University of Leeds

Department of German

MEMORIALISING THE HOLOCAUST

STUDY TRIP TO BERLIN, MARCH 2002

The participants… click here for their reports

The Itinerary

Holocaust Memory in The ‘Berlin Republic’

Since unification in 1990, Germany has been undergoing a process of ‘normalisation’. One aspect of this has been a re-examination of the way in which the nation, its institutions, government, media, and public sphere, has memorialised the Nazi past. A number of debates have shaped this development:

• Berlin Holocaust Memorial Debate
• Daniel Goldhagen’s book Hitler’s Willing Executioners
• The controversy surrounding the Wehrmacht-Ausstellung
• Martin Walser’s Friedenspreisrede
• The deployment of the Bundeswehr ‘out-of-area’

The Photos

The view from Friedrichstraβe S-Bahnhof

Foreground - the Museumsinsel

Middleground – the post-1990 reconstruction of Berlin

Background - the GDR Fernsehturm on Berlin Alexanderplatz

Topographie des Terrors

The Nazi past in Berlin

Jews and Berlin

The Jüdische Museum in Berlin was designed by Daniel Libeskind and opened in 2001

The Garden of Exile at the Jewish Museum

The memorial in the Rosenstraße to ‘Ayran’ women who protested – successfully – against the imminent deportation of their Jewish spouses

This event is often cited as an example of the possibility of resisting to the Nazis

Competing against 165 other architects, Daniel Libeskind won the competition to design an extension to the Jewish museum in June 1989. The Libeskind Building was finished in 1998. During the construction work for the Libeskind Building, intense and controversial discussions revolved around the use of the extension and the status of the Jewish Museum. The building itself reflects the fragmented history of two thousand years of Jewish life in Germany and Berlin

The Neue Synagoge on the Orianienburger Straße

The old Jewish quarter around the Orianienburger Straße contains a number of memorials. The Neue Synagoge was rebuilt in the late 1980s – during GDR times in a belated recognition by the East German authorities of Jewish suffering under National Socialism (previously the emphasis had been on the persecution of communists). The most moving memorials are on Große Hamburger Straße, at the site of a former Jewish old people’s home which was commandeering by the SS as a staging station for deportation to camps in Eastern Europe

Memorials on Große Hamburger Straße

The former Jewish cemetery to the right of these memorials, which was destroyed by the Nazis, has been deliberately left unrestored – a space which marks the absence of Berlin’s Jewish community

There has been intense debate in recent years about how best to memorialise Germany’s Jewish population

The Berlin Jewish museum represents one attempt to do this – by focusing on the two-thousand years German-Jewish history it aims to show that the Jewish engagement with Germany is more enduring than the Holocaust

Alternatively, the construction – starting in 2001 – of a Berlin Holocaust memorial near the Brandenburg Gate, in a form similar to Libeskind’s Garden of Exile, designed to disorientate and unnerve, is intended as a forceful visual reminder of the murder of the overwhelming majority of European Jews. The Holocaust exhibition at the Deutsches Historisches Museum offers a documentary equivalent to this record of the destruction of the Jews

The debate as to what purpose such memorials serve, whether they should celebrate Jewish life in Germany or mourn its destruction, and as to the aesthetics and design of such memorials, continues

Not just Jewish victims?

The Neue Wache was designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel and completed in 1818

It celebrated the defeat of Napolenic France and the end of the French occupation

In 1930 it was rededicated to commemorate the fallen soldiers of the Great War

After 1933, Hitler used it celebrate the martial prowess of the German nation

From the 1960s, the GDR authorities rededicated the site as a ‘Mahnmal für die Opfer des Faschismus’. By this was meant not so much Jewish victims as communist killed by the Nazis

In 1993, Bundeskanzler Helmut Kohl rededicated the memorial once more – the plaque on the right reflects the latest meaning imposed on the memorial

Käthe Kollwitz’s Trauernde Mutter mit totem Sohn

Inside the Neue Wache

‘Den Opfern von Krieg und Gewaltherrschaft’

but which victims…?

Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, the disabled, religious and political dissidents, certainly, but also ‘ordinary Germans’, Wehrmacht soldiers, perhaps even ‘misguided’ SS members…? A memorial to all victims of totalitarianism – does this also include the GDR? Can we equate the GDR with Nazism?

Victimhood and Resistance

A few steps from the Neue Wache, an original GDR memorial to the victims of National Socialism – and to communist resistance

The words hewn into the stone celebrate communist and anti-fascist resistance. The GDR believed itself to be grounded in this tradition of anti-fascist resistance to the Nazis

The opposite side of the stone bears the same inscription

The perspex on the side to the left (and its opposite) has been added since 1990, that is, since unification. It covers – but does not conceal – a reference to eternal friendship with the Soviet Union. GDR history is thus not erased but viewed as a layer of German history beneath the present day

The names listed on the perspex as shown in the photograph individualise the suffering inflicted by the Nazis. In recent years, a focus on individuals – whether as perpetrators or victims – has become common. This may reflect the contemporary sentimentalisation of the Holocaust

The commentary on the opposite persplex suggests that the resistance referred to in the GDR memorial was in fact Jewish resistance. The effect of the post-1990 memorial is thus double-edged – the GDR’s celebration of communist resistance is not eradicated, but it is relativised as less important than the persecution of the Jews and Jewish resistance

Elsewhere in east Berlin a memorial to communist resistance remains unchanged

This memorial is in a street near Warschauer Straße S-Bahnhof, that is, well within east Berlin. The fact that it has not been altered since 1990 may be a result of local wishes – east Berliners’ desire to retain their history – or because it is not too controversial, i.e. does not refer to the Soviet Union, or perhaps because it is not located in a symbolically significant area (the memorial above is on Unter den Linden, opposite the Palast der Republik, the former GDR parliament building)

The Soviet war memorial in Treptower Park has also remained unaltered and is well-maintained

Following unification, the maintenaince of such memorials, including the victory memorial on the Straße des 17. Juni near the Brandenburg Gate was handed over to the German authorities

Despite recent debates on German suffering at the hands of the Red Army in 1945, these sites does not seem to have suffered vandalism or desecration

Sachsenhausen – communist victims?

Sachsenhausen

was for political prisoners, POWs

(especially Soviet), and other

‘undesirables’ (which could often

include Jews). Its main purpose

was not to kill on arrival (unlike)

the Vernichtungslager in the east

(such as Auschwitz) but to intern,

brutalise and kill by neglect and

misteatment

In the GDR, Sachsenhausen was celebrated as the site of communist resistance – and commemorated as the a site of communist victimhood, including German political prisoners who perished at the hands of the Nazis and the thousands of Soviet POWs murdered.

The GDR-era memorials to communist resistance and victimhood remain but are left unexplained and without commentary in the post-unification re-conceptualisation of the site.

The Red Army liberates Sachsenhausen…

The red triangles symbolise the badges

worn by political prisoners

The Soviet soldier places a

protective arm around the newly

liberated inmates…

The Soviet Speziallager - Germans as victims?

Between 1945 and 1950, the Soviet occupation authorities used Sachsenhausen as a camp for the internment of suspected Nazis and war criminals – but also political ‘undesireables’ (who may well also have fallen into the other two categories).

The reconceptualisation of the Sachsenhausen site since unification now includes – for the first time – specific reference to the Soviet Speziallager and a new museum.

It is perhaps worth noting that there is not yet a single centre on the site which draws together the history of the Nazi camp.

Within the Speziallager museum, a noticeboard has become the focal point for Germans seeking trace people who might have known relatives who died in the Soviet internment camp – Germans as victims of oppression, tyranny and persecution?

Some of the notices left by visitors make more explicit political points.

Für Freiheit, Recht und Ehre?

German Resistance to Nazism?

The Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand is located in the former Wehrmacht command centre in the Bendler Block in West Berlin on what is now known as the Stauffenberg Straße – after the army officer who attempted to assassinate Hitler in July 1944.

The memorials in the courtyard of the Gedenkstätte give an idea of its original conceptualisation in the 1980s as a celebration of military resistance to Hitler – a tradition from which the Federal Republic drew much of its legitimacy (in contrast to the GDR’s focus on communist resistance). The July plotters are seen as forerunners to West German democracy, ‘Freiheit, Recht und Ehre’ – and as patriots who died for Germany.

‘Hier starben für Deutschland’

Patriots or traitors?

By contrast the museum inside the building, which was reconceptualised after unification, presents a much more inclusive and balanced vision of resistance, ranging from communist resistance to youth groups to religious opposition.

Reports by Participants

David Amini

Our visit to Berlin was most enlightening from an educational perspective, enabling us to get a taste the diverse range of museums Germany's capital has to offer, but perhaps of most interest to me was the cultural insight it afforded: the opportunity to witness an exciting, ever-changing, vibrant and multicultural metropolis with great vision for the future. This offered a remarkable break from the comparative historical and architectural stasis to be found in some other European capital cities.

In respect of our programme, I was highly impressed by the Holocaust exhibition at the Deutsches Museum, which I felt provided a thorough, balanced and frank portrayal of life in Germany during the Nazi period. A video projection showing the liberation of several concentration camps in 1945 caught my attention - painful, but thought-provoking viewing. The Jewish Museum, with its striking architectural elements by Daniel Libeskind, represented Jewish history in an unconventional manner, but the Tower and Garden of Exile brought home many of the dilemmas faced by the Jewish population during the Nazi time.

I thoroughly enjoyed this trip, and it has inspired me to return to Berlin again this coming summer, and possibly even to seek employment there in the near future.

Claire Goodhand

The trip to Berlin was extremely insightful, as it allowed us to experience first-hand the controversial and delicate issues we have been studying, regarding Germany's presentation of its past.

For me, the trip to Sachsenhausen concentration camp was especially thought-provoking. It illustrated the difficulty of acheiving an accurate balance between commemoration of the National Socialist and Soviet eras. The school parties of obviously uninterested children, as well as the ordinary houses and shops on the same street as the camp, indcated how problematic it must be to prevent memory of this catastrophe from blending unnoticed into everyday life.

The architecture of the Jewish museum caused me to reflect upon the issues connected with abstract memorials, and to develop my own opinions about this subject, based on my personal reactions to it. It also brought to life the work we have done on the controversies concerning the form that the holocaust memorial in Berlin should take.

Aside from the trip's itinerary, the restaurants and bars were excellent, and our hostel was well-located for us to sample these. This was my first trip to Berlin, and I will definately return.