From a contested memorial to a research collaboration
On Cologne's Hohenzollern Bridge stands a memorial unlike any other in Germany. Erected in 2018 by the civil society initiative Völkermord erinnern, it is the first non-religious memorial to the Armenian Genocide in German public space. Bearing the inscription "This Pain Concerns Us All" in Armenian, German, Turkish and English, it commemorates the genocide of the Armenians while also acknowledging Germany's historical complicity. Yet since its installation, the memorial has repeatedly been removed by city authorities, becoming the focus of debates about remembrance, responsibility and democracy.
For Dr. Jeanette Ehrmann, this memorial became the starting point for a collaborative research project, supported by the Open Humboldt Freiräume programme. Rather than examining memory politics from a distance, This Pain Concerns Us All – Multidirectional Remembrance of the Armenian Genocide in Postmigrant Democracy brings together scholars, activists, artists and community organisations to explore how remembrance is practised and contested in contemporary Germany, and how collaborative research can contribute to democratic transformation.
The project responds to a striking contradiction. In 2016, the German Bundestag recognised the genocide of the Armenians and other minoritised Christian communities in the Ottoman Empire and acknowledged Germany's responsibility for its role. The resolution called for the history of the genocide to become part of school and university curricula and political education. Yet, as Ehrmann explains, "Despite this democratically mandated obligation, a comprehensive public engagement with the genocide of the Armenians and German involvement has largely failed to materialise." To this day, there is no state-funded memorial dedicated to the Armenian Genocide in Germany, while denial campaigns continue through Turkish state and diaspora actors.
The memorial in Cologne was created in response to this absence. Unlike the Bundestag resolution, which expresses regret for Germany's “inglorious role” without drawing any political consequences from it, the memorial explicitly refers to German participation in the genocide, which translates into a responsibility to prevent genocides and crimes against humanity in the present. Its repeated removal has revealed the tensions surrounding public remembrance today: "The project traces this conflict in order to more precisely situate memory conflicts within the postmigrant society of Germany and to examine how multidirectional memory can contribute to democratic transformation. Only a democratic approach, rather than administrative suppression as we see it now, can lead to ‘a peaceful and respectful coexistence’ – what, ironically, the authorities claim to promote by removing the memorial," says Ehrmann.
Rethinking remembrance in a post-migrant society
Alongside these conflicts, however, Ehrmann has observed something different. The memorial has not only become a central site of remembrance for Armenians across Germany, who gather in Cologne each year on April 24, the international day of remembrance for the Armenian Genocide. Around the memorial, "a postmigrant memory community has formed … practising multidirectional and relational forms of memory by connecting the twentieth-century crimes against humanity that Germany committed or was involved in without relativizing them." These practices connect the genocides of the Herero and Nama, the Armenian Genocide, the genocide of Roma and Sinti, and the Shoah, demonstrating that different histories of violence can be remembered together while respecting their distinctiveness.
This idea lies at the heart of Ehrmann's research on multidirectional memory. Rather than treating remembrance as a competition between different groups or histories, multidirectional memory recognizes that experiences of violence are historically, politically and emotionally entangled. According to Michael Rothberg, who has coined the concept of multidirectional memory:
