ABSTRACT
This book is an attempt to understand social memory. My focus is on the continued existence of social and symbolic violence in German culture after 1945 and its historical connection with Nazism and genocide. My research suggests that the German political imaginary is infused with a racialized violence that has persisted in a more or less unbroken trajectory from the Third Reich until today. In postwar West Germany, Nazism and the murder of Jews are contested and highly charged domains of cultural reproduction. The horror of the past inspires an intense fascination that generates both desire and repulsion: In a diversity of domains (everyday life, mass media, politics, and leftist protest), the past furnishes narrative material for the contemporary construction of identity and difference. Postwar West German perceptions of Nazism and victimhood entail both inversion and continuity, dissociation and invocation. But my work suggests that the National Socialist aesthetics of race, with its tropes of blood, body, and white skin, continue to organize German political thought to the present day. Contemporary Germans invest bodies and physicalities with meanings that derive significance from historical memory: of Nazi atrocities, the Holocaust, and the Judeocide. These events are implanted in social memory through a repertoire of images and symbols, which, by nature of the violence of representation, sustain and even reproduce the culture of the past. Such mimetic evocations, while often tangibly inscribed on bodies, remain below the level of conscious acknowledgment because they exist in disguised or highly aestheticized form (see frontispiece).
