The duty to remember “it”: How Germans with and without a migration history discuss the role of the Holocaust

Contributing to research on how the Holocaust is interpreted in contemporary Germany, an increasingly pluralistic immigrant society with an official memory culture that has been criticized as hegemonic and univocal, this exploratory study investigates how Germans with and without a migration history talk about the Holocaust. It asks whether the emotions and attitudes of people with a migration history differ from those of Germans without a migration history. Drawing on six focus group interviews conducted with 36 participants (16 Germans without a migration history and 20 with backgrounds in the former Soviet Union, Poland, and Turkey), the study finds that interviewees embrace the idea of a “duty to remember” and that interviewees with a migration history in particular engage in relieving “the Germans,” often by making comparisons with atrocities committed in other contexts. For some (non-white) interviewees, the Holocaust had broader emotional significance, and they linked it to right-wing movements in the present.