The German Approach to Pop Culture and Its Relation to Holocaust Memory

West Germany's post-war production of popular culture and its public reception were massively influenced by British and American music and film genres. Consuming jazz, rock and roll, and Hollywood movies can be understood as the desire to learn from the victors, but it was also an expression of the necessity to forget about the past by immersion in the fantasy world of commercial movies and stardom. In the further course of Germany's “economic miracle,” promoting the more radical genres in pop culture was considered one of the crucial ways to express the post–World War II generational gap that culminated in the 1968 student protests. Adorno, who was himself driven into u.s. exile by Nazi dictatorship, clearly contrasts with the strategy to use pop culture as a means to convey socio-critical themes.¹⁴ Within this context, his verdict that writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric¹⁵ caused an uproar among literary critics and authors, and still causes ripples in present-day Germany.¹⁶ This shows that the returning Frankfurt scholars—most of them Jewish—brought along a clear message: the memory of mass murder is incompatible not only with mass media, but with the Western idea of culture altogether. Their message of extreme moralism in the context of Holocaust memory was a clear rejection of early post–World War II attempts at normalization. Consequently, a whole generation of West German students struggled with Adorno's radical interpretation of commodification. His followers discarded as naive or hypocritical any impulse that followed mere enjoyment. To be modern in the Adornian sense meant to debunk any consumer of globalized pop culture as a victim of capitalism. The charged liaison between critical theory and mass culture did not improve with the student movements of the West and their understanding of mass culture. In a 1968 interview on popular music played within the context of students’ protest culture, Adorno stated the following:

I believe, in fact, that attempts to bring political protest together with popular music, that is, with entertainment music, are doomed from the start. The entire sphere of popular music, even where it dresses itself up in modernist guise, is to such a degree inseparable from commodity character, entertainment, and the lust for consumption that attempts to endow it with a different function remain entirely superficial. And I have to say that when somebody appears singing in a kitschy and sentimental way about Vietnam being unbearable, then I consider this song unbearable by making the horrendous consumable, wringing something like consumption qualities out of it.”¹⁷

It does not take a crystal ball to know that in this quote Adorno is referring to Joan Baez and hippie culture as a form of protest against the violent u.s. intervention in the East. With this attitude, Adorno's ideologically argued cultural critique opened up another generation gap: now it was the father figure who told the sons and daughters that their music taste was corrupted, manipulated by capitalist producers interested in shaping a new generation of acolytes. After Adorno's death in 1969, it took decades to steer cultural criticism to a more liberal and relaxed direction.

The 1980s produced a paradigmatic shift in the understanding of knowledge, values, and the arts in all of the Western world. The questioning of certain standards (concerning technique, material, verification, authenticity, means of communication, etc.) led to a conflation of high and low culture that undermined central aspects of Adorno's aesthetics. Occidental forms of composition, Western institutions of high culture like the museum, concert hall, or ballet, and principles of art critique were severely criticized, and Adorno's “moralizing and politicizing tone” got on the nerves of the new generation identifying with postmodernism.¹⁸ The children of punk, mtv, Game Boy, and Walkman linked the idea of bricolage to their own experiences of social rifts, political changes, and economic high-risk tolerance that characterized the years around the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of digitalized communication. As a consequence, a crucial element of neo-Marxist aesthetics was at stake: the idea that the history of the avant-garde is dependent on the development of productive forces within the most advanced aesthetic techniques.¹⁹

Today, the cultural scene of the German-speaking world in general is characterized by a large variety of styles. A national characteristic à la Dada, Bauhaus, or Neue Deutsche Welle disappears within global art trends and neo-eclecticism on the one hand and the standardization of global commercial specifications on the other. This development seems to surpass the Frankfurt School's cultural criticism, demanding a more complex, synesthetic theory. Interestingly enough, this theory does not exist, making Adorno the last author who attempted to present a comprehensive and authoritative aesthetic theory. What exists, however, is the previously mentioned neo-eclecticism based on the Austrian philosopher Paul Feyerabend's exclamation that “anything goes.”²⁰

Not surprisingly, when it comes to German Holocaust remembrance, the aesthetic and ethical settings change dramatically. Official memory culture presents itself as unified, stern, and adamant. The claim for political correctness is ubiquitous. Consequently, ironic looks or joyful puns in the context of Shoah commemoration are frowned upon. To be sure, since the 1980s Germany has seen a number of radical proposals referring to Holocaust remembrance, such as the counter-monument movement represented by Horst Hoheisel's idea to destroy the Brandenburg gate or Jochen Gerz's invisible monument in Saarbrücken, but they follow the spirit of negativity so prominent in theoretical expressions of the Frankfurt School. As a consequence, scandals and resistance to official memory politics are an affair of antisemitic or right-wing agents, especially when they aim at undermining the status of Jewish victimhood or attack Israeli politics using antisemitic prejudices. Right-wing populism in Germany can be seen as revolting against the normalization of Holocaust remembrance, but it surely has to be taken as a revisionist attack based on nationalist bigotry.

Contemporary dark comedy dealing with Nazi Germany and the Holocaust takes a different approach. After recognizing that official memory politics in the Western sphere is well established, and after having observed the twist and turns of the argument that any kind of art is failing to represent the horrors of the camps, comedy advances into uncontested spheres with two advantages: it does not even aim at representing these horrors, and, despite irony and farcical exaggeration, it leaves the dignity of the victims untouched.

Globalizing Holocaust Memory by Means of Comedy: A Comparison of International and German Approaches

From its beginning, Holocaust memory in the Western world was combined with elements of consumer culture. Published in u.s. magazines and newspapers, photographs of Auschwitz and Treblinka, printed side by side with recipes and fashion advertising campaigns, were expropriated from their character as isolated sites of horror.²¹ This constellation still exerts its power today. Sixty years ago, on 11 April 1961, the trial of one of the main perpetrators of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann, began in Jerusalem. In April 2021, the German news magazine Der Spiegel commemorated the occasion with a 15-minute video in which eyewitnesses are interviewed and harrowing film clips of survivors’ testimonies during the trial are shown. The feature is interrupted three times with commercial breaks for software products helping to develop parlor games.²² The current use of the Internet and its social media platforms intensifies this perception, leading to the broad phenomenon of normalization. In Holocaust representation, this term is used to describe cultural tendencies that display dispassionate neutrality instead of bolstering ethical engagement, a tendency intensified by the Internet's easy ways to publish marginal views and aesthetic challenges to official memory politics.

In contemporary Germany, of course, there are plenty of social protagonists who criticize playful or thoughtless approaches to Holocaust remembrance, aiming to restore the moralistic culture of deep involvement. One of them is Berlin-based artist and comedian Shahak Shapira. In 2017, he launched a project called yolocaust. The “yolo” in yolocaust is an acronym for “you only live once,” a reference to the ancient theme of vanitas, dealing with expressions of the transience of life. The compound noun yolocaust thus points to hedonistic attitudes posted on social platforms alongside representations of utter pain and destruction. Shapira criticized this approach to Shoah commemoration by combining selfies that visitors took standing amid the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin with historical images from Nazi extermination camps. On Facebook, Instagram, Tinder, and Grindr, he found the selfies, showing cheering, conceited, or juggling young people with the Memorial as the backdrop. Comments, hashtags, and “likes” that were posted with the selfies were also included. The web page was visited by over 2.5 million people before Shapira erased his composites.²³ The message had been understood. Shapira's project highlighted that Holocaust memory is not about joking and posing; it is about paying respect to the memorial and its solemn message. Following in the tradition of Adorno and the Frankfurt School, his approach clearly contrasts with the attitude that Instagram and Facebook users presented with their selfies.

As already mentioned, Shapira's work deals with a more recent combination of popular self-representation and dark tourism that uses social media to publish it, but it refers to a long tradition of linking popular culture with Western Holocaust memory. The Italian comedy-drama Life Is Beautiful (Roberto Benigni, 1997) kicked off the wave of Shoah cheerfulness. In Germany, the feature films Comedian Harmonists (Joseph Vilsmaier, Germany 1997) and Aimée & Jaguar (Max Färberböck, Germany 1999) opened the door to a more light-hearted approach to Nazism and the Shoah, followed later by comedies and romances like Mein Führer—Die wirklich wahrste Wahrheit über Adolf Hitler (My Führer—the Absolutely Truest Truth about Adolf Hitler) (Daniel Levy, Germany 2007), Hannas Reise (Hanna's Journey) (Julia von Heinz, Germany 2013), Die Blumen von Gestern (Yesterday's Flowers) (Chris Kraus, Germany/Austria 2016), and Kiss Me Kosher (Shirel Peleg, Germany/Israel 2020). Outside Germany, the black comedy Jojo Rabbit is the most recent example of Holocaust satire (Taika Waititi, u.s. 2019). While all of these movies deal only marginally with Nazism and the Holocaust or mainly attempt to ridicule the figure of Hitler, thus using popular culture to transmit moral outrage concerning Nazi politics, Shapira criticizes an obvious lack of moral consciousness in the posting of irreverent selfies with the Memorial as their background.

In the context of the present investigation, the movie Die Blumen von Gestern deserves a more detailed consideration, as it represents the imponderables of combining German Holocaust memory and comedy in a nutshell.²⁴ The plot of Yesterday's Flowers features a young and attractive French historian whose grandmother died in the Shoah. She joins a German academic team that is preparing a conference on the Holocaust. The commission includes the grandson of one of the perpetrators responsible for the murder of her grandmother. Since the scholar who is responsible for organizing the conference, a highly respected historian, has just passed away, the team needs to reorganize itself in order to convince the conference speakers to stay put. Between this task and the volatility of the young Frenchwoman, the whole plan breaks down. Right from the beginning, the director indicates that none of the twist and turns of the plot should be taken too seriously. At the same time, the film's reference to the historical background is a frank admission of responsibility similar to official German memory politics, as it is supported by renowned authorities and no ironic handling of citations can be detected in the script. The gap between the official representation of historical tragedy and the comedy of the actors may seem radical, but two problems become apparent while the story unfolds: none of the roles are designed to represent the tragic element of the Holocaust, and the jokes do not offer any real alternative to the official memory discourse, since they happen exclusively on the level of private emotions and personal interests. As in the case of the German comedian Jan Böhmermann, which will be discussed later, the satirical attempt ends in a farce, as the breaking of taboos runs on empty.

However, there is another aspect to be considered: the consequences of translating local/national discourses into mass media and thus creating a global response. The film was shown at a Tokyo film festival where it won the first prize and received very positive feedback. Director Chris Kraus, surprised by the success, was made aware of the historical connections between Japan and Germany during World War II: the Tripartite Pact and the Nanjing Massacre committed by Imperial Japanese troops. He explains: “Nearly every conversation I had with the Japanese began with: ‘You Germans do a great job at working through your history.’ [The success of the movie] has to do with the fact that they are longing for some way of dealing with the past. You could sense how the pus bubble in the culture is growing and there has to be a needle somewhere to puncture it.”²⁵ That is to say, the Japanese audience was much more interested in the mere fact that Germany has a firmly established official memory discourse than in being presented a specific blueprint for the way the Japanese society should deal with its own past. It might be concluded that the scope of mass media is a decisive tool to initiate a transnational coming to terms with the past, while each nation has to find its own way to remember.

Without disregarding the fact that recent developments in art and cultural studies question the distinction of high and low culture, it might be instructive to have a quick glance at the way more complex intellectual works of art deal with the subject of Holocaust memory. Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus (1991) is a special case because its story is serious; only the medium is “low culture.” But there are many others who dared to combine consumer culture with remembrance of the genocide of European Jews. Zbigniew Libera, a Polish artist born in 1959, presented the controversial lego Concentration Camp set in 1996. In a first reaction, institutions resented his work, but in the meantime one of his sets was purchased by the Jewish Museum in New York City. Tom Sachs, a New York-based Jewish artist born in 1966, combines famous luxury brands with images of biopolitical suppression. Prada Death Camp (1998) is clearly reminiscent of a Nazi concentration camp, as it quotes both the form of the barracks themselves and their distribution. Central to the works of English-Jewish artist Alan Schechner is the belief that all images exist in social and political contexts and, as such, all images are ideological. Self Portrait at Buchenwald: It's the Real Thing (1991–1993) uses collage techniques to bring together a self-portrait of the artist, a representation of a beverage industry's consumer product (a can of Diet Coke), reminiscent of an advertising campaign, and an iconic photograph of a barrack at Buchenwald taken by Margaret Bourke-White after the camp was liberated.²⁶ Initially harshly criticized as examples of bad taste or excessive narcissism, these works finally were met with less scathing and more differentiated criticism.²⁷ All of these artworks were presented in a 2002 exhibition titled “Mirroring Evil” organized by the Jewish Museum in New York.²⁸ As we can see, even in the realm of contemporary autonomous art subversive tendencies to ironize official Holocaust memory are easily detectable.

Thus, the Jewish-German comedians’ approaches to Shoah memory and Nazism can easily connect to the international genre of autonomous art dealing with the Shoah, Holocaust humor, and Holocaust sexploitation. YouTube and Netflix are full of clips and comedy shows that refer to Auschwitz in a satirical way. Jewish-German and German comedians like Schlecky Silberstein and his Bohemian Browser Ballet, Oliver Polak, and Alexej Boris make allusions to antisemitic prejudices and Holocaust staple images in their stand-up comedy. Even Shahak Shapira embraces Holocaust satire by comparing the online travel company Trip Advisor's 4.5 rating for Auschwitz with Berlin Alexanderplatz's 3.0 rating for McDonald's, thus juggling with Auschwitz as an attraction²⁹ and a destination for genocide tourism. Shapira's gag seems like a sequel of u.s. Sarah Silverman's early 2000 joke: “My lesbian niece … goes to a Jewish school and loves it. The other day, she called me and said: ‘Sarah, did you know it, Hitler killed 60 million Jews.’ I corrected her and said: ‘You know, I think he is responsible for killing 6 million Jews.’ She responded: ‘Oh yeah, I know that, but seriously, what's the difference?’ ‘The difference is, 60 million is unforgivable, young lady.’”³⁰ Both ways to compare what has been declared incomparable have a subversive and liberating effect without questioning the uniqueness of the Holocaust and its importance for Western history. The development just described clearly contrasts with Adorno's position.

Nevertheless, the difference concerning the starting position between German and American comedians has to be taken into account. The latter speak to a nation that produced the liberation of extermination camps, the former to a nation that bears the responsibility for the mass killings. What might work in one culture could be a no-go in the other. That at least is columnist Jan Fleischhauer's argument in Der Spiegel.³¹ He further highlights an argument one will also hear from the participants in The Last Laugh (Ferne Pearlstein, u.s., 88 minutes), a 2016 documentary that discusses the possibility of Holocaust jokes, or from Hanno Loewy, co-editor of the German volume Laughing about Hitler—Auschwitz Laughter?: “One does not laugh when one may, but when one cannot help it. I cannot laugh about the gas chamber, but I can laugh about the way people speak about it.”³² Consequently, most comedians take the stance that Holocaust memory in the shape of jokes is permitted when they are funny, that is, when the audience laughs. Many people laughed about Silverman's joke (self-irony always works), very few about the situation Jan Böhmermann, a German comedian, produced in one of his shows: After an interview with Jewish-German comedian Oliver Polak, Böhmermann stands onstage with an anchorman, a music television presenter, and another comedian, all gentile Germans. Böhmermann pulls out a bottle of disinfectant spray and asks the others, referring to Polak: “Have you given him your hand?” Then he sprays their hands for the sake of disinfecting them.³³ One might ask why jokes by Germans referring to antisemitic prejudices almost never work. One explanation is certainly that Germany's historical “locus of enunciation” undermines almost every attempt to satirically reflect on antisemitism and the Holocaust.³⁴ In the case of Böhmermann's joke, two elements for successful satire or comedy are entirely absent: first, the comedian's historical location is not recognizable as clearly distanced from antisemitic attitudes, and, second, there is no “enemy” the joke seeks to attack. The lack of a radically ironic take, a real social or political constellation in need of improvement, and the absence of mindful exaggeration makes this joke an embarrassing setback, although most of the other comedians are able to comply with these rules.

During the last few years, discussions about “cancel culture” have intensified and have become an influencing factor in memory discourses. In the context of Holocaust remembrance in Germany, ostracism as a consequence of revisionist statements or negationism occurs frequently. In 2007, German comedians Harald Schmidt and Oliver Pocher related to this attitude, often called “safetyism,” with a sketch in which they presented a device called a “Nazometer.” The gadget was connected to the comedians’ heads and flashed every time they used words easily relatable to the historical context of Nazism, such as “shower,” “Autobahn,” “gas stove,” and “ghetto.”³⁵ In this case, the comedians applied the tool of excess to a certain social attitude that they consider to have become somewhat of a mindless routine: the staged indignation produced as a reaction to the naive usage of historically contaminated terms or the clumsy trivialization of the Nazi regime. The show caused a public outrage that partially demonstrated exactly the theatricality that the sketch was targeting. On the other hand, some colleagues supported Schmidt and Pocher's strategy, claiming that teachers, politicians, and social workers might be forced to continue using the official Betroffenheitsrhetorik (rhetoric of dismay) but that it should gradually be possible to make fun of the Nazi jargon.³⁶

What to Make of “Yolocausting”?

Some critics consider the tendency just presented as paving the way for a profound paradigm shift in the context of Holocaust representation, coining terms such as “genocide pop,” “Holocaust supermarket,” and “Shoah business.”³⁷ They are observing a metafictional turn in Holocaust remembrance (i.e., a turn away from the relation between authentic experience and its representation), which now focuses on comparing and criticizing our rhetoric modes of representation. As we have seen, Jewish-German comedians participate in this turn. They subvert and corrupt established modes of Holocaust representation by ironically confronting them with established (memory) politics—an approach similar to that of early avant-garde artists such as John Heartfield, Marcel Duchamp, and George Grosz. With regard to his piece Self Portrait at Buchenwald: It's the Real Thing, Schechner explains his motivation by referring to what Norman Finkelstein calls “the Holocaust industry”:³⁸

Throughout my time in Israel I became acutely aware of how the Holocaust was used to justify some of the more unsavory aspects of Israeli policy. I was told more than once how “whatever we do to them (the Palestinians) can never be as bad as what they (the Germans) did to us.” The first stop of all foreign diplomats on arrival in Israel is Yad Vashem, before the diplomacy, before the state dinners and the visits these images are being used to serve narrow political agendas.³⁹

In all the examples discussed above, the authors take for granted that the Holocaust happened, that Jewish suffering is inconceivable, and that the audience agrees with the existing historical evidence. But they are committed to the attempt of breaking with and foreclosing visual and linguistic routines in memory studies, thus producing a trendsetting method to push forward seemingly exhausted memory discourses. The rise of Holocaust comedy might thus be explained by a change of general interest from the securing of facts and ideologized interpretations of the past to more heterogeneous, emotionally charged everyday stories about the Holocaust.⁴⁰ While the first generation of critical theory faced a general sentiment of denial or repression when it came to the claim of coming to terms with the Holocaust in post-war Germany, both the non-visual narrative and academic history have experienced a similar process of routinization and fatigue.

In her book The New Uneasiness in Memory Culture, the German scholar Aleida Assmann states that Holocaust memory has changed considerably under the constraints of complex developments in the global force field. Considering the controversies of digitized communication, she diagnoses a crisis in memory due to exploitation by intensive media coverage and secondhand comments. Shallow and stereotypical representations, so-called memory wars, and an excess of meaning and morality produce fatigue and, therefore, a degeneration of memory as such.⁴¹ Similarly, with regard to the humanities, Andreas Huyssen suggests that one could never stop adding instances of traumatic memories across the world, but it is questionable whether there would be a cognitive gain from such accumulation in a theoretical or methodological sense.⁴² It seems as there is no evidentiary gap left in Holocaust studies, and debates concentrate only on the relation between aesthetic forms and their adequacy in terms of our moral standards and feelings of decency. Both Assmann and Huyssen observe memory discourses turning into academic routine. Holocaust comedy, when it executes survival with humor and emotion, attempts to subversively tackle this routine.

The routinization argument is used also by Max Czollek in his 2018 book Desintegriert Euch! (Disintegrate!). Czollek denounces official German memory politics as Gedächtnistheater (memory staging) where Jews are supposed to play the role assigned to them by the commemorating German society. For him, Holocaust jokes, with their disrespect, irony, and blasphemy, might be an appropriate way to undermine the predominant political correctness that obliges German Jews to approve the official self-congratulation with which Germany comes to terms with its Nazi past.⁴³ Unfortunately, Czollek contradicts himself by showing how Holocaust jokes are provoking exactly the conforming reaction among gentile Germans that he wants to subvert.⁴⁴

Conclusion

In the end, it seems quite clear that the featured (Jewish-)German comedians belong to a wave of pop culture artists who participate in Holocaust memory by distancing themselves from the established official memory politics. Their approach is by no means revisionist. In most of the cases, comedians, artists, and writers must have felt the wear and tear in traditional ways of Holocaust commemoration and began looking for a more provocative stance that nevertheless complies with basic rules of respect for the victims. Irony, political satire, and the humanization of ultimate evil in this context may support the claim that we have learned our lesson in history, allowing us to show some sovereignty in handling delicate topics. In this regard, advanced Holocaust comedy differs from cases like the German rap duo Kollegah and Farid Bang who won the award for best rap album at the 2018 Echo Music Awards. Their album Jung, brutal, gutaussehend 3 (Young, Brutal, Good Looking 3) contains the provocative line “my body is more defined than that of an Auschwitz inmate,” a line that in conjunction with the erratic ceremony damaged the award to such a degree that it was finally revoked.⁴⁵ The musicians clearly disregarded a crucial rule when it comes to the normalization of Holocaust remembrance: never compare yourself with the inmates of an extermination camp.

Considering the artistic quality of satire and comedy, the underlying political commitment to and the sensibility for the victims’ dignity are crucial when it comes to judging allusions to the Holocaust, Jewish life, and Nazism. The German actor and writer Jasko Friedrich adds to this by highlighting more requirements that have to be met: reference to a poor social or political condition that has to be improved, exaggeration of this condition to render it more visible, and consequently the right to drastic depiction.⁴⁶ The Jewish-German rapper Ben Salomo puts it in a nutshell: “One has to take into account the artistic quality. There is a world of difference between ‘You Jewish bastard,’ and ‘Hey, you upset me, therefore I show disrespect and piss on the Wailing Wall.’ The last line is blasphemous, but not racist.”⁴⁷

Late in his life, Charlie Chaplin regretted his parody on Hitler. In his 1964 autobiography, he wrote: “Had I known of the actual horrors of the German concentration camps, I could not have made The Great Dictator; I could not have made fun of the homicidal insanity of the Nazis.”⁴⁸ Apparently, the conditions for Holocaust representation have changed in the meantime. With the last child survivors dying, academic history departments and the entertainment industry are looking for a contemporary take on the Shoah, an approach capable of reflecting the long list of past Holocaust representations. A second influential aspect surely is the transformation of German society due to increased immigration. Incoming refugees and an international workforce attempting to integrate with their hosting cultures often produce either a more distanced or an entirely different approach to World War II and the Shoah. Consequently, a crucial objective in contemporary intercultural education in Germany is the full recognition of the Other and the prohibition of straightforward assimilation. Multicultural orientation is explicitly understood as a consequence of the generation who failed to resist xenophobia and racism during National Socialism. In education, this creates a dilemma in that children “with a migration background” should be treated as Germans, but as migrants they have a very different generational background that prohibits most kinds of assimilation to the German way of coming to terms with its past.⁴⁹

This fact automatically leads to a rethinking of official memory politics and how it is referred to in school education.⁵⁰ The present article suggests the following conclusion. While official Holocaust memory politics dictate a sublime, noble handling of the unspeakable past, parody, satire, comedy, and other forms of popular culture enable us to globally test the limits of representation—a test that may result in alternative forms of remembrance more suitable for communities with a historical background different from that of German families. These alternative forms are a necessary ingredient to push forward our dealing with difficult pasts, and the boundaries of “good taste” have to be redefined with every twist in official politics and in each specific cultural context. Having said this, it is equally important to concede that Holocaust memory has an undeniable local component—for Germans as the joint heirs of the perpetrators, and Jews as the joint heirs of the victims. No global medium should level this distinction.

To further illuminate this constellation, I would like to conclude with a conversation on Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past) that was held and published on Instagram in February 2021. Berlin-based visual artist Moshtari Hilal, born in Afghanistan, and the German author and philosopher Sinthujan Varatharajah, born in Sri Lanka, met to discuss the Nazi legacy and its continuities in today's Germany. Highlighting the burdened family history of some German intellectuals, they proposed to call regular Germans “people with Nazi backgrounds.” As one can imagine, this labeling caused a public outcry. Nevertheless, it was also understood that both intended to criticize the leveling and sometimes derogatory effect of Germans calling families like their own “people with migration backgrounds.” Ascribing a leveling identity to the members of the German majority population, they asked Germans to uncover and confront their previous generations’ involvement with the exploitations organized by Nazi officials. As descendants of refugees, they indirectly pointed to the fact that the specific way Germans remember the Nazi past is not entirely their own.⁵¹ As a consequence, they might broaden and intensify Germany's way of coming to terms with its past in times of global migration.