But this was just the problem. As many critics noted, the Kohl plan conflated victims and perpetrators, honoring them all equally and indiscriminately. The concept did not distinguish between people who had been killed by the Hitler regime and leading Nazis (like Roland Friesler) who had been victims of the Allied bombing. Since the main thing about victims is their lack of responsibility for their fate, Kohl seemed to be suggesting that the Germans of the Hitler era, virtually all of whom were victims in this scheme, lacked responsibility for the Reich’s crimes. Of course, the chancellor certainly did not mean to suggest this, but in his push to redefine Germany’s relationship with its painful history and to take account of the entire past rather than just the grimmest moments, he showed himself, as he had at Bitburg and Frederick the Great’s reburial, surprisingly ham-handed in the complicated arena of historical symbolism.
Enlarged version of Käthe Kollwitz’s pietà in the Neue Wache, 1999
The controversy surrounding the Neue Wache was further compounded by the renovation plan proposed by Kohl. In place of Tessenow’s stone tomb, the chancellor proposed an enlarged replica of Käthe Kollwitz’s pietà, her sculpture of a mother mourning her dead son. Critics, including leading members of Berlin’s Jewish community, objected that as a Christian symbol this was hardly appropriate for the millions of Jews who had died at the hands of the Nazis. Moreover, the sculpture specifically referred to the loss of dead sons and thus did not encompass the millions of women who had died in World War II. Finally, Kollwitz herself had been a pacifist. Was it appropriate to place a work of hers in a former Prussian guardhouse?
Despite a barrage of criticism from historians, Jewish groups, various leftist and pacifist organizations, and the local art community, Kohl held fast to his plan. On “National Mourning Day” (November 14, 1993), the chancellor personally presided over the reopening of the Neue Wache. The monument had been restored essentially as he had proposed. An enlarged pietà reposed somberly beneath an opening in the ceiling that allowed sunlight to fall on the figure. The only significant change to Kohl’s original concept was a bronze plaque beside the entrance that named the specific victim-groups being memorialized. The long list, a Who’s Who of Nazi victims, did not include Waffen-SS men, but this did not prevent some folks from leaving flowers inscribed to the memory of SS officers killed in the war. Moreover, the last-minute addition of the inclusive plaque failed to make the memorial more palatable to most of its critics. Protesters shouting “murderers are not victims” attended the opening ceremony, which was pointedly boycotted by Berlin’s Jewish leader, Jerzy Kanal, and by the city’s senator for cultural affairs, Ulrich Roloff-Momin.
The controversy surrounding the Neue Wache, acrimonious as it was, paled in comparison to the bitter debate over a commemorative site that did not yet exist: a national monument in Berlin to all the Jews murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust. A plan to create such a site surfaced in 1988, shortly before the Wall came down. It was spearheaded by a television talk-show hostess named Lea Rosh. Originally, Rosh wanted to locate the proposed memorial on the former Gestapo/SS grounds, thereby displacing the “Topography of Terror” exhibit. When Germany and Berlin became unified, however, Helmut Kohl offered Rosh and her backers an even more prominent space, a five-acre site just south of the Brandenburg Gate. Like Rosh, Kohl believed that such a monument would help Germany atone for its greatest crime.
This plan immediately came under fire for a host of reasons. Berlin, as has been noted, possesses a number of sites which had figured prominently in the Holocaust. Many critics of the Rosh concept believed that it would be better to focus Germany’s commemorative and atonement efforts on “active museums” like the Sachsenhausen camp, the “Topography of Terror” exhibit, and the Wannsee villa. As it happened, the site offered by Kohl for the Holocaust memorial was close to a number of Nazi-era bunkers that lay buried under mounds of sand. In 1990 construction workers digging in the area found remains of the underground shelters for Hitler’s drivers, replete with eerie scenes from Nazi mythology. Later, Goebbels’s bunker and remnants of the Führerbunker (whose location was known, but kept secret) were unearthed as well. City officials insisted upon reburying all these sites, but proponents of the active-museum concept argued that they should be preserved as crime scenes, like the Topography of Terror. It would be a travesty, they said, if the proposed Holocaust memorial displaced actual sites of evil. Then there were those many citizens who were simply fed up with efforts by Berlin and Bonn to memorialize the Holocaust and thereby perpetuate Germany’s sense of guilt and obligation. As a character in Michael Kleeberg’s novel, Ein Garten im Norden (1998), complains: “They’ve thrown enough of our tax money away on this crap. It’s high time to draw a line under the past!” In the early 1980s Alfred Dregger, a right-wing Christian Democrat, called for all Germans “to come out of Hitler’s shadow,” to make their nation “normal.” A very different objection came from left-wing Berlin intellectuals, who argued that Germany had no “right” to the memory of the Nazis’ victims. This memory, they said, belonged exclusively to those who had suffered; furthermore, they said, having the sufferers’ pain “honored” next to the Brandenburg Gate would only add to the confusion between victims and perpetrators.
Whether or not they worried about this confusion, some of the victims of the Nazi terror had their own objections to the Rosh project. The Nazis, as we know, had targeted a number of groups besides Jews in their mass killing, and survivors from these groups, such as Gypsies (called Sinti and Roma in Germany), homosexuals, and the mentally disabled, complained about being left out of Rosh’s scheme. If they were to be excluded from the Holocaust memorial, these groups wanted memorials of their own. The Sinti-Roma agitated for a spot at the Brandenburg Gate, so as to be on an equal footing with the Jews, but in 1993 the Berlin Senate vetoed this idea. Homosexual groups likewise agitated for a separate memorial, which spawned a quarrel within Berlin’s gay community, since some of its members believed that the commemoration should focus exclusively on the roughly 50,000 gay men who had been persecuted under National Socialism, while others wanted to include lesbians, who were not specifically targeted by the Nazis. The memorial’s possible location also inspired a dispute. Some wanted it in the Nollendorfplatz, a meeting point for Berlin gays in the 1990s (and Christopher Ish-erwood’s old haunt in the early 1930s), where there was already a triangle-shaped plaque reading: “Beaten to death, silenced to death—to the homosexual victims of Nazism.” Another faction insisted on having the monument near the Brandenburg Gate. Such close proximity to the proposed Jewish memorial, however, provoked opposition from local officials, who worried that it would suggest an “equality of oppression.”
In response to the criticism of an exclusivity in Germany’s politics of memory, backers of a memorial specifically for Jews argued that what was being memorialized was not only the loss of millions of lives, but the destruction of “a thousand-year culture belonging to the heart of Europe,” as Peter Radunski, Berlin’s Senator for Science, Research, and Culture, put it. The unspoken implication here, of course, was that the loss of Jewish creativity through the Holocaust represented a far more significant blow to German culture than did that of the other groups.