Beyond ‘colonial amnesia’: transformative postcolonial memory activism in Germany

Kreft, Johanna (2025). Beyond ‘colonial amnesia’: transformative postcolonial memory activism in Germany. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

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Abstract

This thesis explores the transformative nature of memory activism, investigating the important role of grassroots action in Germany’s process of critically reckoning with its colonial past and its legacies in the present. Over the past four decades, a broad movement of civic initiatives and activist individuals has worked relentlessly to promote a more critical understanding and commemoration of German colonialism and its impact. They have frequently operated among a widespread lack of public knowledge and amidst institutional refusal. This project draws attention to how critical activism has been an integral catalyst and accountability measure in Germany’s process of finding a way for critical reflection and commemoration of its colonial past.
This research is situated in memory studies, with further inspiration taken from postcolonial studies, and uses a qualitative approach informed by critical feminist methodologies and standpoint epistemologies. Building on material gathered through semi-structured qualitative interviews with memory activists involved in the movement, this project addresses activist motivations, experiences, ambitions, challenges, and successes. This project follows an extensive empirical approach, as it investigates a broad range of examples and case studies of activism work from across Germany, highlighting campaigns by established civic organisations, as well as more sporadic activities by loosely organised grassroots initiatives and student groups. It explores movement activities traced back to the 1980s in West Germany and illustrates how over subsequent decades, this evolved into a nationwide multi-vocal and heterogenous movement across reunified Germany.
The core of this thesis focuses on four broad pillars of postcolonial memory activism work in Germany. It illustrates how activists use public engagement strategies, such as walking tours and exhibitions, to stimulate critical learning about and reflection of colonial histories and postcolonial legacies among mainstream audiences. Through the use of political advocacy work and participatory street renaming campaigns, activists address, challenge, and secure changes to colonially themed street names, that for decades have constituted offensive reminders of colonial control and racism in Germany’s urban landscape. Activist institutional critique serves an important accountability measure within Germany’s heritage institutions, as a broad range of critical interventions pushes museums and universities to ‘own up’ to their own implication in colonial violence and lasting postcolonial legacies of injustice. Finally, civic actors establish an important link between descendants of formerly colonised communities, who experienced violent abduction of their cultural belongings and Ancestral Remains during the colonial period, and the institutions, who continue to hold these dispossessions in custody. Through intricate archival research, testimony gathering, and empathetic engagements, grassroots restitution activism significantly contributes to ongoing restitution practices in ways that promote these returns as acts with the potential of justice and healing for dispossessed communities.
This thesis constitutes a timely project. As the idea of the ‘colonial amnesia’ has remained important in public and scholarly discussions of Germany’s postcolonial reckoning to highlight institutional blindspots and political inaction, this study underscores that for many decades, there have been pockets where critical commemoration has been taking place, promoted by ambitious and committed grassroots actors. Furthermore, in a context of emergent institutional and political commitments to postcolonial reckoning across Germany, this research makes visible the grassroots underpinnings of these developments and demonstrates how civic action has been a pivotal factor stimulating institutional changes, thereby adding to the evolving research into the important relationship between grassroots activism and collective memory in Germany in the 20th and 21st century. Finally, amidst ongoing contested discussions about the state and scope of German memory culture more broadly, this thesis underscores important learning points we can draw from grassroots memory work about how multiple and diverse memory narratives can be commemorated in Germany alongside, and even in solidarity, with one another.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):