Outside the German Bundestag, flags fly some of the staff, and inside, wreaths have been placed on the speaker’s desk. Many members of Parliament are dressed in black, as are many guests. Dignitaries deliver speeches, which are won by devout applause.

Every year since 1996, the victims of the Nazis have been commemorated in the Bundestag on January 27, a date that is found in the whole family as the day of the Holocaust memory. Auschwitz fields, and commemoration is in the center of the “culture of memory” of Germany.

There are more than three hundred Nazi commemorative sites and documentation centers in Germany. Students report on national socialism in history classes. Some of them also ancient concentration fields, where the memorials teach them about the atrocities committed through the Nazis.

As a nation, Germany has experienced large -scale war crimes, such as Auschwitz’s judgments. German tracked its own ancient participation in Nazi crimes. Even to this day, the major guards in the Matar Nazis centers are still in trial.

The day of the Holocaust memory is a darker bankruptcy reminder of German history. Germany Nazi began World War II, with its many millions of deaths, and was guilty of the systematic homicide of 6 million European Jews, as well as a lot of thousands of other suffraors of Nazi terror: the Sinti and the Romani were attacked, Like political opponents, homosexuals and other people with disabilities.

“The culture of remembrance is collective wisdom, and a remembrance of the past,” said Saba-nur Cheema, a political scientist and journalist. In the case of Germany, reminiscence of the Holocaust is central, as well as an examination of National Socialism. “Other issues have become increasingly vital in recent years, such as East Germany’s postwar dictatorship and Germany’s role as a colonial power.

Other young people might think that Germany has cultivated a culture of memory.   However, the attorney general who brought Auschwitz crook in Frankfurt in front of the wonderful resistance, Fritz Bauer, is considered to have said in the 1960s: “The enemy territory begins when I leave my office. ” Bauer was Jewish. He only survived the Nazi era as he fled from Sweden.

Holocaust Remembrance Day for the victims of National Socialism was only instituted in Germany in 1996. It has never been designated a public holiday.

The commemoration of Nazi crimes has been directed to hostility, in specific through the right end and the correct wing populists in Germany. Jens-Christian Wagner, director of Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorial, a former Nazi concentration camp near Weimar, took a transparent position opposite to the election of Germany (AFD) in Thuringia. In the past, Wagner has accused the game of containing elements from afar, and wrote in X that he won threats.

“Almost every memorial site faces vandalism and Holocaust denial. But you also see the debate intensifying locally,” said Veronika Hager, of the Souvenir, Duty and The Long Run (EVZ) foundation, whose project is to maintain the reminiscence of the National Socialist persecution alive alive. “Statements that we would have rejected 10 years ago as excessive in society as a whole are now much more popular. “

The AFD coefficient Alice Weidel did the following during a television interview: “There is no doubt that Adolf Hitler was an anti -Semitic socialist, and anti -Semitism is basically. ” This is aligned with the past statements made through AFD colleagues, such as former chef Alexander Gauland, who played in the Nazi era as a “poison of birds undeniable in history. “

“The objective is to melt the situation, so that we end up without talking about what happened. The danger is that the risk raised through the right -wing nationalist teams can then be intangible and more concrete,” said Chema declared.

Michel Friedman is one of many new studies that have for years drawn attention to the spread of anti-Semitism and racism. He is very critical of the existing “culture of remembrance”.

“If we had done our homework, this shameless and brutal hatred of Jews would be endemic,” he said in an interview with the New Germans’ magazine Der Spiegel.

For him, as for Jewish organizations and associations in Germany, the “culture of memory” is too ritualized, too anchored in the past.

“As important as it is to deal with the dead Jews, our responsibility must lie with the living Jews. And life in Germany is not good for them,” he said.

In years, the number of incidents and attacks attributed as anti-Semitic has been highest in Germany. For some, this shows that this country’s “culture of memory” has failed.

The culture of the country’s memory and the coverage of Jewish life are noticed as intrinsically linked: classes beyond have the intention of producing daily works today. expects the culture of memory to produce anything that cannot.

“A culture of reminiscence is not the same as prevention and combat opposite to anti -Semitism,” Wilson said. The compassion that can be felt when visiting a commemorative site does not translate to the existing one, and that does not lead other people to recognize anti -Semitic codes and conspiracy theories in society.

“Instead, we have to realize that our antisemitism prevention concepts have failed in parts,” he said.

Many facets of the German memory culture have been discussed and debated through historians and in the media, and some dispute the uniqueness of Nazis crimes, for example. Thousands of deaths represent the schism, and has revealed a fracture in German society.

For example, the explanation “never being now” can have meaning differently in Germany today. The slogan was sometimes used to explain the feeling that Nazi crimes deserve to take place again, and many other people interpret it as an explanation of solidarity with Jews and Israel. However, this same slogan was also shouted in solidarity with the Palestinian Pro-Palestinian manifestations since the war in Gaza began more than 15 months.

Since the remarkable speech of former Foreign Minister Angela Merkel in the Israeli Parliament in 2008, when he said that Israel’s security was “an explanation for which for the State for Germany”, the aid for Israel has been a component of the duty of Germany: Component of its culture of culture of culture of culture of culture of culture of reminiscence. For some in Germany, this means that its culture of reminiscence is not inclusive and is not designed for the society of immigrants combined today. But the journalist Chema does not agree.  

“I wouldn’t say it wasn’t designed for this. Because civil society itself shapes a culture of memory,” he said.   However, in general from Germany to Israel in the Gaza war, which he justified with his own history, he was strongly criticized, “even through many young immigrants. “Cheema said they were asking queries like, “Why are the Palestinians this way now?”In fact, “this is not a bad query to ask,” he added.

She believes the slogan, “Free Palestine from German guilt!”, often chanted at protests, is primarily a political message and not an attack on the culture of remembrance. The Research and Information Center on Antisemitism in Berlin, on the other hand, assessed the slogan in a report as a “desire to draw a line under the Nazi past.”

Discussions like these are perhaps a sign that there are many “cultures of remembrance” in Germany — not just one.

Veronika Hager of the EVZ Foundation suggests a breakthrough.

“There are so many things we can specifically examine in our daily environment. For instance, company trainees could review their own firm’s activities during the Nazi era, or one could find out which residents in specific houses were murdered. Such activities could be undertaken with young people, whether they have an international background, or not,” she said.

What is little discussed in Germany are the biographies of the authors of their own family. The journalist Friedman, who is Jewish, said one day: “You know, there are millions of fresh witnesses! Look what your grandparents, superiments and grandparents have done!”

It can be the next step in the progression of the culture of reminiscence in Germany. “I never need to get to the point where we say:” Then, now we have the best culture of reminiscence “and that I put a check next to it,” Hager said. “For me, it is anything discursive that moves and moves.

This article was first written in German.