Types of German memory culture for the Nazis and the Holocaust and sustainable memory culture for the future
Authors:   Asia-Europe Perspective Association, Kim Dongjo 
Published: December 2024

Through the teaching of history, political education, memorial education, the media and the broad educational field of Holocaust Education, Germany’s memory culture aims at historical and moral education which, on the one hand, should make National Socialism and the Holocaust historically understandable, on the other hand, should form personalities who can resist mass violence or genocidal violence. Educated goals are the practice of democratic skills and the development of civil courage.
Two apparently contradictory, but mutually dependent and formative tendencies can currently be observed: first, renegotiation and redefinition of national histories, and second, the opening of national historiography to a transnational or globalized perspective. The mediations between private and public memory are pluralizing. Social groups can be understood as memory systems that form a “transactive memory” in the communication between their members, in which each individual member acts as an internal memory and the other group members act as external memories. Since the forms of appropriation of history change constantly with the generations and the time interval between events, it is not easy to continue the previously successful practice of memory and mediation, but must constantly modernize it.
Memory serves as an orientation in a present for purposes of future action. For this reason, as Edmund Husserl has pointed out, “anticipations, ” that is, anticipations of something that will only exist in the future, play an at least as important role as a guide for the orientation of decisions and actions as recourse to pasts that have been experienced or imagined. In his concept of “anticipated retrospections, ” Alfred Schütz further developed Husserl’s distinction between retentions as recourse to past holdings and protests as later-oriented intentions, which has already shown the enormous importance of imagined futures for drafting and executing actions. The human-specific ability to situate one’s personal existence in a space-time continuum and to be able to look back on a past has the purpose of providing orientation for future action. Conversely, people can look back on a future that has not yet become reality. The grammatical form for this is the Futurum II - it will have been - its mental form the “anticipated retro- spection, ” the foresight of something in anticipation of the state of its realization. Anticipated retrospections play a central role in human action - every design, every plan, every projection, every model contains an anticipation of a state that will have passed in the future. And it is precisely from this preliminary design of a future state that motifs and energies are fed from the desire to achieve a different state than the given one. The prospective form of memory has given the human life form the evolutionary advantage of being able to assess advantages and obstacles in shaping the world and to be able to play through them virtually. The reference point of memory is the hoped future.
This opens up a much wider space than before for what is meant by memory. Non-simultaneity in action orientations and options become accessible both on the social and on the individual level, the gravity of self-images and habit formation or the depth effect of historical experiences on the conception of future plans or more generally: future-related action potentials are easier to understand. If the future belongs systematically to memory, one could develop a “theory of the future memory”. The privilege of the past over the present and the future in memory research would thus be history, as would the upgrading of remembering versus forgetting. Since every memory activity is a selective process, forgetting is constitutive for memory in general.