Truth Telling, Historiographical Agonism, and the Colonial Past in Germany and Australia

Abstract

Via an examination of the current state of German attempts to come to terms with the country’s genocidal Nazi past, this article underscores the utility of an approach to historical scholarship and ‘truth telling’ that might be called historiographical agonism. It articulates how historiographical agonism deals with the difficulties of assimilating and reconciling problematic national pasts such as the Holocaust and the radical violence and dispossession that characterises Australia’s settler colonial history. It also demonstrates historiographical agonism’s capacity to adapt to changing social and political contexts.

In their 2018 commentary on the relationship between the Uluru Statement of the Heart and history, Gabrielle Appleby and Megan Davis offered a clear sense of what truth telling might look like and, just as importantly, what it might not look like:

Many have interpreted the call for oversight by a Makarrata Commission as a call for a national truth-telling Commission, informed, for example, by the experience in South Africa … Examination of the purposes that were seen for a truth-telling Commission in the Dialogues reveals a more complicated, but more promising alternative. The delegates spoke of injustices at a local level, and the promise of truth-telling leading to local understandings within communities of a shared history. Truth-telling must thus come from local communities, led by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples working with non-Aboriginal people in that community.¹

This model of truth telling may seem less than satisfactory for some who view a systematic approach to national truth telling as a means by which Australia might achieve a long-sought-after national reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, or a practical route towards what some have called in a different context a ‘decolonized scholarship’.² Alongside Appleby and Davis, however, there exists an important and growing critique that has identified difficulties with the proposition that intellectual labour aimed at a new national history (particularly that led or undertaken by non-Indigenous scholars in institutions of higher education) can achieve this reconciliation or a ‘decolonised’ history’.³

As the following makes clear, those querying the role of knowledge production in this way are not seeking to reinstate the intellectual status quo ante of nationalist scholarship, but rather take the imperative to decolonise too seriously to abet its diminution as a conceptual proxy for any and all progressivist initiatives.⁴ Instead, they are seeking to preserve the term ‘decolonisation’ for practices generally led by Indigenous people (as Appleby and Davis suggest), not settler academics, seeking space for projects of their design. Mindful of this, in this article I argue that even if the claim to be ‘decolonising’ through scholarship must be declined by non-Indigenous scholars, there remains clear potential for scholarship, including history, to inform Indigenous decolonising practices and to engage in a productive form of localised truth telling, as called for by the Uluru Statement of the Heart, which might aid in the project of countering ‘non-Indigenous forgetting’, as Chris Healy once called it.⁵ This truth telling, however, is not one that can sublate the acrimonious histories and counter histories of colonialism within an overarching post-reconciliation history, but rather one that, to recall Stephen Muecke and Paddy Roe, stresses ‘fragmentation, contradiction, unanswered questions, specificity, fluidity and change’.⁶ It is a truth telling that multiplies the localised, smaller narratives of the colonial past that keep alive its variegation, its paradoxes, and – not least – its horror.

Concerning the relationship of the discipline of history with the realities of settler colonialism, and responding to Miranda Johnson’s call for historians researching Indigenous histories to return to some of the ‘fundamental questions in our discipline’, this article contends that, despite an inability to decolonise or achieve reconciliation through their intellectual labour, historians have an important role to play in facilitating the perpetual problematisation of irreducibly traumatic pasts like those of settler colonial states and ensuring that they are not absorbed within programmatically affirmative histories of nationhood that seek to resolve the foundational problems engendered by colonial dispossession.⁷ As part of self-consciously engaging in this task, the following argues, historians grappling with ‘abject’ colonial pasts might find it useful to draw upon the historiographical parallels that have emerged in recent German historiography and how historians there have been involved in reappraising genocidal pasts, whether Nazi or colonial.

Via an examination of the current state of German attempts to historicise a violent past, this article underscores the utility of an approach to both scholarship and more public forms of truth telling that might be called historiographical agonism.⁸ It articulates how agonism precludes the assimilation of ‘abject’ pasts such as the Holocaust and the radical violence and dispossession of colonialism into nationalist historiographies. It also demonstrates agonism’s capacity to reconfigure the meaning of such historical events within changing social and political contexts in ways that refuse static, ‘usable’ narrations of the colonial past. Non-Indigenous historians’ contribution to the work of those undertaking decolonisation, it further argues, lies in their capacity to disqualify univocal (meta)narrations of the past, histories attempting what Daniel May has recently called (following Thomas R. Vale) ‘grand unifying theories’ of Australian history, by pointing to the irreducibility and irreconcilability of the nation’s violent colonial past.⁹ Such pasts, it turns out, cannot be mastered.

Reassessing ‘decolonisation’

Refusing to apply the term ‘decolonial’ to critical scholarship in the vein of new imperial history or postcolonial, anti-colonial, or other work undertaken by non-Indigenous scholars reflects an acceptance that Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang were essentially correct to decry such ‘settler moves to innocence’ as being indicative of a desire ‘to find some mercy or relief in the face of the relentlessness of settler guilt’. Too often, they rightly contend, this ostensibly decolonising work has been ‘a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies’.¹⁰

It is also a recognition of the realities of historiographical positionality and Tuck and Yang’s point that, while non-Indigenous scholars should ensure that ‘settler colonial structuring and Indigenous critiques of that structuring are no longer rendered invisible’, this critical intellectual labour cannot be confused with having assumed a position outside the hydraulics of colonial structures. As Tuck and Yang argue, ‘solidarity is an uneasy, reserved and unsettled matter that neither reconciles present grievances nor forecloses future conflicts’.¹¹ It is always haunted by Muecke’s searching questions ‘will your gazes ever meet? If they do, will you recognize each other? Will this recognition be based on sameness or difference?’¹²

Eschewing the tempting branding of scholarship as ‘decolonial’ is an acknowledgement too of Evelyn Araluen’s point that ‘there is no protocol for settlers to engage with the enormously confronting notion of decolonisation in any discipline’, much less academic history which has long been the subject of critique by Indigenous scholars such as Natalie Harkin.¹³ Despite its undoubted value, critical scholarship of colonialism is different to the work being undertaken both inside and outside the academy by colonised peoples seeking to reposition themselves within the material and intellectual conditions of colonisation. Unlike that undertaken by non-Indigenous scholars, such work reflects the (now two decades old) call of scholars like Linda Tuhiwai Smith for a generation of Indigenous intellectuals and activists to find ways to respond to the ‘imperatives of an indigenous agenda’ and ‘find an academic voice and identity that sat well with a strong indigenous identity’.¹⁴ This call has been taken up and a variety of approaches have emerged as a result. Among them is the ‘Indigenous standpoint theory’ of Martin Nakata, who has articulated a research agenda devoted to ‘making more intelligible the corpus of objectified knowledge about us as it emerges and organises understanding of our lived reality.¹⁵ Elsewhere, Lester Irabinna-Rigney has proposed the concept of ‘Indigenism’ which, while recognising the diversity of Indigenous perspectives and experiences, is held together by a commitment to privileging Indigenous voices and resisting colonial politics and structures.¹⁶ In the South African context, Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni has advocated for ‘epistemological decolonisation’ as a process by which colonised peoples can create sites to reimagine the categories in which they think and work.¹⁷

In a context where positionality is key, this not a question of mobilising the type of ‘strategic essentialism’ that Gayatri Spivak and Martin Nakata warned can fetishise and homogenise the multifarious lived experiences of indigeneity within a narrow nativist frame.¹⁸ Rather, it is an acknowledgement that there are some important differences in epistemological and ontological approaches used by many Indigenous scholars and activists that should neither be discounted nor indeed, as Nakata has pointed out, unduly reified in ways that artificially fix ‘the boundaries between Indigenous and non-Indigenous worlds’.¹⁹ Irrespective of their complexion, these important attempts to claim and hold an Indigenous space should not be unthinkingly coopted by non-Indigenous scholars. It is hard to see any rationale for transforming what is essentially the difficult work of Indigenous auto-reorientation into a scholarly space to be mined like any other by all comers.

Historiographical agonism

With the uneasy relationship between academic intellectual labour and its broader social logic in mind, the form and function of critical historiography undertaken by non-Indigenous historians should be rethought to see how and if, notwithstanding its limitations with regard to decolonisation, historiography might still usefully contribute to the task of truth telling specifically placed upon scholars and citizens alike by the Uluru Statement from the Heart.²⁰ This reassessment might well benefit from careful attention to how the effects of a problematic past have been treated elsewhere. To this end, while other suitable examples certainly exist, the sections below examine the long German historiographical tradition of Vergangenheitsbewältigung – that is, of seeking to come to terms with the past, to demonstrate how, under the weight of its own recent historiographical convulsions, German history has been brought to a generative new situation that is best described as historiographical agonism, a situation from which Australian historians might learn.

Bringing Andrew Bonnell and Martin Crotty’s 2004 comparative history of Australian and German historiography up to date, and re-engaging with themes explored by A. Dirk Moses in 2001 and Neil Levi in 2007, this examination of historiographical agonism is applied to the context of settler colonialism in Australia.²¹ To do so, it invokes Julia Kristeva’s notion of ‘the abject’ to argue that, like Germany’s genocidal twentieth century, the colonial histories of settler colonial states, including Australia, are ‘abject pasts’ – that is, histories that cannot be reconciled or contained within a heroic historical narrative of the national past and which stymie all historiographical and political attempts to move beyond them. As I have argued elsewhere, such abject pasts represent ‘that repellent element of the national self that must be disconnected from or safely contained within the larger collective imaginary or imago of the nation if a national historiography is to unify, without sparking expressions of (anti)national existential dread’.²²

This abject past is a destabilising history that cannot be explained away as somehow eccentric to the broader whole of a nation’s history. It resists all attempts at assimilation, reconciliation, or relativisation. It is a past beyond which it is impossible to move and which disqualifies the national collective imaginary and erodes the legitimacy of nationalist historiography at its very roots. With progress towards a historically based nationalism rendered impossible by the fundamental blockage posed by the abject past, agonism offers a strategy for historians seeking to do history without assuming they can somehow defuse abjection’s power to stymie historiographical remediation and consensus.

In a technical sense, agonism describes the workings of the dialectic in situations that defy sublation. It understands perpetual conflict as ‘an ontological and fundamental characteristic of human society’, and does not suppose that differences between historiographical metanarratives can be resolved without a reversion to coercion.²³ While agonism, like all approaches to historiography, draws on factual evidentiary traces of the past to tell specific, situated truths, it nonetheless eschews the strong claims of an encyclopaedic empiricism to be able to tell the (singular) truth about the past.²⁴ As the theorist of agonism Chantal Mouffe has argued, and as historians have long understood, ‘full objectivity can never be reached’, because both social order and its narration are ‘of an hegemonic nature … any order is always the expression of power relations’. Accordingly, Mouffe continues, all approaches aimed at discursive ‘consensus without exclusion and the hope for a perfectly reconciled and harmonious society have to be abandoned’.²⁵

Historiographical agonism is not merely an academic parlour game of ‘ritualized adversativeness’.²⁶ Nor is it a naïve belief in a ‘marketplace of ideas’ functioning beyond power relations, or a diverting ‘communicative-strategic game’.²⁷ Above all, agonistic history is not frozen in the ‘winner take all’ antagonism of ‘history wars’ in which the adherents of ossified rival positions seek to assert a totalising historical paradigm under the guise of consensus and where each side believes in the possibility of the final intellectual elimination of its opponents’ perspective. Rather, agonism approaches history as a continuous process of reinterpretation and perspectival shifts that complicate the institutionalisation of enduring hegemonic historiographical approaches to narrating the past.

Importantly, in its anti-totalising tendencies, agonism foregrounds the petits récits (or smaller narratives) championed by Jean-François Lyotard.²⁸ It abandons the goal of an assimilative and enduring reconciliation between the abject past and the present and rejects the possibility of any form of overarching historical sublation that would allow a cathartic transcendence of the abject past, after which the national project might be resumed. Agonism also recognises and seeks to ameliorate the pronounced enunciative asymmetry haunting institutional scholarship (particularly in colonial states). This asymmetry, termed the différend by Lyotard, marks a situation in which ‘a conflict between two parties is regulated by the discursive idiom and norms of one party’ despite the fact that ‘the wrong suffered by the other party cannot be signified in that idiom’.²⁹ The necessary historiographical response to this asymmetry is, as Lyotard suggests, ‘to bear witness’ to these différends by inventing new idioms and localised narratives that will enable an articulation of these wrongs, all without imagining that this leads to an end point where the work of truth telling is finished and differing historical experiences can be reconciled and transcended.³⁰ Instead, it stresses that truth telling is a never-ending series of interactions between contending readings of evidentiary materials reflecting the ceaseless multiplication of historical understandings over time.

Through attention to petits récits and their complexity, historiographical agonism also offers the necessary space for the multidirectional historical accounts from below recommended by Shino Konishi as a way of challenging the Manichean ‘native/settler binary’ that has crept into the history of colonialism.³¹ As Anna Cento Bull and Hans Lauge Hansen have pointed out, agonistic historiography offers, in the spirit of Mikhail Bakhtin’s polyphony, an opportunity for the multiplication of dialogic representations of an abject past solicited from an ever-widening circle of voices.³² It is a model for writing history that revivifies the abject past and treats it as always present through a ceaseless layering and rhizomic multiplication of historiographical approaches and accounts.

Historiographical agonism and the abject German past

In the past few years, a new, often acrimonious, historians’ debate (Historikerstreit) has broken out in German history. Building on themes that emerged in the Historikerstreit of the 1980s, it is being conducted, at least partially, along the fault-line separating those who continue to see the Holocaust as a historically singular, sui generis event beyond comparison and those who have sought to highlight the value of re-examining it in the ‘multidirectional’ light of recent approaches such as global history and postcolonial studies that bring the Holocaust into comparisons with other abject pasts and radically violent events stemming from colonialism, including slavery and colonial genocides.³³ This new historians’ debate (Historikerstreit), although unlike that of the 1980s, still addresses Ernst Nolte’s complaint that Nazism and the Holocaust constituted ‘a past that will not pass’.³⁴ At that time, Nolte’s unsustainable comparative claim that Nazi genocide was Hitler’s ‘Asiatic’ response to the Soviet Union’s ostensibly pre-existing genocidal tendencies was robustly countered by Jürgen Habermas, who declared that ‘whoever wishes to exorcise the shame surrounding [the Holocaust] …’ was in effect engaged in ‘apologetic tendencies’.³⁵

Habermas’ charge was justifiable. In his 1986 intervention Nolte had urged Germans to reconcile themselves to their abject Nazi past, to historicise it and to view it as an aberration in an otherwise proud national history. He was not alone, supported by other historians such as Klaus Hildebrand and Andreas Hillgrüber, but also, more tellingly, by nationalist politicians such as the Christian Democrat parliamentarian Alfred Dregger, who infamously urged the German people to ‘come out from Hitler’s shadow’.³⁶ For Dregger, the Holocaust threatened to erode the foundations of patriotism. He feared that a ‘lack of a history and lack of regard for our own nation’ would endanger the nation because ‘without an elementary patriotism, which other peoples take for granted, our people will not be able to survive’.³⁷

In response to these attempts to normalise and relativise the Holocaust and the Nazi era, Habermas insisted upon the sheer impossibility of assimilating this delegitimising abject Nazi past within a functioning nationalist history and expressed a desire to see Germans abandon Nolte’s hope of salvaging a ‘usable past’.³⁸ Auschwitz, he argued had ‘torn to shreds’ the naiveté required for the continued authority of the nation and its ‘unquestioned traditions’.³⁹

Our own life is linked to the life context in which Auschwitz was possible not by contingent circumstances but intrinsically. Our form of life is connected with that of our parents and grandparents through a web of familial, local, political, and intellectual traditions that is difficult to disentangle – that is, through a historical milieu that made us what and who we are today. None of us can escape this milieu, because our identities, both as individuals and as Germans, are indissolubly interwoven with it.⁴⁰

What settler historians might extract from Habermas’ refusal to permit a return to nationalism via historiography is his insistence that the Holocaust reached both backwards into the national past and forward into the present in a way that could never be disentangled or adequately resolved. If the same is true of other ‘abject pasts’ such as colonialism, then the necessary historiographical response to these pasts cannot be to write, as Nolte did, towards an elusive reconciliation that might hold out the possibility of historical absolution, but rather must involve a turn towards an agonism that concedes that the abject colonial past precludes any ameliorative sublation that might lead to the reclamation of a usable national history.

Despite some important scholarly interventions, in some ways, the most recent stage of this debate, the so-called ‘German Catechism debate’ (or sometimes Historikerstreit 2.0), which has hinged on the permissibility of studying the Holocaust alongside other abject pasts such as colonial violence and slavery, has not been a purely historiographical one.⁴¹ Since the 1980s, the sense that the Holocaust somehow stood outside history has ebbed in historical scholarship. Historians have been fruitfully comparing, contrasting and relating the Holocaust to other episodes of mass violence, including the genocide in Germany’s settler colony Southwest Africa, for more than twenty years, as the expanding field of comparative genocide studies shows. So too has the old consensus view that any attempt to historicise the Holocaust or study it in relation to other events somehow ‘relativised’ Nazi genocide broken down.⁴² Strikingly, however, the notion that the Holocaust ‘transcends history’, and therefore should be quarantined from discussions regarding other abject pasts remains the hegemonic (state and feuilleton) discourse in Germany.⁴³ This has been repeatedly made clear, as when in 2020 the African intellectual Achille Mbembe was shamefully accused of anti-Semitism and Holocaust relativisation by Felix Klein, Germany’s Federal Commissioner for the Fight Against Antisemitism, for comparing Israeli conduct towards the Palestinians to South African apartheid and, elsewhere, arguing that apartheid and the Holocaust were two examples of political fantasies of racial separation.⁴⁴

It is this disparity between the emphasis on guarding a singular overarching historical truth driving German public historical commemoration of the Holocaust and the proliferation of histories enabled by the multidirectional turn undergirding contemporary Holocaust historiography that A. Dirk Moses interrogated in his incendiary article ‘Der Katechismus der Deutschen’ in May 2021.⁴⁵ In it Moses sought (amongst other things) to protect the historiographical space that had been won during the past two decades in scholarly discussions of the Holocaust and its relation to colonialism and other abject pasts around the world from the strictures of German public memory. In particular, he sought to reject the stifling demand for a singular, agreed-upon national history of the Holocaust, even one that had itself, until the Historikerstreit of the 1980s, been seen as a forthrightly anti-nationalist view of the past by historians like Nolte. Moses’ target was the ossification of an erstwhile enabling but now restrictive narrative of German history that had been hegemonic for more than three decades and which continued to insist strictly upon the singularity of the Holocaust well after this tenet had been abandoned by most historians, effectively denying the legitimacy of the wealth of new research that suggested that Nazi genocide might sit within a historical web of relations or might be discussed within a broader history of violence and dispossession.⁴⁶

In this sense, the Catechism Debate offers a case study in the utility of agonism and its capacity to enable future histories that revise totalising and programmatic narrations of the national past – even those narrations that have served an important civic role in fostering a critical historical consciousness in the past. Moses’ claim is that just as the history of the Holocaust cannot be integrated into the kind of nationalist historiography desired by Nolte so too it cannot be contained and protected from new forms of historical comparison by an originally critical but now limiting historical catechism.⁴⁷ His emphasis on the necessity of historiographical shifts in response to new historical circumstances suggests that any formally settled history of the Holocaust can in the long run disqualify important future ways of understanding the abject German past. Indeed, even Habermas has recently concluded that the Holocaust could and should be viewed comparatively, conceding that ‘like all historical matters of fact that can be compared with other matters of fact, so too the Holocaust with other genocides’.⁴⁸ Far from tainting or relativising the historical weight of the Holocaust, Habermas has now stressed, recent comparative and connective approaches to historiography had further complicated German history, expanding the scope and reiterating the serious impediments to nationalist attempts to transcend the abject German pasts, now seen as both colonial and Nazi.

Bringing the Nazi past into analytical contact with the abject pasts of earlier colonial societies, as historians of colonialism and genocide have done, has stimulated precisely the kind of generative state of historiographical flux that is characteristic of agonism. The turn to ‘multidirectional memory’ has made it clear that relativising or reconciling Germans to their Nazi past cannot succeed. Instead, the historical weight of the Holocaust is continually reinforced through its re-evaluation in the light of other events in world history, including the history of slavery and colonial genocides. In line with Michael Rothberg’s prediction, by interrogating the Nazi past through a variety of new perspectives, possibilities for addressing the abject past have been multiplied, not reduced, allowing past atrocities to continue to be ‘subject to ongoing negotiation’.⁴⁹ As Mirjam Brusius has pointed out, this process has never been ‘about relativising the Holocaust, or its singularity. Rather, it is about finding more nuance, complicating what we believe we know’.⁵⁰

The irreducibility of Nazi genocide continues to confound the nationalist demand to create an assimilable, ‘usable’ national past, while its comparison to other events forces a reinterrogation of the historical significance of the Holocaust. Far from overshadowing the history of the Third Reich, this dialogical approach to the Holocaust, and its comparison to other abject pasts, has ensured that it remains a central problematic within German historiography, at the same time as bringing other abject pasts around the world more sharply into focus.

Beyond this, the ‘German Catechism’ debate is instructive not only in demonstrating how new avenues of research have cast fresh light on indigestible events, but also in how even those offering the most caustic rejection of these new approaches were still forced to reconsider and reformulate earlier paradigms in response.⁵¹ Summing up this process, Bill Niven argued:

At present, it may seem that a kind of extreme particularism (the Holocaust cannot be connected to colonialism) is pitted against an equally radical inclusivism (the Holocaust cannot be understood without colonialism). These tensions need to be negotiated so that memory of the Holocaust and of colonialism can sit side by side.⁵²

This process of negotiation, the essence of agonism, and the capacity for abject pasts to both ‘sit side by side’, or –perhaps better – inform one another, has not resulted in anything resembling historiographical sublation or a movement towards an ever more perfect historicism. Instead, serious historians doing serious historical research still disagree strenuously on the relationship between the Holocaust and other events, including colonial genocide. Despite this lack of consensus, or rather as a product of it, the terrain for historical analysis has been multiplied, new voices amplified, new truths sourced from new positions, and older, dominant ones, by coming into contact with these, usefully problematised and rethought.⁵³ Nothing has been solved or lost, and the question of the exact nature of the relationship between the Holocaust and earlier colonial violence remains productively unsettled.

The introduction of new voices and perspectives also offers a modicum of multivocality which has not seen the Holocaust relativised, diminished or assimilated into a ‘usable’ national past. Rather, by being recast within a new context, new insights have been won. One important development noted by Moses and Habermas, for example, was that the assumption of cultural homogeneity that marked the historiography of the 1980s is no longer sustainable, given the demands of migrant communities that their histories too be the subject of serious research and reflection. The effects of these new perspectives on the history of violence (including the Holocaust) is neatly encapsulated by Moses, who explains why such migrant communities are unlikely to reproduce the earlier historical narrative that Nazi genocide has no historical antecedent:

Migrants to Germany bring their own experiences and perspectives about history and politics that are not going to indulge the self-congratulatory stories Westerners like to tell themselves about spreading civilization … No wonder these descendants of victims of the German state, whose capacities for development were smashed by genocidal colonial warfare, experience German memory culture as racist.⁵⁴

Others have made similar points about the need for a more heterogeneous historiography of the abject past. Several contributors to the debate including Habermas, Brusius, Zoe Samudzi and Tiffany N. Florvil have similarly reflected on both the changing historiographical landscape and the pressing social realities that have underwritten these changes.⁵⁵ As Florvil succinctly put it, ‘if Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung is such a fundamental feature of postwar German society, where are the perspectives from Black German, Turkish German, and Romani communities? Why don’t we know them and why aren’t they shaping the debate?’⁵⁶ Recognising these lacunae offers the capacity to reconsider critically the cultural assumptions that had underpinned earlier phases of historical debate about the Holocaust.

As Habermas, Moses, Rothberg, Mbembe, Samudzi and a host of others have pointed out, comparing and contrasting the crimes of the Third Reich to those of colonialism has done nothing to facilitate the assimilation of the abject Nazi past into the type of ‘usable’ version of the past desired by Nolte. Instead, the German Catechism debate brought into focus the extent to which the settled historical truisms of Germany’s civic culture of atonement had become ritualised and had dulled the requirement for a perpetually visceral confrontation with the nation’s genocidal past. New approaches to historiography, however, have revivified the field without replacing one catechism with another. Instead, in agonistic fashion, the possibilities for understanding and representing the past have been fruitfully multiplied.

From Vergangenheitsbewältigung to Makarrata

The German Catechism debate has made clear how postcolonial approaches have altered the terrain of German historiography and civic debate without resolving any of the central points of contention or offering a settled synthesis of the multiple positions presented by the participants. This generative impasse and productive inability to arrive at a totalising narrative of the past is also one that is identifiable in the struggle to represent the unassimilable abject pasts of settler colonial successor states like Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Israel, and the United States, all of which have been marked by dispossession and violence. This productive historiographical aporia forestalls any sense of the history of colonialism as something that can somehow be ameliorated through historical truth telling. By foregrounding the perpetual incompleteness of all attempts at coming to terms with colonial history, agonism refuses the false allure of a future manageable national history, ensuring instead that the abject colonial past and its enduring legacies fester as an unhealable wound in the national imaginary.

Arguably, there are clear lessons here for how the current historiographical imperative for ‘truth telling’, derived from the Uluru Statement from the Heart, might avoid the temptation of seeking to ‘tell the truth’, understood as a unifying and redemptive vehicle for national reconciliation through the sublation of earlier contested national histories. In the German example, this project of alleviating the historical source of nationalist dread has proved to be a historiographical dead end and a blockage to new commemorative possibilities in the civic sphere. Instead, historians might seek to facilitate the perpetual ‘telling of truths’ that emerge from the multitude of irreconcilably fractured perspectives on the abject colonial past. This telling of truths might rest, as Appleby and Davis have suggested, on an embrace of localised petits récits, a commitment to fostering a Bakhtinian polyphonic historiography, and an agonistic refusal to tidy up the riotous inconsistencies of the past through totalising histories that ossify into historiographical orthodoxies.

In the Australian context, this need for an approach like historiographical agonism that resists ‘telling the truth’ has long been tacitly understood. Indeed, the drive for a unifying narrative of the colonial past that might underwrite a German-style historical consensus has been viewed for two decades as synonymous with the political project of reconciliation. This project, as Bain Attwood has pointed out, is primarily ‘an exercise in nation-building’ that by its very nature has ‘sought to redeem the history of settler peoples in Australia’.⁵⁷ In this context, seeking a consensus understanding of the colonial past, has become, as Miranda Johnson and Penelope Edmonds have argued, a liberal pathway to the rehabilitation of a viable, ostensibly ‘postcolonial’ nationalism.⁵⁸

This desire to become ‘a reconciled nation’ that could ‘once again look in the mirror and rejoice’ continues to motivate historiographical efforts predicated on salvaging the legitimacy of the settler state.⁵⁹ In this vein, the desire to come to terms with the past remains a process designed to settle the past rather than continuously interrogate it, and is quite often one in which Indigenous people rather than non-Indigenous people are expected to concede the historical ground that separates Australia’s colonisers from its colonised. As recently as February 2022, for example, the then Prime Minister of Australia, Scott Morrison, reflected upon the national reconciliation process, explicitly arguing against ‘reigniting the coals of pain’ and insisting that the responsibility for progress towards reconciliation lay with the Indigenous people of Australia. ‘Sorry is not the hardest word to say’, he chided. ‘The hardest is I forgive you’. It was the absence of Indigenous forgiveness, he implied, that had stopped the nation from reaching ‘a path of healing’.⁶⁰

Morrison’s comments were a strongly worded but not idiosyncratic formulation of how historical truth telling as national history has been seen as a way of fostering a form of reconciliation that in its forgiveness and finalisation of historical debts represents a project of national vindication. Absent from this understanding of the role of truth telling and those interested in it is any understanding that historians and others with a stake in the past rightly remain committed to seeking endlessly differing forms of historical critique that might shed new light on how to approach the enormity of the abject colonial past and how to find a form of utterance that gives voice to the settler colonial différend that hampers the attempts of historians to adequately represent the violence done to the material and epistemic basis of Indigenous life. Historiographical agonism accepts the need to try and ‘bear witness’ to this différend by constantly finding new forms of expression and new avenues of research that might offer fresh ways to gesture towards it, while accepting that these idioms too inevitably become inadequate and even ossify in ways that enable the re-emergence of what Habermas rightly criticised in the German context as the ‘apologetic tendencies’ of nationalist historiography.⁶¹ Given the unresolvable, aporic tension engendered by the settler colonial différend, any confidence in the sublatory role of historiography appears misplaced. In a situation in which, by virtue of its origins in colonial dispossession, the historical foundations of the Australian nation must be perpetually interrogated, historical agonism offers the only way to approach the abject colonial past dialogically without emplotting an imagined final status, a telos of a reconciled nation that presumes and permanently reinscribes ‘settler futurity’.⁶² By recognising the impossibility of historiographical closure on the myriad complicated and localised histories of an eventually all but total dispossession and denial of sovereignty, historians can ensure that these processes cannot ever be historiographically rationalised as inevitable, if regrettably violent, waystations that have since been transcended and redeemed through the dialectical progress of the settler nation.⁶³ Conversely, should historians accept a historiographical model that foregrounds the hope of reconciliation and sublation, seeking a way to tame the historical record of dispossession and frontier violence by viewing it as part of Hegel’s ‘slaughter bench of history’ and of the (ultimately progressive) dialectical workings of history, this can only lead, however slowly, to the reinscription of a destigmatised, teleologically nationalist post-reconciliation history.⁶⁴

As in the case of the history of the Holocaust, historiographical agonism in settler state settings like Australia is predicated on the realisation that attempts to destigmatise the abject colonial past by telling the truth can only fail.⁶⁵ It is also founded, however, on an awareness that it is material rather than idealist forms of change that remain primary. Just as in the case of the German Catechism debate where the changes in the social composition of those participating (when compared with the Historikerstreit of the 1980s) radically altered the bounds of possible discourse, so too in the Australian case has the growing commitment to listen to increasingly vocal and heterogeneous Indigenous voices, as well as voices from Australia’s own migrant community, expanded the terrain of debate, pointing out that the abject colonial past is also compounded by the racism of the White Australia policy and more recent forms of exclusion such as Australia’s treatment of refugees or incarcerated Indigenous people.⁶⁶ In this sense, agonism, by viewing discourse and the range of enunciative possibilities as a residual effect of changing social realities rather than the primary locus of change, offers a model for integrating Tuck and Yang’s critique of the idealist view that change is a matter of ‘free your mind and the rest will follow’. It recognises that, by themselves, ‘the pursuit of critical consciousness, [and] the pursuit of social justice through a critical enlightenment, can also be settler moves to innocence’ rather than a path to an ostensibly decolonised future.⁶⁷

Under this reading, historiography also necessarily reflects the material changes demanded by and negotiated with (amongst others) Indigenous people. In the context of Australia’s abject colonial past, this is utterly consistent with and reinforces the tertiary role of truth telling established by the Uluru Statement from the Heart, the blueprint for the social and political change authored and adopted by Indigenous Australians. As Megan Davis and others have repeatedly pointed out, the Uluru Statement has frequently been misread as a document that promotes the idea that reconciliation is possible via a process of centralised, state-directed historical truth telling that will offer a consensus version of the past spanning the intercommunal divide engendered by colonisation. The Uluru Statement does indeed call for ‘a fair and truthful relationship with the people of Australia’, but only as one of three pillars: constitutional change, a change in the foundational basis for territorial compromises or agreements, and, stemming from this, a new appreciation of and dedication to Australia’s Indigenous history, or as Eddie Synot summarises them, ‘Voice, Treaty and Truth’.⁶⁸ Primarily, however, the Uluru Statement from the Heart is a document through which ‘Indigenous advocates for constitutional reform are looking to secure their own foothold and self-determination’.⁶⁹ This self-determination, as Jesse John Fleay and Barry Judd argue, pertains primarily to ‘the protection of rights to land, culture and language’ and, to begin with, ‘the right to be equal socially and economically with settler Australians’.⁷⁰

As Appleby and Davis point out, ‘truth-telling will not, in itself, reset the relationship between First Nations and non-Indigenous Australians’, and historical truth-telling is not a substitute for ‘structural reform’.⁷¹ Davis has underscored this point elsewhere, explaining that ‘the First Nations Regional Dialogues ranked the voice to parliament as the primary reform priority. The next priority was treaty or agreement-making. The third was truth-telling’. Regarding this tertiary priority, she stressed that this was not to be on the model of a centralised national truth commission, but rather through a process that maps well onto the petits récits – the telling of truths that ‘would be localised and grow out of the agreement-making process’.⁷² As Davis wrote in The Monthly, while truth telling was required, it needed to be undertaken ‘bottom up’.⁷³ The priority, however, remains political change. Reflecting on the role of history and historiography, Davis has been clear:

The idea that truth automatically will lead to justice is fraught. It is illusory. It is an ahistorical belief that is simply not borne out by the evidence. It defies the demands we have made as Aboriginal people for rigorous evidence-based thinking and public policy in Indigenous affairs. Beware the ally spruiking truth.⁷⁴

The model of truth telling envisaged by Davis and the Uluru Statement – contingent, localised, strategic, and from below – accords with Lyotard’s championing of the petit récit and historiographical agonism’s suspicion of the totalising and programmatic assumptions of top-down narrations of the past that assume and work towards the legitimacy of the settler nation and, accordingly, seek to control alternative narrations of the past.⁷⁵ Historiographical agonism offers a possibility for a vigorous investigation of the abject past stripped of any assumption that historiography can destigmatise it or offer a basis for historical and political reconciliation or national absolution. Agonism, that is, offers the approach sought by Attwood when he commented that, as historians,

We will have to consider how different historical narratives can talk to one another and what they are going to be talking about so that there can be a basis for ongoing dialogue – for mutually unsettling exchanges of diverse histories – rather than the development of a final settlement, some final (re)solution of the past for the present.⁷⁶

Polyphonic agonism is not decolonisation

In the introduction to their edited collection dealing with Indigenous self-determination in Australia, Laura Rademaker and Tim Rowse argue against reading history through the settler colonial paradigm, on the grounds that it

presents the relationship between Indigenous and settler authorities in zero-sum terms, such that Indigenous engagement with policies of self-determination is destined to fail and/or be self-deluding. We feel wary about this theoretical framework because it supposes reconciliation to be impossible, a process of self-delusion … We read the history of settler–Indigenous relationships as shaped by historical particularities, interdependence and political agency on each side, even as these can be understood within a broader colonial structure.⁷⁷

Rademaker and Rowse’s critique of the settler colonial studies paradigm, shared with Konishi and pursued in earlier work by Rowse, is largely apposite in the sense that some formulations of the settler colonial paradigm have indeed veered towards an antagonistic model that presents power in the settler state as strictly monodirectional.⁷⁸ In many ways, the multivocal and multiperspectival modality of agonism sits well with their warning, given the way in which it fosters historiographical heterogeneity and an emphasis on the irreducibility of anomic human experiences to totalising narratives.⁷⁹ Their call for historians to be attentive to instances of Indigenous agency is, in this regard, of vital importance.

Notwithstanding the riotous inconsistencies and anomic nature of lived experience and the importance of charting these, the links Rademaker and Rowse draw between exploring expressions of Indigenous agency and the project of reconciliation should nonetheless be followed with great caution. It involves a fraught leap from documenting the variegation of the experiences of settler colonialism towards potentially obscuring the irreconcilable historical legacies of dispossession and its consequences and reinscribes the view that the abject colonial past is a past that might yet be managed in such a way as to allow a historically grounded form of national reconciliation, a successful sublation of the abject colonial past that might even at a later stage be a cause for national celebration.

It is worth scaling back the hopes and claims of historians, whether that be for a form of reconciliation that presumes the continuation of an only slightly modified version of the settled status quo, or the exuberant claim to be advancing decolonisation through scholarship. A more sustainable claim might be that historiography, by rendering eternally present but constantly afresh the multiplicity of experiences and expressions of agency that both served and frustrated the dispossessive logic and radical violence of the settler state, can offer the intellectual raw materials that might inform (but not direct) those involved in the material transformation, or ‘decolonisation’, of colonial successor states.⁸⁰

The German Catechism debate in Germany exemplified the messy and multivocal nature of historiographical agonism. For all of those involved, the central issue remains how best to frame and reframe Germany’s irreconcilable, genocidal past in the present, particularly in light of new historiographical perspectives won from the study of colonial genocides and atrocities by a new generation of historians. Fruitfully, no consensus has been achieved. Less usefully, the frustration this lack of consensus engendered in those committed to forcing some form of sublation has devolved into antagonistic ad hominem attacks on its central protagonists. Historiographical agonism, however, rejects the notion of forcing consensus and of the manageability of a stable past that can be contained within fixed pieties before gradually being integrated into a usable national past via agreed-upon forms of commemoration. Instead, agonism insists upon a dynamic, contested, multivocal, and dialogic historiography that is self-renewing through its intersection with contemporary history and the material changes that enable new permutations in public memory and historiography.

As in the German case, so too do Australia’s processes of coming to terms with its abject colonial past remain necessarily unfinished and continuously open to new currents of exploration, including comparison and contrast with the abject pasts of others. These abject pasts cannot be satisfactorily assimilated into official forms of national remembrance that offer a palliative effect through ‘telling the truth’. Instead, an agonistic historiography – the ‘telling of truths’ and the perpetual renewal of the parameters and terrain of colonial history – can avoid the false promises of a final moment of reckoning or national reconciliation. The agonist approach recognises that it is important for the colonial past to remain deeply painful in perpetuity, and it is the work of historians to reopen the scars of the abject past anew if ever they look like healing.

Acknowledgement

Thanks are due to A. Dirk Moses, Catherine Kevin and Alessandro Antonello for their assistance in clarifying my argument in this article.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council: [Grant Number FT210100448]: Strategic Friendship: Anglo-German Cooperation in the Asia-Pacific Region.

Notes

1 Gabrielle Appleby and Megan Davis, ‘The Uluru Statement and the Promises of Truth’, Australian Historical Studies 49, no 4 (2018): 508.

2 Henry Reynolds, Truth-Telling: History, Sovereignty and the Uluru Statement (Sydney: New South, 2021); Josie Gill, ‘Decolonizing Literature and Science’, Configurations 26 (2018): 283–8.

3 See recently, for example, Vanessa Barolsky, ‘Truth-Telling about a Settler-Colonial Legacy: Decolonized Possibilities?’ Postcolonial Studies, 2022, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13688790.2022.2117872 (accessed 31 May 2023).

4 On nationalist historiographical mythopoesis in Australia, see Ann Curthoys, ‘Disputing National Histories: Some Recent Australian Debates’, Transforming Cultures 1, no. 1 (2006): 6–18; Mark Hearn, ‘Writing the Nation in Australia: Australian Historians and Narrative Myths of Nation’, in Writing the Nation: A Global Perspective, ed. Stefan Berger (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 104–25.

5 Chris Healy, Forgetting Aborigines (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2008), 214. For a copy of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, see Shireen Morris, ed., A Rightful Place: A Roadmap to Recognition (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2017), 1–3.

6 Kim Benterrak, Stephen Muecke, and Paddy Roe, Reading the Country: Introduction to Nomadology (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1984), 11.

7 Miranda Johnson, ‘Writing Indigenous Histories Now’, Australian Historical Studies 45, no. 3 (2014): 330.

8 For other approaches to agonism, see Barolsky; Sarah Maddison in ‘Agonistic Reconciliation: Inclusion, Decolonisation and the Need for Radical Innovation’, Third World Quarterly 43, no. 6 (2022): 1307–23.

9 Daniel May, ‘Rethinking The Biggest Estate on Earth: A Critique of Grand Unified Theories’, History Australia 20, no. 1 (2023): 154–72.

10 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, ‘Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2021): 1, 9, 11.

11 Ibid., 3. There is the danger of an infinite regress here in which claims, such as those made here, regarding the need to refuse the status of scholarship as the work of decolonisation, are in themselves a new, barely obscured settler move to innocence.

12 Benterrak, Muecke and Roe, 16.

13 Evelyn Araluen, ‘Resisting the Institution’, Overland 227 (2017), https://overland.org.au/previous-issues/issue-227/feature-evelyn-araluen/ (accessed 31 May 2023); Natalie Harkin, ‘Intimate Encounters Aboriginal Labour Stories and the Violence of the Colonial Archive’, in Routledge Handbook of Critical Indigenous Studies, eds Brendan Hokowhitu et al. (New York: Routledge, 2021), 147–61; Evelyn Araluen-Corr, ‘Silence and Resistance: Aboriginal Women Working Within and Against the Archive’, Continuum 32, no. 4 (2018): 487–502.

14 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 2nd ed. (London: Zed Books, 2012), vii, xi.

15 Martin Nakata, Disciplining the Savages: Savaging the Disciplines (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007), 215.

16 Lester Irabinna-Rigney, ‘Indigenist Research and Aboriginal Australia’, in Indigenous Peoples’ Wisdom and Power: Affirming Our Knowledge through Narratives, ed. Julian E. Kunnie and Nomalungelo I. Goduka (Burlington: Ashgate, 2006), 41–2.

17 Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Epistemic Freedom in Africa: Deprovincialization and Decolonization (New York: Routledge, 2018), 3.

18 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993), 4–5; Martin Nakata, Disciplining the Savages, Savaging the Disciplines (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007).

19 Martin Nakata, ‘The Rights and Blights of the Politics in Indigenous Higher Education’, Anthropological Forum 23, no. 3 (2013): 302.

20 Edward W. Said, The World, the Text and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 150.

21 Andrew Bonnell and Martin Crotty, ‘An Australian “Historikerstreit”? Review Article’, Australian Journal of Politics and History 50, no. 3 (2004): 425–33; A. Dirk Moses, ‘Coming to Terms with Genocidal Pasts in Comparative Perspective: Germany and Australia’, Aboriginal History, 25 (2001): 91–115; Neil Levi, ‘“No Sensible Comparison”? The Place of the Holocaust in Australia’s History Wars’, History and Memory 19, no. 1 (2007): 124–56.

22 Matthew P. Fitzpatrick, ‘The Pre-History of the Holocaust? The Sonderweg and Historikerstreit Debates and the Abject Colonial Past’, Central European History 41, no. 3 (2008): 480.

23 Ann Cento Bull and Hans Lauge Hansen, ‘Agonistic Memory and the UNREST Project’, Modern Languages Open, 1 (2020): 2.

24 Keith Jenkins, Rethinking History (London: Routledge, 2002), 26.

25 Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically (London: Verso, 2013), xi.

26 Deborah Tannen, ‘Agonism in Academic Discourse’, Journal of Pragmatics 34, nos. 10–11 (2002): 1651.

27 James Tully, ‘The Unfreedom of the Moderns in Comparison to Their Ideals of Constitutional Democracy’, Modern Law Review 65 (2002): 219.

28 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 57–61.

29 Andrew Schaap, ‘The Absurd Proposition of Aboriginal Sovereignty’, in Law and Agonistic Politics, ed. Andrew Schaap (New York: Routledge, 2009), 209–10.

30 Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 13.

31 Shino Konishi, ‘First Nations Scholars, Settler Colonial Studies, and Indigenous History’, Australian Historical Studies 50, no. 3 (2019): 296.

32 Anna Cento Bull and Hans Lauge Hansen, ‘On Agonistic Memory’, Memory Studies 9, no. 4 (2016): 390–404.

33 While the debate includes a range of other themes pertaining to positionality in German history and the effects that the perspectives of migrants, colonised peoples, and the globalisation of the history discipline have had on German history and society, for the sake of intelligibility the following concentrates on that part of the debate related to changing approaches to Holocaust history. For the classic statement regarding a ‘multidirectional’ approach to the Holocaust, see primarily Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).

34 Ernst Nolte, ‘Vergangenheit die nicht vergehen will’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 6 June 1986.

35 Nolte, as quoted in Jürgen Habermas, The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians’ Debate (Cambridge: Polity, 1994), 239; Jürgen Habermas, ‘A Kind of Settlement of Damages (Apologetic Tendencies)’, New German Critique 44 (1988): 25–39.

36 Alfred Dregger as quoted in Elliot Y. Neaman, A Dubious Past: Ernst Jünger and the Politics of Literature after Nazism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 224. For the positions of German historians in this debate, see Steffen Kailitz, ‘Der “Historikerstreit” und die politische Deutungskultur der Bundesrepublik Deutschland’, German Studies Review 32, no. 2 (2009): 279–302.

37 Alfred Dregger, as quoted in Habermas, The New Conservatism, 230–231.

38 Robert G. Moeller, ‘War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany’, American Historical Review 101, no. 4 (1996): 1008–48.

39 Habermas, The New Conservatism, 252.

40 Ibid., 233.

41 Susan Neiman and Michael Wildt, eds, Historiker streiten: Gewalt und Holocaust – die Debatte. (Berlin: Ullstein Verlag, 2022); Natan Sznaider, Fluchtpunkte der Erinnerung. Über die Gegenwart von Holocaust und Kolonialismus (Munich: Carl Handers Verlag, 2022); Frank Bajohr and Rachel O’Sullivan, ‘Holocaust, Kolonialismus und NS-Imperialismus: Forschung im Schatten einer polemischer Debatte’, Viertel für Zeitgeschichte 70, no. 1 (2022); Urs Lindner,‘Die Singularität der Shoah und die postkoloniale Herausforderung der deutschen Erinnerungskultur’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 48, no. 2 (2022). For some recent contributions to the Catechism debate in English, see Jennifer Evans, ed., ‘The Catechism Debate’, http://newfascismsyllabus.com/category/opinions/the-catechism-debate/ (accessed 31 May 2023). For a more exhaustive list including press commentary in English and German, see https://serdargunes.wordpress.com/2021/06/04/a-debate-german-catechism-holocaust-and-post-colonialism/ (accessed 31 May 2023).

42 Notwithstanding the rearguard action of Saul Friedländer, Norbert Frei, Sybille Steinbacher, Dan Diner und Jürgen Habermas, Ein Verbrechen ohne Namen. Anmerkungen zum neuen Streit über den Holocaust (Munich: Beck, 2022).

43 Elie Wiesel, ‘Trivialising the Holocaust: Semi-Fact and Semi-Fiction’, New York Times, 16 April 1978, II, 29.

44 Natan Sznaider, ‘The Summer of Discontent: Achille Mbembe in Germany’, Journal of Genocide Research 23, no. 3 (2021): 412–9; Michael Rothberg, ‘Lived Multidirectionality: “Historikerstreit 2.0” and the Politics of Holocaust Memory’, Memory Studies 15, no. 6 (2022): 1319.

45 A. Dirk Moses, ‘Der Katechismus der Deutschen’ Geschichte der Gegenwart, 23 May 2021, https://geschichtedergegenwart.ch/der-katechismus-der-deutschen/ (accessed 31 May 2023), 49.

46 Dirk Moses, ‘Der Katechismus der Deutschen’; Jürgen Zimmerer, Michael Rothberg, ,Enttabusiert den Vergleich!’, Die Zeit, 4 April 2021, https://www.zeit.de/2021/14/erinnerungskultur-gedenken-pluralisieren-holocaust-vergleich-globalisierung-geschichte (accessed 31 May 2023); Michael Wildt, ‘Was heisst: Singularität des Holocaust?’, Zeithistorische Forschungen 19 (2022): 128–47.

47 On the progressive origins of the ‘German catechism’, see Frank Biess, ‘Confessions of an Ex-Believer’, in Jennifer Evans, ed., ‘The Catechism Debate’, New Fascism Syllabus (25 May–2 June 2021) http://newfascismsyllabus.com/opinions/the-catechism-debate/confessions-of-an-ex-believer/

48 Jürgen Habermas, ‘Der neue Historikerstreit’, Philosophie-Magazin 6 (2021): 10. For his reply, see A. Dirk Moses, ‘Dialektik der Normalisierung’, Berliner Zeitung 229, 2 October 2021, 19.

49 Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 3.

50 Mirjam Brusius, ‘Stones Can Talk Back: Vergangenheitsbewältigung Revisited’, in Jennifer Evans, ed. ‘The Catechism Debate’, New Fascism Syllabus, (25 May–2 June 2021), http://newfascismsyllabus.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/The-Catechism-Debate.pdf (accessed 31 May 2023).

51 See for example Helmut Walser Smith’s contribution, ‘“Sieferle von links”: A Fair Criticism?’ in Jennifer Evans, ed., ‘The Catechism Debate’, https://newfascismsyllabus.com/opinions/sieferle-von-links-a-fair-criticism/ (accessed 31 May 2023).

52 Bill Niven, ‘A Plea for More Balance’, in Jennifer Evans, ed., ‘The Catechism Debate’ https://newfascismsyllabus.com/opinions/a-plea-for-more-balance/ (accessed 31 May 2023).

53 Indicative of this are new perspectives on the German colonial past, the new Humboldt Forum and repatriation policy. Daniel Morat, ‘Katalysator wider Willen: Das Humboldt Forum in Berlin und die deutsche Kolonialvergangenheit’, Zeithistorische Forschungen 16 (2019): 140–53; Jeremiah J. Garsha, ‘Expanding Vergangenheitsbewältigung? German Repatriation of Colonial Artefacts and Human Remains’, Journal of Genocide Research 22, no. 1 (2020): 46–61.

54 A. Dirk Moses, ‘Der Katechismus der Deutschen’.

55 Jennifer Evans, ed., ‘The Catechism Debate’ http://newfascismsyllabus.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/The-Catechism-Debate.pdf (accessed 31 May 2023); Jürgen Habermas, ‘Der neue Historikerstreit’, 11.

56 Tiffany N. Florvil, ‘Queer Memory and Black Germans’, https://newfascismsyllabus.com/opinions/the-catechism-debate/queer-memory-and-black-germans/ (accessed 31 May 2023).

57 Bain Attwood, ‘Unsettling Pasts: Reconciliation and History in Settler Australia’, Postcolonial Studies, 8, no. 3 (2005): 243–59.

58 Miranda Johnson, ‘Reconciliation, Indigeneity, and Postcolonial Nationhood in Settler States’, Postcolonial Studies 14, no. 2 (2011): 187–201; Penelope Edmonds, Settler Colonialism and (Re)conciliation (Berlin: Springer, 2016).

59 Shelley Reys, ‘Foreword’ to 2021 State of Reconciliation in Australia Report: Moving from Safe to Brave Summary Report (Canberra: Reconciliation Australia, 2021), 1.

60 Jack Latimore, ‘PM Prompts Fury by Looking for Forgiveness 14 Years after Rudd’s Apology’, Sydney Morning Herald, 14 February 2022.

61 Lyotard, The Differend, 13; Habermas, The New Conservatism, 212.

62 Tuck and Yang, 3.

63 J Kēhaulani Kauanui, ‘“A Structure, Not an Event”: Settler Colonialism and Enduring Indigeneity’, Lateral 5, no. 1 (2016).

64 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte (Leipzig: Reclam Verlag, 1924), 12.

65 A similar conclusion has been reached very recently by Sarah Maddison in ‘Agonistic Reconciliation’.

66 Samia Khatun, Australianama: The South Asian Odyssey in Australia (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2018); Sukhami Khorana, ‘From “Dewogged” Migrants to “Rabble-Rousers”: Mapping the Indian Diaspora in Australia’, Journal of Intercultural Studies 35, no. 3 (2014): 250–64; Levi, 134, 148.

67 Tuck and Yang, 19.

68 Eddie Synot, ‘The Universal Declaration of Human Rights at 70: Indigenous Rights and the Uluru Statement from the Heart’. Australian Journal of International Affairs 73, no. 4 (2019), 324.

69 Bronwyn Fredericks and Abraham Bradfield, ‘“More than a Thought Bubble … ”: The Uluru Statement from the Heart and Indigenous Voice to Parliament’, M/C Journal 24, no. 1 (2021), https://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2738 (accessed 31 May 2023).

70 Jesse John Fleay and Barry Judd, ‘The Uluru Statement: A First Nations Perspective of the Implications for Social Reconstructive Race Relations in Australia’, International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies 12, no. 1 (2019), 10.

71 Appleby and Davis, 503, 508.

72 Megan Davis, ‘The Long Road to Uluru: Walking Together – Truth before Justice’, Griffith Review 60 (2018).

73 Megan Davis, ‘The Truth about Truth Telling’, The Monthly (December 2021–January 2022).

74 Ibid.

75 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 57–61.

76 Attwood, 243–59.

77 Laura Rademaker and Tim Rowse, eds, Indigenous Self-Determination in Australia: Histories and Historiography (Canberra: ANU Press, 2020), 27.

78 Konishi, ‘First Nations Scholars’; Tim Rowse, ‘Indigenous Heterogeneity’, Australian Historical Studies 45, no. 3 (2014): 297–310.

79 Also exemplified in Laura Rademaker, Found in Translation: Many Meanings on a North Australian Mission (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2018).

80 In this sense, see Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Decolonizing Settler Colonialism: Kill the Settler in Him and Save the Man’, American Indian Culture and Research Journal 41, no. 1 (2017), 1–18.