Tokens of national redemption: The symbolic economy of Jewish ‘witness testimonies’ in contemporary Germany

As an ‘imagined community’, the nation needs to be symbolically mediated. Classic symbols of nationhood studied in political science are majoritarian, indexing dominant groups and their (official) history. In this paper, I focus on the public role allocated to Jewish Holocaust witnesses in contemporary Germany to explore how a fantasmatic minority becomes a symbolic resource for the national project. I show how policymakers use stories of Jewish suffering and survival to construct and extend repertoires of symbolic action (questions 1 and 3). I analyse how Holocaust ‘testimonies’ are used to generate a post-Nazi narration of national redemption; and I trace how state actors seek to retain control of the symbolic resources derived from these testimonies after the last Holocaust survivors have passed away. The resulting deployment of ‘the witness’ and her story as national tokens raises questions about the ownership of these stories. It connects reflection on the symbolic aspects of policy to critical debates on epistemic extractivism. Empirically, I make this argument based on a multi-method qualitative analysis. First, I reconstruct the centrality of the Jewish witness to German national politics through an account of the 2025 death of Margot Friedländer; a Holocaust survivor who had come to function as the quintessential public Jewish witness. Drawing on a discourse analysis of the televised imagery of her funeral and on official pronouncements of German political leaders, I unpack the symbolic repertoires attached to the figure of ‘the witness’. Second, I show how state-affiliated actors seek to prolong the symbolic function of the witness testimony to (re-)generate the German national community. I do so through an ethnographic account of public educational projects that aim to turn young Germans into ‘secondary witnesses’ (Zweitzeugen). Here, youngsters should internalise the life stories of deceased Holocaust survivors as if these biographies were their own, so as to replicate the testimony authentically after the ‘primary witness’ has passed away. Through this transfer, it is hoped that the symbolic power of the testimony will remain available for the construction of the post-Nazi nation. This empirical analysis yields distinct theoretical implications for our understanding of the symbolic repertoires of political action. First, when it comes to the symbolic economy of nationalism, post-Holocaust witnessing in Germany highlights the role of (imagined) minorities in stabilising the national community. Second, I showcase how witnessing reduces Jewish testimonies to narrative resources that are relentlessly mined for a German national project. This functionalisation of ‘Jewish stories’ represents a form of epistemic extractivism and thus highlights the potential for symbolic violence inherent in the state-led appropriation of symbolic resources. Third, I emphasise that symbols such as ‘the witness’ are not just strategically deployed by opportunistic political actors; rather, these symbols also come to circumscribe the very limits of political imagination. In attending to moments where the reinscription of Jewish stories into a redemptive national narrative produces self-contradictory outcomes or breaks down, I draw attention to the symbolic labour of erasure that is necessary to uphold these limitations in the face of a recalcitrant reality.