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. Memo From Berlin

Germany Confronts Holocaust Legacy Anew

 

By Nicholas Kulish and Victor Homola
January 29, 2008.

 

Rabbi William Wolff attends a commemoration of Holocaust victims in the German parliament in Berlin. (January 25, 2008.)

 

BERLIN -- Most countries celebrate the best in their pasts. Germany unrelentingly promotes its worst.

The enormous Holocaust memorial that dominates a chunk of central Berlin was completed only after years of debate. But the building of monuments to the Nazi disgrace continues unabated.

On Monday, Germany's minister of culture, Bernd Neumann, announced that construction could begin in Berlin on two monuments: one near the Reichstag, to the murdered Gypsies, known here as the Sinti and the Roma; and another not far from the Brandenburg Gate, to gays and lesbians killed in the Holocaust.

In November Germany broke ground on the long-delayed Topography of Terror center at the site of the former Gestapo and SS headquarters. And in October, a huge new exhibition opened at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. At the Dachau camp, outside Munich, a new visitor center is set to open this summer. The city of Erfurt is planning a museum dedicated to the crematoriums. There are currently two exhibitions about the role of the German railways in delivering millions to their deaths.

Wednesday is the 75th anniversary of the day Hitler and the Nazi Party took power in Germany, and the occasion has prompted a new round of soul-searching.

A visitor walking through the snow-covered Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. (January 2008)

"Where in the world has one ever seen a nation that erects memorials to immortalize its own shame?" asked Avi Primor, the former Israeli ambassador to Germany, at an event in Erfurt on Friday commemorating the Holocaust and the liberation of Auschwitz. "Only the Germans had the bravery and the humility."

It is not just in edifices and exhibits that the effort to come to terms with this history marches on. The Federal Crime Office last year began investigating itself, trying to shine a light on the Nazi past of its founders after the end of the war. And this month Germany's federal prosecutor overturned the guilty verdict of Marinus van der Lubbe, the Communist Dutchman executed on charges of setting the Reichstag fire; that event's 75th anniversary is Feb. 27.

The experience of Nazism is alive in contemporary public debates over subjects as varied as German troops in Afghanistan, the nation's low birthrate and the country's dealings with foreigners. Why Germany seems unendingly obsessed with Nazism is itself a subject of perpetual debate here, ranging from the nation's philosophical temperament, to simple awe at the unprecedented combination of organization and brutality, to the sense that the crime was so great that it spread like a blot over the entire culture.

Whatever the reasons, as the events become more remote, less personal, this society is forced to confront the question of how it should enshrine its crimes and transgressions over the longer term.

In the decades after the war, the central question was how Hitler ever came to power, Horst Möller, director of the Institute of Contemporary History, said in an interview. Even an American television mini-series called "Holocaust" in the 1970s affected the debate in what was then West Germany, shifting the focus more onto the suffering of the victims themselves, Mr. Möller recalled.

Rüdiger Nemitz first began welcoming back Berlin's exiled victims of Nazi tyranny, an overwhelming majority of them Jews, in 1969. Berlin flies its former citizens back for a week of visits, all expenses paid and complete with a reception by the mayor.

The Invitation Program for Former Persecuted Citizens of Berlin, which has brought roughly 33,000 people for visits to the city, once had 12 full-time staff members. Now it is just Mr. Nemitz and a half-time employee.

The program is not, however, winding down because of waning support. At a time when the Berlin city government has had to make deep cutbacks in other areas, Mr. Nemitz said, the program's $800,000 budget has not been pared since at least 2000.

"When it started, they were grown-ups," said Mr. Nemitz from his office on the ground floor of City Hall. "Now, it's people with hardly any memory of Berlin. Those who come today were children then." The visits will end in 2010 or 2011, Mr. Nemitz estimated, because there are so few victims left.

Overlooked next to the fact of the survivors' dying out is that Mr. Nemitz's generation, those who fought to break the silence of their parents and teachers, is starting to retire. When the last tour group leaves Berlin, Mr. Nemitz, 61, who says he is afraid to take vacations and treats his position more like a mission than a job, will shut the door to his office and retire.

A nation pays more attention than ever to the consequences of its past, and lessons for the future.

Some say that young Germans, who are required to study the Nazi era and the Holocaust intensively, have shown little indication of letting the theme drop, despite their distance from the events. They say that the younger generation has tackled it as a source not of guilt, but of responsibility on the world stage for social justice and pacifism, including opposition to the war in Iraq.

Others say that the crimes are dealt with only superficially, and that the young will eventually, and perhaps in carefully guarded ways, express their exhaustion with the topic. "I can't help but feeling that some of the continued, 'Let's build monuments; let's build Jewish museums,' is a fairly ritualized behavior," Susan Neiman, director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, an international public research group, said by telephone. "I worry terribly that it's going to backfire."

Germany's relationship with its Nazi history still regularly generates controversy, as in the case of the dueling train exhibits. The first, Train of Commemoration, is a locomotive carrying displays detailing the way Jewish children were murdered in the Holocaust.

The train is making its way through German cities, open for visitors along the way, ultimately bound for the site of the Auschwitz camp, in Poland. Organizers complain that rather than embrace the project, the national railway, Deutsche Bahn, has hindered it, requiring payment for use of the tracks.

The second exhibition, sponsored by Deutsche Bahn itself, opened in Berlin at the Potsdamer Platz train station last week. Critics have derided "Special Trains to Death" as a response to the first exhibition. But Deutsche Bahn's exhibition does lay out how the company's predecessor, the Reichsbahn, carried some three million passengers to their deaths; it is filled with painful statistics, photographs and powerful stories of some of the people who perished.

Any failure to handle the history with care grabs national attention. In Munich this past weekend, a traditional carnival season parade overlapped with the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, observed every year on Jan. 27. The result was a flood of negative publicity for the city.

Stefan Hauf, a spokesman for the city, said, "There was no conscious affront," adding that the city would have changed the date of the parade, but that too many participants were flying in from other countries to make the change on short notice.

Munich played a special role in Nazi history. It is where the National Socialist party rose to prominence and was the location of the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, the failed coup attempt enshrined in Nazi lore. Hitler eventually declared it the Capital of the Movement. Unlike Berlin, which has developed a reputation as a city with a memorial on practically every street corner, Munich has often been criticized for playing down its history.

"Munich was the Capital of the Movement; since 1945 it's been the capital of forgetting," said Wolfram P. Kastner, an artist who said he had fought the city over the years for permission to use performance art to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive there.

Munich's government believes it has been very active in preserving the history of that time. A short walk from the city's historic Marienplatz, an entire complex of new buildings is devoted to both the city's Jewish history and the present. The synagogue there opened in November 2006 on the anniversary of the Nazi-led Kristallnacht attacks on Jewish people, businesses and places of worship. The Jewish Museum and a new community center opened in Munich last year.

The city is working on a new museum to be built where the Nazi party headquarters once stood. Called the Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism, it is expected to open in 2011. The stated goal, according to the museum Web site, "is to create a place of learning for the future."

To that end, Angelika Baumann of the city's Department of Arts and Culture has run workshops for schoolchildren 14 to 18 years old. "We're planning for people who aren't even born yet," she said.

 

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