Abstract
The paper analyzes the mnemonic and political context of the occupation of the Roma Holocaust memorial in Berlin in May 2016, carried out by groups demanding the right to remain in the country for non-citizen Roma. Observing the actor strategies apparent in this event, as well as the governmental logics organizing memorialization, it argues that the pervasive contemporary phenomenon of ‘politics of recognition’ needs to be interpreted as a providing merely a frame for struggles for political agency. Normative symbolic clashes taking place in this frame require a more fine-grained analysis to establish whether certain mnemonic practices inhibit or empower the social groups they reference. The concepts the paper advances as better explaining the outcome of memory struggles are referentiality and productivity. These signify attempts to (re)organize the semantic spaces of memory, and, if successful, allow for political agency to operate in the reconstituted mnemonic landscape. Governmentalities, however, will frequently attempt to deny such reconstitutions of ‘settled’ memory, in which case any politics of recognition remains a hollow shell without the potential to re-orient societal and political practices in the present. In the case of the occupation, the memory conflict highlighted how the past may be use to challenge accepted boundaries and the practice of boundary-making in society, while also highlighting the importance of social and political coalitions to advance change.
Highlights
Memory work and meaning-creationThe occupation of the space around the Memorial to the Sinti and Roma Victims of National Socialism on May 22, 2016 represented multiple conflicts over interpreting the past-present nexus, the relationship between current governmental practices and ethical imperatives derived from historical knowledge
Moving beyond the generalizations that impede disentangling the operations of power-knowledge, this paper focuses on modalities of recognition rather than the binary dilemma of what acknowledgment or the lack of such signifies in the context of memory politics
The German case is usually considered ‘paradigmatic’ in histories of Roma civil rights movements because of the perceived linear progress achieved through successive campaigns and through persuasion and co-optation directed at the political classes of the country
Summary
The occupation of the space around the Memorial to the Sinti and Roma Victims of National Socialism on May 22, 2016 represented multiple conflicts over interpreting the past-present nexus, the relationship between current governmental practices and ethical imperatives derived from historical knowledge. The following sections investigate and contextualize the occupation, focusing on the challenge it represented to the prevailing governmentality – understood as the milieu of actors deploying relevant knowledges to administer aspects of social organization, or ‘in the broad sense of techniques and procedures for directing human behavior’ (Foucault, 1997: 82) This includes both the knowhows and capabilities of government agencies and civil society actors who, in this case, had successfully constructed a niche for themselves during earlier decades of gradual progress towards recognition of German minority Sinti and Roma as victims of the Holocaust and citizens of the new Germany. While a rich repository of disruptive, even insurrectionary and often group-specific knowledges, memory needs to be questioned as mnemonic practice and social event to highlight the struggle over meaning-making in the socio-political setting of the present
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