This year, we are all facing challenges that directly affect memory culture. The electoral successes and growing strength of far-right and fascist forces in Europe, Russia’s ongoing war of aggression against Ukraine, the terrorist attack by Hamas on Israel, and the ongoing and expanding war in Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, the shifting global dynamics towards autocracy and misanthropy, which were recently made visible through the reelection of a convicted criminal as President of the United States.
Under the weight of these and so many other events, we experience daily how civil society alliances are breaking apart—due to a lack of solidarity, active de-solidarization, and a lack of empathy. Marginalized groups are pitted against each other—and end up playing each other off. At a critical juncture, the shared visions for our plural society and a solidaristic Europe are significantly weakened—and the fantasies of homogeneity promoted by far-right forces and their idea of struggle as a central element of politics are strengthened.
The Coalition for Pluralistic Public Discourse (CPPD) and its partners are an exception in this regard. At a time when we are fighting to preserve spaces, the CPPD is expanding its spaces even further. In the face of collapse, we focus on collaboration. One significant change in the past year concerning our collaborative, plural, and dialogue-based approaches has been the intensification of our commitment, particularly as so many gaps in civil society and discourse have become visible or have opened up deeper and wider. Because that is our work: doing our utmost to prevent the anti-democratic and nationalist forces from doing what they wish and openly promise: the abolition of plural democracy.
As plural as our societies are, as plural are the moments of memory, and so plural remembrance culture must be shaped. Only when we understand the past as a complex web of memories we are able to do justice to it. And by doing so, we also live up to the present, which today is more threatened than at the beginning of our work by a return to traditions of violence. Plurality means, especially for German and European memory culture, continually becoming aware of and confronting this simultaneity and sometimes even ambivalence. Especially when we understand how much we are always remembering the past within the present—its conflicts, struggles, and social negotiation processes.
This simultaneity is also embodied in the Pluralistic Remembrance Calendar #Erinnerungsfutur. It brings together contributions from members of the CPPD network and guest authors, who reflect on various remembrance days in journalistic texts, scientific papers, interviews, and creative formats, expanding the cultural canon of remembrance. The fact that the calendar is now in its third and expanded edition demonstrates the breadth of memory-relevant topics at the intersections of antisemitism, ableism, racism, queer- and misanthropy, as well as resistance history and official memorial days.
The Pluralistic Remembrance Calendar demonstrates something very clearly: Memory culture must be shaped by the people of Europe, not by an idea of how those people should be. Plurality is not the central problem of society but its foundation. We firmly believe that this must also apply to remembrance culture: that we tell about remembrance collectively, not alone, because we have together shaped—and been shaped by—what we now call the present.
The CPPD, like this remembrance calendar, is a field of experimentation. The results we achieve, the insights we gain, are like memory itself: incomplete, unfinished, in constant processes of change. Therefore, the third edition of Erinnerungsfutur also asks all readers to suggest additional memorial days and moments of memory, so that the calendar can be supplemented and continued together, because: A resilient democracy cannot exist without a plural memory culture.
If you would you like to receive a remembrance calendar in German, we will gladly send you a copy, starting in January 2025. Orders can be placed via the form below. Donations are very much appreciated.
The English edition will be available soon.
