The Comforts of Provincialism: The History and Future of Colonial Memory in Germany

This article analyzes some of the historical causes for contemporary disputes in Germany over the commensurability of colonial violence and the Holocaust, which have once again intensified after Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. It argues that opposition to the use of colonial analogies by former German colonies such as Namibia to describe the situation in Israel-Palestine as well as resistance to the inclusion of German colonialism into official public memory reflect a long-standing, comfortable provincialism among politicians, historians, and the wider public in understanding Germany’s colonial past. Similar to their approach to the murder of European Jews during the Cold War, Germans have tended to filter the history of colonialism through narrow concerns with shifts in German sovereignty since the First World War. The resulting myopia has prevented acknowledgment of the country’s history of colonial violence on its own terms without tethering it to debates about either the Shoah or Germany’s relationship with Israel. To overcome this provincialism, the article advocates including the history of colonialism in the country’s public memory and drawing on insights from African history to shift how we speak about and research the colonial past.