World Affairs & Human Rights

WHEN “NEVER AGAIN” DOES NOT INCLUDE EVERYONE

Germany’s culture of remembrance is indispensable. The test is whether its promise of human dignity reaches anti-Black racism in ordinary life.

Germany is right to protect the memory of the Holocaust.

The murder of six million Jews and millions of other victims of Nazi persecution must not be relativized, competed with or converted into a rhetorical tool. Antisemitism is not a finished chapter.

The question is whether the principle Germany draws from that history, human dignity must be defended before dehumanization becomes catastrophe, reaches everyone living in Germany now.

Article 1 of the Basic Law begins with a promise: human dignity is inviolable. Yet a 2022 survey published by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights found that 76 percent of respondents of African descent in Germany reported racial discrimination during the previous five years. Sixty-four percent reported it within the previous year. Among respondents stopped by police during that period, 69 percent perceived their most recent stop as racial profiling.

These are reported experiences from a defined survey population, not proof that every institution or encounter in Germany is racist. The German sample included 579 respondents and focused on people of sub-Saharan African origin or descent. Methodology and limits belong beside the numbers.

So does the scale.

Anti-Black racism can be less publicly legible than an attack on a memorial because it often arrives through ordinary systems: a housing inquiry that goes unanswered, a job application judged before the interview, a school expectation lowered, a medical concern discounted, a police stop experienced as suspicion.

Damage to a Holocaust memorial rightly provokes outrage because the symbol is clear and the danger historically understood. The answer is not less concern for Jewish memory or antisemitism. It is equal seriousness about the human beings whose exclusion is occurring in front of us.

The strongest counterargument is that Germany’s responsibility to Holocaust memory is historically unique and should not be diluted by folding every form of injustice into the same framework.

Agreed. Histories are not interchangeable. Anti-Black racism in Germany has its own roots, including colonialism, migration, American occupation history and contemporary institutions. Comparison becomes dishonest when it erases difference.

But a moral commitment can be particular in origin and universal in application. “Never again” should not mean every injustice is the Holocaust. It should mean the country has learned to recognize dehumanization before it reaches an endpoint that future generations will memorialize.

Germany can act concretely: collect better disaggregated equality data with privacy safeguards; strengthen independent complaint systems; test housing and employment discrimination; publish policing data; teach German colonial history alongside National Socialism; and include Black German scholars and communities in policy design.

Memory is not a competition between victims.

It is a responsibility to the living.

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