Is Holocaust Memory Over?

How the German political and media classes have hollowed out the lessons of history

Editor’s note: The following text is adapted from a talk presented at “Der grosse Kanton: Rise & Fall of the BRD,” which was held in Zurich on 5-6 December. It was delivered on a panel examining the place of German cultural institutions within a global context.

IN 1970, FRENCH HISTORIAN François Furet published an article in Annales titled “The Revolutionary Catechism” in which he attacked social historians for defending socialist ideals rather than pursuing historical truth. In 1978, he published Penser la Révolution française, declaring that the “French Revolution is over.” It was over both because its memory had been politically instrumentalized and because its ideals were now part of the French consensus. 

I see evidence to indicate that we are reaching the same moment with Holocaust memory — for the same two reasons. First, in the view of millions of Germans, that memory has been instrumentalized to justify the Staatsräson: Germany’s unqualified support for Israel’s security. And, second, the ideal of preventing genocidal warfare has become part of the moral fabric of the public conscience: Holocaust memory has succeeded in this sense. For these Germans, the invocation of the Holocaust to justify the Israeli campaign in Gaza, which they understand as a genocidal war, has led to a crisis of confidence in Holocaust memory as officially propagated in Germany and in the West. For them, Holocaust memory has more than run its course or passed its used-by date; it has been abused to death by the German political class.

What do I mean by the slow death of Holocaust memory? I observe in many media that the younger generation has been so shocked by Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, by the support of Western states, and by parts of their presses’ partisan stance on the carnage, that it has concluded that this war rather than the Holocaust represents the Absolute Evil of the age. What is more, its members observe that this evil is justified with an elite understanding of Holocaust memory as “never again-a-genocide-of-Jewish people” in particular and not of people in general. In other words, they argue that Holocaust memory, which was designed to prevent the worst, is being used to motivate and justify the worst. And they feel outraged — and betrayed. 

The “walls of dead children” through which one must speak, as the former Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz recently put it, have understandably led to high emotions, expressed in slogans and chants at demonstrations that have upset the delicate sensibilities of German journalists and politicians. Not trusting these journalists and politicians, younger people have found their own sources of information on social media where they can tune into atrocities livestreamed by Palestinian journalists until they themselves are killed. And in the videos made by Israeli soldiers exulting in their destruction or dancing in the underwear of Palestinian women found in the destroyed apartments that they have ransacked. Tellingly, the deaths of Palestinian journalists did not lead to the broad public support that we are finally seeing for the German journalist Sophie von der Tann¹ in withstanding the defamatory campaign against her. People are seeing double standards and react accordingly.

However, rather than face the fact that German and Western publics express revulsion at the death and destruction in Gaza, their political classes have decided that the medium and not the message is the problem. Social media is to blame, we hear. It’s because China and Qatar control the algorithm of TikTok that teenagers are seeing “walls of dead children.” Their solution is to change the ownership of TikTok so that pro-Israel messages flood their phones instead. 

The political and media classes have reason to be apprehensive. Were it not for the independent journalist with her phone in Amsterdam, who filmed Israeli soccer fans running amok against Dutch citizens, we would have been stuck with the lie propagated by the mainstream media that a “pogrom” against the Israeli fans in Amsterdam had been perpetrated by those very victims of those soccer fans. Only once this journalist placed her footage online were mainstream stations compelled to correct their coverage. 

All that separates us from the world predicted by George Orwell are independent sources of information and the healthy instincts of publics who have drawn a universal lesson from the Nazi past, namely that the near-total destruction of a region like Gaza is illegitimate, criminal, unacceptable: even in the face of the deplorable Hamas-led attack on Israeli communities more than two years ago.

The Israeli genocidal counterinsurgency, its bid for permanent security by killing sufficient Palestinians and creating conditions calculated to destroy them in part so they are induced to self-deport — an aim stated openly and continuously by leading Israeli ministers and media personalities — this is now understood by vast numbers of people now as an Absolute Evil, and genocide is the word they use regardless of the legal technicalities. 

Yet Western governments and media have offered justification or trivialization of these claims in the same breath. Can they be surprised by the crisis of confidence in the media, evidenced by academic studies, and that people are turning to alternative sources and political parties? The logic of the postwar order, built on ethnic cleansing and the acceptance of genocidal warfare (as opposed to a very narrow and almost impossible to prove definition of genocide), was becoming apparent, and world publics are rejecting it. 

I take no pleasure in having predicted this outcome in various publications. Years ago, it was already obvious that Holocaust memory and related antisemitism accusations were used to silence opponents. They have culminated in the absurdity of the Israeli ambassador denouncing the Israeli philosopher Omri Boehm for antisemitism because he advocates for a binational polity in his homeland in which everyone enjoys equal rights. 

The memory logic of the postwar order — never again genocide and never again antisemitism — has now reached its conclusion in a paranoid search for those disloyal to ethnonational fundamentalism. And the public is drawing the conclusion the associated memory culture, which has been imposed and not developed organically from learning processes, and its imperatives of “never again is now,” has been discredited by its conscription into a genocidal military campaign and witch hunt against those with universalist commitments who oppose state policy. If anyone has killed belief in Holocaust memory, it is Western political classes whose misuse of it to justify an undeniable evil have destroyed its currency. The Israeli historian, Moshe Zimmermann, also came to this conclusion in a presentation at the Fritz Bauer Institute on 17 December 2025: “The Gaza War: How the Capital of Holocaust Memory Was Gambled Away,” was its title.

I deplore this incipient death of Holocaust memory in German and Western publics. I think Germans should never forget what their ancestors did to Jewish, Roma, Slavic, queer, and other peoples as well as resistance fighters during the Nazi regime. Nor should other Europeans who collaborated with the Germans in ridding their countries of unwanted minorities. My own concern has been to keep Holocaust memory alive and relevant by linking — not equating — the Holocaust to the mass state violence against civilians that preceded it and that inspired the Nazis — like the genocide of the Herero and Nama in German Southwest Africa and the genocide of the Armenians before and during World War I. 

This news was difficult for German journalists to bear. One of them, Peter Neumann in Die Zeit, in his report on the conference at which I delivered a version of this paper, claimed that I welcome the demise of Holocaust memory. The newspaper soon had to correct the record:

“Note from the editor: In an earlier version of this text, Dirk Moses was described as ‘not especially upset by the beginning of the end of memory of the Shoah’, although in his speech he explicitly regretted it. We have corrected the error.” 

Episodes like this lead ordinary Germans to distrust the media. The general public is saying that a durable and ethically tenable memory regime must acknowledge and honor all the victims of mass state violence and terror that is designed to achieve a dystopian permanent security. If politicians want to restore the public’s confidence in them and in the media, respecting its universalist moral convictions would be the place to start.