Memorialization in Germany since 1945

Transcription

Edited by
Bill Niven and Chloe Paver
10.1057/9780230248502preview - Memorialization in Germany since 1945, Edited by Bill Niven and Chloe Paver
Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to npg - PalgraveConnect - 2017-01-15
Memorialization in
Germany since 1945
Also by Bill Niven
FACING THE NAZI PAST
GERMANS AS VICTIMS (edited)
Also by Chloe Paver
REFRACTIONS OF THE THIRD REICH IN GERMAN AND
AUSTRIAN FICTION AND FILM
Memorialization in Germany
since 1945
Edited by
Bill Niven
and
Chloe Paver
Senior Lecturer in German, University of Exeter
Professor of Contemporary German History, Nottingham Trent University
Editorial matter, selection and Introduction,
© Bill Niven and Chloe Paver 2010
All remaining chapters © their respective authors 2010
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First published 2010 by
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Contents
List of Illustrations
ix
Notes on Contributors
xi
1
Section 1 Remembering German Losses
1.1 The Volkstrauertag (People’s Day of Mourning) from 1922 to the
Present
Alexandra Kaiser
15
1.2 Beyond Usable Pasts: Rethinking the Memorialization of the
Strategic Air War in Germany, 1940 to 1965
Jörg Arnold
26
1.3 Roads to Revision: Disputes over Street Names Referring to the
German Eastern Territories after the First and Second World Wars in
the Cities of Dresden and Mainz, 1921 to 1972
Christian Lotz
1.4 Monuments and Commemorative Sites for German Expellees
Hans Hesse and Elke Purpus
37
48
1.5 A Memorial Laissez-Passer? Church Exhibitions and National
Victimhood in Germany
Daniela Sandler
58
1.6 Remembering on Foreign Soil: The Activities of the German War
Graves Commission
David Livingstone
69
1.7 Neither Here nor There? Memorialization of the Expulsion
of Ethnic Germans
Dagmar Kift
78
Section 2 Remembering Nazi Crimes, Perpetrators, and
Victims
2.1 The Mediators: Memorialization Endeavours of the Regional Offices
for Political Education (Landeszentralen für politische Bildung)
Dieter K. Buse
v
91
Introduction
Contents
2.2 Memorialization of Perpetrator Sites in Bavaria
Markus Urban
103
2.3 Pieces of the Past: Souvenirs from Nazi Sites – The Example of
Peenemünde
Ulrike Dittrich
114
2.4 Remembering Euthanasia: Grafeneck in the Past, Present, and
Future
Susanne C. Knittel
124
2.5 Remembering Prisoners of War as Victims of National Socialist
Persecution and Murder in Post-War Germany
Jens Nagel
134
2.6 (In)Visible Trauma: Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset’s Memorial
to the Homosexuals Persecuted under the National Socialist Regime
Thomas O. Haakenson
146
2.7 Memorializing the White Rose Resistance Group in Post-War
Germany
Katie Rickard
157
2.8 The Role of German Perpetrator Sites in Teaching and Confronting
the Nazi Past
Caroline Pearce
168
Section 3 Remembering Jewish Suffering
3.1 Memorialization through Documentation: Holocaust
Commemoration among Jewish Displaced Persons in
Allied-Occupied Germany
Laura Jockusch
3.2 Memorializing Persecuted Jews in Dachau and Other West German
Concentration Camp Memorial Sites
Harold Marcuse
181
192
3.3 Remembering Nazi Anti-Semitism in the GDR
Bill Niven
205
3.4 Rosenstraße: A Complex Site of German-Jewish Memory
Hilary Potter
214
3.5 The Counter-Monument: Memory Shaped by Male Post-War
Legacies
Corinna Tomberger
3.6 Stumbling Blocks: A Decentralized Memorial to Holocaust Victims
Michael Imort
224
233
vi
Contents
vii
3.7 Affective Memory, Ineffective Functionality: Experiencing Berlin’s
Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe
Brigitte Sion
243
3.8 From Monuments to Installations: Aspects of Memorialization in
Historical Exhibitions about the National Socialist Era
Chloe Paver
253
4.1 Heroes and Victims: The Aesthetics and Ideology of Monuments
and Memorials in the GDR
Susanne Scharnowski
267
4.2 Beating Nazis and Exporting Socialism: Representing East German
War Memory to Foreign Tourists
Lynne Fallwell
276
4.3 Memorializing Socialist Contradictions: A ‘Think-Mark’ for Rosa
Luxemburg in the New Berlin
Riccardo Bavaj
287
4.4 Challenging or Concretizing Cold War Narratives? Berlin’s
Memorial to the Victims of 17 June 1953
Anna Saunders
298
4.5 GDR Monuments in Unified Germany
Mia Lee
308
4.6 Memorialization of the German-German Border in the Context of
Constructions of Heimat
Gerd Knischewski and Ulla Spittler
318
4.7 The Fight in the Prison Car Park: Memorializing Germany’s ‘Double
Past’ in Torgau since 1990
Andrew H. Beattie
328
Section 5 Memorializing Germany’s Ambivalent Legacies
5.1 Martin Luther – Rebel, Genius, Liberator: Politics and Marketing
1517–2017
Ulrike Zitzlsperger
341
5.2 Building Up and Tearing Down the Myth of German Colonialism:
Colonial Denkmale and Mahnmale after 1945
Jason Verber
351
5.3 Remembering the Battle of Jutland in Post-War Wilhelmshaven
Georg Götz
360
Section 4 Socialist Memory and Memory of Socialism
viii Contents
5.5 A Democratic Legacy? The Memorialization of the Weimar Republic
and the Politics of History of the Federal Republic of Germany
Sebastian Ullrich
5.6 Memorializing the Military: Traditions, Exhibitions, and
Monuments in the West German Army from the 1950s to the
Present
Jörg Echternkamp
369
379
388
5.7 The Legacy of Second German Empire Memorials after 1945
Bill Niven
399
Index
409
5.4 The Memoralization of 9 November 1918 in the Two German States
Arne Segelke
22
53
54
59
65
118
120
130
136
139
147
152
158
160
194
200
217
219
244
ix
1 Representatives of Germany’s five constitutional bodies (the five
Bundesverfassungsorgane) lay wreaths in the New Guardhouse in
Berlin, 14 November 1993
2 Expellees’ Monument in Tornesch, Schleswig-Holstein. The
inscription reads ‘There Is Only One Germany’
3 Expellees’ Monument in Tornesch, Schleswig-Holstein, after the
inscription was altered in 1997 to read ‘In Memory of Our
Unforgotten Home’
4 Exhibition chronicling the history of the KaiserWilhelm-Gedächtniskirche, Berlin
5 Frauenkirche, Dresden, monument comprising a piece of the
original dome, whose silhouette is represented on its face
6 Model rocket near the entrance to the Visitor Centre, Peenemünde
7 Build-your-own model of the ‘Führer’s’ bunker at the site of the
former Wolf’s Lair in Poland
8 The Grey Bus Memorial during its stay in front of the Berlin
Philharmonic on Tiergartenstrasse, from January 2008 to January
2009
9 Named single graves, 1945. They later became the Ehrenhain
Zeithain
10 The ‘universal monument’ at the Sandbostel cemetery today
11 Memorial to the Homosexuals Persecuted under the National
Socialist Regime in the Tiergarten, Berlin
12 Still image from the film loop that currently appears in the
Memorial to the Homosexuals Persecuted under the National
Socialist Regime
13 Memorial to the White Rose set into paving stones in front of the
main entrance to Munich University
14 Marble sculpture of Sophie Scholl (centre of photograph on plinth)
by Wolfgang Eckert
15 1946 Jewish Memorial in Belsen
16 1967 Jewish Memorial in Dachau
17 The three central sections of Ingeborg Hunzinger’s sculpture Block
of Women (Block der Frauen)
18 One of two advertizing columns – visible between the parked cars –
used to display an exhibition about the Rosenstrasse Protest, close
to where it took place
19 The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin
20 Detail from an installation in the exhibition Home and Exile: Jewish
Emigration from Germany since 1933 at the Jewish Museum Berlin
21 Detail from one of a series of banners listing the names of victims
of National Socialist persecution, shown in the exhibition National
Socialism in Mainz 1933–45: Tyranny and Everyday Life
22 Fritz Cremer’s Buchenwald sculpture
23 Soviet memorial in Schönholzer Heide Park
24 Section of the ‘Think Mark for Rosa Luxemburg’ near the People’s
Theatre, Berlin
25 Wolfgang Rüppel’s Memorial to the Victims of 17 June 1953, with
Max Lingner’s mural in the background
256
259
272
280
288
304
x
Jörg Arnold was awarded his PhD by the University of Southampton, and recently
took up a position at the University of Freiburg (under Ulrich Herbert). He has
research interests in the social and cultural history of modern wars, the history of memory, and the history of the emotions. He is currently working on a
monograph of the memorialization of the bombing war in post-war Germany.
Riccardo Bavaj is Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of
St Andrews (UK). He has published widely on twentieth-century German history, including Die Ambivalenz der Moderne im Nationalsozialismus: Eine Bilanz der
Forschung (Munich, 2003).
Andrew H. Beattie is Lecturer in German studies at the University of New South
Wales, Sydney. His publications include Playing Politics with History: The Bundestag
Inquiries into East Germany (New York, 2008).
Dieter K. Buse is Professor Emeritus, History Department, Laurentian University, Sudbury, Canada. His study The Regions of Germany (2005) complements his
Modern Germany: An Encyclopedia of History, People and Culture, 1871–1990 (1998,
2 vols). He has published widely on various aspects of contemporary German
history in journals such as Central European History and the Journal of Modern
History.
Ulrike Dittrich is a freelance text editor and works for a consulting firm. She
was an academic assistant at the Ravensbrück Memorial Museum. Her book
KZ-Souvenirs (on concentration camp souvenirs) was published by the Brandenburg Office for Political Education in 2005. Her research project on memorial
souvenirs was affiliated to the Center for Interdisciplinary Memory Research in
Essen.
Jörg Echternkamp holds a PhD from the University of Bielefeld and has been
a Fellow at the Research Institute for Military History (MGFA), Potsdam, since
1997. He was visiting professor at Calgary, Canada, in 2004, and has been associate lecturer at the Sorbonne (Paris). He is author of Kriegsschauplatz Deutschland
1945. Leben in Angst, Hoffnung auf Frieden. Feldpost aus der Heimat und von der Front
(Paderborn, 2005).
Lynne Fallwell is Assistant Professor of History at Texas Tech University. Her
publications include work on tourism and representations of German food in Edible Ideologies: Representing Food and Meaning (K. LeBesco and P. Naccarato, eds).
She is currently completing a book on English-language guidebooks to Germany
post-1945.
xi
xii Notes on Contributors
Georg Götz has developed history exhibitions and collection management
schemes for museums in North Germany. His recent publications have focused
on the visualization of German regions in photobooks, and on Second World War
memorials. He teaches history and English at a grammar school in Bavaria.
Hans Hesse is a historian and project leader of the ‘Archive of Memorialisation of
the Third Reich in the Rhineland’ at the Art and Museums’ Library of Cologne.
His main publication deals with de-Nazification (Konstruktionen der Unschuld. Die
Entnazifizierung am Beispiel von Bremen und Bremerhaven (Bremen, 2005)).
Michael Imort is an associate professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo (Ontario, Canada). His
research examines the political instrumentalization of landscape representations
and focuses on the use of the German forest landscape by both nationalist and
environmentalist groups.
Laura Jockusch is Kreitman Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Jewish
History at Ben Gurion University of the Negev and fellow at the International
Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. She studied Jewish
studies, modern history, and sociology at the Free University in Berlin and received
her PhD in Hebrew and Judaic Studies from New York University in 2007.
Alexandra Kaiser was fellow of the Collaborative Research Centre on War Experiences, Tübingen, between 2005 and 2008. Her doctoral thesis focuses on the
history of the People’s Day of Mourning, and its role in German memory culture
and politics. Since 2009 she has been a museum trainee at the Forum for Contemporary History in Leipzig. Her research interests include German memory culture,
National Socialism, museum studies, and regional ethnography. She has published
several essays.
Dagmar Kift is senior curator at the LWL-Industrial Museum in Dortmund and
was head of the exhibition project ‘Rebuilding the West’. She studied history,
German literature, sociology, and law at the Free University in Berlin and was
a British Council scholar at Oxford University (St Antony’s College). She has
published widely on German social, cultural, and industrial history.
Gerd Knischewski is Senior Lecturer at the School of Languages and Area Studies and a member of the Centre for European and International Studies Research
(CEISR) at the University of Portsmouth, and a member of the Editorial Committee
of the Journal of Contemporary European Studies Research. His publications include
work on war memory in Germany, and united Germany’s attempts at coming to
terms with the past.
Thomas O. Haakenson is Associate Professor and Chair of the Liberal Arts Department, University of Minnesota, where he completed his doctorate in 2006. He has
articles forthcoming in Cabinet, New German Critique, The Rutgers Art Review, and
the anthology Legacies of Modernism, among others. He has received several awards
and fellowships, for instance from the US Fulbright Program.
xiii
Susanne C. Knittel is currently finishing her dissertation ‘Uncanny Homelands:
Grafeneck, Trieste, and the Struggle for Memory’ at Columbia University. It combines an analysis of two memorial sites – one dedicated to the memory of National
Socialist euthanasia in Germany, the other to the memory of Fascist anti-Jewish
and anti-Slav persecution in Italy – with a discussion of the various literary texts
that address the memories of these specific historical sites and events.
David Livingstone is a Lecturer in History at Moorpark College in California. He
holds BA and MA degrees in modern European History from California State University, Northridge. He has previously taught Strategy and Policy for the United
States Naval War College and has travelled extensively to European military
cemeteries.
Christian Lotz studied history and social sciences at the Universities of Leipzig,
Edinburgh, Vienna, and Poznan. He is a member of the ‘Leipziger Circle – Forum
for Science and Art’. In 2007 he received his PhD at the University of Stuttgart for a
thesis entitled Interpretations of Loss: Political Controversies in Divided Germany about
the Memory of Flight, Expulsion and the Eastern Territories (1948–1972), subsequently
published with Böhlau (2007).
Harold Marcuse is professor of contemporary German history at the University
of California, Santa Barbara. In addition to works on the history of the reception
of the Nazi past in Germany, he has written about the memorialization of events
during the Second World War around the world.
Jens Nagel is head of Zeithain Memorial Site, Germany. In his research, he focuses
on the history of Wehrmacht POW camps, looking particularly at the treatment of Soviet, Polish, and Italian POWs. He has published widely on this topic,
most recently in the German history journal Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte 4
(2008).
Bill Niven is Professor of Contemporary German History at Nottingham Trent
University, UK. He is author of Facing the Nazi Past (2002), and editor of Germans
as Victims (2006). He is currently preparing a book called A Post-Holocaust History
of Germany, 1945–2010, and editing a volume on the history and memory of the
sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff.
Chloe Paver is a Senior Lecturer in German at the University of Exeter, UK. She
is the author of Refractions of the Third Reich in German and Austrian Fiction and
Film (Oxford, 2007). Since undertaking research as a Humboldt Fellow at the University of Konstanz in 2006–07, she has published a series of articles on historical
exhibitions about the National Socialist era; she is preparing a monograph on the
subject.
Caroline Pearce is Lecturer in German at the University of Sheffield. Her research
focuses on German confrontation with the National Socialist past since 1990 and
Mia Lee is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Warwick. She is
completing a book on art and political movements in West Germany.
xiv
the role of memorial sites. Her most recent publication is Contemporary Germany
and the Nazi Legacy. Remembrance, Politics and the Dialectic of Normality (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007).
Elke Purpus is Director of the Art and Museums Library of Cologne. Her
most recent publication focuses on memorialization in Northrhine Westfalia
(Gedenken und Erinnern im Rhein-Erft-Kreis. Ein Führer zu Mahnmalen, Denkmälern
und Gedenkstätten (Essen, 2008)).
Katie Rickard completed her PhD in 2006. She was a Lecturer at the University
of Bath, UK, where she also worked in the Graduate Office. She now works at the
University of Reading, UK, for Aimhigher Berkshire.
Daniela Sandler is an architectural and urban historian, specializing in Germany
and Brazil. Her research and teaching focus on social inclusion, memory, culture,
and representation in the built environment. She has a PhD in Visual and Cultural
Studies from the University of Rochester (2006). She also has a professional degree
in Architecture and Urbanism from the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. She teaches
at the Rhode Island School of Design in the USA.
Anna Saunders is a Lecturer in German at Bangor University, Wales. Her research
interests include questions of history and memory in eastern Germany, memorialization in contemporary Germany, and socialist and post-socialist youth culture;
her monograph, Honecker’s Children, was published with Manchester University
Press in 2007.
Susanne Scharnowski has research interests in German literature of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. She has also published on memorial
art in the GDR. She has taught at the Free University of Berlin, Germany, the
University of Cambridge, UK, National Taiwan University, and the University of
Melbourne, Australia. Since 2008, she has been administrative director of the PhD
programme at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies.
Arne Segelke graduated from the University of Hamburg, Germany, and is currently writing his doctoral thesis on ‘Images of the First World War in Scandinavia’.
He lives in Colombo, Sri Lanka.
Brigitte Sion is Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow at New York University’s Program in Religious Studies and Department of Journalism. Her doctoral dissertation in Performance Studies focused on the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of
Europe in Berlin and the Monument to the Victims of State Terrorism in Buenos
Aires.
Hilary Potter is a postgraduate student in the European Studies and Modern
Languages Department at the University of Bath, UK, where she has taught
on undergraduate courses in German and in European Studies. She is currently
completing her PhD on Representations of the Rosenstrasse Protest in Post-Wende
Germany.
xv
Ulla Spittler is Principal Lecturer at the School of Language, Literature, and
Communication at the University of Brighton, UK. She has published on memorialization of the Holocaust and the GDR, on German perspectives on Europe, and
war memory in Germany.
Sebastian Ullrich wrote his PhD on the ‘Weimar-Complex’ of the early Federal
Republic. He is editor for modern history, contemporary history, and politics at
the publishing house C. H. Beck in Munich, Germany.
Markus Urban is a public historian and works as a freelance lecturer, author, and
tour guide in Nuremberg, Germany. He is author of a book on the Nazi Reich
Party Rallies (Die Konsensfabrik. Funktion und Wahrnehmung der NS-Reichsparteitage,
1933–1941 (V&R Press, 2007)).
Jason Verber is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of
Iowa, USA. His dissertation, which is in its final stages, examines the relationship
between Germans and colonialism after 1945.
Ulrike Zitzlsperger is Senior Lecturer in German at the University of Exeter,
UK. Her main research interest lies in the culture and literature of twentiethcentury Berlin, with a particular focus on the 1920s and 1990s. She also works
on sixteenth-century culture in Germany with a focus on Reformation pamphlets.
Corinna Tomberger, PhD, is an art historian and social scientist working on memory politics and visual representation. She has been teaching gender studies and art
history at the Humboldt University and the University of Arts in Berlin, Germany.
Lately she has been preparing an exhibition on national symbols for the ‘Haus der
Geschichte’ Foundation in Bonn.
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Introduction
Observers of contemporary Germany’s relationship to its past cannot fail to notice
the very high number of memorials and memorial sites throughout the country. Nor can they fail to notice how seriously Germany takes its memorials and
memorial sites. A measure of this is surely Germany’s Federal Strategy for Memorial Sites (Gedenkstättenkonzeption des Bundes), which passed into law in 1999 (and
was amended in 2008).1 While Germany’s Basic Law ascribed the task of overseeing memorial sites to the federal states (Länder), some sites of national importance
were able to call on central state funds for all or part of their costs, particularly after
1989. The Gedenkstättenkonzeption put an end to these rather piecemeal arrangements, formalizing the division of responsibilities between central and regional
government by defining what counted as a ‘national’ memorial site. To some
degree, then, the Gedenkstättenkonzeption can be viewed simply as an overdue
bureaucratic tidy-up, concerned with funding budgets. Nevertheless, it was also
born of more lofty considerations: recommendations made by the panel of experts
advising on how Germany should deal with the memory of the East German
dictatorship (the second of the so-called ‘Enquete-Kommissionen’). Accordingly,
the strategy endeavoured to formulate a statement of the meaning and purpose
of memorials for the German state and its people. The otherwise bureaucratic
‘framework principles’ end with the statement: ‘In remembering the National
Socialist reign of terror, Stalinism, and the SED dictatorship, and in commemorating the victims and those who opposed or resisted these regimes, we strengthen
our sense of freedom, justice, and democracy, and consolidate the anti-totalitarian
consensus in Germany.’2
A further measure of the importance Germany’s government and parliament
ascribes to processes of memorialization was its involvement, from its inception
through to its completion, in the building of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews
of Europe in Berlin (which is analysed in the chapters by Brigitte Sion and Corinna
Tomberger in this volume); a parliamentary resolution backing the memorial was
passed on 25 June 1999. At the same time, the memorial was not just a focus of
parliamentary interest: it would never have been built without the initiative of the
1
Introduction
citizens’ action group ‘Perspective for Berlin’, founded in 1989, or without public
donations to supplement the government support. The gestation process of the
memorial was long; it was accompanied by years of discussion in national and
regional newspapers, while scandals accompanied its construction. Even following its dedication in 2005, it has continued to attract discussion and debate.3 The
extent of political involvement, public interest, and media coverage enjoyed –
if that is the right word – by this memorial is probably exceptional. Nevertheless, as several contributors to the current volume (including Michael Imort, Mia
Lee, and Riccardo Bavaj) show, there are many other examples of memorials in
Germany whose conceptualization, planning, and execution were also a matter of
considerable public and political attention.
This edited collection is the first of its kind to assess the nature and chart the
extent of this phenomenal memorial activity in Germany. In so doing, it focuses
largely on processes of memorialization since 1945. Why 1945? It would have
been possible to extend the perspective back to consider memorialization during
the Third Reich, the Weimar Republic, and the Second Reich – and indeed much
earlier in German history. That this book would then have been unmanageably
long (it is quite long as it stands), represents a practical reason for the decision
to circumscribe the focus. But the choice of the post-1945 period is above all a
conscious one. The year 1945 was not a ‘Zero Hour’ (Stunde Null) in the history
of memorialization in Germany, but it did represent a watershed in this history
as it did in so many other areas of German political, cultural, and economic history. The Second World War ended, for Germany, in catastrophic defeat, mass
expulsion, and occupation; for many soldiers, the experience of war scarred them
for life, while civilians were traumatized by the effects of carpet bombing. Yet,
Germany had started this war, and had conducted it – especially in the East – with
unbelievable cruelty; 6 million Jews were murdered, 3.3 million Soviet POWs perished in German captivity, hundreds of thousands of Sinti and Roma were killed.
Many, many others suffered a similarly murderous fate. In view of the above, the
self-celebratory tradition of German memorialization was severely ruptured. After
1945, the heroic messages of Second Reich memorials to Wilhelm I and Bismarck,
or of Third Reich memorials to military heroes such as Hindenburg, rang hollow.
Many were removed – not just by the Allies, but also by Germans themselves.
Even a straightforward appropriation, in memorials to the Second World War, of
the tradition of self-pity typical of Weimar Republic memorialization of the First
World War proved difficult to sustain.
One should not, however, imagine that self-pitying traditions died out. The year
1945 brought with it not only flight and expulsion, but the de facto loss of the former Eastern homelands (discussed in the present volume by Christian Lotz, and
by Elke Purpus and Hans Hesse). It also initiated the process which led to German
division and the establishment of two German states, each of which perceived
the inhabitants of the other Germany as ‘victims’ – of capitalism and communism respectively. With the onset of the Cold War, narratives of victimhood soon
became intimately bound up with political propaganda. In the GDR, East German citizens learnt that the legacy of communist suffering under Hitler was the
2
3
obligation in the present to resist the continuation of fascism in the West. The
triumphalist gesture of much communist statuary in the GDR – evidence that
the heroic tradition had not yet had its day – stressed, however, that suffering
had been productive: Nazism had been overcome, and the struggle against the
West would surely end in victory. Susanne Scharnowski’s chapter demonstrates
this tendency.
East German commemoration of the bombing of Dresden also had the function
of raising awareness of the alleged destructiveness of capitalism and strengthening ‘resistance’ in the present (for memorialization of the bombing war, see Jörg
Arnold’s chapter). In West Germany, expellees, former soldiers, and victims of
bombing, among others, sought with varying degrees of success to have their
suffering inscribed in memorial form onto townscapes.4 Politicians in the West
were often complicit in the instrumentalization of the memory of expulsion and
division to discredit the communist East and the GDR in particular. Some monuments lamenting division, such as the repurposed Kaiser Wilhelm memorial in
Koblenz (discussed in the chapter on Second Empire memorials by Bill Niven),
were not without a degree of nationalistic swagger. The present volume, among
other things, examines the commemorative preoccupation with tragic, sometimes heroic, often politically charged and propagandistic notions of German
victimhood in West and East Germany, especially in the 1950s and 1960s.
Still, by and large West Germany did eschew the nationalistic tradition of
memorial-building after 1945. While the resistance of the Stauffenberg circle did,
in time, become a source of pride, the 1950s memorial to resistance in Berlin’s
Bendler Block is modest to say the least (for discusson of the memorialization
of military traditions, see Jörg Echternkamp’s contribution). Moreover, the East
German celebration of communism in its memorials cannot be taken as a symptom of an indigenous nationalism; after all, it reflected the greater glory of Soviet
communism, rather than expressing a national spirit – and whether East Germans
identified with the often-memorialized figure of German communist leader Ernst
Thälmann is debatable. As for the preoccupation with German victimhood, this
did begin to recede in the 1960s and especially the 1970s. Increasingly, in West
Germany at least and particularly as of the 1980s, memorials to Jewish victims
of Germans were constructed (see, in particular, Harold Marcuse’s chapter). Many
factors have been adduced for this, such as generational shifts; the impact of the
Frankfurt Auschwitz trials (1963–65); and the shift, in 1969, to a coalition government of Social Democrats and Liberals. Even in East Germany interest in the
commemoration of Jewish suffering under Hitler began to emerge in the late 1970s
and early 1980s (see Bill Niven’s chapter on memorialization of the Holocaust in
the GDR). It follows from this that one could certainly overstate the significance of
1945 as a watershed since, to an extent, the evolution of a ‘counter-monumental’
culture was a gradual process that only started to gather strength in the 1970s and
1980s. However, the cracks in the tradition of heroic memorialization were already
clear in 1945.
What of 1990? The Cold War had in many ways hindered the development of
a confrontation with the legacy of Nazism; each German state could not resist the
Introduction
temptation to pin blame for dictatorial developments on the other German state.
After 1990, with this hindrance removed, the memorialization of the victims of
National Socialism developed at a more rapid pace than ever before. This was particularly the case in Eastern Germany, which had lagged behind the Western part
of the country in its acknowledgement of the Holocaust. A visitor to most of the
larger memorial sites in Germany today – for instance, to Dachau, Buchenwald,
Sachsenhausen, or Neuengamme – will be struck by the attempt to document
and memorialize the wide range of Nazi victims. Buchenwald Memorial Site, for
instance, now has memorials to Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Sinti and Roma, and
victims of Nazi military injustice; it has also set up a number of important exhibitions since 1990 (some of which are discussed in Chloe Paver’s chapter). Berlin’s
Topography of Terror Foundation has been equally active in memorializing various groups of Nazi victims (see, for instance, the chapter by Hilary Potter). At
central level in Berlin, there is now not only the Holocaust memorial (since 2005),
but also, since 2008, a Memorial for the Homosexuals Persecuted under National
Socialism (analysed in Thomas Haakenson’s chapter), while a Memorial for the
Sinti and Roma Murdered under National Socialism is also planned. United Germany, it seems, is taking responsibility for its murderous past – at central, regional,
and local level (see, for instance, Susanne Knittel’s chapter on memorialization
of euthanasia victims). In certain areas, however, such as the memorialization of
Soviet POWs who suffered at the hands of the Wehrmacht, more could certainly
be done (as Jens Nagel’s chapter shows).
Until a few years ago, the evolution of German memory, and certainly its memorial landscape, towards a self-critical preoccupation with the legacy of German
crime seemed unstoppable, raising fears even of a ‘negative nationalism’. Could
self-indictment form a sound basis for national self-regeneration after 1990? Yet
1990 also set in train a process towards a resurgent interest in injustice done to
and suffering endured by Germans (discussed here by Dagmar Kift, amongst others). The post-1990 transformation of East Germany’s memorial landscape, which
has certainly been greater than that of the landscape in the West, would seem
to confirm this. The end of the GDR led to a discrediting of communism, and
to the removal of many (though not all) memorials and street-names honouring the heroes of the communist pantheon (see Lee’s chapter). Shortly afterwards,
memorials and memorial sites began to spring up throughout Eastern Germany
which commemorated the suffering caused by the Soviet interregnum (1945–49)
and the East German communist regime and its security system, as well as resistance to the latter (as documented in the chapters by Andrew Beattie and by Gerd
Knischewski and Ulla Spittler). Some locations, such as Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen memorial sites, became lieux de mémoire for Germany’s ‘double’ past
of National Socialist and communist injustice (a process discussed by Beattie). In
addition, long-standing West German memorial traditions soon spread eastwards.
Memorials to the victims of flight and expulsion, for instance, have been erected
in Eastern Germany since 1990 (see Hesse and Purpus); such memorialization,
with its implicit criticism of the Soviets for their part in this expulsion, would
4
5
not have been possible in the GDR. At the same time, there has been a degree of
‘cross-fertilization’. Memory of the bombing war was more common in the GDR
than in West Germany; in united Germany, it is ubiquitous.
Opinions are divided on what this (re)discovery of narratives of German victimhood means, and on their impact on ‘Holocaust-centred’ memory.5 Many
reasons could be adduced for the phenomenon: the end of the Cold War (which
made certain narratives of German suffering politically inopportune); the quite
natural wish to come to terms with the criminal legacy of the ‘second German
dictatorship’; a renascence of totalitarian theory (according to which suffering
caused by Germans is cancelled out by suffering endured by them, opening the
way for a more positive German self-image); the development of a politically
more self-confident Germany; changes in government since 1990; generational
shifts; the eruption of a long-standing discrepancy between private and public
memory (with the former focused on German suffering, the latter on German
guilt);6 the impact of a worldwide trend towards the rewriting of national history as the history of victimhood; or indeed a combination of these, and of
other factors. Yet whatever the reasons, the interest in German victimhood is
(by and large) free of the resentment and politicization which characterized it
in the 1950s. Certainly, concern has been expressed in Germany that the federal
government leans more towards supporting the memory of communist, rather
than National Socialist injustice; by doing so, of course, the focus can be shifted
from German crime under National Socialism towards German victimhood under
Soviet-imposed socialism. Thus, in 1997, the Association of Concentration Camp
Memorial Sites in the Federal Republic objected to planned revisions to the
Federal Strategy for Memorial Sites not least because of the danger that the significance of National Socialism for German history would be rendered ‘unclear’.7
The Gedenkstättenkonzeption was subsequently rephrased in the light of criticism
from various quarters.8 To date, so it seems at least, the focus on communism or
German victimhood has not ‘ousted’ the Holocaust from the centre of German
memory or memorialization.
The year 1990, then, triggered processes of change during which memorial traditions were either rejected, extended, modified, introduced, or revitalized. Yet for
all that, 1945 remains the most decisive turning point. Flight, defeat, expulsion,
occupation, the confrontation with German crime and guilt, political transformation, division, and the Cold War can all be linked – directly, indirectly, or in
significant part – to this year. National Socialism became a legacy as of 8 May
1945, and to this day German memorialization concentrates almost obsessively
on this legacy. Not that there were not attempts to memorialize earlier periods in
German history; nor were all pre-1933 memorials simply removed. But it became
difficult to regard the Weimar Republic and the Second Empire – or indeed historical periods which precede these – without the knowledge of what came after
(see, for instance, the chapters by Jason Verber, Ulrike Zitzlsperger, Arne Segelke,
and Sebastian Ullrich): National Socialism cast its shadow over all that followed it,
including all subsequent appraisals of what preceded it.
6
Introduction
This is a book, then, about post-1945 memorialization. But what do we mean by
this term? In the 1980s, Pierre Nora developed the concept of lieux de mémoire,
generally rendered in English as ‘sites of memory’. For Nora, such ‘sites’, in the
case of France, encompassed not just memorials, memorial sites, or graves, but
also emblems and flags (such as the tricolore), the Marseillaise, or even the Code
Napoléon.9 Recently, in analogy to Nora’s three-volume ‘anthology’ of 130 essays
on sites of French memory, Etienne François and Hagen Schulze brought out a
three-volume collection of essays on German lieux de mémoire, or ErinnerungsOrte as they translated the term (though German-speaking academics tend to
prefer Nora’s French term). In addition to memorials, museums, and buildings,
this collection includes among such sites works of literature, authors themselves,
philosophers, historical treaties, battles, specific days, whole historical periods
(such as the Reformation), laws, symbolically charged slogans (such as ‘Made in
Germany’), concepts (such as ‘Blood and Soil’), organizations, and fairy-tales.10
Sites of memory, here, are understood as widely as they conceivably could be
to embrace every person, idea, artefact, time, or event around which collective
memory crystallizes.
The editors of this volume have followed Nora only in part. Memorialization, as
we understand it, is a conscious process. Nora certainly has such a process in mind
to a degree, but his ‘places of memory’ include many sites which seem to ‘secrete’
themselves into collective memory in ways that are far less direct. Also, while
Nora’s ‘places of memory’ include many sites that exist in the collective imagination, inscribed onto our mental map, we focus in this volume on sites of memory
which (also) exist as marks on the physical and temporal landscape – be these
memorials in the traditional sense, memorial sites (such as at former concentration camps), commemorative days and rituals, flags, street-names, or exhibitions
(which, beyond their informative and pedagogical function, enjoin us to remember). Our book is interested in other words in ‘reading’ the more visible, tangible
markers of memory, and what they tell us about Germany’s relationship to its difficult past. If memory is about what we see and don’t see, then this book focuses
on the former.
A more restrictive, perhaps ‘conventional’ understanding of lieux de mémoire was
necessary not least on practical grounds: every book has its physical limits. For reasons of space, too, we decided not to include discussion of those ‘sites of memory’
which exist in the virtual world of the internet, concentrating instead on physical locations that the reader might not be able to visit; in any case, most virtual
lieux de mémoire in the German case are ‘offspring’ of physically existing memorial
sites, foundations and institutions (although there certainly are exhibitions that
only exist virtually).11 Furthermore, the reader will not find in this volume exhaustive treatment of well-known memorials which have already been the subject of
academic study elsewhere. While the volume does contain chapters on Berlin’s
Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, and on the memorial sites at Buchenwald and Dachau, these contributions examine relatively under-explored aspects
Memorials and memorialization
7
of these sites, rather than reprising what is already known. The main aim of our
book is to provide analysis of less well-known memorials and memorial sites, and
to convey thereby an impression of the range of memorialization in Germany
since 1945. This book is not a lexicon: not every memorial site is discussed here.
But the volume certainly aims to provide key examples of typical and emerging
patterns, together with models for understanding and evaluating them.
A further aim is to do justice to what we see as an increasing trend towards
the blurring of boundaries between those very categories the volume examines.
Visitors to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin will have
been struck by the fact that it is a memorial above ground, and an exhibition
below. Many German concentration camp memorial sites are themselves amalgams of exhibitions, memorials, graveyards, archives, and libraries. They also
provide a focus for acts of commemoration. Perhaps it is not simply boundaries
that are being blurred, but the very substance of original memorial forms that
is being called into question. James Young uses the term ‘counter-memorial’ or
‘counter-monumental’ to describe recent memorials in Germany which challenge
the concept of monumentality.12 This volume discusses examples of memorials
which either disappear or are inverted into the ground, for instance (a particular
focus of Tomberger’s chapter). The more fleeting, hidden memorial may, as Young
suggests, return ‘the burden of memory to those who come looking for it’.13 The
volume also considers memorials which either move from place to place (as Knittel
shows in her chapter), or are set into the pavement outside doorways (see Imort’s
chapter). Rather than memorials eking out a distant existence on a hilltop, they
come into the cities, invoking memory of injustice by drawing attention to its
traces. They are thus not only fleeting or hidden, but they can be insistent, importunate, and intrusive. The second generation of ‘counter memorials’ is perhaps far
less self-effacing than the first.
Critical approaches
Like other subjects within the wider field of German cultural memory, the subject
of memorials and memorialization attracts scholars from a wide range of disciplines, most notably history, art history, museum studies, literary and film studies,
and cultural geography. While most of these modes of scholarly enquiry would
fit under the interdisciplinary umbrella of Cultural Studies, in practice relatively
few scholars approach memorialization using the theoretical repertoire of Cultural Studies, with its interest in the intersections between ethnicity, nationality,
gender, and social class. Possibly there is something in the topic itself – the fact
that ideology is written all too obviously across many memorials and decried very
explicitly by others – that makes memorials less than intriguing to those working in Cultural Studies. This is not to say that contributors to this volume are
either disinclined to theoretical approaches or wedded conventionally to single
disciplines: historian Lynne Fallwell’s work on tourism or historian Jörg Arnold’s
interest in the history of emotions remind us how fluid disciplinary boundaries
have become. Nevertheless, much work on memorialization is, quite properly, still
Introduction
grounded in distinct disciplines, each with its own working methods and expectations. As a result, scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds pose different
questions of memorialization, its processes, and the meanings it generates. In the
final part of this Introduction we ask how different approaches to memorialization
frame memorials and memorial activities in different ways and, in the process,
create different kinds of knowledge about them.
The historians who have contributed to this volume have drawn on unpublished or little-known archival material such as government and civil service
documents, institutional memoranda, and contemporary newspaper reports. One
of the most valuable aspects of such archive-based research is that it looks beyond
the neat models and paradigms that necessarily characterize broad-brush narratives of post-1945 cultural memory to the messy complexity of memorial activities
as they are lived out. The ‘messiness’ derives partly from the fact that individual
examples resist neat periodization. The broadest chronological narrative of post1945 memory (the amnesiac years of the ‘economic miracle’, the radical 1960s, the
citizens’ initiatives of the 1980s, and post-Wende normalization) turns out, when
the archives are consulted, to involve all kinds of false dawns and sudden reversals, and surprisingly liberal moments in the most conservative of times. Several
chapters (including those by Arnold and by Laura Jockusch) deal partly or wholly
with the very early post-war years, when positions in memory politics were not
yet fixed and the survivors and bereaved briefly had a strong lobbying voice on
matters of memorialization, which they were able to use with varying degrees of
success. A Jewish survivor group that collected a vast documentary archive concerned with Jewish life and its destruction, as a memorial to what had been lost, is
analysed by Jockusch: had it remained in Germany and been published or publicized it might have had a significant effect on German memory culture, especially
since it contained material about, and even supplied by, the perpetrators; instead
it was shipped to Israel and left no mark on Germany.
While there is nothing new in regarding the supposed ‘Zero Hour’ of 1945 as
a myth, the chapters by Alexandra Kaiser, Jörg Arnold, and David Livingstone, in
particular, shine a light on the practical details of that continuity in the realm of
memorials and commemoration, demonstrating how pre-1945 commemorative
practices survived the moral and political ruptures of the National Socialist years
often for pragmatic reasons (because alternative ritual forms or institutional structures were not readily available) – though such continuities became less ‘innocent’
as the years progressed.
The ‘messiness’ of memorial activity derives also from the fact – demonstrated
in many of the contributions – that memorial culture does not only consist of
‘memory contests’ of the kind that produce a clear winner and a clear loser: on
the contrary, competing memory discourses often co-exist without directly clashing, even where they come into contact with one another. Arnold finds evidence
that, in the post-war years, citizens of Germany’s ruined cities quietly appropriated
municipal commemorations to serve their own, private needs, which ran counter
to the intentions of the municipality. Georg Götz shows that those responsible for
memorial discourses in the naval town of Wilhelmshaven continued to celebrate
8
9
the same German naval traditions as before 1945, often using identical ritual and
rhetoric, while also laying claim to a new international spirit which would allow
Germany to play a role within the new Europe. Alexandra Kaiser shows how the
two parts of an official national ceremony in commemoration of the dead – one
part more liberal and inclusive, the other based on an exclusive notion of the ‘German’ dead – for years pulled against one another in terms of their meanings and
symbolism, without this tension ever coming to a head.
Finally, case studies and archival work can call into question the kinds of
political categorizations that are taken for granted in debates about post-war
memory. By studying the nitty-gritty of civic disputes about contentious street
names, Christian Lotz discovers that the conventional Left-Right paradigm that is
generally assumed to operate in political attitudes towards the National Socialist past breaks down in particular cases: Lotz reminds us, for instance, that
the expellees from Germany’s former Eastern territories, who have become a
byword for right-wing attitudes to the past, initially included social democrats
as well as conservatives.14 Similarly, Markus Urban’s case study of Bavarian ‘perpetrator sites’ reveals that the campaign for a proper public documentation of
the Nuremberg Party Rally Grounds benefited from the landslide victory, in
local elections, of the conservative CSU over the previously dominant Social
Democrats (SPD).
By contrast with historians, scholars whose training is in the Arts are more likely
to be interested in narrative structures, iconographical traditions, and processes of
symbolization, in other words in the visual and verbal rhetoric of memorials. On
the whole, memorials (as distinct from memorial sites, which generally contain
museums) favour the visual over the verbal, but the very fact that any text featured on a memorial is artificially restricted makes it an interesting object of study.
The terseness of monumental inscriptions – which cannot contextualize and relativize as scholarly and political discourse may do – favours those memorial-makers
who want to convey programmatic messages, such as the expellees whose memorials are analysed by Hans Hesse and Elke Purpus, and those wishing to obscure
awkward particularities such as the distinction between perpetrators and victims
or between different kinds of victim. The best known example of this, the New
Guardhouse (Neue Wache) memorial in central Berlin, re-dedicated in 1993 to
‘The Victims of War and the Rule of Violence’, provides a reference point for several of our contributors, while Katie Rickard points to a provincial example: the
bust of Sophie Scholl in the national pantheon of Walhalla, whose glib dedication
to ‘all those who bravely resisted the injustice, violence, and terror of the “Third
Reich”’ belies the fact that resistance took widely differing forms, some of which –
unlike the resistance carried out by the hugely popular Scholl – stand little chance
of national memorialization.
Susanne Knittel provides a positive counter-example, a memorial that rejects
the categorical statements of the traditional inscription: drawing on a Jewish story
about a man who invites God to form prayers from the alphabet he recites, Diane
Samuels’ memorial at Grafeneck provides only individual, scattered letters, from
which the viewer must form names or sentiments. However, attempts to counter
Introduction
the foreshortening tendency of inscriptions are not always so successful: Hesse and
Purpus show that simply supplementing an existing, now politically unacceptable inscription (which makes territorial claims on lands forfeited in 1945) with
a more long-winded, politically acceptable one fails to re-signify the memorial.
Anna Saunders shows how a recent attempt to reform the conventional inscription
by borrowing its epigrammatic form but replacing the confident, unambiguous
statement with an open-ended question – made yet more hesitant by the use of
a subjunctive – ended only in a failure of communication and the scrapping of a
worthwhile memorial project.
If the demands of concision can unhelpfully limit the expressiveness of the
memorial text, the visual signification which is the dominant language of the
memorial may be dangerously uncontrolled. Daniela Sandler argues that largeformat images of burning churches, once detached from a textual narrative,
encourage an emotional response to the terrors of fire (and thus an ahistorical identification with the victims). More positively, Chloe Paver argues that
some historical exhibitions, while deliberately employing art installations to evoke
emotional responses, maintain a responsible framework of meaning through the
dominant historical discourses in the exhibition as a whole.
Several contributions consider the significance of the vertical and horizontal
planes in the visual language of memorialization. Not for nothing are the verbs ‘to
erect’ and ‘to put up’ commonly collocated with the noun ‘monument’ in English,
since the vertical is the traditional plane of monumentality. Livingstone discovers
that, on German war graves abroad, flat crosses were perceived as less threateningly nationalistic than erect crosses. Tomberger questions whether the much
vaunted ‘counter-monument’ can ever really neutralize the masculine symbolic
power of the soaring vertical simply by sinking it in to the ground, while Paver
finds examples of the use of the anti-monumental horizontal plane in art installations that, while located within exhibitions, serve a clearly commemorative
function.
Analyses of the rhetoric and symbolism of memorials may sometimes run the
risk of treating the memorial as a static object, one that might just as well be
viewed as a photograph in a catalogue. Two kinds of approach ensure that this
does not happen in this volume as a whole. In the first, which may be grounded
variously in performance studies, visual theory, or cultural geography, the memorial is understood from the point of view of the participant, conceived either as
an embodied viewer who physically experiences the memorial space (as in the
chapters by Haakenson and Sion) or as a tourist and consumer (in Ulrike Dittrich’s
analysis); in the second approach, which tends to be based on an analysis of institutional publications, the memorial is seen as ‘coming alive’ only through the
institutional practices that publicize, frame, and explain it (see chapters by Dieter
Buse, Caroline Pearce, and Lynne Fallwell).
This Introduction has attempted to convey a sense of the complexity of the
questions at issue in memorializing Germany’s past, in particular its National
Socialist past. That complexity is evident both in the approaches taken to the
material and in the insights gleaned from it. To help orientate the reader we end
10
11
with a rather more conventional summary of the content of the five sections.
Section 1 considers the often problematic ways in which the non-persecuted German majority has remembered its ‘own’ losses and sufferings: soldiers killed in
action, civilians killed and towns destroyed in the air war, and the trauma of flight
and expulsion from the former Eastern territories. Section 2 addresses two related
questions: the memorialization of (often unjustly neglected) victims of National
Socialism, such as POWs, homosexuals, people with disabilities, and those active
in resistance; and the problems of finding an appropriate memorial form and an
appropriate use for sites associated with the activities of the National Socialists
and their supporters. Section 3 examines a range of ways in which Jewish suffering
and loss has been commemorated, from the early endeavours of Jewish survivors
to the divided memory cultures of the Cold War and the most recent memorials and exhibitions. Section Four focuses on memory in the GDR and memory of
the GDR, from the heroic traditions of Socialist Realist sculpture to the toppling
of statues after the collapse of communism and the building of new memorials
and museums in memory of the GDR past. In Section Five, the volume acknowledges that Germany has more ‘pasts’ than just its two dictatorships. Throughout
the post-1945 years, Germany has looked back – though rarely in straightforward
celebration – at pasts as diverse as the Reformation, Prussia, the brief colonial era,
the First World War, and the Weimar Republic.
Notes
1. The official title appears to be ‘Konzeption der künftigen Gedenkstättenförderung des
Bundes’ (Strategy for the Future Funding of Memorial Sites by the Federal Government), though the strategy is known, in government documents and publicly, by
its shorthand ‘Gedenkstättenkonzeption des Bundes’ or ‘Gedenkstättenkonzeption der
Bundesregierung’. Archived under: Deutscher Bundestag, 14. Wahlperiode: Drucksache
14/1569.
2. Ibid., p. 3.
3. For more on the Berlin memorial, see B. Niven, Facing the Nazi Past: United Germany
and the Legacy of the Third Reich (London and New York, 2002), and C. Pearce, Contemporary Germany and the Nazi Legacy: Remembrance, Politics and the Dialectic of Normality
(Basingstoke, 2007).
4. For an excellent discussion of the memorializing activities of such groups in the city of
Nuremberg in the 1950s, see N. Gregor, Haunted City: Nuremberg and the Nazi Past (New
Haven, 2008).
5. For an overview of the debates, see B. Niven (ed.), Germans as Victims: Remembering the
Past in Contemporary Germany (Basingstoke, 2006).
6. For more on this discrepancy see H. Welzer et al., ‘Opa war kein Nazi’. Nationalsozialismus
und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis (Frankfurt am Main, 2002).
7. See V. Knigge, ‘Stellungnahme zur Fortschreibung der Gedenkstättenkonzeption durch den
Beauftragten der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien vom 22. Juni 2007 für die Anhörung
des Ausschusses für Kultur und Medien des Deutschen Bundestages am 7. November
2007’, at http://www.bundestag.de/ausschuesse/a22/anhoerungen/gedenkstaettenkonzept-nicht__ffentlich/Stellungnahmen/Knigge.pdf (accessed 18 February 2009).
8. For the revised version, see ‘Fortschreibung der Gedenkstättenkonzeption des Bundes:
Verantwortung wahrnehmen, Aufarbeitung verstärken, Gedenken vertiefen’ (Deutscher
Bundestag, 16. Wahlperiode: Drucksache 16/9875, 19 June 2008), at http://www.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
Introduction
bundesregierung.de/nsc_true/Content/DE/__Anlagen/BKM/2008-06-18-fortschreibunggedenkstaettenkonzepion-barrierefrei,templateId=raw,property=publicationFile.pdf/
2008-06-18-fortschreibung-gedenkstaettenkonzepion-barrierefrei (accessed 18 February
2009).
See Pierre Nora (ed.), Les Lieux de mémoire, 3 vols (Paris, 1992).
E. François and H. Schulze (eds), Deutsche Erinnerungsorte, 3 vols (Munich, 2001).
For a particularly rich range of virtual exhibitions, see The Topography of Terror Foundation’s website at http://www.topographie.de/en/index.htm. One particularly noteworthy exhibition offered by the Foundation which leads a purely virtual existence
is Der 20. Juli 1944: Erinnerungen an einen historischen Tag. Reden und Gedenkfeiern, at
http://www.20-juli-44.de/index1.html (accessed 19 February 2009). In contrast to physical exhibitions, virtual ones can be easily updated – as is the case with the 20 July 1944
exhibition.
See J. E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven,
1993).
See Shoah Resource Center, ‘Excerpt from Interview with Professor James E. Young’ (24
May 1998), at www1.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%203852.pdf
(accessed 19 February 2009).
Similarly, Dagmar Kift notes in her chapter that the Czech Republic has belatedly begun
to commemorate – initially in the form of an exhibition – opponents and victims of
Nazism who were expelled from Czechoslovakia after 1945 on the same basis as those
Germans that had consented to National Socialist rule.
12
Section 1
Remembering German Losses
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1.1
The Volkstrauertag (People’s Day of
Mourning) from 1922 to the Present
‘Back to the old Volkstrauertag’, proclaimed the People’s League for the Maintenance of German War Graves (Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge, hereafter
Volksbund or VDK) in its newsletter Kriegsgräberfürsorge in 1950.1 While the year
1945, an undoubted watershed in German memorialization, is rightly taken as a
starting point for this volume, a sweeping characterization of 1945 as Germany’s
‘Zero Hour’ (Stunde Null) fails to do justice to the Volkstrauertag which, as the opening quotation hints, survived the historical caesura of 1945. Introduced in the
1920s as a commemoration day for the dead German soldiers of the First World
War and continuing as Heldengedenktag (Heroes’ Remembrance Day)2 in the Nazi
era, it was retained in West Germany (the FRG) but not in the east (the GDR).
With unification, it came to be observed nationwide3 and is currently celebrated
on the November Sunday two weeks before the beginning of Advent. The main
Volkstrauertag ceremony has been held in Berlin since 1992, with parallel events
in communities throughout the country.
As in the Weimar Republic, the Volksbund remains the chief impetus behind
the commemoration day. The organization is mainly active abroad (see this book’s
chapter by David Livingstone), but the Volkstrauertag both encapsulates its ideology and serves as its central domestic public forum. The institutionalization of
the VDK’s commemoration day in spite of its origins in private rather than government initiative can be seen as reflecting the political difficulties inherent in
commemorating soldiers ‘fallen’ for a lost cause or publicly assigning a higher
meaning to their deaths. Like the Second World War, the First World War made
it impossible for official Germany to connect reverence for the dead with a normative national identity. The Volkstrauertag played the role of ‘surrogate’ in the
absence of an official holiday.
Following a review of its history in the Weimar Republic and the Nazi era, this
chapter will focus on continuity and changes in the meaning and ritual procedures
of the Volkstrauertag after 1945. Given the Wehrmacht’s role in a war of aggression
and its record of atrocities, the most striking question is how it proved possible to
continue the tradition at all. How could honouring German soldiers in a public
ritual after the Second World War be even remotely tenable? Part of the answer can
be found in the Volkstrauertag’s outward transformation, from the 1960s onward,
15
Alexandra Kaiser
16
The Volkstrauertag from 1922 to the Present
into a Commemoration Day for all Victims of War and Violence (Gedenktag für alle
Opfer von Krieg und Gewalt) that included not only the dead soldiers and other German war dead but also those who were persecuted under Nazi rule. But how was
this transformation of the commemoration day managed? How was its new face
popularized? And how has the day’s ostensible role changed since unification? In
trying to answer these questions the chapter draws, to a large extent, on previously
untapped archival sources.
After the First World War new memorial days and commemorative rituals for dead
soldiers were introduced in every European country that had taken part in the
war. But given its defeat and the change in the political system, remembering the
war dead was problematic in Germany, despite its two million ‘fallen’.4 There was
no political consensus in Germany on the war itself or the legacy of the soldiers’
deaths. Thus, notwithstanding repeated efforts, the government failed to establish
a national commemoration day. Instead, the Volksbund succeeded in popularizing
its conception of a Volkstrauertag, with an essentially anti-Republican thrust. On
5 March 1922, the VDK announced its first call for participation in a commemorative ceremony to honour the fallen at the Reichstag in Berlin.5 A commemorative
ceremony on the national level was held every year thereafter, beginning in 1924,
and local VDK chapters organized parallel events all over Germany. The VDK saw
the Volkstrauertag not merely as an act of commemoration, but as a means of
‘healing’ dissension within the German Volk (a term that the Volksbund would
continue to use even after 1945, despite its contamination by National Socialism).6 Thus, the VDK had always insisted on an additional, non-denominational
commemoration day to be staged as a unifying event for all Germans, dramatizing the difference between death under ‘normal’ circumstances and ‘honourable’
death in war. Secondly, the VDK wanted a date in springtime to symbolize the resurrection of the German nation after its defeat.7 Positioning the Volkstrauertag six
or (from 1926 on) five weeks before Easter, on Reminiscere Sunday,8 suggested an
image of the fallen as ‘heroes’ who had sacrificed their lives for Germany’s better
future.
That interpretation of the commemoration day made it possible for the National
Socialists to adopt the VDK’s conception without a hitch: according to Nazi ideology, the ‘sacrifice’ of the fallen had fulfilled its purpose with the rise of the
Third Reich. In 1934, the Volkstrauertag was renamed Heldengedenktag and made
a national holiday. Responsibility for its organization was delegated to the Ministry of Propaganda and the Ministry of the Interior.9 At the centre of interest was
now the annual state ceremony in Berlin, consisting of a ceremony at the state
opera house (Staatsoper) or, from 1940 onwards, in the Zeughaus on Unter den
Linden, followed by a pompous wreath-laying by the Führer in the nearby New
Guardhouse (Neue Wache), framed by a detachment of troops. In 1939, the commemoration day was severed from the ecclesiastical year, but it still took place in
From Volkstrauertag to Heldengedenktag: The commemoration day
from 1922 to 1945
Alexandra Kaiser
17
spring, on the Sunday before 16 March.10 In 1940, the commemorations began
referencing the ‘fallen heroes’ of the Second World War.
After the Second World War, Germany had to come to terms with the deaths of
more than five million soldiers and roughly half a million civilians.11 Unknown
numbers were disabled, refugees, or prisoners of war. And beyond the victims in its
‘own’ ranks, the nation was forced to face the consequences of crimes committed
by Germans both at home and abroad, suffering what Bernhard Giesen has called
a ‘trauma of perpetrators’.12
In VDK ideology, neither 1933 nor 1945 constituted a caesura in its conception
of the Volkstrauertag or its function of commemorating the ‘fallen’. The continuity
in meaning is most clearly reflected in the uninterrupted use of the ‘Song of the
Good Comrade’ (‘Lied vom guten Kameraden’).13 With its melancholy tune and
lyrics, the song functions as the commemoration day’s most fundamental symbol.
Without giving any reason for the war and emphasizing the arbitrariness of a soldier’s death, the ballad had been one of the most popular songs among German
soldiers in the First World War. In the Weimar Republic it was sung annually at the
Volksbund’s main ceremony and it was later adopted into the ritual of Heldengedenktag. After 1945, the song again became an essential element of Volkstrauertag
rites, and it can be heard at the central commemoration in Berlin to this day.
After the Second World War, the VDK extended its conception of commemoration: German civilians who had died in the war and its aftermath were to be
explicitly included. From the perspective of the VDK, the role of the Volkstrauertag
was (still) to commemorate one’s ‘own’ dead, that is the German war dead, but
it tacitly excluded those Germans (and people of other nations) who were persecuted and killed by the Nazis, that is those who had already been excluded
from the ‘folk community’ (Volksgemeinschaft) during the Third Reich as ‘foreign
elements’ (Gemeinschaftsfremde). From the government’s standpoint, however, it
was impossible – in light of German atrocities – to retain the exclusive focus.
Aleida Assmann has postulated a ‘memory of suffering’ (Leidgedächtnis) in German
families, represented by the Volksbund, in contrast with the ‘memory of guilt’
(Schuldgedächtnis)14 embodied by the state; to survive, the Volkstrauertag had to
encompass both aspects.
In 1950, the Volkstrauertag was officially revived. The VDK – on Reminiscere and
exactly 28 years after its first commemoration in Berlin – organized a commemoration ceremony in the Bundestag in Bonn, with a wreath-laying at the nearby
war cemetery in Ittenbach.15 The twofold structure, consisting of a commemoration ritual and a wreath-laying following the example of the official ceremony on
Heldengedenktag, became typical for the VDK commemorations after the Second
World War. Since 1951, the wreath-laying has normally been held at Bonn’s North
Cemetery.16 In 1952, the Volkstrauertag was moved to the autumn. On 16 November 1952, the commemoration day was held simultaneously in all federal states
for the first time,17 and it has since been celebrated every year in November.
Reviving the tradition: Reintroducing the Volkstrauertag after 1945
The re-establishment of the Volkstrauertag in the FRG marked the end of a ‘state
of transition’18 in German public memory culture that characterized the period
from 1945 to 1949. In the years immediately after the war, German society not
only suffered from a loss of meaning and the lack of a new master narrative, but
also lacked – after the suspension of Nazi rituals and symbolic language, but before
the establishment of new memorial forms or the rehabilitation of older ones –
stable structures for a public commemoration.19 Moreover, under the protection
of the Allied occupation forces, those who had been persecuted in the Third Reich
were able to influence the public culture of memory to a greater degree than in
later years.20
Before the two separate German states came into being, commemorations for
the ‘victims of fascism’ were celebrated throughout Germany, even though most
German people were unable, or rather unwilling, to identify with such commemorations: the dead to be remembered were – unlike those later honoured by the
Volkstrauertag – not conceived as ‘their own’. In 1947, with support from the Association of the Persecutees of the Nazi Regime (Vereinigung der Verfolgten des
Naziregimes or VVN), a Commemoration Day for the Victims of Fascism (Gedenktag für die Opfer des Faschismus) was fixed on the second Sunday in September,
bringing together the antifascist commemorations. That commemoration day was
preserved in the GDR and became an element of the SED’s official antifascism, but
it quickly lost its significance in the FRG.21
The National Commemoration Day of the German People (Nationaler Gedenktag
des Deutschen Volkes) on 7 September 1950 was intended as a direct counterpart
to the commemoration day of the VVN,22 which in the FRG had been disparaged
as a communist front since 1948. Held on the anniversary of the first sitting of
the Bundestag, it indicated more than mere symbolic separation from the GDR;
it was also the sole attempt in FRG history to link public commemoration of the
war dead and victims of the Nazi regime with reference to the state’s democratic
foundations and thus with a positive national identity.23 But the ‘experiment’ was
not repeated. Celebrations in 1951 and 1952 no longer included the dead. That
task was re-assigned to the Volkstrauertag – and thus put to a large extent under the
control of the Volksbund. In 1954, National Commemoration Day in September
was replaced by the Day of German Unity (Tag der deutschen Einheit), celebrated
on 17 June.24
In 1948, soon after its readmission in the Allied occupation zones (later FRG),
the VDK began to demand a revival of the Volkstrauertag.25 Dismissing its recent
past, the VDK stressed the day’s roots in the Weimar Republic, proclaiming it a way
for a ‘fundamental and positive use of this war catastrophe for the life of our people’ that would make ‘the deepest experience of suffering by the German people
in its history . . . productive’.26 Thus, by gathering the bereaved, the Volkstrauertag
would constitute a forum for staging a Volksgemeinschaft after the collapse of the
Third Reich.
In early articles and memoranda produced by the VDK, a sacrificial interpretation of soldiers’ deaths clearly predominates. By emphasizing their ‘duty’
and ‘good faith’ in defending the beloved native land (Heimat), the Wehrmacht
18
19
soldiers could be cast as heroes whose deaths should be revered. The inclusion
of civilians in the Volkstrauertag commemorations did not entail an ideological
rupture; they became ‘fallen’ – and thus implicitly ‘heroic’ – in the Volksbund’s
vocabulary as well. Paralleling the ideological continuity, the post-1945 VDK
clung to the Volkstrauertag’s traditional date, demanding not only an additional
commemoration day to supplement the ecclesiastical memorial days but, again,
striving to attach it to Reminiscere. The Ministry of the Interior and the federal
states, as well as the Protestant church, preferred to reschedule the day due to its
symbolism.27 The date in November was a compromise. No longer suggesting a
national resurrection – and with it, the controversial notion of death in war as
‘sacrifice’ – a damp, grey Sunday in late autumn would emphasize grieving for the
dead. Significantly, the compromise did not satisfy the demands of the Protestant
church. It had asked to combine the Volkstrauertag with its own memorial for the
dead (of all eras, in war and in peacetime) on the last Sunday of the church year,28
and thus to respond – in a different way to the VDK – to the high rate of casualties
among civilians and ‘normal’ Germans.
Expanding the concept: The Volkstrauertag as a Commemoration
Day for All Victims of War and Violence
The rescheduling was not the only change to the Volksbund’s original conception.
The Bundestag ceremony and the cemetery wreath-laying were held in the presence of senior representatives of the state. Although the Volksbund was mainly
responsible for it, the federal government identified with the event and exerted an
influence on the arrangements. This became especially apparent in the late 1950s,
when, against the background of FRG membership in NATO and the reintroduction of compulsory military service, remembering German soldiers acquired a new
political significance. Thus, it was the government that ordered the increased Bundeswehr presence at the wreath-layings from 1960.29 But while promoting the
day’s militarization, the government had also begun, much earlier, to compel the
VDK to mention the victims of Nazism.30
The Bundestag ceremony was the stage where the expanded commemorative
conception of the Volkstrauertag was acted out. Politicians invited as guest speakers were the first to advocate it openly. In 1951, Hermann Ehlers (CDU), then
President of the Bundestag, made reference to resistance fighters and those murdered in concentration camps.31 In 1952, Federal President Theodor Heuss (FDP),
whose speech can be viewed as a prototype for later collective memory strategies,
told his audience that he wished ‘on purpose’ to equate the fallen soldiers on the
battlefields with those killed in air raids, victims of the concentration camps, and
the dead in Jewish cemeteries.32
Since 1954, a text honouring the dead (the so-called Totenehrung) has been
recited each year by a representative of the government – since 1976 by the
German Federal President. The necrology, naming different groups of dead to
be recalled on Volkstrauertag, represents a kind of closure or counterpart to the
‘Song of the Good Comrade’ (with its restriction to dead soldiers). Today, each
Alexandra Kaiser
central commemoration ceremony in the Bundestag ends with the Totenehrung
and a performance of the song – followed, since 1983, by the German national
anthem. From 1958 onwards, victims of Nazi crimes were regularly included in
the Totenehrung’s catalogue.
In 1973, at the suggestion of Chancellor Willy Brandt (SPD), the Totenehrung was
introduced with the sentence ‘Wir gedenken der Opfer von Krieg und Gewalt’ (‘We
remember the victims of war and violence’).33 The introductory phrase became
something of a motto for the Volkstrauertag. While the VDK had resisted the
inclusion of the victims of Nazism during the 1950s, it adopted an expanded conception from the 1960s onwards, calling Volkstrauertag a commemoration day for
all victims of war and violence, especially towards the end of the decade. Likewise,
in the 1970s when families’ grief had faded, the Volksbund de-emphasized the
day’s function of helping to overcome the past, but directed its message ‘toward
the future’, even calling it a Day of Admonition to Peace (Friedensmahntag).34
By accepting the inclusion of those persecuted by Germans, the VDK followed a
general shift in public opinion and memorialization in the FRG. After the crimes
of the Nazis and the Wehrmacht began to enter public awareness in the late 1950s
(helped in part by the foundation, in 1958, of a central West German office for
the investigation of Nazi crimes), it became increasingly difficult to demand a
distinctive or extraordinary form of reverence for fallen soldiers. The re-branding
of the Volkstrauertag can thus be regarded not only from a moral perspective, but
first and foremost as a strategy: only by erasing the distinction between those who
had fought for the Third Reich and those who were persecuted by it was possible
to ‘honour’ the former group any longer in the public eye.35 At the same time,
the blurring of different cohorts of the dead, which facilitated the sublimation
of German guilt, might be interpreted as a means of coping with a ‘trauma of
perpetrators’.
The ‘all-victims-together’ model, as Bill Niven has termed it, which became quite
widespread in memorialization in the FRG beginning in the mid-1960s, is reflected
in the phrase ‘alle Opfer von Krieg und Gewalt’ (or ‘Gewaltherrschaft’, the rule of
force). The levelling function of this dedication is reinforced by the ambiguity of
the German word ‘Opfer’, which can mean either ‘sacrifice’ or ‘victim’. That is, a
central term in German public memory allows no differentiation between giving
one’s life voluntarily and the involuntary suffering of helpless victims. The use
of the term Opfer enabled the transformation of Wehrmacht soldiers – would-be
‘heroes’ whom defeat had turned into ‘perpetrators’ – into ‘victims’, and at the
same time helped them save face as, if not heroic, then at least decent men.36
The annual event in the Bundestag, with speeches by politicians and prominent
personalities and the recitation of the Totenehrung, served to embody the politically motivated ‘memory of guilt’. It presented the Volkstrauertag’s ‘new look’ as a
day for all victims of war and violence and – being disseminated by mass media,
notably on television37 – dominated public perceptions of the Volkstrauertag, at
least on the level of national politics. But the Volkstrauertag’s position – between
commemoration of the ‘fallen’ and commemoration of ‘all victims’ – was always
ambivalent. That ambivalence is reflected in the juxtaposition of the Totenehrung
20
21
and the ‘Song of the Good Comrade’ in the Bundestag ceremony, but it is also
evident in the duality of the celebration’s overall structure. The wreath-laying,
rather than conforming to the new image of the Volkstrauertag, stressed its traditional aspects. Likewise, the victims of Nazi crimes, however conspicuous in
the Bundestag event, were not commemorated appropriately by a wreath-laying
clearly devoted to soldiers. This was readily apparent not only in the martial
atmosphere evoked by the stark presence of the Bundeswehr and the display of
elements of military tradition, but also in a glance at the list of participating (military) organizations and a consideration of the locality: while the North Cemetery
contains graves of German soldiers of both World Wars and non-combatant victims of Allied air raids, there is nothing to remind participants and viewers of
Germans persecuted or murdered for religious, racial, or political reasons, much
less to remind them of other ‘peoples’.
The ‘traditional’ face of the Volkstrauertag remained particularly prominent at
the local level. Ute Frevert has noted: ‘The greater the distance to the capital, the
more the commemoration became restricted to the fallen soldiers.’38 In most communities, people gathered at local war memorials or the graves of ‘fallen’ family
members, places naturally devoid of reference to those killed by the Wehrmacht
or the Nazis. The expanded conception of a commemoration day for all victims of
war and violence thus failed to influence the great majority of Volkstrauertag commemorations. It never filtered down to the local level, where families’ memories of
their ‘own’ dead have always dominated and still do – a reality unaffected by German unification. But how did unification alter the function of the Volkstrauertag
on the public, political level?
Remembering ‘one’s own dead’: The Volkstrauertag’s function since
unification
The unification of the two Germanys opened a new chapter in German memorialization. Not only has the perspective on the German past changed, but the
pattern of the construction of national identity as well. At the same time, shifts
in public discourse and ruptures or lapses in memory culture in the Berlin republic have influenced the Volkstrauertag. The ‘all-victims-together’ model that had
been the basis of public memory culture in the ‘old’ FRG is disintegrating. The
official culture of memory is no longer dominated by the elision of difference
between victims and perpetrators, but is instead characterized by extensive public
presentation and dramatization of German crimes.
Like the Holocaust Memorial in the heart of downtown Berlin, the Commemoration Day for the Victims of National Socialism (Gedenktag für die Opfer des
Nationalsozialismus) held each year on 27 January – the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz – exemplifies the shift in perception of Germany’s past and
the phenomenon Bernhard Giesen has called the ‘public confession of guilt’.39
The new commemoration day, inaugurated in 1996 by German President Roman
Herzog,40 clearly suggests that the Volkstrauertag never achieved acceptance as a
commemoration day for all victims (of war and violence). By questioning this role,
Alexandra Kaiser
the new day posed direct competition while, at a political level, the Volkstrauertag
reverted – almost automatically – to the function it had always retained at a local
level: the (exclusive) commemoration of the German dead.41
The significance of the Volkstrauertag at the local level has receded with fading
memories of the Second World War. Today, it is largely the elderly who attend
local ceremonies. Not least in view of the competition from 27 January, one might
therefore expect a decline in its relevance on the political level as well. But that
is not the case: public attention has increased since German unification. On Volkstrauertag 1993 (14 November), the New Guardhouse was dedicated as a National
Site of Admonition and Remembrance (Nationale Mahn- und Gedenkstätte). Annually – and with extensive coverage from TV and print media – wreaths are laid
in front of the Kollwitz pietà in the guardhouse by representatives of the five
branches of government (Figure 1): the Federal President, the Chancellor and cabinet, the Bundestag (parliament), the Bundesrat (a body composed of delegates
from the federal states), and the Bundesverfassungsgericht (supreme court). While
the main Volkstrauertag ceremony, held in the Bundestag’s new quarters in the
former Reichstag since 1999, is still directed by the VDK, the wreath-laying in
the guardhouse has become an act of state organized by the Ministry of the Interior. The government has thus reasserted at least partial responsibility for public
commemoration of the German war dead, avowing the past in a novel way. At
the same time, the wreath-laying is evidence of a new conception of German
national identity: after the return to normalcy symbolized by unification, the
Figure 1 Representatives of Germany’s five constitutional bodies (the five Bundesverfassungsorgane) lay wreaths in the New Guardhouse in Berlin, 14 November 1993 (photo reproduced
here courtesy of the German Federal Press Office)
22
23
German government sees itself as entitled to mourn its losses just as any other
nation might.42
With regards to the Volkstrauertag’s current political role, another striking
change can be noted. In 2006, Bundeswehr soldiers killed during recent military operations abroad were included in the Totenehrung by Federal President
Horst Köhler for the first time.43 Their deaths were assuredly not in compliance with the Volkstrauertag’s positioning as a commemoration of the ‘victims’
of war, but conform instead to the notion of active, voluntary ‘sacrifice’. Their
inclusion thus ushers in a revival of the Volkstrauertag as a commemoration day
for German soldiers, re-emphasizing the sacrifice-related rationalization of the
commemoration.
In a sense, Volkstrauertag came full circle in the 1990s, reset to its original
meaning as a day of mourning for German losses. The expanded conception of
Volkstrauertag as a ‘commemoration day for the victims of war and violence’ that
had served to mask its purpose since the 1960s became dysfunctional. At the same
time, the linking of today’s Bundeswehr to the fallen of previous generations has
established a new and troubling memory construction whose consequences have
yet to be fully discussed.44
Notes
1. Anon., ‘Warum Volkstrauertag?’, Kriegsgräberfürsorge 26:2 (1950), 11.
2. For ease of reading, I will use the German terms Volkstrauertag, Heldengedenktag, and
Volksbund/ VDK instead of the English translations in this chapter.
3. In the new Germany (as in the Weimar Republic and in the ‘old’ FRG) holidays are
under the jurisdiction of the individual federal states. The Volkstrauertag is not an official nationwide commemoration day, but its status is similar, since it is observed in
all states and city-states without exception. See also T. P. Petersen, Die Geschichte des
Volkstrauertages (Bad Kleinen, 1999).
4. On this period of the VDK’s history see A. Kaiser, ‘“Allerheldentotenfest”: Politische
Sinnstiftung und rituelle Formung des Gefallenengedenkens im Volkstrauertag’, in
G. Korff (ed.), Alliierte im Himmel. Populare Religiosität und Kriegserfahrung (Tübingen,
2006), pp. 83–125.
5. Anon., ‘Unsere Gedenkfeier im Reichstagshaus’, Kriegsgräberfürsorge 2:3 (1922), 26.
6. Anon., ‘Jahresbericht 1920’, Kriegsgräberfürsorge 1:1/2 (1921), 2–6, here 5.
7. Ibid.
8. During the 1920s, there were extensive discussions about the date of a Volkstrauertag
or rather about whether to initiate a commemoration day for the ‘fallen’ at all. See
F. Schellack, Nationalfeiertage in Deutschland von 1871 bis 1945 (Frankfurt am Main, 1990),
pp. 148–56, 204, and 231–46; M. Lurz, Kriegerdenkmäler in Deutschland, 6 vols (Heidelberg,
1985–87), vol. 4, Weimarer Republik, pp. 414–22.
9. Petersen, Geschichte des Volkstrauertages, p. 22.
10. Ibid. The date was reminiscent of 16 March 1935, when Hitler had introduced military
service in violation of the Treaty of Versailles.
11. On this chapter in the VDK’s history see A. Kaiser, ‘“Sie wollen gar nicht, dass wir mit
lauten Worten sie ‘Helden’ nennen”. Der Volkstrauertag und der Mythos vom Sinn des
Sterbens im Krieg’, in H. Hein-Kircher and H. Hahn (eds), Politische Mythen im 19. und
20. Jahrhundert in Mittel- und Osteuropa (Marburg, 2006), pp. 63–80.
Alexandra Kaiser
12. B. Giesen, ‘The Trauma of Perpetrators. The Holocaust as the Traumatic Reference of
German National Identity’, in J. Alexander et al. (eds), Cultural Trauma and Collective
Identity (Berkeley, CA, 2004), pp. 112–54.
13. The lyrics were written by the German poet and politician Ludwig Uhland (1787–1862)
in 1809 and set to music by Friedrich Silcher (1789–1860).
14. A. Assmann, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit. Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik
(Munich, 2006), pp. 203–4.
15. Anon., ‘Ihr seid nicht allein und verlassen in Eurem Leid’, Kriegsgräberfürsorge 26:4 (1950),
26–7.
16. Between 1964 and 1968 it was moved to the Hofgarten park in Bonn.
17. Anon., ‘In Stadt und Land gedenken wir der Kriegstoten’, Kriegsgräberfürsorge 28:12
(1952), 125.
18. S. Behrenbeck, ‘Between Pain and Silence: Remembering the Victims of Violence in
Germany after 1949’, in R. Bessel and D. Schumann (eds), Life after Death: Approaches
to a Cultural and Social History of Europe during the 1940s and 1950s (Cambridge, 2003),
pp. 37–64, here p. 40.
19. For the memory culture of the immediate post-war years see also F. Maciejewski,
‘Trauer ohne Riten – Riten ohne Trauer. Deutsche Volkstrauer nach 1945’, in J. Assmann
et al. (eds), Der Abschied von den Toten. Trauerrituale im Kulturvergleich (Göttingen,
2005), pp. 245–66; G. Margalit, ‘Gedenk- und Trauerkultur im Nachkriegsdeutschland.
Anmerkungen zur Architektur’, Mittelweg 36 13:2 (2004), pp. 76–92.
20. Behrenbeck, ‘Between Pain and Silence’, p. 41.
21. For the history of the commemoration day, see H. Coppi and N. Warmbold, Der zweite
Sonntag im September. Gedenken und Erinnern an die Opfer des Faschismus. Zur Geschichte des
OdF-Tages (Oswiecim, 2006).
22. See proposal of the Federal Minister of the Interior Gustav Heinemann (CDU, later SPD)
from 14 August 1950, Bundesarchiv Koblenz (BArch) B106/77151.
23. See announcement of the Federal Press Office dated 30 August 1950, BArch B106/77151.
24. For a brief history of the National Commemoration Day see BArch B106/77151;
B106/77152; B106/77153; S. Behrenbeck, ‘Rituale des Zwiespalts. Politische Feiertage in
Ost und West’, in H. Hastedt et al. (eds), Zeichen und Mythen in Ost und West. Rostocker
Philosophische Manuskripte, NF 6/1999 (Rostock, 1999), 45–70.
25. A first discussion paper (Denkschrift) was published in October 1948 (others were to
follow in the succeeding years), Archive VDK (Kassel).
26. ‘Denkschrift über den Volkstrauertag’ (28 December 1949), Archive VDK.
27. There were further complex discussions about fixing the date of the Volkstrauertag in the
early 1950s. See BArch B106/104109; B122/2238; B136/3003.
28. See Evangelisches Zentralarchiv Berlin (EZA), 2/4416.
29. For the state’s interventions in the organization of the Volkstrauertag, see BArch
B106/77166; B136/4931; B122/5150.
30. The government communicated its desires to the VDK explicitly at a meeting in 1953.
See ‘Niederschrift der Präsidiumssitzung vom 17.3.1961’, Archive VDK.
31. See the transcript of Ehler’s speech, Anon., printed in Kriegsgräberfürsorge 27 (1951).
32. ‘Kriegsleid bindet Menschen und Völker’, Kriegsgräberfürsorge 28:12 (1952), 141–5,
here 142.
33. See Bulletin des Presse-und Informationsamtes der Bundesregierung, No. 149 (20 November
1973), 1135.
34. See, for instance, Anon., ‘“Volkstrauertag ist Friedensmahntag”’, Kriegsgräberfürsorge 56:1
(1980), 4–7.
35. See, for instance, the programmatic title ‘Der Tod hat alle Unterschiede ausgelöscht’
(Death Has Eliminated all Differences) which was given to an article in Kriegsgräberfürsorge 39:5 (1963), 90–1.
36. G. L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York, 1990),
p. 216.
24
25
37. Already in the 1950s and 1960s, people could follow the entire celebration in the
Bundestag as a live broadcast.
38. A. Assmann and U. Frevert, Geschichtsvergessenheit – Geschichtsversessenheit. Vom Umgang
mit deutschen Vergangenheiten nach 1945 (Stuttgart, 1999), p. 210.
39. Giesen, ‘The Trauma of Perpetrators’, p. 146. Originally, Giesen applied this interpretative
model to Chancellor Willy Brandt’s gesture of kneeling in the Warsaw ghetto in 1970.
40. Thus, the commemoration day in Germany was a forerunner of Holocaust Remembrance
Day, officially introduced by the UN in 2005.
41. This has, however, not (yet) affected the Volksbund’s propaganda, which continues to
conform to the ‘all-victims-together’ model.
42. B. Niven (ed.), Germans as Victims: Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany
(Basingstoke, 2006), p. 19.
43. Anon., ‘Gedenken an getötete Bundeswehrsoldaten’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 20
November 2006, 1–2.
44. For an analysis of some of the problems involved in constructing a ‘tradition’ for the
Bundeswehr see the chapter by Jörg Echternkamp.
Alexandra Kaiser
1.2
Beyond Usable Pasts: Rethinking
the Memorialization of the Strategic
Air War in Germany, 1940 to 1965
Recent scholarly research into the cultural impact of Second World War bombing has done much to dispel simplistic notions about an alleged absence of the
bombing war from the political cultures of the two successor states of the Third
Reich.1 In the German Democratic Republic, the Communist elites were quick to
exploit collective memories of urban destruction and mass death for the political
confrontations of the Cold War. As Gilad Margalit, Matthias Neutzner, and others
have shown, it was above all the bombing of Dresden on 13–14 February 1945
that served state-sponsored propagandists as a powerful symbol of both ‘imperialist’ atrocity and German victimhood.2 Meanwhile, the air war also occupied a
prominent place in public discourse west of the inner-German border, albeit on
the communal rather than the state level. In cities such as Hamburg, Pforzheim,
Kassel, and many others, annual commemorations were held in memory of the
bombing, attracting a considerable number of residents.3 In West German cities,
public memory was dominated by the local elites of City and Church, who harnessed the air war to the task of physical and spiritual reconstruction while largely
avoiding thorny questions of agency and causality.
Much of this scholarship adopts a functionalist approach to the study of memory, working on the premise that the memory of past events serves the needs of the
present. On this view, memorial cultures are best explained by looking at the social
contexts and political motivations of the present rather than the lived experiences
of the historical events themselves.4 Such an approach has done much to shed
light on the politics of memory, demonstrating the bewildering array of contradictory myths to which narratives of Second World War bombing have contributed –
myths of resilience and sacrifice, overpowering and victimhood, guilt and atonement. It has also considerably broadened our understanding of the ‘agents’ of
public memory and their goals of political mobilization, social integration, and
community building.
Yet, for all its merits, the present historiography shows a troubling tendency
to prioritise questions of function and usability over ‘existential’ issues of loss
and bereavement.5 This imbalance is in part a consequence of the broader framework of Vergangenheitsbewältigung within which most studies operate. There are,
of course, perfectly valid reasons for an approach that examines the post-history
26
Jörg Arnold
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preview.html[22/12/2014 16:51:21]

Memorialization in Germany since 1945

Transcription

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