Was ist schiefgelaufen? Die Erinnerungspolitik und die Rückkehr der fremdenfeindlichen Rechten

This article, published in a prestigious collective volume bringing together some of the world's most authoritative and counter-current voices on Holocaust memory and its contemporary political uses, argues that Holocaust remembrance policy — the victim-centered memory of the Shoah that emerged over the past thirty years to fill the ideological vacuum left by the collapse of revolutionary utopias — has fundamentally failed. Rather than preventing the resurgence of racism, xenophobia, and far-right politics, it may have inadvertently contributed to them. Pisanty identifies four dogmatic mechanisms embedded in contemporary memory politics that have produced authoritarian, rather than democratic, effects: The sacralization of eyewitness testimony, which has displaced historical-critical methodology with an authority principle based on blind trust, eroding public skepticism and enabling the spread of conspiracy theories. The individualization of history, which transforms collective memory into a private possession, generating irresolvable conflicts over who "owns" the past and whose narrative deserves universal recognition. The appropriation of Holocaust language, which has allowed various political actors — including antisemites — to cast themselves as victims deserving compensation and immunity, hollowing out the Holocaust narrative into a rhetorical framework available to anyone. The political use of criminal law through Holocaust denial legislation, which paradoxically empowers denialists to pose as martyrs of free speech, risks criminalizing dissent more broadly, and has drifted toward authoritarian applications across Europe. The article concludes with a provocative thesis: the new right did not hijack Holocaust memory in spite of remembrance culture — it learned how to do so from it.