The Holocaust in Public Memory Culture

Recorded march 22, 202. 'The 'German Catechism' Revisited: The
Holocaust in Public Memory Culture' a talk by Professor A. Dirk
Moses (Chapel Hill, USA) as part of the School of Languages,
Literatures and Cultural Studies Research Seminar Series in
association with Trinity Long Room Hub. Whether an orthodoxy about
historical remembrance exists in Germany is hotly contested, not
least by members of the intelligentsia and the political class who
enforce it. In a short article in April 2021, I called this
orthodoxy a “catechism” watched over by “priests” who conduct de
facto heresy trials against those who violate any of its five
articles of faith. While this provocative framing succeeded in
(re)stirring debate about Holocaust memory, it failed to prevent
excommunications of artists and journalists from polite society or
the cowing of academics. This paper looks back over 12 months of
fraught discussion about German Erinnerungskultur to analyse the
creeping illiberalism in modern Germany. A. Dirk Moses is Frank
Porter Graham Distinguished Professor of Global Human Rights
History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His
first book, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past (2007)
reconstructed postwar West German debates about its republican
democracy and coming to terms with the legacy of National Sociaism.
His second book, The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and
the Language of Transgression (2021), is a genealogy of the
genocide concept. He is senior editor of the Journal of Genocide
Research and is working on a book called Genocide and the Terror of
History. Learn more at: https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/