Paper Short Abstract:

This paper explores modes of colonial remembrance among German and Spanish museum actors, and how their practices engage with ongoing struggles to redefine national memories in both countries. We are interested in how these memory struggles tie into ongoing anti-progressive politics in Europe.

Paper Abstract:

In recent years, Spain and Germany have both faced ongoing struggles to redefine national memory narratives. In Germany, this debate is centered around how to deal with its colonial past alongside an already well-institutionalized culture of remembrance surrounding the Nazi era and the Holocaust. In Spain, struggles concern ways to remember the Civil War and to unearth memories and realities of the Francoist dictatorship. A critical examination of its directly connected colonial past is slowly entering mainstream memory culture. While activism to decolonize (Germany) and to de-Francoize (Spain) have received broad scholarly attention, those voices that have resisted the consolidation of new national memory narratives have not.

Concentrating on actors often positioned by activists as “accomplices of coloniality”, we hope to understand where their resistance stems from and how it acts. Our research focuses on two locations: 1) Cologne, with an ‘association of friends’ of a German ethnographic museum and the German right-wing party AfD (whereby there is no network-like connection between former and latter), and 2) Northern Morocco, with an association of former Spanish colonialists. Said groups engage with private and institutional collections and archives, with exhibitions and forums of debate surrounding memory. Many of our interlocutors shared self-perceptions of marginalization and being silenced, concerns about lost memories, and are engaged in museum practices as a way of home-making. We ask how these similar emotions and motivations inform their different practices of resistance, and how their actions engage with the ongoing boom of right-wing politics in Germany and Spain.