Singularity by Other Means: Germany’s Colonial Question and the Bureaucracy of Memory

This essay argues that the disputes over colonial memory now confronting former imperial powers are increasingly resolved not through historical argument but through administration. In Germany, the federal memorial-sites concept presented in late 2025 excludes colonialism, deferring it to a separate, under-resourced concept; at the December 2025 Bundestag hearing the long-running quarrel over whether the Holocaust may be compared with other atrocities was not re-adjudicated but routed around, with the singularity thesis functioning as a sorting rule that has been encoded, since 2008, in the funding instrument itself. Britain’s ‘retain and explain’ guidance and its settlements over Mau Mau display the mirror-image grammar: the historical wrong is conceded while its legal, fiscal and curatorial consequences are sealed off by administrative design. Reading the German episode alongside the British one, the essay contends that what these states administer is not the past itself but its circulation as public knowledge – which histories are funded, displayed and officially remembered. For a discipline that studies how historical knowledge is made and contested, this marks the passage of interpretive authority from the seminar and the archive to the cabinet table and the appropriations committee.