Beyond Erinnerungsmania and white blindness: A radical entanglement approach to Germany’s Erinnerungskultur

Abstract

Germany’s Erinnerungskultur—long praised as a model for confronting historical violence—has reached a critical impasse in the face of Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza (2023–2025). While originally developed to reckon with the crimes of the Holocaust, this memorial framework now reveals deep historiographic, epistemic, and ethical limitations. This article presents Erinnerungskultur as a form of state-directed memoro-politics, exposing its reliance on selective narratives and its complicity in legitimizing current forms of oppression. In response, the article proposes a radical entanglement approach to memory culture: one that challenges hegemonic structures and explores instead subjugated bodies of experiences and memories, bringing to the fore previously excluded or disqualified mnemonic perspectives. Rather than isolating historical traumas, this approach highlights their structural continuities and points of convergence—whether between the Holocaust and the Nakba, or among other entangled histories of violence, displacement, and resistance. In doing so, it seeks to contribute to reshape German Erinnerungskultur in particular, and memory culture in general, as a space for critical self-understanding, transhistorical solidarity, and empathetic political engagement.