Not a German past to be reckoned with: negotiating migrant subjectivities between Vergangenheitsbewältigung and the nationalization of history

In discussing the public commemoration of the Armenian genocide and the case of a Turkish refugee‐turned‐memory‐activist in Germany, this article focuses on migrants as they mediate political concerns by reference to the German discourse and practice of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (confronting the past). Such engagements shed light on the intersection of a performative and inclusionary dimension of citizenship inscribed in the figure of the repentant perpetrator and the continuous re‐ethnicization of subjects by reference to particular nationalized histories. The analysis thus reveals the ‘memorial’ contour of a normative German citizen‐subject, one that is self‐reflexive vis‐à‐vis his or her national past. The article charts how the politics of history and citizenship thus play out at the level of subjectivity, implicating registers of affect and aesthetics that are not captured by the more commonly employed framework of ‘memory’, which falls short of analytical import precisely because it lacks a theory of the subject.