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 Archives of Violence The Holocaust and the German Politics of Memory Uli Linke This essay is an attempt to understand the transformative potential of public memory . My focus is on the modalities of symbolic violence in German culture after  and their historical nexus with Nazism and genocide. My research suggests that German public memory is infused with visions of corporeal violence that have persisted in a more or less unbroken trajectory from the Third Reich until today. In postwar West Germany, Nazism and the murder of Jews are contested and highly charged domains of cultural reproduction. The horror of the past inspires an intense fascination that generates both desire and repulsion. In a diversity of public domains (everyday life, mass media, politics, and leftist protest), the past is brought into focus through violent iconotropic repertoires that are seized for the contemporary construction of identity and difference. My work suggests that the National Socialist phantasms of race, with their tropes of blood, body, and contagion, continue to organize German political thought to the present day. Contemporary Germans invest bodies and physicalities with meanings that derive significance from historical memory: of Nazi atrocities, the Holocaust, and the Judeocide. These events are implanted in public memory through a repertoire of images and symbols , which, by nature of the violence of representation, sustain and even reproduce the culture of the past. Such mimetic evocations, while often tangibly inscribed on bodies, remain below the level of conscious acknowledgment because they exist in disguised or highly aestheticized form. My analysis of German memory practices proceeds by examination of a basic, organizing metaphor: the body. In post-Holocaust Germany, standing in the midst of the “ruins of culture” after Auschwitz, the body endures as a central icon of the past. Yet as Theodor W. Adorno suggests, this relation between body, history, and memory is skewed and pathological: “In all instances, where historical consciousness has been mutilated or maimed, it is hurled back onto the body and the sphere of bodiliness in rigid form [Gestalt], inclined to violence . . . even through the  terror of language, . . . as if the gestures of speech were those of a barely controlled bodily violence” (:–). Traumatized historical consciousness is housed in memory icons of the human body, and these images are in turn connected to cultural agency and political practice. In this chapter, in short, I examine how a specific form of “catastrophic nationalism” (Geyer ), which culminated in global war and genocide, reverberates in German body memory. BODY MEMORY AND THE GERMAN NATION German nation-building after  was driven by the formative power of a public imaginary that sought to anesthetize the trauma of war and violence. Indeed, postwar nationhood was dramatically confronted with the aftermath of the Third Reich: with the reality of wounded bodies, ruined landscapes, and mountains of corpses (Barnouw ). But in the complex attempts at national reconstruction, the gaze of ordinary Germans turned away from the past: the “powerfully visible enormity of the atrocities and the burden of their responsibility for these acts” (ibid.:xiv). The postwar experience, marked by mass dislocation, urban devastation , and political uncertainty, produced an overwhelming sense of victimization: Germans came to see themselves as victims of war, not as perpetrators of Judeocide (Bartov ). Moreover, with the conclusion of the Nuremberg trials, which led to the execution of prominent Nazi officials, the West German parliament began to pursue a “politics of the past” that was to impose a further closure of history : former Nazi civil servants, including judges, bureaucrats, and teachers, were exonerated by an act of amnesty (Frei ). Such procedures of postwar state formation were synchronized with the recuperation of a retrograde archaism of national state culture: older sediments of a cultural aesthetic of state violence were transposed in the remetaphorization of the political landscape. The deforming effects of historical trauma were thus domesticated by implanting into the political vernacular of everyday life residual memories of national belonging: ethnic Germanness, organic (blood) unity, and a racial logic of citizenship. Seeing nationalism as a generalized condition of the modern political world, Liisa Malkki suggests “that the widely held common sense assumptions linking people to place, and nation to territory, are not simply territorializing but deeply metaphysical ” (:). My analysis of the politics of German memory offers a schematic exploration of further aspects of this metaphysics. In postwar West Germany , national identity came to be dissociated from the very fixities of place that are normally associated with the spatial confines of the...

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