Description
What does it mean to “move past” political violence undertaken in the service of hegemonic power structures? In the wake of the Christchurch massacre and the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol, policymakers have frequently turned to Germany as the prototypical example of a country that has previously reckoned with white supremacist violence. Yet the frequent invocation of German memory culture as a blueprint for other countries to aspire to papers over contention, hostility, and at times outright refusal to reckon with white supremacy itself. I suggest, instead, that the limits of memorialization and social change in Germany underscore the differences between symbolic and institutional reckonings. Using fieldwork and archival data from Berlin and Washington, DC, I show how the process of binding white supremacy to a particular historical era both erases and strengthens its continued presence, producing institutional continuity rather than transformative societal change.
