Professor Jennifer Yoder\u2019s talk on German Chancellor Angela Merkel revolved around a central political discourse known as memory politics\u2014that is, integrating imagery from a society\u2019s past into the present in order to facilitate a certain course of movement into the future. In Merkel\u2019s case, this manifested itself in using past discourses about Germany in order to take responsibility for the past and push for a more conscientious future.<\/p>\n
Angela Merkel is both the first East German and the first woman to serve as Germany’s Chancellor. In many ways, she acts as a challenger of tradition: someone to shake up norms, whether those be in politics or culture. Germany has long lived with its WWII actions coloring others\u2019 opinions of the country, and one might assume that, like her predecessors, Merkel would attempt to distance today\u2019s Deutschland from its history. However, by employing memory politics, Merkel actually continues the commemoration of those lost in the \u201cShoah\u201d and ethnic German expulsions in order to create a humanitarian vision for the future. Though she reintegrates the past through educational programs and memorials, the overall effect is to motivate the German populace to culturally enact changes so that genocides like those of the mid-20th century never occur again.<\/p>\n
When looking into memory in tandem with governance, the discussion turned to maintaining a balance between remembrance and national pride. Angela Merkel did eventually feel the effects of her \u201cunapologetic commitment to admitting German involvement in WWII\u201d, as Prof. Yoder put it: those German and not alike wondered if she too aggressively was advocating for shame for her country, rather than pride for how far the nation has come. However, I share the view with Prof. Yoder that Merkel is working not under the motive of anti-nationalism, but rather towards creating a sense of solidarity within the European Union and between German politics and those who have been negatively affected by it in the past. Merkel works more toward reparations with these memory politics. If she had not touched the wounds of the past, they would have festered. By disallowing for ignorance regarding the issue, the country has had to address and evolve from its past mistakes.<\/p>\n
Questions I had moving forward from this talk mainly center around extrapolation: what are ways in which our political state might draw influence from Chancellor Merkel\u2019s memory politics? Germany has numerous museums, memorials, and educational programs \u201cto remember the cultural traumas of WWII and the Holocaust,\u201d (Yoder) yet we in the US only within the last decade opened a museum of African-American history in our capital. Constantly, race relations are brought up but minimized; people today suffer from melanin-based discrimination on an us-vs-them formula instituted during chattel slavery. As Alexey Rizvanov stated in his blog post, “Money is not a good payment for the death of millions, and the argument that ‘It wasn\u2019t me,’ is not good enough. ” Presidents have spoken extensively about the United States\u2019 morally reprehensible relationship with slavery in the past. However, though race-based discrimination has been banned de jure<\/em>, action to remedy de facto<\/em> negative codes of conduct has not been taken. Because of this, it would seem that memory politics help us to heal these festered wounds, but only if actual action is taken in tandem with the inspirational speeches.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Professor Jennifer Yoder\u2019s talk on German Chancellor Angela Merkel revolved around a central political discourse known as memory politics\u2014that is, integrating imagery from a society\u2019s past into the present in order to facilitate a certain course of movement into the future. In Merkel\u2019s case, this manifested itself in using past discourses about Germany in order … <\/p>\n