In the final section of this composition, I wish to briefly explore two of the central problems that make the task of remembrance in Germany such a difficult one, and that make remembrance in the form of the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe an impossible one. I will first document the great difficulties that arise simply by trying to memorialize an event such as the Holocaust, and the objections to this memorial in particular. Then I will discuss Germany after its reunification, and what has become a “Catch-22” for a country trying to forge a new identity, while also constantly being reminded of the horrors of its past.Attempting to memorialize the Holocaust at a location removed from the actual sites of the persecution and extermination is, as we have seen, a decidedly bold undertaking. James E. Young suggested that the more memory “comes to rest in its exteriorized forms,” the less that a visitor will experience it internally.64 He argued that once a person or a group allows memory to assume a monumental or memorial form, they have also partially rid themselves of an obligation to remember. They have a false impression that a memorial is a permanent object, and therefore take leave of it and return only at their own convenience, encouraging the memorial to do their “memory-work” for them.65This is precisely what Michael Naumann meant when he argued that a memorial would freeze history and indirectly suggest that the Germans were settling their final debt with history.
Abstract monuments such as Eisenman II also pose a danger to remembrance, according to Michael Lind. The greatest danger, he maintained, is one of the latent functions of this “horrifying monument”, the tendency of a visitor to subconsciously begin to associate the dreadful imagery with the millions of murdered Jews and not the Nazis themselves.
He wrote, “A monument to the victims of the Holocaust should not be a monument to the Holocaust. Its purpose should be to honor the lives of the people who perished, not the way they died.”66 Lind believed that civic memorials should serve to reinforce the minds of citizens for future encounters with evil, not invoke the sins of history to discourage the present. In the case of the memorial to the Murdered Jews, succumbing to the temptation of the latter would award Adolf Hitler with a second, posthumous victory over these victims by turning him into the subject.67
In her study of the memorial, Caroline Wiedmer mentioned another factor that made Germany’s endeavor for a central Holocaust memorial all the much more difficult. Such a project, she claimed, is so difficult because it is so unique. Few, if any, countries have undertaken an attempt to commemorate their own crimes in the form of memorial.68 There is no central memorial to the victims of slavery in the United States, or, in a European example, to the victims who perished in Stalin’s gulags in the former Soviet Union. There was no predecessor for Germany to emulate, and assuming the role of the pioneer guaranteed that the Germans would experience plenty of difficulty.
In this unique case, however, the discussion of the inherent struggles in the construction of a Holocaust memorial is only half of the required analysis. We must also examine the potential problems that would have arisen if the Germans had ultimately cancelled their plans to honor the Murdered Jews of Europe. Although it is clear that many German intellectuals, politicians, and private citizens were critical of any attempt to erect a memorial, we must remember that the seemingly smaller group of proponents featured the most powerful people involved with the debate, especially Lea Rosh and Helmut Kohl.
Jane Kramer called Rosh a “media grande dame”, a women who is famous in Germany for her self-invention, but also for her devotion to her image and reputation. Rosh insisted that the idea for the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe was hers, Kramer writes, and followers of Ms. Rosh’s career assured Kramer that once Rosh had the idea for such a memorial, the project was inevitable.69
Chancellor Kohl, the most powerful man in Germany, was also a strong supporter of the memorial, and for good reason. Kohl had already suffered two misfortunes involving Holocaust remembrance, and his relationship with the Jewish community was strained at best. In 1985, Kohl, along with American president Ronald Reagan, attended a ceremony at a military cemetery in Bitburg, Germany, that contained the graves of members of the Schutzstaffel, or SS, Adolf Hitler’s henchmen in the Nazi era. This visit, of course, caused a public relations uproar.
Kohl later proceeded to erect a memorial to all of the victims of war and fascism in Berlin’s Neue Wache, only to be widely criticized on a number of issues. First of all, the memorial was a replica of a sculpture by German expressionist Käthe Köllwitz, featuring a Pietá of a mother with her dead son.
Historical Pietás were traditionally portrayals of the Virgin Mary and the crucified Christ, and critics realized this and immediately objected to the sculpture's motif, noting that six million of the victims being remembered were not Christians. Furthermore, many felt that the crucified Christ excluded women from memory and limited the remembrance to male victims. Lastly, a memorial to war and fascism would honor Nazi soldiers and Jewish Holocaust victims at the same site, a fact that many Jews obviously opposed.70
With the objections to his earlier blunders still fresh in his mind, it is easy to see why Kohl would support a plan for a memorial. The success of a national, central memorial would easily overshadow the controversy over a relatively minor memorial in the Neue Wache, while also greatly improving his standing in the Jewish community. Kohl’s power and support reinforced the memorial against many of the sound, yet drastically less influential protests from historians and members of the media.
Even when Gerhard Schröder, a staunch opponent of a memorial, defeated Kohl in the 1998 elections, he learned that there was little that he could do to stop its momentum. A writer for The Economist hinted at the potential consequences that Schröder and the SPD would face if they were to abandon the memorial initiative. How would it look to Germany’s Jewish community, the writer wondered, after it had purposefully kept out of the complex debate but has been led to believe from the outset that there would be a memorial?71 This is certainly a valid question, considering the debates in Germany over how a reunited superpower would deal with a dreadful past, and it leads us to the second part of our discussion.
There is a word in German, Vergangenheitsbewältigung, which has been the basis for a great deal of debate in a unified Germany, the so-called “Berlin Republic.” The word means “getting over, dealing with the past”, and with the German government now relocated to the capital of Hitler’s Third Reich, and Germany once again poised to become Europe’s most powerful country, the Germans’ changing relationship to the years of the Nazi regime has become the subject of intense scrutiny. The desire of many Germans to move forward and become a “normal” European nation has come into direct conflict with the views of other Germans and non-Germans, who feel that such a progression would slowly lead the country to forget its past.
Andrei Markovits astutely observed that the new Deutschland is a far different country than the old Bundesrepublik.72 The Bundesrepublik Deutschland (the former West Germany) and the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (the former East Germany) became Deutschland on the night of November 9, 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall. The two halves became “Germany”, and were once again the country that had started two world wars and caused the deaths of almost fifty million people. As Kramer noted, this was the night that Germans inherited a German history, and lost all claims to a history of “East” and “West”. They discovered how hard it was to be “ordinary folks” when an event like the Holocaust was part of that history.73
Of course, as Brian Ladd noted, there are Germans who want to forget about that past. These people “think they hear far too much about Hitler and vanished Jews and alleged crimes of their parents and grandparents,” said Ladd, but always encounter other Germans who insist on remembering just these things. The calls for remembrance make forgetting impossible, but the calls for forgetting make remembrance much more difficult.74
This is especially problematic, of course, in a country that wants to welcome its new role in the world with open arms, and in a capital that is perhaps the symbol of post-Cold War Europe. Every step forward will elicit a call to look backward. Historian Dan Diner acknowledged this fact when he admitted that future historians will always interpret the history of the German nation knowing that the National Socialist regime grew out of it. Germany, Diner believed, will always “trigger concerns and doubts,” especially with those whose lives were so negatively affected by the power of Hitler’s Nazi Party. It will only be possible to revive the idea of a nation if Germans also accept the memory of the regime and its terrible crimes.75
The question is not truly whether Germans can accept the past, however, but how much of it they can tolerate before it becomes a nuisance that leads them to try to forget the years from 1933 to 1945. If this happens, according to Israeli psychoanalyst Zvi Rex, the “Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.”76
As we can see from such discussion, the problem of Vergangenheitsbewältigung is ultimately made up of two parts. The first part involves those Germans who reject any idea of a memorial. Many have had too much Hitler and too much Holocaust, and simply want to remain focused on the twenty-first century. This mentality is obviously a problem, because the more that Germans want to forget the past, the more such attitudes will actually facilitate forgetfulness. On the other hand, as I noted in the first half of this section, even if a monument were built, many Jews and Germans feel that its presence would also evidence Germans’ attempt to “control the past,” as it would assist the concept of “frozen memory” that Michael Naumann found so dangerous.
As this analysis concludes and this essay draws closer to a conclusion, there is one more factor, perhaps so obvious as to not be noticed, that ultimately makes the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe and all Holocaust remembrance a truly impossible endeavor. Six million Jews and eleven million persons in all died as a result of Hitler’s program of extermination, and no memorial, written or verbal apology, or monetary sum will ever bring them back, or change the fact that the Nazis murdered them because of who they were and what they believed. Germans can erect a memorial, a research center, or nothing, and it will never change the past. Perhaps that is why SPD Deputy Michael Roth and many others believe that all of the discussion and debate about the Holocaust, remembrance, and the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe was the most important part of the memorial, and perhaps the best memorial possible.77 Although it did no more than other projects to compensate for the loss of so many lives, it nonetheless kept the Holocaust in the public eye for well over a decade, and the differing viewpoints, daily controversies, and plot twists ensured the debate was always a fresh one, something that maybe even the concentration camps themselves could not accomplish for such an extended period of time.
All of this information simply adds to the mounting evidence that the Germans’ attempt to honor Jewish victims of the Holocaust would have been an impossible task, regardless of how they decided to do it. The erection of a memorial can be problematic in a number of ways, especially because such a project threatens to freeze memory and unintentionally relieve visitors of their “memory-work”, thereby aiding in their forgetfulness instead of their remembrance. Selecting an abstract, intimidating memorial can also lead to problems, as Lind noted, because this form can subconsciously alter the mindset of the visitor, and shift his or her focus away from the lives of the victims and onto their horrible deaths. Even with the potential problems of the construction of a memorial, there were also numerous problems that would have arisen if a memorial had been vetoed, mainly extreme embarrassment for the German government and an escalation in the already strained relations between Germany and its Jewish community. Such strain, as we saw, is a direct factor of the complexities that come with the new Germany that is torn between its past and its future. Most moves to embrace the future bring about a warning not to forget the past, and many attempts to preserve the past are criticized because they seem to restrain Germans from setting their sights on a promising future. And, of course, all remembrance is impossible in that it cannot bring back the honored victims. That is not to suggest that remembrance be avoided, but to emphasize the obligation of the living to learn about the past, and ensure that such things can never happen again.