There are apparently good reasons to assess the state of the art of atrocity memory, the war in Ukraine being one of them, and there are excellent reasons to do that together with Dirk Moses. Moses has advanced the debates on two levels. In his new book The Problems of Genocide, he has argued that we have failed to understand key underlying causes of the Holocaust and other genocides. He claims that we have created a misleading albeit comforting dichotomy between illiberal fascist and communist regimes engaging in mass crimes, on the one hand, and liberal democratic regimes allegedly foregoing such violence, on the other hand. Moses places the various political systems on a spectrum. Despite important differences in the scale of their transgressions, they are all driven by illegitimate and unethical security needs prompting them to violate the rights of citizens and civilians time and again. How does that historical insight change our memory priorities?

In addition, in a widely read discussion piece “The German Catechism,” Moses has directed his critical gaze at the cradle of self-reflexive Holocaust memory and admonished Germany for aggressively promoting a non-inclusive, hierarchical, and unjust memory culture that differentiates gratuitously between different acts of collective violence and different groups of victims. He considers Holocaust memory, as institutionalized by state institutions, an obstacle for Germany on its way to becoming a more diverse, tolerant, and inclusive society. What concrete, sweeping changes would he like to see in German and European memory culture?

The panel will put Moses’ theses to the test and develop suggestions about the relevance of atrocity memory in post-colonial, anthropocenic times.

Panelists