021a: 17). Instead, journalists demand the recognition of the crimes committed by the FLN against Europeans. Crucially, the French media reject the notion of colonialism as an analytical framework for understanding the relationship between France and Algeria, which Stora uses in his report. Instead, Algeria’s victim status would be perpetuated by assuming a fundamental asymmetry between the colonized and the colonizers in the view of French media (Sévillia, 2021). Consequently, this interpretation places the Algerian War outside of French colonial history.

In conclusion, the analysis of the French case has shown that the discourses of reciprocity and repentance are combined in a framework that refuses to judge the system of colonialism as illegitimate and unjust, thus making even the idea of an apology to Algeria impossible. Despite the importance that Macron ascribes to the Algerian War of Independence in terms of memory politics, the war is not interpreted within the framework of French colonial expansionism, which began in North Africa in the 19th century. The attempt to establish the French version of “historical truth” explains why Algerian perspectives are only rarely being discussed in the French press. As a result, both French politics and the media reject the Algerian demand that colonialism should be condemned as a crime against humanity. This is despite the fact that no legal consequences can be derived from this recognition because of the amnesty laws that have been passed. It follows that French public debates are characterized by a discursive impossibility of understanding the Algerian War as colonial. Instead, the analysis suggests that France is trying to establish its “own” historical truth about the Algerian War, in which equal combatants fought against each other. This is also why Macron has never repeated his 2017 statement that colonialism is a crime against humanity that requires apologetic gestures, which he made during his visit to Algeria as a presidential candidate.

Nevertheless, the debates surrounding the report and its contents have opened up a discursive field in which the Algerian War of Independence is beginning to be reassessed. The analysis has shown that newspapers are increasingly writing about French colonization in the 19th century, thereby broadening the perspective to other regions of the former French Empire to initiate a debate on the systematic use of violence during colonialism. In contrast to France, the German government already agreed in 2016 to formulate an apology for the genocide committed against the OvaHerero and Nama (1904–1908). In the German case, however, the affected communities and the Namibian Parliament refuse to accept the promised apology, thus creating conditions that make an apology impossible.

The German case: The ambivalent construction of “historical and moral responsibility” for the OvaHerero and Nama Genocide

The announcement of the conclusion of a “Reconciliation Agreement” between Germany and Namibia in May 2021 also included a plan for German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier (SPD) to apologize to the Namibian Parliament before the end of the legislative period in September. But it never came to that point: Already in the summer of 2021, the negotiations came to a halt due to the harsh criticism from representatives of the OvaHerero and Nama, as well as the Namibian opposition, regarding the results of the agreement (Press statement by Paramount Chief Advocate Vekuii Rukoro (Ovaherero Traditional Authorities, OTA) and Gaob Johannes Isaack (Nama Traditional Leaders Association, NTLA) (2021, Anonymous 2021c: 9). In particular, the OvaHerero and Nama associations did not feel adequately represented in course of the five year long dialogue between the two governments. Finally in January 2023, opposition parties and members of the affected communities filed a lawsuit against the Namibian government to prevent a signing of the “Joint Declaration” to which the “Reconciliation Agreement” had been downgraded to circumvent approval by the parliaments of both countries (Theurer, 2023: 1150). At the time of writing, the court case is still pending, and the German and the Namibian governments have only agreed “that remaining questions can only be resolved through renegotiation [Nachverhandlungen] – not new negotiations [Neuverhandlungen]” while still adhering to the “Joint Declaration” (Drucksache 20/5788, Antwort der Bundesregierung, 2023: 3). In the following, I analyze the context surrounding the dialogue process of the “Reconciliation Agreement” and the press coverage between May and June 2021, from the announcement of the agreement to the moment when the German media coverage subsided after the first reactions in the Namibian Parliament. Doing so allows me to identify the conditions created by the emotional discourse of moral responsibility that make the acceptance of an apology impossible.

The central points of criticism of the German–Namibian negotiations can best be illustrated by the press release, which the German Foreign Office (Federal Foreign Office, 2021) issued on May 28 and which summarizes the main results of the “Joint Declaration” as follows:

Our aim was and remains to find a shared path towards genuine reconciliation in memory of the victims. This includes being unreserved and unflinching in naming the events of the German colonial period in what is now Namibia and in particular the atrocities between 1904 and 1908. We will now officially call these events what they are from today’s perspective: a genocide.

Given Germany’s historical and moral responsibility, we will ask Namibia and the descendants of the victims for forgiveness.

As a gesture of recognition of the immeasurable suffering inflicted on the victims, we want to support Namibia and the victims’ descendants with a substantial program to the tune of 1.1 billion euro for reconstruction and development. [. . .] Legal claims for compensation cannot be derived from it.

[. . .] The past cannot be put to rest. Recognizing our guilt and offering an apology however is an important step to come to terms with the crimes of the past and to shape the future together. (Original in English, emphasis added by S.R.)

In this short statement, the German government recognizes “our guilt,” accepts its “historical and moral responsibility” and offers an apology as a first step to “shape the future together.” However, the quote also confirms the German position that the government will speak of genocide “from today’s perspective.” By offering 1.1 billion Euros in development aid promised over 30 years, Maas’ press release and the excerpts from the “Joint Declaration” confirm the German government’s position that the recognition of the genocide will have no consequences under international law and that “[l]egal claims for compensation cannot be derived from it” (Brössler, 2021; Federal Foreign Office, 2021). Back in 2015/2016, when the mass killings of the OvaHerero and Nama were first referred to as “genocide,” the German government managed to reject recognition under international law for fear of setting a legal precedent that would allow various victims of the past to legally claim reparations. Germany justifies this position on the basis of the UN Genocide Convention, which only gave international validity to the crime of genocide in 1948 (Imani and Theurer, 2021). By rejecting the retroactive application of the Convention to the OvaHerero and Nama Genocide, the German government also denies the qualification of the genocide as a “crime against humanity.” However, it is important to note that recognition under international law would in no way legally confer the right to reparations. Nevertheless, the German government seeks to define the conditions under which the colonial past should be dealt with by promoting an exclusively moral (not legal) obligation to deal with the genocide. Consequently, the rejection to recognize the genocide under international law points to the ambivalence in the construction of moral collective ideals: On the one hand, the German government acknowledges its “guilt” and the responsibility for the genocide. On the other hand, it seeks to limit the bargaining position of the Namibian state and the OvaHerero and Nama. How does Germany’s understanding of “historical and moral responsibility” ultimately make it impossible to apologize for the genocide 2021?

As early as 1989, the German Bundestag recognized a “special responsibility” toward Namibia (Drucksache 11/4205, Auswärtiger Ausschuss, 1989: 2). In the literature on memory, responsibility is often referred to as a normative outcome of successfully dealing with “difficult pasts.” Interestingly, just as the introduction to the recent volume entitled “Mediating Historical Responsibility” (Bartolini and Ford, 2024: 5) observes, the notion of responsibility is still under-theorized for the study of memory. When thinking about the meaning of responsibility for societies, most literature assumes a connection between the construction of “collective guilt” and “notions of civil and collective responsibility” (Bartolini and Ford, 2024: 12). In their understanding of collective responsibility, Bartolini and Ford (2024: 16–17) seek to “capture the ethical demand that lies in the past.” Accordingly, societies can be held accountable for structural injustices, such as racism, that have their origins in the imperial and colonial past. In contrast to Bartolini and Ford, the sociologist Jeffrey Olick (2007: 121–122) emphasizes that the “politics of regret” do not represent the actual feelings of the members of a society. Rather public actors would seek to generate political legitimacy through the performance of remorse and responsibility. In addition to Olick’s observation, I argue that the success of this performance depends on the established moral collective ideals that make societies feel responsible to work through past crimes. Thus, taking responsibility is a practice that is linked to the moral collective ideals that define the actions to be taken to satisfy the moral needs of the society. The sense of responsibility (Verantwortungsgefühl) is thus produced in discourse and embedded in power differentials through which different actors of memory politics seek to establish political legitimacy.

A diachronic analysis of Germany’s “historical and moral responsibility” for Namibia reveals a discursive shift in the construction of responsibility. The “special responsibility” towards Namibia already declared in 1989 was particularly directed to Namibia’s “German and ethnic German minority” (Drucksache 11/4205, Auswärtiger Ausschuss, 1989: 2). At the same time, Germany has already been committed to providing development aid to its former colony since Namibia’s independence in 1990. In the course of time, the support for German minorities lost its significance for German foreign politics in Namibia, and the “special responsibility” was specified as a “historical and moral” one (Drucksache 15/3329, Antrag der Fraktionen FDP/DVP, 2004). Interestingly, the government uses the constant reference to responsibility to create the impression of consistency in dealing with the colonial past (Drucksache 15/3329, Antrag der Fraktionen FDP/DVP, 2004: 2). In contrast, colonialism did not play a role in German development cooperation until 2004, the year of the 100th anniversary of the genocide (Bürger, 2017).

In 2015/2016, when the intergovernmental dialogue process began after years of advocacy by the OvaHerero and Nama communities, development cooperation remained the main strategy for dealing with the colonial past. However, it is a strategy that illustrates the asymmetrical power relations between the two governments, and even more so between the OvaHerero and Nama and German interests (Kößler, 2020: 129). It is important to note that the demands on how to deal with the genocide differ between the Namibian government and the different Namibian representative groups. While the government demands that compensations be paid to the state, OvaHerero and Nama groups, such as the Ovaherero Traditional Authority (OTA) and the Nama Traditional Leader Association (NTLA), demand that reparations be paid directly to the descendants of the victim groups. In the view of the OvaHerero and Nama, only reparations would give them the power to define the conditions under which the colonial past should be dealt with—also toward the Namibian government (Selz, 2021). However, throughout the entire dialogue process, Germany was able to define the conditions under which the results of the ”Joint Declaration” were negotiated, i.e. that the apology should be issued before the end of the legislative period in September 2021, or “that the Namibian Government and people accept Germany’s apology” (Federal Republic of Germany and Republic of Namibia, 2021: Point 14, emphasis S.R.). Furthermore, the promised payment to “the tune of 1.1 billion euro for reconstruction and development” is also meant to “settle all financial aspects of the issues relating to the past” (Federal Republic of Germany and Republic of Namibia, 2021: Point 20). Thus, the accepted “historical and moral responsibility” for the genocide, which features prominently in the “Joint Declaration,” is not only equated with increased investment in Namibia’s development. Rather, the German government’s strategy is to draw a line under dealing with the colonial past by attempting to settle all remaining claims by the OvaHerero and Nama or the Namibian government. Berlin-based Herero activist Israel Kaunatjike therefore judges that “reconciliation cannot be achieved as it is now. The Namibian government is on the drip of German development funds, and Germany is exploiting this in a neo-colonialist way to push through its agreement” (Ling, 2021: 4). As a result, the construction of “historical and moral responsibility” for the genocide as future-oriented development cooperation perpetuates the power asymmetries between the negotiating parties and elevates Germany to the position of a generous benefactor by reducing the promised payments to a voluntary self-commitment. In the end, the results of the “Joint Declaration” only follow Germany’s “own” moral standards, which means that the German government fulfills its obligation to deal with the genocide—but by keeping the effects and costs as low and predictable as possible. The refusal to pay reparations as demanded by the OvaHerero and Nama and to offer development aid instead thus creates the conditions for the impossibility of the apology. Never before have the OvaHerero and Nama insisted so strongly on the recognition of the genocide under international law as they did in 2021. Despite the aforementioned limitations of the law to claim reparations, this demand suggests a shift in collective ideals that could ultimately make the payment of reparations a moral obligation—even if it is one that is not legally enforceable. The lawsuit filed by the OvaHerero and Nama in the Windhoek High Court in January 2023 to prevent the signing of the “Joint Declaration” and to demand a direct participation in the negotiations and reparations also points in this direction (Theurer, 2023).

The discourse analysis of the German press in 2021 also indicates a discursive shift in the moral collective ideals. The link between moral responsibility and development cooperation is increasingly criticized in media reporting. Most of the analyzed articles agree that working through colonial crimes requires the recognition of the genocide under international law, the formulation of an official apology, and some kind of compensation. For instance, the Frankfurter Rundschau writes that “[t]he now agreed payment of billions [. . .] is to be understood merely as a political-moral obligation” (Huesmann, 2021: 7, emphasis by S.R.). The Süddeutsche Zeitung, in turn, states that “[. . .] the German state has not managed yet to apologize adequately for the crimes and to compensate the people [. . .]” (Anonymous, 2021a: 4). And the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung states unequivocally: “Whoever asks for forgiveness is in debt. He must first acknowledge his guilt and secondly explain what follows from it” (Bröll and Haupt, 2021: 2). These examples illustrate that the demand for an official apology for the genocide has become the moral collective ideal in media coverage. Not only does the obligation to apologize express the moral collective ideal as a performative practice, but it also readjusts moral registers.

In the case of Germany, the government’s attempt to define the terms and conditions for issuing an apology to Namibia explains the moment of impossibility. Especially since the OvaHerero and Nama have made it clear that they will not accept an apology that does not include reparations to the affected communities. However, both the OvaHerero and Nama communities, and German society consider state apologies to be necessary, as they are globally accepted instruments to fulfill the moral obligation to deal with the colonial past. The growing support for the OvaHerero’s and Nama’s demand for an apology and reparations in the German press, as well as the pending court case in Windhoek, suggest that the German government can no longer dictate the conditions of working through the colonial past. Ultimately, this highlights the performative yet ambivalent nature of negotiating the (im)possibilities of apologies.

Discussion and conclusion: State apologies in a transnational perspective

Finally, I would like to return to the question I posed at the beginning: Can we observe a new willingness in Europe to work through the colonial past? Looking at France and Germany, the analysis has shown the ambivalence in attributing meaning to the past. On one hand, working through colonialism has become a moral obligation. On the other hand, French and German memory politics, in dealing with the Algerian War of Independence and the OvaHerero and Nama Genocide, are exclusively oriented toward their “own” moral collective ideals. To unravel these ambivalences, I conducted a transnational comparison of French and German postcolonial memory politics. By analyzing the different emotional discourses, I examined how they structure postcolonial memory practices in the former colonizing countries. However, the analysis does not suggest a significant transnational relationship that would transcend the borders of the nation-state as I will illustrate with the following example.

On June 8, 2021—at the height of the debates of the “Reconciliation Agreement”—the journalist Arne Perras (2021: 8) writes in an article entitled “Europe’s Dark Side” in the Süddeutsche Zeitung that the “reappraisal of colonial violence was suppressed for a long time,” but is now being “discussed more openly.” The article is illustrated with two photographs, one from the war against the OvaHerero and Nama and the other from the Algerian War. The pictures are captioned as follows: “A German soldier guards prisoners during the war against the Herero and Nama. The photo was taken between 1904 and 1908 (top). The lower image shows the arrest of Algerian suspects by the French colonial power in 1956” (Perras, 2021: 8). Visually, the repression and violence perpetrated within the different colonial systems are placed in a transnational relationship. The chosen historical images complement the text of the article, which deals with memory politics in the present, linking past and present with the intention of pointing to the persistence of postcolonial hierarchies. The text departs from the planned “Reconciliation Agreement,” which is perceived as a “historical milestone,” quoting the historian Jürgen Zimmerer, and which would “send out a signal to countries other than Namibia.” Perras then reviews recent debates on dealing with the colonial past in Great Britain, Belgium and France.

Interestingly, the article does not explain why German and French colonialism are visually entangled in the article. Nevertheless, France’s postcolonial memory politics features in one of the sub-headlines, which states: “In France, President Macron has made it clear that there will be no apologies for the Algerian question.” While the French press treats the Algerian War exclusively in the context of French colonialism and in relation to its former colony, German newspapers often draw connections to other former colonial powers in Europe, making France in particular an important point of reference. However, the article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung as well as others analyzed for transnational references in German media coverage often lack precision in the portrayal of historical events or the developments in memory politics. For example, the Stora report as well as the debates about a French state apology to Algeria are hardly reflected in German newspapers. Rather, the reference to other former colonial powers and their memory politics is intended to emphasize Germany’s positive pioneering role or to scandalize its lack of it. In contrast to the German coverage of the Stora report, French articles talk about the “Reconciliation Agreement” and the planned apology, but without making any direct reference to the Algerian War of Independence or the debates about the Stora report a few months earlier. The only direct reference is made when Macron acknowledges French responsibility for the Rwandan genocide in April 2021—although French newspapers still conclude that “a state doesn’t apologize” (Koenig, 2021: 11) and “that ‘French mistakes’ in Rwanda cannot be compared with the genocidal violence of the German Reich committed in Africa” (Moïsi, 2021: 10). These few empirical transnational references between France and Germany illustrate the extent to which memory politics are still driven by national interests in both countries.

However, the methodological entanglement of postcolonial memory politics in a transnational Franco-German comparison could reveal the different emotional discourses and how they structure the practices of working through the colonial past in the former colonizing countries. The transnational comparative perspective on French and German postcolonial memory politics allowed me to analyze and to relate the simultaneous discussions of apologies that took place in 2021. The analysis showed, first, the perpetuation of power imbalances underpinned by emotional discourses. Second, it showed how emotional discourses were constituted differently in the two countries. As a result, in both cases, the reconstructed emotional discourses created conditions that made an official state apology impossible. Moreover, these conditions hindered the qualification of colonial violence as a “crime against humanity.”

In the French case, the colonial empire is not yet seen as a global system of oppression, which would allow colonialism to be recognized as a “crime against humanity.” Instead, the Algerian War is understood as a war between equal combatants and not as a decolonial war of liberation. Consequently, this perspective removes it from its colonial historical background in the 19th century. In this respect, the French discourse rejects a division of the warring parties in “perpetrators” and “victims” as too simplistic and one-dimensional. The French critique of Algeria’s claim to be recognized as a “victim” explains the prevailing discourse of reciprocity, which demands that the Algerian side also take steps toward reconciliation. Conversely, the analysis has shown that various political, media, and academic actors are working to establish a “historical truth,” that, on closer examination, is aimed at making the French version of the history of the Algerian War “objective.” However, the attempt to do so is countered by the emotional discourse of repentance. The construction of an apology for colonialism as an act of repentance primarily prevents a reassessment of French colonialism in its globality and thus serves the French nation to retain the power to interpret the past for the present.

In Germany, too, the genocide against the OvaHerero and Nama was not officially recognized until 2015. However, the historical context allowed for a clear definition of the “perpetrators” and the “victims,” which was the basis for recognizing a “special responsibility” for Namibia as early as 1989, long before the term genocide was officially used by the German government. Nevertheless, the recent recognition of the genocide “from today’s perspective” denies the application of international law, which would qualify the colonial violence as a “crime against humanity.” Instead, the government translates its “historical and moral responsibility” for the genocide into development cooperation, with the intention of avoiding any claims for financial reparations. It is important to note that the qualification as a “crime against humanity” does not lead to a legal right to reparations, as, for example, the French recognition of the transatlantic slave trade in 2001 proved. However, the recognition of colonialism and the crimes committed in its name as “crimes against humanity” would contribute to a shift in the moral collective ideals by consolidating the narrative of colonialism as a historical wrong that need to be redressed, including political action. In attempting to define the conditions for redressing the colonial past, Germany and France are primarily responding to their “own” terms for working through the pasts. In this way, the comparison shows how the power imbalance between the former colonized and the colonizer remains intact.

Despite the fact that French and German memory politics are oriented toward the interests of the postcolonial nation-state, the established moral collective ideals still make working through the colonial past an obligation. Consequently, dealing with colonialism, which has also facilitated the discussions about apologies, has performative effects with direct consequences in the social world (Ahmed, 2004: 114; Bentley, 2015: 627). The analysis of media coverage suggests that the “affective states” regarding the colonial past are changing in both France and Germany. In France, colonialism is beginning to be discussed as a global system of domination and exploitation. In Germany, media coverage increasingly supports the demands of the OvaHerero and Nama for recognition of the genocide under international law and for reparations. The debates about the “right” way to apologize have thus changed the public perception of the colonial past in public opinion and affectively inscribed it into German history.

In conclusion, the rendering of an apology cannot to be understood as a desirable end of the process of working through the colonial past as they hardly overcome their “colonialist and Eurocentric predicaments” (Yeğenoğlu, 2017: 18). However, their significance as an internationally applied practice distinguishes them as a moral collective ideal that has to be satisfied. While nation-states, as this analysis has shown, are primarily concerned with following their “own” moral collective ideals, they are also interested in maintaining their moral integrity internally and externally. Therefore, the negotiation of apologies—even when made impossible—opens up a discursive field in which the interpretation and meaning of the past can be reassessed. Working through colonial pasts—and this is true for both Germany and France—has become a moral obligation that requires political responses. This article has highlighted the ambivalence in the construction of emotional discourses in creating conditions that produce an obligation to work through the colonial past, while leaving the power imbalances between “the West and the Rest” intact. Furthermore, it pointed to the mechanisms of (im)possibility in postcolonial memory politics by reconstructing these ambivalent yet performative processes that are still ongoing. Future research should therefore work not only to theorize decolonial perspectives on emotions and emotionality, but also to analyze their effects in the longue durée to better understand their transformative efficacy in postcolonial societies.