Desiring Memorials: Jews, Muslims and the Human of Citizenship

Germany is hailed as a successful model of facing difficult pasts. Based on ethnographic research in civic education, this article situates Holocaust commemoration within German secularism. It brings together memory, Palestine and African-American studies to articulate how Holocaust memory manages an enduring crisis of citizenship. This crisis is predicated upon the disparity between the ideal of freedom and the reality of ethno-religious difference. The article demonstrates how Holocaust memory has been institutionally folded into secular time leading to a more liberal nation-state. It further explores memorial sites as extensions of secular governance, but also spaces in which embodied forms of memory, such as the Palestinian experience of catastrophe enter and desire an extension of this humanity. This notion of humanity co-produces the figure of the “anti-human.” This figure is enabled by an older strand of antisemitism and has an “afterlife” in the real or imagined body of the “Palestinian-Muslim troublemaker.”