The Villa Wannsee lies not far from the freight train station at Grunewald from which some 50,000 Berlin Jews were shipped to the concentration camps. The vast majority never returned. Like the infamous villa, this place received no acknowledgment of its historical role in the killing process for many years after the war. In 1973 a private group erected a plaque at the loading ramps, but the plaque was often defaced and twice stolen. Shortly before the Wende, the West Berlin government commissioned a modest memorial for the site; unveiled in 1991, it consists of a concrete slab imprinted with walking human forms. Two years later, the local head of the national railway system—the same organization that had contracted with the SS to transport Jews to the camps at a bargain rate—announced that the ramps would be torn down and replaced by a cleaning facility for high-speed Intercity-Expreßzug (intercity express, ICE) trains. Upon learning of this plan, Jewish groups vehemently protested. Jerzy Kanal, the head of the Berlin Jewish Community, noted that there were still Jews living in Berlin who had been deported from Grunewald. Local newspapers decried the planned “ramp to the train-wash.” Claiming that he had not known of the Grunewald station’s history, the railway chief agreed to forego the cleaning facility and to work with the Central Council of German Jews to construct “a worthy memorial” and historical exhibit at the site.
If the memorials and “memory sites” in the former West Berlin testify to the hesitancy, tortuousness, and ambiguity of the commemoration process, this is doubly true of the sites that were established in the East. To the extent that the GDR government wrestled with the legacy of National Socialism at all, it was mainly to interpret the crimes of the Nazis as the consequences of a crusade by “monopoly capitalism” against the Communists, who were portrayed as both Nazism’s primary victims and as its heroic conquerors. If the leftist resisters happened to be Jewish, this was downplayed or ignored. Only in the 1980s did the GDR regime begin to acknowledge the fate of the Jews under Nazism with commemorative sites in East Berlin. Monuments or plaques were placed at the Jewish cemeteries at Weißensee and Schönhauser Allee and at the deportation site at Grosse Hamburger Strasse. Yet even this belated effort was half-hearted and spotty. A small monument in the Lustgarten dedicated to the Communist resister Herbert Baum failed to mention his Jewish origins, and the location on the Rosenstrasse where demonstrations by non-Jewish wives had led to the release of their Jewish husbands was acknowledged only after German unification.
Monument to the deportation of Berlin’s Jews at Grunewald Station
A typical example of GDR memory politics was the memorial erected at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienburg, about twenty-five miles north of Berlin. As with the larger memorial at Buchenwald near Weimar, this exhibit focused almost exclusively on the Communist prisoners and Red Army POWs. The plight of the Jews who were incarcerated there was hardly mentioned. Moreover, beyond installing their tendentious museum, the GDR authorities did little to preserve the camp’s buildings and facilities, which were allowed slowly to rot away. Even worse was the situation at the women’s camp at Ravensbrück, where the National People’s Army built a base on the grounds.
After unification, the federal government and the state of Brandenburg announced plans to thoroughly restore the Sachsenhausen site, but little was done beyond a partial revision of the exhibits. In 1992 neo-Nazi vandals burned some of the Jewish barracks at the camp. Due to a lack of funds, the foundation responsible for the site was unable either to repair this damage or to prevent further deterioration of the property. At several places on the grounds visitors were warned away from buildings by signs reading, “Caution! Danger of Collapse. No Trespassing.” The custodians were also unable to hire guides to conduct tours or to adequately catalog the new material donated to the camp on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of its liberation in 1995. “This is an authentic site, a place where the evil was actually perpetrated,” said the foundation’s director. “It is a place that horrifies even people who have read many books about the Holocaust. When the federal government moves to Berlin in a few years, it will become more important than ever. But we don’t have the resources to do what needs to be done here.”
Monument to the Rosenstrasse Women’s Protest, 1999
A lack of resources was not a problem at the Neue Wache, which in the first half of the twentieth century stood as Germany’s main shrine to its fallen soldiers—a German version of Britain’s Cenotaph and France’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Upon being absorbed into the commemorative culture of reunited Germany, this hallowed structure became embroiled in a revealing struggle over how the new nation should memorialize the victims of military violence and political tyranny in the era between 1914 and 1945.
The Neue Wache, which stands on Unter den Linden next to the former Prussian Arsenal (now the German Historical Museum), is a small but striking neoclassical building designed by Schinkel in 1818 to celebrate Prussia’s victory over Napoleon. Until 1918 it served as the headquarters of the Palace Guard. In 1931 it was converted by the architect Heinrich Tessenow into a memorial for the German dead of World War I, with an unknown-soldier tomb in the shape of an altar, as well as a large gold and silver wreath that recalled the corona civica awarded by the Roman Senate to the Republic’s heroic soldiers. The Nazis co-opted this shrine, adding a cross on the back wall as “a symbol of the Christian Volk in the new Reich.” As part of their own co-optation of national symbolism, the East Germans rededicated the Neue Wache in 1960 as a “Memorial to the Victims of Fascism and Militarism.” In front of the building they established a permanent honor guard, whose members goose-stepped into position. (Tourists were always astonished at this sight, associating the goose step with Nazi militarism, but in fact this was an old Prussian maneuver and thus part of the GDR’s appropriation of Prussian symbolism.) In 1969 the East Germans redesigned the building’s interior, adding a Tomb of the Unknown Resistance Fighter and urns containing ashes from the concentration camps and World War II battlefields.
With the collapse of the GDR and the dissolution of the National People’s Army in 1990, the Neue Wache was closed, its fate uncertain. Three years later, however, Chancellor Kohl decided that this structure should be pressed into service once again as a place of memory—this time as the central memorial for all the victims of both world wars, as well as for “the victims of racial persecution, resistance, expulsion, division, and terrorism.” In other words, this was to be a one-stop-covers-all memorial, a kind of supermarket of commemoration sites. As Kohl noted, state visitors wishing to lay a wreath at a sacred site could absolve that obligation here through a single gesture. And for the Germans themselves, he said, the Neue Wache offered a version of the “nation united in mourning.”