Why collective memory can never be pluriversal: A case for contradiction and abolitionist thinking in memory studies

Abstract

Bringing together memory studies with the emerging field of contradiction studies, in this article, I suggest the need for an alternative way of thinking about collective memory by juxtaposing the ideal of wholeness that necessarily underlies any group’s identity with that of the inevitable contradiction of the plurivers. I discuss the power of the Western narrative order in regard to the Haitian Revolution and examples of mnemonic disharmony in contemporary Germany and seek to illuminate the epistemic violence constitutive of this narrative order. The article therefore interrogates memory study’s epistemological foundation and the practices in which these underpinnings result. The aim is to highlight the potential of contradiction in an attempt to pluriversify responses to the past as well as future visions for the worlds we live in. Special attention is paid to the question of what it is we hope for when attempting to (scholarly) contribute to making collective memory more inclusive, and where the limitations of this might lie. The purpose of my contribution, then, is to explore the tacit imperative of harmony that often remains unchallenged in memory studies, and to propose a shift in focus, from the ways in which memory might help us understand (e.g., current clashes of identities), toward a research agenda that is considerate of its own entanglements with power, yet, at the same time, lives up to its potential to contribute to transformation.

I continued working on this article just a week after I got back from the Memory Studies Association’s (MSA) annual conference that, in 2023, was held in Newcastle (UK), and which I was fortunate enough to attend. There, I followed great discussions that seemed to mirror the wish of many colleagues to critically engage with the salient features of our moment, such as environmental crises, gross inequality, heightened racism, or gender-based violence. I really appreciated being surrounded by so many scholars who seemed to commit to not just being academics but also social justice activists. Yet, at the same time, my concern or even discomfort regarding how—if at all—the pressing political issues that a lot of memory scholarship addresses are theorized, and which had sparked an earlier version of this article, did not cease. Moreover, I became very aware of my own limitations to think in certain directions or dimensions, for example, to properly acknowledge the plant people whom the working group on memory and nature had brought into our midst, and whom I struggle(d) to see as anything other than what Western ontology and epistemology made of them: something opposed from and to be dominated by humans. ¹

Before going to Newcastle, I had already been wary of how the concept of collective memory is often approached, especially in constellations that involve struggles for inclusion into institutionalized public memory. ² Then, being at the conference and listening to numerous presentations that reflected different trajectories of the field and offered new perspectives on memory and its entanglement with politics of inclusion and exclusion made me realize where, despite my sympathy, my discomfort lies; that it is an epistemological problem. This realization helped me immensely to carve out the argument I wish to unfold in this contribution. It goes as follows: Collective memory will never be fully inclusive nor can it be the arena in which new solidarities emerge because it is epistemologically bound to the ideal of purity. Put differently, one cannot think about collective memory without upholding the premise of wholeness and its inherent demand of “freedom from contradiction” (Lossau et al., 2019: 4) that underlies dominant euro-modern ³ epistemology and the violence it has caused and continues to cause. Therefore, if we seek to pluriversify (Escobar, 2020) memory discourse in order to make it less harmful for those who were erased from the dominant narratives, we need to abolish the ideal of a collective memory altogether.

At said conference, where I voiced something similar, I was told that this was a radical claim, and maybe it is. Though, I do not write this to sound “radical,” it is not just a rhetorical move. I really mean it, and having more memory scholars seriously consider it a possibility, a necessity even, is the purpose of this article. That said, I am particularly interested in public memory, of recollected historical narratives and their “emplotment” (White, 2016: 56) in public discourse because such narratives can tell us a lot about the societies in which they materialize. In this regard, scholars such as Benedict Anderson (2016) as well as Stuart Hall (and of course many others) have theorized the interdependency of history and identity. Focusing on Europe, Anderson has shown how nation-states center their biographies around a founding myth. He conceives of nations as imagined communities whose trajectories, which emerge from a distant past and project into a limitless future, encompass a territorially defined population as an essential unity. Presuming that there is an interdependence between history and identity places value on events and historical figures that resonate with the perception of a supposedly unique culture (e.g., of a group, a nation-state, “the West,” etc.) and its distinguishing features, such as language and customs. Memory is therefore intrinsically connected to the project of establishing and upholding a national culture and identity (Hall, 2019). Scholarship on public and collective memory is of course aware of this and moreover assumes “that the process of telling and retelling stories of the past is a partial and a presentist process,” which means “that not all that happened is recounted” and that “the selection and ordering of past events is determined by the present-day needs of the storytellers” (Korycki, 2023: 161). This, we can conclude by relying on the vast literature on collective memory (Olick, 2008), points to a close connection between memory and identity, because “it is in the process of choosing and telling stories of the past that groups, or social and political actors, gain identitarian self-understandings” (Korycki, 2023: 161).

In a 2002 article, Wulf Kansteiner already aimed to criticize what he called “collective memory studies” and its shortcomings. For him, memory studies ideally is “a bona fide intellectual exercise, one that allows academics to respond to the most interesting philosophical legacies of the past century,” because “through the concept of memory, we can demonstrate [. . .] how representations really work and how the power of representation can be explained” (Kansteiner, 2002: 180). Kansteiner then suggests that, for memory studies to respond to this challenge, it needs to broaden its methodology as well as further “conceptualize collective memory as the result of interactions among three types of historical factors” (p. 180). These factors that constitute “all our representations of the past” are, according to his analysis, “cultural traditions,” “memory makers,” and “memory consumers.” In part, I agree with him. Yet, at the same time, I think—and hope to show with this article—that these three factors are missing a very important dimension, namely the epistemology of the very concept of collective memory. Without considering the basic assumptions on which our thinking about collective memory is premised, we will not be able to fully understand nor tackle the contradiction that arises in the many current struggles to make it more inclusive. ⁴ Similarly, we will not be able to substantially contribute to reducing the violence of being excluded from an imagined community’s collective memory, because even if we think memory multidirectionally and aim for “differentiated solidarity” – concepts prominently offered to us by Michael Rothberg (2009, 2019), we will not illude the limitations of possibility that are intrinsic to the euro-modern tradition of thought.

For this reason, I increasingly incline to abolitionist thinking that goes beyond the project of making better what we already have and instead calls for daring entirely different imaginaries of what is possible (Escobar, 2020; Gilmore, 2022). Here, in my understanding, abolitionism does not only involve, as in its historic context, the abolition of Slavery, nor contemporary movements to abolish the police and the system of incarceration but also poses a more general quest to think and imagine alternative realities, of “worlding life on new premises” (Escobar, 2020: 4). In this vein, the “pluriverse” and pluriversal memory is something totally different than, for example, transnational or cosmopolitan memory. More than just adding to what’s already the norm in order to broaden oneness, the pluriverse entails a political vision for a reality “in which many worlds would coexist” and that hence departs from the ideal of the world as one unity (Mignolo, 2018: ix). Thinking with concepts such as abolition and pluriversity enables us to see that there is a fundamental contradiction between an inclusion into one world (in the singular) and the mutual coexistence envisioned through pluriversity. Contradiction studies, to which I will turn in the following, furthermore allow us to understand the power inherent in the contradiction itself, and can thus help to come to a more critical understanding of collective memory and the wholeness it aims for.

Thus, in order to make my argument more tangible, I will first lay out the theoretical basis that prompts my claim—namely, contradiction studies and decolonial theory, because it allows us to interrogate more thoroughly the contradiction between the imperative of oneness (Lossau, 2002) and visions for the “pluriverse” (Reiter, 2018). The theoretical part will be followed by a discussion of Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s work on the Haitian Revolution and the ways in which the radicality of its events have (partially) been erased from and tamed by narrative. Trouillot’s contemplations are particularly helpful to make us understand just how strongly the euro-modern epistemology impacts historical narratives and their politics of representation. Both of these sections will be rather abstract. Thus, in order to bring my argument home and make its implications for today’s politics of memory comprehensible, in the last section, I will discuss a trend in Germany to establish certain forms of memory as a social norm in order to keep its (supposedly) collective memory intact amid the many unresolved paradoxes of its plural society. This way, the first example (Haiti) will illustrate the extent to which the discursive construction of a memory based on the premise of oneness is entangled with epistemic violence, while the second (Germany) simultaneously underscores that assessment and opens up perspectives to rethink and contradict dominant approaches to collective memory.

Starting a dialogue: memory and contradiction studies

What is a contradiction and contradiction studies? Why is it interesting to engage with the concept of contradiction as a memory scholar? ⁵ Following Warnke et al. (2021), I wish to start from the assumption that the very term or idea of a contradiction, which includes the imperative of resolving contradiction, has become a discursive “ordering figure” that often stands in a relationship of tension to the many complexities of social life. The logic of contradiction entails the already mentioned “axiomatic imperative of ‘freedom from contradiction’” and thus becomes a means of control, one that “derives normativity” (Lossau et al., 2019: 4–7). This “Law of Non-Contradiction” can, according to Febel et al. (2023: 1–2), who trace it back as far as Aristotle, be “considered to be the foundation of all philosophy” and remains widely accepted. Yet, they continue, “[c]ontradiction is not only a philosophical concept, but also a form of argumentation, of structuring thoughts and framing ideas” (p. 2). Foucault (1972: 149) also considered this logic and calls it “the law of coherence” that orders us not to “multiply” but instead resolve, or at least manage, contradictions. Consequently, “demands to avoid contradictions can be used to create order or to eliminate unwelcome opinions and supposedly ‘irrational’ behaviour” (Febel et al., 2023: 2). Allowing for contradiction is, according to this rationale, viewed as irrational, while maintaining consistency is associated with reason and the ability to think (and act) logically. Yet, we should keep in mind that for Foucault (1972: 152), problematizing contradiction and the “law of coherence” should not be mistaken as an attempt at a new “common,” as he thought coherence to be an illusion altogether.

The claim for reason and rationality is always opposed to irrationality, which is predominately ascribed to the colonized/racialized, “mad” (Foth, 2014), or “queer” people (Edelman, 2022) who are conceptualized as “the lack of the human” (Wynter, 1994: 43). This dichotomy as well as the authority ascribed to “coherence” needs to be further understood in light of decolonial critique. Such critique has long pointed to the very problematic rationale inherent to such distinctions that underpin euro-modern epistemology and are constantly reproduced by it. During the period of what we now call the Enlightenment (though, one could of course argue that there have been multiple and contradictory moments of enlightenment during that period), knowledge became strongly inclined toward abstraction and hence disengaged from “nature” (Dhawan, 2014). By this logic, man (as in both human and male) is destined to dominate nature and must therefore comprehend that it is “other” to him (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 7). This does not yield the classification of humans as either “rational” (able to abstract from and thus rule the natural world) or “primitive” (unable to perform such feats of abstraction and hence subject to domination); rather, this discursive system also posits that there is knowledge to be gained from looking at “the other”—whether a person, place, or period of time. Otherness and the constant identification of what is other in contrast to the self is therefore inherent in Euro-modern epistemology, not only with regard to being human but also in relation to time: the “past” or “history” is demarcated from the present and future as its “other” (Allen-Paisant, 2020; De Certeau, 1988). This is especially interesting in the context of memory studies, because, as Allen-Paisant (2020) has pointed out, these basic assumptions on which the Euro-modern tradition of thought is based further rely on the “inexorable forward-moving logic of time” (p. 10).

Moreover, as Lossau (2002) explains, part and parcel of the contradiction (and freedom thereof) paradigm as well as of euro-modern thought tradition is the idea of our planet as “one world,” to which I already referred in contrast to the pluriverse. We find it in numerous discourses, ranging from policies targeting climate change to humanitarian actions in the name of universal human rights. The thought of one world, as Lossau (2002) writes, “relates to the ideal of peaceful exchange and mutual understanding, i.e. to a shared homeland for all human beings where conflicts can be resolved and harmony prevails” (p. 153). This idea of “one world” is also constitutive of the very idea of collective memory. Any singular world, be it our shared planet or smaller geographical or cultural units, needs to get rid of contradictions, or at least balance them out, in order to achieve anything close to a consensus and avoid the discredited chaos. Chaos, however, can, as Éduard Glissant (2020) argues, also be experienced and conceptualized in a positive way, understanding that chaos is productive because “all its elements are equally necessary, functioning in nonsystematic, unpredictable, and, therefore, dynamic ways” (p. 45). Julia Lossau et al. (2019) argue in a similar vein that, in order to understand the very idea of a contradiction in relation to power—from which public memory is of course inseparable, our reflections also need to include discrepancies, disproportions, aporias, deviations, differences, etc. that are declared as contradictory in fields of contested knowledge.

In what follows, I will show that cultural or public memory, which eventually aims at constituting collective memory, is one of the many fields of contested knowledge that contributes to the epistemic disavowal of contradiction by helping to structure and harmonize the chaos of times, stories, and anticipations. To study memory, something that cannot be thought of without demarcating what has happened from what is now, and to simultaneously attempt alternative approaches to time, is a contradiction in itself. It might not be an impossibility, but it certainly needs to be understood as a contradiction in order to get to the bottom of just how entangled memory scholarship is in the continuous reinforcement of dominant ontology and epistemology. Being aware of the knowledge systems underpinning and structuring how we conceptualize memory is moreover the necessary point of departure into the difficult project of thinking about memory in terms of pluriversity and a democracy yet to come, which can never be achieved by remaining within the realm of what we already know. That is because, as Jacques Derrida has explained, due to the many flaws of the current liberal-democratic order that result from the fundamental contradistinctions at the heart of its dominant ontology and epistemology, democracy is never fully present in the claim that democracy has arrived or been fully achieved. ⁶ Instead, it is conditioned by modes of silencing and domination that serve the purpose of freedom from contradiction in and of itself. It is in this sense that democracy is always still “to come.” Significantly, the “to come” here is not the positing of some horizon of possibility for democracy, as if it were just an ideal that we must move toward, exhibiting certain behavior or pursuing certain policies. Rather, the “to come” expresses the dislocation that structures the very possibility of democracy from within. Derrida distinguishes between “the future”—thought of as a future-present, predictable and programmable—and the “to come” which names an unforeseeable coming of the events, a rupture or disturbance that is unpredictable and open, without a knowable destination. In my understanding, the term “pluriverse” or “pluriversity” can add to this way of thinking about the unknown and the alternative possibilities it holds because it is premised on a similar notion of “radical rupture from the metaphysical structures of modernity” (Escobar, 2020: xxi). Memory, however, as I have more extensively argued elsewhere (Antweiler, 2023), usually adds to rather clear-cut future visions, with little room for the open-ended “to come,” which is why memory scholarship needs to start investigating its own regimes of truth.

“Unthinkable” histories as constitutive features of collective memory

I would now like to turn to the intriguing work of Michel-Rolph Trouillot, who offers so many valuable insights for memory scholars but is nonetheless mostly absent from our canon. In his work on the Haitian Revolution, he showed how the events between 1791 and 1804 that culminated in the successful revolt of the enslaved people of Haiti and the creation of the first independent Black nation-state became, what he calls, “non-events” in the process of narrativization (Trouillot, 1995: 70). The reason why I chose to discuss his work here is closely connected to the contradiction I am trying to trace throughout this article. Trouillot confronts us with the problem of the “non-event” which can be understood as the counterpart to mainstream discourse’s frequent evocation of history as a set of instructive case or even the “final arbiter of right and wrong” (Scott, 2020: 1), because it is not only the discursive figure of the “instructive-event” that is constitutive of the epistemic disavowal of contradiction within dominant memory work and research but similarly the “non-events.”

In the chapter entitled “An Unthinkable History,” Trouillot ponders how, within the hegemonial discourses that are productive of both history and memory, not only at the time of the revolution itself but also until now, certain events, “even as they occur,” cannot be “accepted” into the dominant storyline, as they are “unthinkable in the world within which these narratives take place” (p. 73). ⁷ To Trouillot, it is clear that rendering certain episodes “non-events” is a powerful act with immense ramifications, because if the Haitian Revolution was and remains an unimaginable incident, how, then, “can it be assessed” and retold? Moreover, as I would add drawing from Lewis R. Gordon (2019), Trouillot’s observation can be seen as a blatant example of a logic according to which only some people and their ways of life are regarded as belonging to the future, while all others are relegated to a past not worth preserving. In his 2019 TedTalk, Gordon refers to the dichotomy between “civilized democrats” and those rendered “uncivilized” in euro-modern epistemology. Yet, Trouillot’s considerations seem to go even further because, according to him, at stake is not just the (more or less) intended exclusion of “some people and their ways of life,” but something even more consequential, that is, the sheer unthinkability of certain events. What can be more fatal than something being unimaginable in its very existence?

As Trouillot (1995: 72) argues by quoting from a letter a French colonist wrote to his wife just months before the insurrection in Haiti, it was not just the revolution itself that was unthinkable; it was, on a more fundamental level, the desire of the enslaved people to be free that was incomprehensible, unimaginable for the colonizers, who thought of the colonized and enslaved in terms that did not include any such human impulses. And even though the revolution did turn the supposed “chimera” of freedom for the enslaved into an undeniable reality, at least in Haiti, it did not fundamentally change the perception of colonized and enslaved peoples, as we might assume today. Instead, it was the insurrection itself that “entered history with the peculiar characteristic of being an unthinkable even as it happened” (pp. 72–73) and thus remained a mere sidenote in world history. In this regard, Trouillot speaks of two different kinds of “historicity” (p. 106), differentiating between “what happened and that which is said to have happened,” although, in a similar way to scholars like Hayden White, Michel de Certeau or Beverley Southgate, he does not imply that the latter is fictional. On the contrary, he argues that the reality of the Haitian Revolution did not “coincide with deeply held beliefs” about the enslaved people on the island or about Black people in general, and that when such incidents occur, humans nonetheless tend to “devise formulas to repress the unthinkable and to bring it back within the realm of accepted discourse” (p. 72). Trouillot goes on to write:

“That fact itself is not surprising: the historical process is always messy, often enough contradictory. But what happened in Haiti also contradicted most of what the West has told both itself and others about itself. [. . .] How many of us can think of any non-European population without the background of a global domination that now looks preordained? And how can Haiti, or slavery, or racism be more than distracting footnotes in a narrative order?” (p. 107)

If we take this assessment seriously, attempt to think it through, and consider its political implications, it is a troubling one. Yet, I do not set out to answer the complex questions Trouillot asks at the end of the quotation above, however pressing they might still be. Instead, the reason why I have recalled his work in such length is its on-point observation of the following two aspects that are key to the aim of this article: first, the “non-event” as a constitutive element of memory and, second, the perception of history and memory as both “contradictory” (in itself) and potentially “contradicting” (to other, especially dominant narratives).

What I find particularly fascinating about Trouillot’s text is the clarity with which he connects what he calls Western ontology, the very core assumptions about “the world and its inhabitants” (p. 73), to the (im)possibilities of historical narratives, and hence, memory: What we cannot imagine, we cannot memorialize because, as Trouillot explains by quoting from Bourdieu, the unthinkable “is that which one cannot conceive within the range of possible alternatives” (p. 82). For, if the inhabitants of the “zone of nonbeing,” as Frantz Fanon (2001 [1963]) refers to the colonized (and others) that threaten to disrupt or undo a given order by laying bare the fact that wholeness, or oneness, is actually the primal contradiction of dominant discourse, if they were to enter history, the whole “Western framework” (Trouillot, 1995: 81) would be dismantled. This is particularly pertinent in relation to the ideal of Western universalism, because the danger such “non-events” pose is to expose the impossibility of oneness of being, of the one world, of any freedom of contradiction, and therefore, of a collective memory. Yet, for the purpose of managing contradiction and keeping the narrative order intact, Trouillot argues that dominant history-writing today employs two interrelated mechanisms which he identifies as “formulas of erasure” and “formulas of banalization” (p. 96). He demonstrates that both are strikingly similar to the modes of silencing the radicality of the Haitian Revolution that were at play during the time of the revolution itself, constantly reinforcing its unthinkability. In this sense, we can see how collective memory relies on and simultaneously produces instances of unthinkability, building on the “non-event” in order to uphold wholeness.

The impossibility of collective memory in a post-migrant society

It goes without saying that any form of (institutionalized) memory is infused with contradiction. Yet, despite its epistemic violence, it appears to me as if in both mainstream discourse as well as in memory scholarship, collective memory (and along with it, collective identity) is thought of as something positive—difficult to gain and maintain, but nonetheless desirable. It is, as I will demonstrate in reference to contemporary Germany, perceived as a necessary feature of any functioning society and, for this reason, as something that needs to be attended to by various means. Thus, historical education aims at collective memory in as much as performative acts of public commemoration do. However, there has never been anything close to a consensus when it comes to history and its functions in contemporary societies, not regarding the stories about the past, especially when they involve difficult histories nor in terms of temporality or the different imaginaries that varying understandings of time might prompt.

My main focus in what follows will be on contradictions of and within the “narrative order” that underlies the ideal of Germany’s collective memory, on the ways in which we can study these to the end of diversifying or even transforming our understanding of how memory works, and what we wish for it to achieve. Thus, shifting focus, the very idea of a group’s, even an entire society’s, “collective memory” might all of a sudden appear as a means to keep contradiction and dissension in check. That is, to put it simply, because for any memory to be collective, a certain narrative structure needs to be established. This means the histories to be memorialized need to be selected and agreed upon as being the ones most constitutive for the given group’s identity, and those stories that might contradict the dominant storyline need to be channeled and redirected elsewhere so that they do not cause disharmony. In this sense, the aim of the remaining part of the article is by no means a historical comparison of two very different events that are both referenced here—the Haitian Revolution and the Holocaust—but instead the scrutinization of how these are narrativized, though in seemingly opposing ways, to the same end of minimizing contradiction, and hence, to keep the illusion of collective memory intact.

We already know that constructing and upholding collective memory does not always work well, especially in societies that are shaped historically by violence or currently by transformation—for example, due to processes of migration—we find memories competing with each other for their respective place in the national (or even sometimes transnational) consciousness. Sometimes, this competition becomes so heated that the term “memory wars” is used (Stone, 2012); sometimes, memory laws are introduced to keep order (Balavusau and Gliszczyńska-Grabias, 2017). At the same time, the struggles for recognition often lead to instances in which groups of victims that are less prominent in public memory refer to those more prominent, especially to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, in order to make their desires more tangible and add weight to their cause (Rausch, 2022). This often happens less in an attempt to belittle the experiences of the victims of other atrocities but more as a result of the narrative order that credits some and ignores many other histories of violence and leaves the ones less heard with hardly any other option than the turn to comparison (Brusius, 2021; Samudzi, 2021). In this context, apparently, memory is a source of conflict—though it is also conjured for its supposed unifying potential—and dominant discourses tend to view divergent memories as undesired disruptions on a path toward mnemonic harmony, and hence as something to best be resolved. In an attempt not to give in to the logic of competition we need to understand that memory is not a “zero-sum game,” as convincingly argued by Michael Rothberg (2009). Instead, many different memories of violence are entangled with each other and could even provide meaning for each other, and thus, if thought of more in terms of solidarity, create a sense of shared experience rather than leading to a struggle against each other. From this point of view, different histories and memories can be talked about and even commemorated dialogically (Assmann, 2015), with the potential of creating more space for all.

But what about the contradictions? I am tempted to ask. Don’t we, by foregrounding the entanglement of memories, inevitably gloss over ambiguous narratives and the chaos they entail and cause, thus obeying the law of coherence in favor of mnemonic harmony? Moreover, to make the matter even more complicated, does this perspective not overlook the fact to which Trouillot has pointed our attention, namely that some memories remain within a zone of erasure and are thus not even re-collectible within the accepted narrative order? Looking at Germany and its attempt to uphold a collective memory in light of the undeniable fact that its society is both post-national socialist (Haselberg, 2020) and post-migrant (El-Tayeb, 2016) can help us to keep track of the contradiction at play in the very process of creating a relatable collective memory. ⁸

As I mentioned in the previous section, many scholars (mostly critical historians, e.g., Joan W. Scott) have pointed to the common yet problematic idea that history is a set of instructive cases from which we can learn for the future—an aspect I have also contemplated at some length elsewhere (Antweiler, 2023). In short, this view not only implies the specific euro-modern temporality that thinks of history as a linear, forward-moving process but also implies, first, that what has been in the past lies behind us and is therefore over, so to speak. Second, it relies on the assumption that looking at the past provides unambiguous lessons which, if internalized properly, equip us with the necessary tools to define and realize a better future. In Germany, that much we know, the most frequently evoked lesson is that of the Holocaust. We find it, for example, in the practice of encouraging (or, as demanded in 2017 by the then Minister of Justice Heiko Maas, even requiring) refugees to engage with the Holocaust—with the aim that the newcomers would eventually be able to better appreciate German democracy via a detour through history (Özyürek, 2023; Partridge, 2010). Demands such as those made by Maas in 2017 were immediately related to allegations of anti-Semitism and a lack of respect for German values that many migrants, especially those coming from Muslim-majority countries, have been (and continue to be) accused of demonstrating (Arnold and König, 2019). In the course of this debate, programs were developed in cooperation with memorial sites, NGOs from the field of anti-Semitism prevention, as well as integration courses, ⁹ to teach the people who have, since 2015 especially, arrived from Syria, North Africa, and Afghanistan, about the history and meaning of the Holocaust and to sensitize them to the values of German democracy on the basis of the lessons learned from history. ¹⁰ Questions about access to Germany’s culture of remembrance are thus no longer primarily discussed among educators but are taken up by a broad spectrum of civil society actors and politicians and linked to discourses about democratic participation and security. In this context, the U.S.-American anthropologist Damani Partridge (2010, 2022), who conducted a multi-year ethnographic study of educational programs on the Holocaust that were primarily aimed at Berlin youth with a so-called migration background, found that the programs he observed (including a memorial trip to Auschwitz) ultimately aimed to make the participating youth “less irritating residents within the nation-state” rather than “more equal members” of Germany’s post-migrant society (Partridge, 2010: 848).

Therefore, thus far, dominant German memory politics not only fail to adequately consider the multiple histories of violence Germany is implicated in but, I would like to emphasize, these memory politics are oblivious to the potential range of reactions the abovementioned refugees (and also others who are excluded from the hegemonic society) might have to Germany’s Nazi-history. While it is assumed that learning about, or from, the Holocaust will lead to greater respect for democracy and its core values, many of those who migrated to Germany since 1945 have reported a very different response to the history of their new home: something that might be best described as suspicion, a distrust in the dominant society of the post-Nazi state(s). ¹¹ That is, because unlike the assumption underpinning the logic detailed above, learning about the Holocaust, and engaging with its memory by, for example, visiting sites of former concentration camps, does not automatically prompt respect for the political order of post-1945, but might instead serve as a reminder, for those who are still targeted by racism today, to not get too comfortable among the descendants of the former perpetrators. This means that, for some, Holocaust memory pedagogy does not function as a reassurance that the lessons from history have been learned, leading to the wish to acculturate to German collective memory, but rather separates them from this supposed collective—yet, not because they do not care for democracy, but because they know better than the members of the mainstream society about the many repercussions of National Socialism and legacies of a colonial world-view and its racism in today’s Germany. Yet, despite this contradiction, a new norm seems to have emerged by which to probe what being German, or rather, becoming German, requires today, and an essential component of this norm is an engagement with the Holocaust. Other histories, be these in relation to colonialism or migrants who came to Germany only after 1945, as has been harshly critiqued in the past few years, find little or no consideration in this preconfigured collective memory (Arnold and Bischoff, 2023). Thus, is it possible to voice a call for a more multidirectional memory in an attempt to do all of these different histories justice, to grant them space, and to derive new forms of solidarity among those who are still considered as Germany’s others? But also, will this (a more multidirectional memory) solve the problem of Germany’s or any other plural society’s collective memory?

The politics of memory I outlined above mirror the assumption that memory scholars and practitioners share with mainstream society, and which I already mentioned afore: that a well-functioning society cannot do without a collective memory, and that the more diverse the society, the more maintenance and management its collective memory requires—as the German case clearly shows. As memory scholars we know that on the societal level, memory is a social construct and does not come naturally. We know how the process of discursively constructing collective memory can go wrong, and have negative outcomes if a collective memory primarily serves, say, all too nationalistic causes. But we nevertheless tend to leave collective memory’s usefulness, or even necessity for the well-being of society, unquestioned. Here, on the one hand, the concept of the post-migrant society helps us to further uncover why mainstream German memory discourse is as exclusive as it is. Yet, on the other hand, thinking about Germany’s memory problem in post-migrant terms can also push us to question whether inclusion or “differentiated solidarities” (Rothberg, 2019) sufficiently tackle collective memory’s inherent violence, and thus, if appealing to an imagined community’s memory will ever get us closer to the plurivers.

That is, because the post-migrant, or, in German language, where the term originates, das Postmigrantitsche, is premised on the conviction that Germany—and Europe—does still not acknowledge its inherent structural racism but instead continuously downplays systemic racism by locating it within some deviant “thugs” but not among the mainstream, let alone the educated elites (El-Tayeb, 2016: 11 (my translation)). Building on this, El-Tayeb argues that the only way to escape the patterns of marginalization on which German, and more generally, white identity relies, and without which it cannot exist, is a “drastic change” of the status-quo of racial capitalism (p. 24). Following El-Tayeb’s analysis, Oholi and Cha (2023) moreover suggest that the post-migrant offers a radical position, a standpoint that departs from a view on migration and plurality as problematic and potentially harmful to German national identity (and memory, I would add). The post-migrant thus entails a substantial transformation of Germany’s racist and antisemitic society and creates something new.

To take seriously the histories, memories, and responses to the Holocaust voiced by many current-day Germans with a so-called migration background as well as German Jews, whose presentiment and fear that they might be the next ones to die (Czollek, 2023) is mostly silenced, can be a way to stick with the contradiction that the post-migrant seeks to both remind us of but also let be. It would entail allowing Germany’s racialized “others” to complicate the current narrative order that strongly relies on the human-rights-centered storyline of having learned from the past (David, 2020; Moyn, 2014) because it brings to the fore that one can be deeply unsettled by Holocaust history for a variety of reasons. What is more, it would necessarily prompt not only a very different memory culture—one that is less about harmonizing some of the contradictions inherent to any plural society and hence keeping old hierarchies intact—but also a call for abolition and transformation. In that sense, the post-migrant can be related to the democracy still to come, as a potential that requires the departure from dominant imaginaries of what is possible and desirable.

In this constellation, there are of course several contradictions at play and what I outlined above is just one example out of many we might discover once we start following the contradiction within the ideal of collective memory, in Germany as well as elsewhere. We saw that thinking about public memorialization with the ordering figure of contradiction in mind, we soon find ourselves within those kinds of spaces that Foucault (1972) identified as being constituted by “multiple incompatible meanings” (p. 152). Yet, being epistemologically bound to the logic of contradiction and its rule to resolve the contradiction, work in the field of memory studies is almost automatically prompted to explain the tension within such a constellation toward the end of relieving it. Yet, if we allow for the contradiction to stick around and study it not for the sake of consoling the narrative but for the purpose of understanding how it structures public and hence collective memory itself as well as our way of thinking and theorizing about it—inclusive of our attempts to contribute to its inclusivity, we will start to grasp the constellations of power at play at the current conjuncture, find tools to critique them and, maybe, even create new (scholarly) spaces that commit to “radical rupture from the metaphysical structures of modernity” (Escobar, 2020: xxi).

The logic of memory revisited

As we saw, the very concept of a group’s or society’s memory is based on the assumption that, if composed and regulated well, it will provide stability and enable the respective group to move forward. Yet, this is only one view on memory. In contrast to this perception of memory, in a poem, the anti-colonial writer, philosopher, and co-founder of the Négritude movement, ¹² Aimé Césaire, writes:

Dear head I lose you again I lose my memory I don’t recover it don’t give a damn since right where I’m mutilated other limbs grow back (Césaire, 1948, trans. and qtd. in Allen-Paisant, 2020).

Unlike Césaire, who claims that he does not “give a damn” about losing his memory, most of the scholarship in cultural memory studies deals with the manifold modes of preserving and materializing memories, thereby almost automatically prioritizing remembering over not caring for memory. I am intentionally refusing to call the latter “forgetting” because forgetting is already framed as the antithesis to remembering and is thus something different from the ongoing transformation that might occur despite the memory loss described by Césaire. It is a common presumption that we need memory in order to continue living, though too much memory, especially the harmful sort, might petrify us in the same way that Lot’s wife turned to stone when she looked back in the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah (Heyd, 2004). This means that, in the academic sphere, there has not been much debate about whether or not we should remember—it is merely a question of how, not if we do it: to what extent, motivated by what interests and politics, in which media and over how many generations. Moreover, memory research and acts of memorialization rely on the idea of a natural “flow” of time, which presupposes a linearity structured along the parameters of past, present, and future. This, as I argued, prompts such assumptions as the aforementioned necessity of collective memory in order for a group to maintain its identity and ability to move on. As a result, memory is often studied in the light of problems that evolve around competition over recognition, an issue particularly pertinent in regards to “difficult history” ¹³ and the narrativization thereof. Such conflicts, as per the common assumption, might then result in larger issues concerning a group’s collective memory and identity, referring to a national conscience that traverses from the individual to an entire society. It is therefore impossible to separate the concept of memory from the notion of history and its corresponding temporality, or from the ideal of wholeness.

It becomes clear that at the very heart of collective memory there are two interrelated contradictions that are resolved in an intrinsically violent discursive process. Such memory not only favors some histories over others—in itself already harmful to all whose stories are given less attention and hence value—but also fortifies an ontology according to which some people are relegated to the “zone of non-being” (Fanon, 2001 [1963]), their actions not even conceived as driven by human forces, and the results of these actions rendered non-events. This alone makes memory, its discourses, practices, and studies thereof a political project that must be understood as such and examined not only in light of its fundamental ideas but also its ends. Therefore, given the current conjuncture that is deeply characterized by multiplicity and fragmentation as well as inequality and constant loss, we need to advance a way of thinking about memory that allows for alternative perceptions of mnemonic disharmony and the (im)possibility thereof, meaning, enduring contradiction despite the “law of coherence.” This way, we might also come to understand how the concept of collective memory can never be inclusive to all but is instead implicated in creating lives that are non-grievable (Butler, 2009). That is because, as Judith Butler notes,

“[t]he epistemological capacity to apprehend a life is partially dependent on that life being produced according to norms that qualify it as life or, indeed, as part of life. In this way, the normative production of ontology thus produces an epistemological problem of apprehending a life, and this in turn gives rise to the ethical problem of what it is to acknowledge, or indeed, to guard against injury and violence.”

And what other, at its very core, is public memory than an acknowledgment of life? In other words, those lives that are lived by “unintelligible creatures” (Fanon, 2001 [1963]) are lost to memory discourse and cannot touch us, nor prompt a feeling of being “implicated” (Rothberg, 2019), because such life has never been considered a life and has never been a part of the one world.

Problems at stake are related to “archival power” (Trouillot, 1995: 99) and the erasure which Trouillot calls “formulas of silence” (p. 96), and that condition the writing of history without actual mention of non-events. Moreover, the effect of “banalization,” which Trouillot (p. 96) identifies as the second “trope” in dominant accounts of Haiti, unfolds its power because it belittles the political force behind the revolution and narrativizes it in forms that do not grasp the fundamental ways in which the revolution contradicted Western ontology. Here, Trouillot’s analysis of the way in which the radicality of the Haitian Revolution has been tamed by dominant narrative structures can even be related to hegemonic discourse on the Holocaust, which, as Hayden White (2016: 56) convincingly argues, is also “emplotted” to the end of making its enormous violence more digestible and less troubling, thus less likely to spark calls for radical change. ¹⁴ Both White’s and Trouillot’s contemplations make clear the degree to which selective accounts of history are the result of a complex of power-knowledge relations that cement the narration of images and coherent narratives of history by reintegrating them into an overarching storyline structured by singularity (the world as “one”) and progress (Simon, 2006). Trouillot (1995) in particular has called out the contradiction that the Haitian Revolution posed to the story that “the West” had maintained about itself. For this storyline to hold, incidents that challenge or contradict it either discursively transform into non-events or, at best, are translated into a language and framed within a narrative structure that makes them consumable, as it so often happens in regards to the Holocaust (Didi-Huberman, 2017).

It is for this reason that I claim that the ontological negation and epistemological silencing are also implied or, at least, not accounted for enough in memory studies, despite the attempts by many of us to engage in social change. The ideal of collective memory to which one ultimately appeals when calling for inclusion, aims to reconcile potentially conflicting narratives about the past in order to then achieve a certain degree of harmony on the level of a society and even beyond. In contemporary Germany, the post-migrant society will not be acknowledged by adding memories to its collective consciousness. That is, because these memories, especially if they point to shared experiences of ongoing racism and antisemitism, to femicide or homo- and transphobia, and the embeddedness thereof in the very fabric of German society, fundamentally call into question the very pillars on which hegemonic German identity is based. These memories are, more generally speaking, in ultimate contradiction with the images of Western nation-states that claim to be the bearers and chaperones of human rights and democracy, to be those on the right side of history (Scott, 2020).

Conclusion

In this article, I drew attention not just to the already established fact that memory, on the individual as well as on the societal level, is always fragmented and contradictory, but to its epistemological underpinnings that inevitably lead to collective memory being in constant contradiction with the quest for more inclusivity. In this regard, I pointed to the idea of memory as an asset that can stabilize imagined communities and argued that, because of this attribute attached to it, even if we recognize the need to adjust ideas about collective memory to the realities of today’s plural societies, memory remains intrinsically connected to the essentialism that underlies the illusion of a nation. Therefore, I suggest that instead of holding the possibility of opening up space for currently marginalized groups and their memories, the institution of collective memory serves as a means to manage the contradictions that arise in any plural society by creating certain norms for memorialization. Subsequently, by pondering the question of whether we need a collective memory at all, I made a case for transforming some of our fundamental assumptions about memory and its function in today’s societies as well as recognizing its limitations to create more just spaces. In this way, I tried to highlight the potential of contradiction studies in an attempt to think about what it means to pluriversify responses to the past and its corresponding future visions for the worlds we live in. Thus, the purpose of this article was to explore the tacit imperative of a single story and the ideal of oneness that lies at the heart of collective memory. The dominant narrative order often remains unchallenged in memory studies primarily because we as memory scholars lack critical engagement with “our” epistemology. This often results in an appeal to the ideal of collective memory in our engagement for change. This article, instead, made a case for an engagement with abolitionist thinking beyond the inclusion paradigm.

My assertion poses both challenges and opportunities for memory studies. To investigate memory alongside contradiction as well as beyond contradiction might involve looking at the past and how it is “emplotted” (White, 2016: 52) from new angles in order to understand how contradictions are epistemically and ontologically “bound” (Lossau et al., 2019: 7). At the same time, it also means allowing oneself, as a researcher, to come to unfamiliar, maybe uncomfortable places and conclusions. In this way, we might be better equipped to think about alternative ways to speak about difficult histories that lay open the cracks in the dominant narrative order through which we can then invite in different images and stories than the ones implied in dominant discourse. These other images and stories might open up “spaces of dissension” (Foucault, 1972: 152), which can then be cherished “as spaces of multiple incompatible meanings” (Lossau et al., 2019: 7) and not discredited as too chaotic. Drawing from the above, we saw how in a constellation like current-day Germany, which is, indeed, shaped by “multiple incompatible meanings,” the logic of contradiction calls for order. For the critical thinker, however, this also holds the temptation to stick with the contradiction too, first, identify the ordering mechanisms, and second, in staying with disorder, envision plurality anew. This way, so my optimistic attempt at a conclusion, opening up spaces for different lessons from and perspectives on the past, a pluriversal memory landscape that nurtures contradiction can contribute to the project of democracy yet to come (Derrida, 2006) because it reminds us of our current democracy’s internal compromise or flaws. As explained above, the “to come” in Derrida’s formulation points to a transformative and disruptive potential at the heart of democracy, it points to a promise of change in the here and now. A transformation to which I suggest memory studies subscribe and will be able to contribute because it is concerned with some of the narratives at the very basis of euro-modern ontology and epistemology as well as those that have the potential to deeply unsettle this order.