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Paul Gilroy offers “paralyzing guilt” and “productive shame” as two approaches to state and community engagement after genocide (99). He confers upon shame positive political and psychological qualities, including the collective impulse to repair historical harm. Yet it is paralyzing guilt that compels Germany to commemorate in perpetuity the genocidal wrongdoings it perpetrated against German and European Jews in the Second World War to the preclusion of proper recognition of and restitution for other genocidal crimes for which it is responsible. The specter of the Nazism rightfully drives both national and continental commemorations of lives taken so that such horrors might not be repeated: “Never again,” goes the maxim. The Nazi Holocaust provides the framework for the definition of genocide under international law. The 1951 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide formalizes Raphael Lemkin’s definition of mass eliminatory murder first published in his 1944 landmark text, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. The term combines the Greek génos (meaning “race” and denoting a group of people with a common origin or descent) with the Latin suffix -cide (meaning “killing”). Lemkin’s definition revolves fundamentally around colonialism, emerging from his study of the collective annihilation of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire and colonial projects in the Americas. The Convention posits a standard definition for prosecuting “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” and its passage in 1951 formally criminalizes genocide while implicitly codifying who can and cannot be killed.
In a recent iteration of the enduring debate about historiographic considerations of German genocide (i.e. whether Nazi genocide was a singular phenomenon as opposed to part of a historical arc or relational framework of German racial statecraft), historian Dirk Moses offers a provocation that analogizes dominant German memory culture as religious orthodoxy. This political catechism is governed, most critically, by the twinned ideas that, first, the uniqueness of the Nazi Holocaust arises from the hate-motivated desire to eliminate European Jewry: that “it was the unlimited Vernichtung der Juden (extermination of Jews),” which is distinct from the “limited and pragmatic aims of other genocides.”1 Second, the attempted racial annihilation driven purely by this antisemitic ideology...