Germany’s Failed Remembrance Culture: When ‘Never Again’ Became a Political Slogan

It’s time to lay elite Germanophilia to rest—particularly regarding Germany’s much-lauded remembrance culture. Books like Susan Neiman’s Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil and John Kampfner’s Why the Germans Do It Better have praised German society as a model for confronting historical evil. Neiman’s thesis was straightforward: unlike America (especially the South), Germany had achieved an honest reckoning with its racist past, creating a more just, diverse present.

Recent years have shattered this rosy view. As Germany becomes a country where Jews increasingly cannot live openly and safely, the failure of its remembrance culture has become undeniable.

Josef Schuster, President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, crystallized this failure in his remarks before this year’s commemoration of the 1938 November Pogroms. The German exclamation “Never again” has become a cliché built on a fundamental misunderstanding: “For Germans, it is about never again taking on guilt. For us Jews, however, ‘Never again’ means: Never again be victims.”

Germany’s culture of repentance has always mixed genuine contrition with self-interest. Initially, this served the understandable aim of overcoming Germany’s pariah status—portraying post-war Germany as a new state that had broken definitively with its Nazi past. But in recent years, a more insidious element has emerged: the cynical exploitation of remembrance culture by politicians to promote their agendas and bolster their moral authority.

Steinmeier’s abuse of Holocaust memory

Consider President Frank-Walter Steinmeier’s speech on November 9th—the anniversary of Kristallnacht, when synagogues burned across Germany, Jewish-owned shops were looted, and Jews were hunted through the streets. According to recent research, over 1,500 were murdered that night, with many more injured and raped.

Instead of honoring the victims and educating the public about these atrocities, Steinmeier hijacked the occasion to demand a ban on the right-populist AfD party. Positioning himself as one of the last anti-fascists standing—as if facing down a modern Hindenburg ready to hand power to a 21st-century Hitler—he declared that democracy in reunified Germany faces “unprecedented attack” from right-wing extremist forces.

Liberal critics like Wolfgang Kubicki (FDP) have rightly condemned this historical relativism. Equating the National Socialists with the AfD is not merely ahistorical—it’s an impertinence that trivializes the Holocaust itself.

This wasn’t an isolated incident. In January, on the anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation, Steinmeier again used a Holocaust memorial event to warn against the AfD—just before parliament debated Germany’s “asylum crisis.” Two years earlier, the government placed “queer victims” at the center of Holocaust Remembrance Day. The government’s Queer Commissioner, Sven Lehman, claimed the persecution and “terrible experiences of LGBTIQ* during the Nazi reign of terror” had been met with “complete indifference, often even explicit approval” for decades. 

This sleight of hand transformed the Holocaust—the culmination of virulent antisemitism and the attempted extermination of every Jew on Earth—into just another instance of minority persecution. Weeks later, the government passed its pro-transgender self-identification law.

The reality: rising antisemitism and willful blindness

Steinmeier’s grandstanding becomes especially grotesque against the backdrop of Jewish life in Germany today. Statistics reveal a “drastic increase” in antisemitic crimes—nearly 9,000 incidents in 2024 alone, averaging almost 24 per day. Anti-Israel mobs openly celebrate Jewish deaths. In November last year, Berlin’s police chief advised Jews to avoid wearing kippahs in public, warning of “certain neighborhoods where the majority of residents are of Arab origin and sympathize with terrorist groups.”

What began on October 7, 2023, in Berlin’s Neukölln district—where residents organized street parties and distributed sweets to celebrate Hamas’s massacre—has continued unabated. Pro-Palestine demonstrations occur almost weekly, with participants chanting “Death, death to the IDF.” In October, a prominent anti-Israel activist celebrated the dead Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar at a Berlin demonstration. This same individual had recently been welcomed as a guest speaker by the German Left Party—and even by Amnesty International.

Steinmeier dutifully acknowledged that “87 years after the pogroms of November 9, 1938, antisemitism is not back—it never left.” Yet he lacked either the courage or focus to identify the main sources: radical left-wing forces and Islamists. Acknowledging these would have undermined his narrative that the gravest threat to German democracy is the right-populist AfD.

Ron Prosor, Israel’s ambassador to Germany, speaking on the same anniversary, called left-wing antisemitism the most dangerous form today. He explained that German authorities know how to handle right-wing antisemitism—they have the political and legal tools. While Islamist antisemitism “undermines the democratic order like a Trojan horse,” Germany is at least “learning how to deal with it”—a claim we can only hope will prove accurate. 

But it is on the German left—the Left Party and large sections of the SPD and Green Party—where anti-Israel sentiment verging on open antisemitism is strongest. These same groups most loudly demand banning the AfD. Steinmeier’s anti-populist hysteria has confirmed these self-appointed ‘antifascists’ in their comfortable belief that they stand on the right side of history.

The fruits of cynicism: historical amnesia

The failure of Germany’s remembrance culture manifests most starkly in rising historical ignorance among young Germans. A Jewish Claims Conference survey earlier this year revealed that among respondents aged 18-29, approximately 40% didn’t know that six million Jews were murdered during the Nazi era. 15% believed fewer than two million had been killed. 2% of all surveyed denied the Holocaust occurred at all.

This ignorance didn’t emerge despite Germany’s remembrance culture—it emerged because of it. The abuse of Holocaust commemoration for contemporary political goals has bred cynicism and indifference. When politicians exploit historical memory to score partisan points rather than preserve truth, they teach the public that the past is merely a tool for present manipulation.

November 9th, 1938, remains the turning point in Holocaust history—the moment when discrimination escalated into systematic persecution and extermination. That night served as the official signal for the destruction of European Jewry.

The failure of Germany’s remembrance culture is complete. It has neither protected Jews nor educated Germans.

If German politicians cannot be trusted to preserve and honor the memory of the Holocaust with integrity—if they insist on weaponizing it for their political agendas—then they should keep silent on such matters. Better no official, state-led commemoration than one that serves only to advance partisan interests while actual antisemitism flourishes unchecked.