Paper short abstract:

The term Palestine in Jewish biographies and Holocaust archives signals survival. This paper explores this telos of survival as part of a national pedagogy to inculcate a sense of repair and belonging in Germany, and how Palestinians reach through sediments of history to recover their experience.

Paper long abstract:

In the last two decades, Holocaust history and memory has shifted from a "difficult heritage" (Macdonald 2018) to an agreeable past. As a genocide that has been publicly acknowledged and monumentally displayed, the Holocaust is not an obstacle to a collective national self anymore. Quite the opposite, as a history of sedimented layers of violence against Jews and Others, it serves in the national narrative of Germany to justify the censoring, canceling and even the denial of basic human rights of current political, ethnic, racial and religious minorities. Moreover, Holocaust education is heavily deployed to inculcate a sense of belonging in Germany through the repair (Wiedergutmachung) of the genocidal past. This repair is placed on the relationship to the figure of the Jew, replaced from the 6 million victims of the Holocaust to historical Palestine-turned-state of Israel, often conflated in public discourse with a Jewish collective.

The layering of History includes the violent dispossession and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948, to be precise only in the term Palestine. This paper has its starting point in museums and archives that display Holocaust history and Jewish survivor biographies in civic education programs that target predominantly immigrant groups in Berlin. Although, these educational initiatives have been critiqued by anthropologists as reproducing racism and racial hierarchies (Partridge 2010; Doughan 2022; Ozyurek 2023), this paper seeks to address "the minor detail" (Shibli 2016) of Palestine as a way of building a different kind of ethical relationship with past violence and the notion of belonging.