Analysing History, Discourse and ‘Absence’ in Memory Culture in German Curricula: A Psychoanalytical Commentary

“History is to somewhat memory is to others...We do not remember, we rewrite memorymuch as history is rewritten.”, Chris Marker remarks as he takes up the role of provocateur and philosopher in his iconic documentary film ‘Sunless’ (1983). He makes numerous other iterations regarding memory, time and history as he uses the islands of Japan and Guinea Bissau to shed light on the liminalities shared by them, while making simultaneous references to colonization, occupation and reproduction of geographical as well as visceral spatialities. Since the classroom setting acts as a space that allows history to be remembered, recreated and reiterated, both the static and performative pedagogical aspects employed for such purposes retain a dialectical position spatio-culturally. Pedagogical spaces have spatial variations of their own, owing to regional and relational attributes alluding to the geopolitical specificity and cultural history of said space.

While there has been a growing scholarly emphasis placed on the complex relationship shared between emotions and memory in the recent years [1], it must be bore in mind that both memory studies and its association with affect are relatively fresh methods of scholarly enquiry. The subject henceforth is in development, and relatively under researched in the German context. Cronin (2022) elucidates how there is a stark emphasis on the Shoah (Holocaust), but barely enough context or content to understand the intricacies of Germany’s colonial legacy. Such politics of selective amnesia is observable in Germany’s treatment of Occupied Palestine (Ibid.), as the most prominent example at this hour. In a broader context, fractured remembering and mistreatment of discourses associated with displacement and genocide, occupation and deprivation and equipping a national memory culture instead results in a superficial and reductive understanding of the affective experience of colonialism Özyürek [2] in the classroom setting, as well as the public pedagogies that cross pollinate with institutional spaces.

Deleuze [3] marks affect as “a passage or transition from one state to another” and memory as a “membrane which in the most varied ways. makes sheets of the past and layers of reality correspond, the first emanating from an inside which is always already there, the second arriving from an outside always to come, the two gnawing at the present which is now only their encounter”. Drawing from Deleuzean thought, Zelbylas et al. (2014) perceive institutionalised pedagogical setting, as a space that serves the purpose of cultivating and subsequently transmitting and embodying memories. Since such memories are collectively and socially accomplished, so is the dialectical inculcation of the absence of the same.

The act of forgetting and remembering in the classroom setting is a bodily act. Since memory, emotion and affect are interdependent, inter-relational [4] and cross-pollinating agents, it is impossible to extricate them exclusively. This creates a body politic-in both its psychoanalytic and sociological functions that responds to stimuli drawn from the metaphorical, rhetorical and dialogical aspects of portrayal of histories and historical spatialities in the classroom setting. The cross-pollination between public pedagogies and institutional spaces such as classrooms renders the latter as a spatial apparatus that deliriously draws from its colonial amnesia [5] while simultaneously dissociating from the colonial roots of its horrors that at least in part can be traced back to the hegemonic cultural monopoly exercised by the gebildete elite [6] and discourse.

As a collective space that is both unable and unwilling to cater to the necessities of delving into an anatomy of a relatively cohesive and holistic past, the German pedagogical system is preoccupied with its deliberate dissociativity from its own primal wounds of sabotaging affect associated with recognizing a troubled past. This causes a disjunction between what is cognitively graspedand as Curti [4] efficiently analyses, as an inability to recognise a greater spectrum of how the bodies that interact within the pedagogical system create inter-relational environments and microcosms to produce memories of their own. In a Deleuzean purview, pedagogical memory then is rewritten in the classroom setting. Such memories are consolidated through the means of interweaving past traumas that are both individual and collectively constructed at a given time alluding to the specificities of the social setting. Such a social setting, at least in its culmination, shares a majoritarian, overly simplistic and reductive reading of histories of trauma, war and conflict. Subsequently and inter-relationally, it affects the affective realisation of concepts such as colonisation, power, hegemony and colonialism that by extension create a cognitive-affective dissonance through the means of the school curricula.

Oblivion associated with absent discourses regarding the nature and persistence of conflict might indeed influence one’s affective and emotional regulation and a generic ability to empathise with suffering, trauma, grief and pain. Özyürek [2] observes that immigrant students in the German classroom setting generally share a complex relationship with the German actors in the Holocaust and the impact that colonialism had on their lives. Exercising a fractured memory culture that rampantly encourages historical erasure and selective amnesia is dually responsible for creating apathy amidst the student cohort who are unknowingly engaging in spatio-temporal, cognitive and affective obliviousness as well as creating a secondary impact in their inability to empathise with the embodied memories of colonial repression that persists amongst communities that have suffered the impact of the same. Middleton [7] argues, drawing from Lefebvrian theory and Bernstein’s ideas of a pedagogical device that colonial spatialities are reproducible and proliferative in terms of spatial practice and pedagogical appropriation.

Bourdieu & Wacquant [8] refer to absence as being “the most radical form of censorship”. The absence of portrayal of previous trauma in a broader context leads to the construction of fractured knowledge systems that do not engage in supporting affectively reparative pedagogical environments. Colonial amnesia [5] as well as an overemphasis on postcolonial exotics (Huggan, 2001) in the German pedagogical setting has led to a recurrent pattern of reductive understanding of transnational justice, identities, bodies and pedagogies. Exoticisation of historical spatialities and deliberate repression of affect in the learning environment has long been observed to recreate patterns of repression that are then smoothly sustained in an inherently apathetic neoliberal information economy.

In contrast, and as a reparative advent point, critical memorialisation that allows one to come to terms with difficult histories and historical conjectures might offer possibilities of spontaneous construction and fluid iterations of reparative empathy. This might allow one to reflexively examine difference in existential and material identities in order to move towards a pedagogical politics of co-existence forged through critical melancholia [9,10] and the discomforts associated with anatomy of identity politics in the present hour that induce the possibility of reparative empathy.

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2. Özyürek E (2023) Subcontractors of guilt: Holocaust Memory and Muslim Belonging in Postwar Germany.
3. Deleuze G (1989) Cinema 2: The Time-Image. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, USA.
4. Curti GH (2008) From a wall of bodies to a body of walls: Politics of affect | politics of memory | politics of war. Emotion, Space and Society 1(2): 106-118.
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