Erinnerungskultur • (er-in-ne-rungs-kul-tur) • noun
Definition: Memory culture
Origin: German
Last year, I read a book by Susan Neiman titled Learning From the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil. This book focused on how the Germans had worked to culturally recover from the atrocities they committed during World War II and brought into question whether America could learn from them in order to address our own racial conflicts. In no way did the book posit that the Germans had completely recovered and were no longer confronting the past, but it spoke about the various measures they had undertaken to continuously learn from their unpleasant history and strive to create a better future. Obviously, this book did not talk about ethnocide or the other concepts we use at SCL to describe America, but it did introduce me to new German words that can help us in our journey towards combating ethnocide. One of those words is erinnerungskultur.
Memory Culture
Erinnerungskultur literally translates to “memory culture” (“erinnerung” means memory and “kultur” means culture), and German people have adopted this philosophy for addressing the atrocities they committed during World War II, specifically the Holocaust and the war crimes of the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. Erinnerungskultur speaks to the acknowledgment that the horrors of the past cannot and should not be erased and that the task of a society is to figure out the proper ways to remember tragic events. Erinnerungskultur is a complex and sobering endeavor because in theory and practice it will never end, but it will evolve.
As part of their memory culture, Germany actively teaches about the horrors of the Holocaust and the Nazi Party. Berlin, Germany’s capital, has at least 20 memorials dedicated to the victims, and you can find more than 70,000 Stolpersteine (“stumbling stones”) laid within cobblestone streets throughout Germany and the rest of Europe. Each Stolpersteine is located outside of the person’s last-known freely chosen residence and begins with “Hier Wohnte” (meaning “Here Lived”) followed by their name, date of birth, and fate: internment, suicide, exile, deportation, or murder. They focus on individual tragedies and make remembrance incredibly personal and humbling; and in order to read the stone, you must bow before the victim. Memory is so infused with Germany’s culture that even affluent German families have conducted internal audits to determine if their ancestors were Nazi sympathizers and whether they had financially benefited from their atrocities. These investigations often expose the horrors that previous generations tried to hide.
The main point is that there will never be a stage where a culture no longer needs a memory or a history, and it is crucial to keep our memories accurate with all of its highs and lows in order to prevent being disillusioned about who we are and how far we’ve come. As time passes, the balance between remembering the highs and the lows will fluctuate depending on the needs of the society, but as human beings, we can never completely move beyond the horrors and only stick to the highs.
American society, unfortunately, is one that tries to only remember the highs. It actively works to erase the lows and distort its ethnocidal underpinnings: confederates and colonizers are propped up as heroes, Black/Latinx/Indigenous/AAPI stories get erased, and we are taught American Exceptionalism the first moment we enter school. America seeks to exist without memory, and I was reminded of this dystopian status quo particularly when the Trump administration and many American conservatives were outraged by The New York Times’ “1619 Project,” which retold American history in a way that included Black narratives. Just last week, President Trump tweeted that any California school that decides to teach the 1619 Project can be investigated by the Department of Education. By not making the effort to keep Black stories as a part of the narrative, Donald Trump and ethnocidal America deliberately try to erase us from memory.
The atrocity that is ethnocide equates to a cultural low that many Americans would prefer to forget. Similarly, many Germans following the war preferred to forget the genocidal atrocity that was the Holocaust and the mass killings of eastern European Slavs. The short-term and seemingly simple solution would be to merely ignore the atrocity and believe that your society has innately learned from the mistake while simultaneously covering up and ignoring the crime. This theory is absurd and can never work, but ethnocidal America forcefully tries to suppress the memory of the atrocities inflicted upon people of color. Following World War II, the international community refused to forget the crimes of the Holocaust and ensured that they became part of our collective memory. To this day, Jewish people from around the world consistently emphasize the importance of never forgetting what happened to them and their ancestors.
It is our duty to establish and protect our own memory culture in this country that deliberately tries to erase and exist without memory. We and all Americans have to confront the fear, dread, anxiety, and angest of addressing the past in order to inform the choices we get to make in the future.
The Altars Project
At The Sustainable Culture Lab, we not only discuss ethnocide, but we also cultivate cultural experiments to combat and defeat it in a way we refer to as Ethnogenesis or Cultural Naissance. All of our work manifests this desire for cultural change, and The Altars Project is one of our ambitious cultural initiatives that align with the message of erinnerungskultur.
Throughout the next few weeks, we will provide you with details about The Altars Project and how you can participate in it this fall. Be sure to follow us on social media to see live updates.