Creating a Memory of Germany’s Past

Not long ago, Germany had what it called a “Jewish problem.” Then it had a paralyzing Holocaust memorial problem, a double-edged conundrum: How would a nation of former perpetrators mourn its victims? How would a divided nation reunite itself on the bedrock memory of its crimes? On June 25, after 10 years of tortured debate, the German Bundestag voted to build a national “memorial for the murdered Jews of Europe.” It also accepted the design, a waving field of pillars by American architect Peter Eisenman, recommended by the five-member Findungskommission, for which I served as spokesman.

Like many others, I had been quite satisfied with the insolubility of Germany’s memorial dilemma. Better a thousand years of Holocaust-memorial competitions in Germany than a “final solution” to Germany’s memorial problem. Instead of a fixed icon for Holocaust memory in Germany, the debate itself should be enshrined. Thus, when Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s government proposed, in 1995, a national “memorial for the murdered Jews of Europe” for a prime piece of Berlin real estate between the Brandenburg Gate and the Potsdamer Platz, a stone’s throw from Adolf Hitler’s bunker, I feared that such a memorial would serve as a great burial slab for the 20th century, a hermetically sealed vault for the ghosts of Germany’s past. It would be a place where Germans would come dutifully to unshoulder their memorial burden, so that they could move freely and unencumbered into the 21st century. A finished monument would, in effect, finish memory itself.

When, in June 1997, the Berlin Senate invited me to descend from the safety of my critic’s perch into the muddy design battle itself as one of five members of a newly appointed design commission--its only foreigner and only Jew--I was forced to ask myself a series of questions: Did I want Germany to return its capital to Berlin without publicly and visibly acknowledging what had happened the last time Germany was governed from Berlin? With its gargantuan restoration plans and torrent of big-industry money pouring into the new capital in quantities beyond Nazi architect Albert Speer’s wildest dreams, could there really be no space left for public memory of the victims of Berlin’s last regime? No, the missing Jewish part of German culture would have to remain a palpable and gaping wound in the German psyche--and would have to appear as such in Berlin’s otherwise reunified and reconstructed cityscape. It was time to work on memory rather than just talk about its impossibility.

I agreed to serve on the condition that I could dissent publicly from the commission’s decision, if necessary, and that we make this memorial’s aims and inherent difficulties explicit. First, we stipulated that the memorial would not displace the nation’s other memorial sites. Neither would it pretend to speak for the Nazis’ other victims but would, in fact, necessitate other memorials to political prisoners, Soviet POWs, the handicapped, homosexuals and the tribes of Sinti and Rom, or Gypsies. Nor would we suppress the impossible questions driving Germany’s memorial debate. If the government insisted on a memorial in Berlin to Europe’s murdered Jews, then it would have to reflect Germany’s own tortured, self-abnegating motives for Holocaust memory.

There was another concern, shared by members of the Findungskommission and the memorial’s opponents: Should it be a contemplative site only or pedagogically inclined, too? Because we did not see Holocaust memory in Germany as a zero-sum project, we concluded that there is room in Berlin’s new landscape for both commemorative spaces and memorial learning centers. Berlin and its environs are already rich in excellent museums and permanent exhibitions on the Nazi regime, from the Wannsee Villa to the Topography of Terror, from the new Jewish Museum on Lindenstrasse and the proposed Institute for the Study of Anti-Semitism, to the critical and insightful exhibitions at Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen.

The question was never whether there would be only a memorial or a museum. Rather, in addition to existing pedagogical houses of memory, was there room for a commemorative space meant for memorial contemplation and national ceremonies? We answered, “Yes.” Even though we were still suspicious of the monument as a form, we began to see how important it would be to add a space to Germany’s restored capital deliberately designed to remember the mass murder of Europe’s Jews. This would not be a space for memory designed by the killers themselves, as the concentration-camp sites inevitably are, but one designed specifically as a memorial site. It is a deliberate act of remembrance, an acknowledgment that memory must be created for the next generation, as well as preserved.

Will the new memorial mark the end of Germany’s Holocaust memory work? Now that the Bundestag has decided to give Holocaust memory a central place in Berlin, an even more difficult job awaits organizers: defining exactly what is to be remembered in this waving field of pillars. What will Germany’s national Holocaust narrative be? Who will write it and to whom will it be written? The question of historical content begins at precisely the moment the question of memorial design ends.

By choosing to create a commemorative space in the center of Berlin, a place empty of housing, commerce or recreation, the Bundestag reminds Germany and the world of the self-inflicted void at the heart of German culture and consciousness. It is a courageous and difficult act of contrition on the part of the government and reflects Germany’s newfound willingness to act on such memory, as it recently did in Kosovo, and not be merely paralyzed by it. But because the murdered Jews can respond to this gesture with only a massive silence, the burden of response now falls on living Germans, who in their memorial visits will be asked to recall the mass murder of a people once perpetrated in their name, the absolute void this destruction has left behind and their own responsibility for memory itself.*