Memorialization in Germany since 1945

Memorialization in Germany since 1945

Also by Bill Niven FACING THE NAZI PAST GERMANS AS VICTIMS (edited)

Also by Chloe Paver REFRACTIONS OF THE THIRD REICH IN GERMAN AND AUSTRIAN FICTION AND FILM

Memorialization in Germany since 1945 Edited by

Bill Niven Professor of Contemporary German History, Nottingham Trent University

and

Chloe Paver Senior Lecturer in German, University of Exeter

Editorial matter, selection and Introduction, © Bill Niven and Chloe Paver 2010 All remaining chapters © their respective authors 2010 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–20703–5 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

Notes on Contributors

xi

Introduction Bill Niven and Chloe Paver

1

Section 1 Remembering German Losses 1.1 The Volkstrauertag (People’s Day of Mourning) from 1922 to the Present Alexandra Kaiser

15

1.2 Beyond Usable Pasts: Rethinking the Memorialization of the Strategic Air War in Germany, 1940 to 1965 Jörg Arnold

26

1.3 Roads to Revision: Disputes over Street Names Referring to the German Eastern Territories after the First and Second World Wars in the Cities of Dresden and Mainz, 1921 to 1972 Christian Lotz 1.4 Monuments and Commemorative Sites for German Expellees Hans Hesse and Elke Purpus

37 48

1.5 A Memorial Laissez-Passer? Church Exhibitions and National Victimhood in Germany Daniela Sandler

58

1.6 Remembering on Foreign Soil: The Activities of the German War Graves Commission David Livingstone

69

1.7 Neither Here nor There? Memorialization of the Expulsion of Ethnic Germans Dagmar Kift

78

Section 2 Remembering Nazi Crimes, Perpetrators, and Victims 2.1 The Mediators: Memorialization Endeavours of the Regional Offices for Political Education (Landeszentralen für politische Bildung) Dieter K. Buse v

91

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Contents

2.2 Memorialization of Perpetrator Sites in Bavaria Markus Urban

103

2.3 Pieces of the Past: Souvenirs from Nazi Sites – The Example of Peenemünde Ulrike Dittrich

114

2.4 Remembering Euthanasia: Grafeneck in the Past, Present, and Future Susanne C. Knittel

124

2.5 Remembering Prisoners of War as Victims of National Socialist Persecution and Murder in Post-War Germany Jens Nagel

134

2.6 (In)Visible Trauma: Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset’s Memorial to the Homosexuals Persecuted under the National Socialist Regime Thomas O. Haakenson

146

2.7 Memorializing the White Rose Resistance Group in Post-War Germany Katie Rickard

157

2.8 The Role of German Perpetrator Sites in Teaching and Confronting the Nazi Past Caroline Pearce

168

Section 3 Remembering Jewish Suffering 3.1 Memorialization through Documentation: Holocaust Commemoration among Jewish Displaced Persons in Allied-Occupied Germany Laura Jockusch 3.2 Memorializing Persecuted Jews in Dachau and Other West German Concentration Camp Memorial Sites Harold Marcuse

181

192

3.3 Remembering Nazi Anti-Semitism in the GDR Bill Niven

205

3.4 Rosenstraße: A Complex Site of German-Jewish Memory Hilary Potter

214

3.5 The Counter-Monument: Memory Shaped by Male Post-War Legacies Corinna Tomberger 3.6 Stumbling Blocks: A Decentralized Memorial to Holocaust Victims Michael Imort

224 233

Contents

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3.7 Affective Memory, Ineffective Functionality: Experiencing Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe Brigitte Sion

243

3.8 From Monuments to Installations: Aspects of Memorialization in Historical Exhibitions about the National Socialist Era Chloe Paver

253

Section 4 Socialist Memory and Memory of Socialism 4.1 Heroes and Victims: The Aesthetics and Ideology of Monuments and Memorials in the GDR Susanne Scharnowski

267

4.2 Beating Nazis and Exporting Socialism: Representing East German War Memory to Foreign Tourists Lynne Fallwell

276

4.3 Memorializing Socialist Contradictions: A ‘Think-Mark’ for Rosa Luxemburg in the New Berlin Riccardo Bavaj

287

4.4 Challenging or Concretizing Cold War Narratives? Berlin’s Memorial to the Victims of 17 June 1953 Anna Saunders

298

4.5 GDR Monuments in Unified Germany Mia Lee

308

4.6 Memorialization of the German-German Border in the Context of Constructions of Heimat Gerd Knischewski and Ulla Spittler

318

4.7 The Fight in the Prison Car Park: Memorializing Germany’s ‘Double Past’ in Torgau since 1990 Andrew H. Beattie

328

Section 5 Memorializing Germany’s Ambivalent Legacies 5.1 Martin Luther – Rebel, Genius, Liberator: Politics and Marketing 1517–2017 Ulrike Zitzlsperger

341

5.2 Building Up and Tearing Down the Myth of German Colonialism: Colonial Denkmale and Mahnmale after 1945 Jason Verber

351

5.3 Remembering the Battle of Jutland in Post-War Wilhelmshaven Georg Götz

360

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5.4 The Memoralization of 9 November 1918 in the Two German States Arne Segelke 5.5 A Democratic Legacy? The Memorialization of the Weimar Republic and the Politics of History of the Federal Republic of Germany Sebastian Ullrich 5.6 Memorializing the Military: Traditions, Exhibitions, and Monuments in the West German Army from the 1950s to the Present Jörg Echternkamp

369

379

388

5.7 The Legacy of Second German Empire Memorials after 1945 Bill Niven

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Index

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List of Illustrations 1 Representatives of Germany’s five constitutional bodies (the five Bundesverfassungsorgane) lay wreaths in the New Guardhouse in Berlin, 14 November 1993 2 Expellees’ Monument in Tornesch, Schleswig-Holstein. The inscription reads ‘There Is Only One Germany’ 3 Expellees’ Monument in Tornesch, Schleswig-Holstein, after the inscription was altered in 1997 to read ‘In Memory of Our Unforgotten Home’ 4 Exhibition chronicling the history of the KaiserWilhelm-Gedächtniskirche, Berlin 5 Frauenkirche, Dresden, monument comprising a piece of the original dome, whose silhouette is represented on its face 6 Model rocket near the entrance to the Visitor Centre, Peenemünde 7 Build-your-own model of the ‘Führer’s’ bunker at the site of the former Wolf’s Lair in Poland 8 The Grey Bus Memorial during its stay in front of the Berlin Philharmonic on Tiergartenstrasse, from January 2008 to January 2009 9 Named single graves, 1945. They later became the Ehrenhain Zeithain 10 The ‘universal monument’ at the Sandbostel cemetery today 11 Memorial to the Homosexuals Persecuted under the National Socialist Regime in the Tiergarten, Berlin 12 Still image from the film loop that currently appears in the Memorial to the Homosexuals Persecuted under the National Socialist Regime 13 Memorial to the White Rose set into paving stones in front of the main entrance to Munich University 14 Marble sculpture of Sophie Scholl (centre of photograph on plinth) by Wolfgang Eckert 15 1946 Jewish Memorial in Belsen 16 1967 Jewish Memorial in Dachau 17 The three central sections of Ingeborg Hunzinger’s sculpture Block of Women (Block der Frauen) 18 One of two advertizing columns – visible between the parked cars – used to display an exhibition about the Rosenstrasse Protest, close to where it took place 19 The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin

ix

22 53

54 59 65 118 120

130 136 139 147

152 158 160 194 200 217

219 244

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List of Illustrations

20 Detail from an installation in the exhibition Home and Exile: Jewish Emigration from Germany since 1933 at the Jewish Museum Berlin 21 Detail from one of a series of banners listing the names of victims of National Socialist persecution, shown in the exhibition National Socialism in Mainz 1933–45: Tyranny and Everyday Life 22 Fritz Cremer’s Buchenwald sculpture 23 Soviet memorial in Schönholzer Heide Park 24 Section of the ‘Think Mark for Rosa Luxemburg’ near the People’s Theatre, Berlin 25 Wolfgang Rüppel’s Memorial to the Victims of 17 June 1953, with Max Lingner’s mural in the background

256

259 272 280 288 304

Notes on Contributors

Jörg Arnold was awarded his PhD by the University of Southampton, and recently took up a position at the University of Freiburg (under Ulrich Herbert). He has research interests in the social and cultural history of modern wars, the history of memory, and the history of the emotions. He is currently working on a monograph of the memorialization of the bombing war in post-war Germany. Riccardo Bavaj is Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of St Andrews (UK). He has published widely on twentieth-century German history, including Die Ambivalenz der Moderne im Nationalsozialismus: Eine Bilanz der Forschung (Munich, 2003). Andrew H. Beattie is Lecturer in German studies at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. His publications include Playing Politics with History: The Bundestag Inquiries into East Germany (New York, 2008). Dieter K. Buse is Professor Emeritus, History Department, Laurentian University, Sudbury, Canada. His study The Regions of Germany (2005) complements his Modern Germany: An Encyclopedia of History, People and Culture, 1871–1990 (1998, 2 vols). He has published widely on various aspects of contemporary German history in journals such as Central European History and the Journal of Modern History. Ulrike Dittrich is a freelance text editor and works for a consulting firm. She was an academic assistant at the Ravensbrück Memorial Museum. Her book KZ-Souvenirs (on concentration camp souvenirs) was published by the Brandenburg Office for Political Education in 2005. Her research project on memorial souvenirs was affiliated to the Center for Interdisciplinary Memory Research in Essen. Jörg Echternkamp holds a PhD from the University of Bielefeld and has been a Fellow at the Research Institute for Military History (MGFA), Potsdam, since 1997. He was visiting professor at Calgary, Canada, in 2004, and has been associate lecturer at the Sorbonne (Paris). He is author of Kriegsschauplatz Deutschland 1945. Leben in Angst, Hoffnung auf Frieden. Feldpost aus der Heimat und von der Front (Paderborn, 2005). Lynne Fallwell is Assistant Professor of History at Texas Tech University. Her publications include work on tourism and representations of German food in Edible Ideologies: Representing Food and Meaning (K. LeBesco and P. Naccarato, eds). She is currently completing a book on English-language guidebooks to Germany post-1945. xi

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Georg Götz has developed history exhibitions and collection management schemes for museums in North Germany. His recent publications have focused on the visualization of German regions in photobooks, and on Second World War memorials. He teaches history and English at a grammar school in Bavaria. Thomas O. Haakenson is Associate Professor and Chair of the Liberal Arts Department, University of Minnesota, where he completed his doctorate in 2006. He has articles forthcoming in Cabinet, New German Critique, The Rutgers Art Review, and the anthology Legacies of Modernism, among others. He has received several awards and fellowships, for instance from the US Fulbright Program. Hans Hesse is a historian and project leader of the ‘Archive of Memorialisation of the Third Reich in the Rhineland’ at the Art and Museums’ Library of Cologne. His main publication deals with de-Nazification (Konstruktionen der Unschuld. Die Entnazifizierung am Beispiel von Bremen und Bremerhaven (Bremen, 2005)). Michael Imort is an associate professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo (Ontario, Canada). His research examines the political instrumentalization of landscape representations and focuses on the use of the German forest landscape by both nationalist and environmentalist groups. Laura Jockusch is Kreitman Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Jewish History at Ben Gurion University of the Negev and fellow at the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. She studied Jewish studies, modern history, and sociology at the Free University in Berlin and received her PhD in Hebrew and Judaic Studies from New York University in 2007. Alexandra Kaiser was fellow of the Collaborative Research Centre on War Experiences, Tübingen, between 2005 and 2008. Her doctoral thesis focuses on the history of the People’s Day of Mourning, and its role in German memory culture and politics. Since 2009 she has been a museum trainee at the Forum for Contemporary History in Leipzig. Her research interests include German memory culture, National Socialism, museum studies, and regional ethnography. She has published several essays. Dagmar Kift is senior curator at the LWL-Industrial Museum in Dortmund and was head of the exhibition project ‘Rebuilding the West’. She studied history, German literature, sociology, and law at the Free University in Berlin and was a British Council scholar at Oxford University (St Antony’s College). She has published widely on German social, cultural, and industrial history. Gerd Knischewski is Senior Lecturer at the School of Languages and Area Studies and a member of the Centre for European and International Studies Research (CEISR) at the University of Portsmouth, and a member of the Editorial Committee of the Journal of Contemporary European Studies Research. His publications include work on war memory in Germany, and united Germany’s attempts at coming to terms with the past.

Notes on Contributors

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Susanne C. Knittel is currently finishing her dissertation ‘Uncanny Homelands: Grafeneck, Trieste, and the Struggle for Memory’ at Columbia University. It combines an analysis of two memorial sites – one dedicated to the memory of National Socialist euthanasia in Germany, the other to the memory of Fascist anti-Jewish and anti-Slav persecution in Italy – with a discussion of the various literary texts that address the memories of these specific historical sites and events. Mia Lee is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Warwick. She is completing a book on art and political movements in West Germany. David Livingstone is a Lecturer in History at Moorpark College in California. He holds BA and MA degrees in modern European History from California State University, Northridge. He has previously taught Strategy and Policy for the United States Naval War College and has travelled extensively to European military cemeteries. Christian Lotz studied history and social sciences at the Universities of Leipzig, Edinburgh, Vienna, and Poznan. He is a member of the ‘Leipziger Circle – Forum for Science and Art’. In 2007 he received his PhD at the University of Stuttgart for a thesis entitled Interpretations of Loss: Political Controversies in Divided Germany about the Memory of Flight, Expulsion and the Eastern Territories (1948–1972), subsequently published with Böhlau (2007). Harold Marcuse is professor of contemporary German history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In addition to works on the history of the reception of the Nazi past in Germany, he has written about the memorialization of events during the Second World War around the world. Jens Nagel is head of Zeithain Memorial Site, Germany. In his research, he focuses on the history of Wehrmacht POW camps, looking particularly at the treatment of Soviet, Polish, and Italian POWs. He has published widely on this topic, most recently in the German history journal Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte 4 (2008). Bill Niven is Professor of Contemporary German History at Nottingham Trent University, UK. He is author of Facing the Nazi Past (2002), and editor of Germans as Victims (2006). He is currently preparing a book called A Post-Holocaust History of Germany, 1945–2010, and editing a volume on the history and memory of the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff. Chloe Paver is a Senior Lecturer in German at the University of Exeter, UK. She is the author of Refractions of the Third Reich in German and Austrian Fiction and Film (Oxford, 2007). Since undertaking research as a Humboldt Fellow at the University of Konstanz in 2006–07, she has published a series of articles on historical exhibitions about the National Socialist era; she is preparing a monograph on the subject. Caroline Pearce is Lecturer in German at the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on German confrontation with the National Socialist past since 1990 and

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the role of memorial sites. Her most recent publication is Contemporary Germany and the Nazi Legacy. Remembrance, Politics and the Dialectic of Normality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Hilary Potter is a postgraduate student in the European Studies and Modern Languages Department at the University of Bath, UK, where she has taught on undergraduate courses in German and in European Studies. She is currently completing her PhD on Representations of the Rosenstrasse Protest in Post-Wende Germany. Elke Purpus is Director of the Art and Museums Library of Cologne. Her most recent publication focuses on memorialization in Northrhine Westfalia (Gedenken und Erinnern im Rhein-Erft-Kreis. Ein Führer zu Mahnmalen, Denkmälern und Gedenkstätten (Essen, 2008)). Katie Rickard completed her PhD in 2006. She was a Lecturer at the University of Bath, UK, where she also worked in the Graduate Office. She now works at the University of Reading, UK, for Aimhigher Berkshire. Daniela Sandler is an architectural and urban historian, specializing in Germany and Brazil. Her research and teaching focus on social inclusion, memory, culture, and representation in the built environment. She has a PhD in Visual and Cultural Studies from the University of Rochester (2006). She also has a professional degree in Architecture and Urbanism from the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. She teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design in the USA. Anna Saunders is a Lecturer in German at Bangor University, Wales. Her research interests include questions of history and memory in eastern Germany, memorialization in contemporary Germany, and socialist and post-socialist youth culture; her monograph, Honecker’s Children, was published with Manchester University Press in 2007. Susanne Scharnowski has research interests in German literature of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. She has also published on memorial art in the GDR. She has taught at the Free University of Berlin, Germany, the University of Cambridge, UK, National Taiwan University, and the University of Melbourne, Australia. Since 2008, she has been administrative director of the PhD programme at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies. Arne Segelke graduated from the University of Hamburg, Germany, and is currently writing his doctoral thesis on ‘Images of the First World War in Scandinavia’. He lives in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Brigitte Sion is Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow at New York University’s Program in Religious Studies and Department of Journalism. Her doctoral dissertation in Performance Studies focused on the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin and the Monument to the Victims of State Terrorism in Buenos Aires.

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Ulla Spittler is Principal Lecturer at the School of Language, Literature, and Communication at the University of Brighton, UK. She has published on memorialization of the Holocaust and the GDR, on German perspectives on Europe, and war memory in Germany. Corinna Tomberger, PhD, is an art historian and social scientist working on memory politics and visual representation. She has been teaching gender studies and art history at the Humboldt University and the University of Arts in Berlin, Germany. Lately she has been preparing an exhibition on national symbols for the ‘Haus der Geschichte’ Foundation in Bonn. Sebastian Ullrich wrote his PhD on the ‘Weimar-Complex’ of the early Federal Republic. He is editor for modern history, contemporary history, and politics at the publishing house C. H. Beck in Munich, Germany. Markus Urban is a public historian and works as a freelance lecturer, author, and tour guide in Nuremberg, Germany. He is author of a book on the Nazi Reich Party Rallies (Die Konsensfabrik. Funktion und Wahrnehmung der NS-Reichsparteitage, 1933–1941 (V&R Press, 2007)). Jason Verber is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Iowa, USA. His dissertation, which is in its final stages, examines the relationship between Germans and colonialism after 1945. Ulrike Zitzlsperger is Senior Lecturer in German at the University of Exeter, UK. Her main research interest lies in the culture and literature of twentiethcentury Berlin, with a particular focus on the 1920s and 1990s. She also works on sixteenth-century culture in Germany with a focus on Reformation pamphlets.

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Introduction Bill Niven and Chloe Paver

Memorialization in Germany since 1945 Observers of contemporary Germany’s relationship to its past cannot fail to notice the very high number of memorials and memorial sites throughout the country. Nor can they fail to notice how seriously Germany takes its memorials and memorial sites. A measure of this is surely Germany’s Federal Strategy for Memorial Sites (Gedenkstättenkonzeption des Bundes), which passed into law in 1999 (and was amended in 2008).1 While Germany’s Basic Law ascribed the task of overseeing memorial sites to the federal states (Länder), some sites of national importance were able to call on central state funds for all or part of their costs, particularly after 1989. The Gedenkstättenkonzeption put an end to these rather piecemeal arrangements, formalizing the division of responsibilities between central and regional government by defining what counted as a ‘national’ memorial site. To some degree, then, the Gedenkstättenkonzeption can be viewed simply as an overdue bureaucratic tidy-up, concerned with funding budgets. Nevertheless, it was also born of more lofty considerations: recommendations made by the panel of experts advising on how Germany should deal with the memory of the East German dictatorship (the second of the so-called ‘Enquete-Kommissionen’). Accordingly, the strategy endeavoured to formulate a statement of the meaning and purpose of memorials for the German state and its people. The otherwise bureaucratic ‘framework principles’ end with the statement: ‘In remembering the National Socialist reign of terror, Stalinism, and the SED dictatorship, and in commemorating the victims and those who opposed or resisted these regimes, we strengthen our sense of freedom, justice, and democracy, and consolidate the anti-totalitarian consensus in Germany.’2 A further measure of the importance Germany’s government and parliament ascribes to processes of memorialization was its involvement, from its inception through to its completion, in the building of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin (which is analysed in the chapters by Brigitte Sion and Corinna Tomberger in this volume); a parliamentary resolution backing the memorial was passed on 25 June 1999. At the same time, the memorial was not just a focus of parliamentary interest: it would never have been built without the initiative of the 1

2

Introduction

citizens’ action group ‘Perspective for Berlin’, founded in 1989, or without public donations to supplement the government support. The gestation process of the memorial was long; it was accompanied by years of discussion in national and regional newspapers, while scandals accompanied its construction. Even following its dedication in 2005, it has continued to attract discussion and debate.3 The extent of political involvement, public interest, and media coverage enjoyed – if that is the right word – by this memorial is probably exceptional. Nevertheless, as several contributors to the current volume (including Michael Imort, Mia Lee, and Riccardo Bavaj) show, there are many other examples of memorials in Germany whose conceptualization, planning, and execution were also a matter of considerable public and political attention. This edited collection is the first of its kind to assess the nature and chart the extent of this phenomenal memorial activity in Germany. In so doing, it focuses largely on processes of memorialization since 1945. Why 1945? It would have been possible to extend the perspective back to consider memorialization during the Third Reich, the Weimar Republic, and the Second Reich – and indeed much earlier in German history. That this book would then have been unmanageably long (it is quite long as it stands), represents a practical reason for the decision to circumscribe the focus. But the choice of the post-1945 period is above all a conscious one. The year 1945 was not a ‘Zero Hour’ (Stunde Null) in the history of memorialization in Germany, but it did represent a watershed in this history as it did in so many other areas of German political, cultural, and economic history. The Second World War ended, for Germany, in catastrophic defeat, mass expulsion, and occupation; for many soldiers, the experience of war scarred them for life, while civilians were traumatized by the effects of carpet bombing. Yet, Germany had started this war, and had conducted it – especially in the East – with unbelievable cruelty; 6 million Jews were murdered, 3.3 million Soviet POWs perished in German captivity, hundreds of thousands of Sinti and Roma were killed. Many, many others suffered a similarly murderous fate. In view of the above, the self-celebratory tradition of German memorialization was severely ruptured. After 1945, the heroic messages of Second Reich memorials to Wilhelm I and Bismarck, or of Third Reich memorials to military heroes such as Hindenburg, rang hollow. Many were removed – not just by the Allies, but also by Germans themselves. Even a straightforward appropriation, in memorials to the Second World War, of the tradition of self-pity typical of Weimar Republic memorialization of the First World War proved difficult to sustain. One should not, however, imagine that self-pitying traditions died out. The year 1945 brought with it not only flight and expulsion, but the de facto loss of the former Eastern homelands (discussed in the present volume by Christian Lotz, and by Elke Purpus and Hans Hesse). It also initiated the process which led to German division and the establishment of two German states, each of which perceived the inhabitants of the other Germany as ‘victims’ – of capitalism and communism respectively. With the onset of the Cold War, narratives of victimhood soon became intimately bound up with political propaganda. In the GDR, East German citizens learnt that the legacy of communist suffering under Hitler was the

Bill Niven and Chloe Paver 3

obligation in the present to resist the continuation of fascism in the West. The triumphalist gesture of much communist statuary in the GDR – evidence that the heroic tradition had not yet had its day – stressed, however, that suffering had been productive: Nazism had been overcome, and the struggle against the West would surely end in victory. Susanne Scharnowski’s chapter demonstrates this tendency. East German commemoration of the bombing of Dresden also had the function of raising awareness of the alleged destructiveness of capitalism and strengthening ‘resistance’ in the present (for memorialization of the bombing war, see Jörg Arnold’s chapter). In West Germany, expellees, former soldiers, and victims of bombing, among others, sought with varying degrees of success to have their suffering inscribed in memorial form onto townscapes.4 Politicians in the West were often complicit in the instrumentalization of the memory of expulsion and division to discredit the communist East and the GDR in particular. Some monuments lamenting division, such as the repurposed Kaiser Wilhelm memorial in Koblenz (discussed in the chapter on Second Empire memorials by Bill Niven), were not without a degree of nationalistic swagger. The present volume, among other things, examines the commemorative preoccupation with tragic, sometimes heroic, often politically charged and propagandistic notions of German victimhood in West and East Germany, especially in the 1950s and 1960s. Still, by and large West Germany did eschew the nationalistic tradition of memorial-building after 1945. While the resistance of the Stauffenberg circle did, in time, become a source of pride, the 1950s memorial to resistance in Berlin’s Bendler Block is modest to say the least (for discusson of the memorialization of military traditions, see Jörg Echternkamp’s contribution). Moreover, the East German celebration of communism in its memorials cannot be taken as a symptom of an indigenous nationalism; after all, it reflected the greater glory of Soviet communism, rather than expressing a national spirit – and whether East Germans identified with the often-memorialized figure of German communist leader Ernst Thälmann is debatable. As for the preoccupation with German victimhood, this did begin to recede in the 1960s and especially the 1970s. Increasingly, in West Germany at least and particularly as of the 1980s, memorials to Jewish victims of Germans were constructed (see, in particular, Harold Marcuse’s chapter). Many factors have been adduced for this, such as generational shifts; the impact of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials (1963–65); and the shift, in 1969, to a coalition government of Social Democrats and Liberals. Even in East Germany interest in the commemoration of Jewish suffering under Hitler began to emerge in the late 1970s and early 1980s (see Bill Niven’s chapter on memorialization of the Holocaust in the GDR). It follows from this that one could certainly overstate the significance of 1945 as a watershed since, to an extent, the evolution of a ‘counter-monumental’ culture was a gradual process that only started to gather strength in the 1970s and 1980s. However, the cracks in the tradition of heroic memorialization were already clear in 1945. What of 1990? The Cold War had in many ways hindered the development of a confrontation with the legacy of Nazism; each German state could not resist the

4

Introduction

temptation to pin blame for dictatorial developments on the other German state. After 1990, with this hindrance removed, the memorialization of the victims of National Socialism developed at a more rapid pace than ever before. This was particularly the case in Eastern Germany, which had lagged behind the Western part of the country in its acknowledgement of the Holocaust. A visitor to most of the larger memorial sites in Germany today – for instance, to Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, or Neuengamme – will be struck by the attempt to document and memorialize the wide range of Nazi victims. Buchenwald Memorial Site, for instance, now has memorials to Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Sinti and Roma, and victims of Nazi military injustice; it has also set up a number of important exhibitions since 1990 (some of which are discussed in Chloe Paver’s chapter). Berlin’s Topography of Terror Foundation has been equally active in memorializing various groups of Nazi victims (see, for instance, the chapter by Hilary Potter). At central level in Berlin, there is now not only the Holocaust memorial (since 2005), but also, since 2008, a Memorial for the Homosexuals Persecuted under National Socialism (analysed in Thomas Haakenson’s chapter), while a Memorial for the Sinti and Roma Murdered under National Socialism is also planned. United Germany, it seems, is taking responsibility for its murderous past – at central, regional, and local level (see, for instance, Susanne Knittel’s chapter on memorialization of euthanasia victims). In certain areas, however, such as the memorialization of Soviet POWs who suffered at the hands of the Wehrmacht, more could certainly be done (as Jens Nagel’s chapter shows). Until a few years ago, the evolution of German memory, and certainly its memorial landscape, towards a self-critical preoccupation with the legacy of German crime seemed unstoppable, raising fears even of a ‘negative nationalism’. Could self-indictment form a sound basis for national self-regeneration after 1990? Yet 1990 also set in train a process towards a resurgent interest in injustice done to and suffering endured by Germans (discussed here by Dagmar Kift, amongst others). The post-1990 transformation of East Germany’s memorial landscape, which has certainly been greater than that of the landscape in the West, would seem to confirm this. The end of the GDR led to a discrediting of communism, and to the removal of many (though not all) memorials and street-names honouring the heroes of the communist pantheon (see Lee’s chapter). Shortly afterwards, memorials and memorial sites began to spring up throughout Eastern Germany which commemorated the suffering caused by the Soviet interregnum (1945–49) and the East German communist regime and its security system, as well as resistance to the latter (as documented in the chapters by Andrew Beattie and by Gerd Knischewski and Ulla Spittler). Some locations, such as Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen memorial sites, became lieux de mémoire for Germany’s ‘double’ past of National Socialist and communist injustice (a process discussed by Beattie). In addition, long-standing West German memorial traditions soon spread eastwards. Memorials to the victims of flight and expulsion, for instance, have been erected in Eastern Germany since 1990 (see Hesse and Purpus); such memorialization, with its implicit criticism of the Soviets for their part in this expulsion, would

Bill Niven and Chloe Paver 5

not have been possible in the GDR. At the same time, there has been a degree of ‘cross-fertilization’. Memory of the bombing war was more common in the GDR than in West Germany; in united Germany, it is ubiquitous. Opinions are divided on what this (re)discovery of narratives of German victimhood means, and on their impact on ‘Holocaust-centred’ memory.5 Many reasons could be adduced for the phenomenon: the end of the Cold War (which made certain narratives of German suffering politically inopportune); the quite natural wish to come to terms with the criminal legacy of the ‘second German dictatorship’; a renascence of totalitarian theory (according to which suffering caused by Germans is cancelled out by suffering endured by them, opening the way for a more positive German self-image); the development of a politically more self-confident Germany; changes in government since 1990; generational shifts; the eruption of a long-standing discrepancy between private and public memory (with the former focused on German suffering, the latter on German guilt);6 the impact of a worldwide trend towards the rewriting of national history as the history of victimhood; or indeed a combination of these, and of other factors. Yet whatever the reasons, the interest in German victimhood is (by and large) free of the resentment and politicization which characterized it in the 1950s. Certainly, concern has been expressed in Germany that the federal government leans more towards supporting the memory of communist, rather than National Socialist injustice; by doing so, of course, the focus can be shifted from German crime under National Socialism towards German victimhood under Soviet-imposed socialism. Thus, in 1997, the Association of Concentration Camp Memorial Sites in the Federal Republic objected to planned revisions to the Federal Strategy for Memorial Sites not least because of the danger that the significance of National Socialism for German history would be rendered ‘unclear’.7 The Gedenkstättenkonzeption was subsequently rephrased in the light of criticism from various quarters.8 To date, so it seems at least, the focus on communism or German victimhood has not ‘ousted’ the Holocaust from the centre of German memory or memorialization. The year 1990, then, triggered processes of change during which memorial traditions were either rejected, extended, modified, introduced, or revitalized. Yet for all that, 1945 remains the most decisive turning point. Flight, defeat, expulsion, occupation, the confrontation with German crime and guilt, political transformation, division, and the Cold War can all be linked – directly, indirectly, or in significant part – to this year. National Socialism became a legacy as of 8 May 1945, and to this day German memorialization concentrates almost obsessively on this legacy. Not that there were not attempts to memorialize earlier periods in German history; nor were all pre-1933 memorials simply removed. But it became difficult to regard the Weimar Republic and the Second Empire – or indeed historical periods which precede these – without the knowledge of what came after (see, for instance, the chapters by Jason Verber, Ulrike Zitzlsperger, Arne Segelke, and Sebastian Ullrich): National Socialism cast its shadow over all that followed it, including all subsequent appraisals of what preceded it.

6

Introduction

Memorials and memorialization This is a book, then, about post-1945 memorialization. But what do we mean by this term? In the 1980s, Pierre Nora developed the concept of lieux de mémoire, generally rendered in English as ‘sites of memory’. For Nora, such ‘sites’, in the case of France, encompassed not just memorials, memorial sites, or graves, but also emblems and flags (such as the tricolore), the Marseillaise, or even the Code Napoléon.9 Recently, in analogy to Nora’s three-volume ‘anthology’ of 130 essays on sites of French memory, Etienne François and Hagen Schulze brought out a three-volume collection of essays on German lieux de mémoire, or ErinnerungsOrte as they translated the term (though German-speaking academics tend to prefer Nora’s French term). In addition to memorials, museums, and buildings, this collection includes among such sites works of literature, authors themselves, philosophers, historical treaties, battles, specific days, whole historical periods (such as the Reformation), laws, symbolically charged slogans (such as ‘Made in Germany’), concepts (such as ‘Blood and Soil’), organizations, and fairy-tales.10 Sites of memory, here, are understood as widely as they conceivably could be to embrace every person, idea, artefact, time, or event around which collective memory crystallizes. The editors of this volume have followed Nora only in part. Memorialization, as we understand it, is a conscious process. Nora certainly has such a process in mind to a degree, but his ‘places of memory’ include many sites which seem to ‘secrete’ themselves into collective memory in ways that are far less direct. Also, while Nora’s ‘places of memory’ include many sites that exist in the collective imagination, inscribed onto our mental map, we focus in this volume on sites of memory which (also) exist as marks on the physical and temporal landscape – be these memorials in the traditional sense, memorial sites (such as at former concentration camps), commemorative days and rituals, flags, street-names, or exhibitions (which, beyond their informative and pedagogical function, enjoin us to remember). Our book is interested in other words in ‘reading’ the more visible, tangible markers of memory, and what they tell us about Germany’s relationship to its difficult past. If memory is about what we see and don’t see, then this book focuses on the former. A more restrictive, perhaps ‘conventional’ understanding of lieux de mémoire was necessary not least on practical grounds: every book has its physical limits. For reasons of space, too, we decided not to include discussion of those ‘sites of memory’ which exist in the virtual world of the internet, concentrating instead on physical locations that the reader might not be able to visit; in any case, most virtual lieux de mémoire in the German case are ‘offspring’ of physically existing memorial sites, foundations and institutions (although there certainly are exhibitions that only exist virtually).11 Furthermore, the reader will not find in this volume exhaustive treatment of well-known memorials which have already been the subject of academic study elsewhere. While the volume does contain chapters on Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, and on the memorial sites at Buchenwald and Dachau, these contributions examine relatively under-explored aspects

Bill Niven and Chloe Paver 7

of these sites, rather than reprising what is already known. The main aim of our book is to provide analysis of less well-known memorials and memorial sites, and to convey thereby an impression of the range of memorialization in Germany since 1945. This book is not a lexicon: not every memorial site is discussed here. But the volume certainly aims to provide key examples of typical and emerging patterns, together with models for understanding and evaluating them. A further aim is to do justice to what we see as an increasing trend towards the blurring of boundaries between those very categories the volume examines. Visitors to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin will have been struck by the fact that it is a memorial above ground, and an exhibition below. Many German concentration camp memorial sites are themselves amalgams of exhibitions, memorials, graveyards, archives, and libraries. They also provide a focus for acts of commemoration. Perhaps it is not simply boundaries that are being blurred, but the very substance of original memorial forms that is being called into question. James Young uses the term ‘counter-memorial’ or ‘counter-monumental’ to describe recent memorials in Germany which challenge the concept of monumentality.12 This volume discusses examples of memorials which either disappear or are inverted into the ground, for instance (a particular focus of Tomberger’s chapter). The more fleeting, hidden memorial may, as Young suggests, return ‘the burden of memory to those who come looking for it’.13 The volume also considers memorials which either move from place to place (as Knittel shows in her chapter), or are set into the pavement outside doorways (see Imort’s chapter). Rather than memorials eking out a distant existence on a hilltop, they come into the cities, invoking memory of injustice by drawing attention to its traces. They are thus not only fleeting or hidden, but they can be insistent, importunate, and intrusive. The second generation of ‘counter memorials’ is perhaps far less self-effacing than the first.

Critical approaches Like other subjects within the wider field of German cultural memory, the subject of memorials and memorialization attracts scholars from a wide range of disciplines, most notably history, art history, museum studies, literary and film studies, and cultural geography. While most of these modes of scholarly enquiry would fit under the interdisciplinary umbrella of Cultural Studies, in practice relatively few scholars approach memorialization using the theoretical repertoire of Cultural Studies, with its interest in the intersections between ethnicity, nationality, gender, and social class. Possibly there is something in the topic itself – the fact that ideology is written all too obviously across many memorials and decried very explicitly by others – that makes memorials less than intriguing to those working in Cultural Studies. This is not to say that contributors to this volume are either disinclined to theoretical approaches or wedded conventionally to single disciplines: historian Lynne Fallwell’s work on tourism or historian Jörg Arnold’s interest in the history of emotions remind us how fluid disciplinary boundaries have become. Nevertheless, much work on memorialization is, quite properly, still

8

Introduction

grounded in distinct disciplines, each with its own working methods and expectations. As a result, scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds pose different questions of memorialization, its processes, and the meanings it generates. In the final part of this Introduction we ask how different approaches to memorialization frame memorials and memorial activities in different ways and, in the process, create different kinds of knowledge about them. The historians who have contributed to this volume have drawn on unpublished or little-known archival material such as government and civil service documents, institutional memoranda, and contemporary newspaper reports. One of the most valuable aspects of such archive-based research is that it looks beyond the neat models and paradigms that necessarily characterize broad-brush narratives of post-1945 cultural memory to the messy complexity of memorial activities as they are lived out. The ‘messiness’ derives partly from the fact that individual examples resist neat periodization. The broadest chronological narrative of post1945 memory (the amnesiac years of the ‘economic miracle’, the radical 1960s, the citizens’ initiatives of the 1980s, and post-Wende normalization) turns out, when the archives are consulted, to involve all kinds of false dawns and sudden reversals, and surprisingly liberal moments in the most conservative of times. Several chapters (including those by Arnold and by Laura Jockusch) deal partly or wholly with the very early post-war years, when positions in memory politics were not yet fixed and the survivors and bereaved briefly had a strong lobbying voice on matters of memorialization, which they were able to use with varying degrees of success. A Jewish survivor group that collected a vast documentary archive concerned with Jewish life and its destruction, as a memorial to what had been lost, is analysed by Jockusch: had it remained in Germany and been published or publicized it might have had a significant effect on German memory culture, especially since it contained material about, and even supplied by, the perpetrators; instead it was shipped to Israel and left no mark on Germany. While there is nothing new in regarding the supposed ‘Zero Hour’ of 1945 as a myth, the chapters by Alexandra Kaiser, Jörg Arnold, and David Livingstone, in particular, shine a light on the practical details of that continuity in the realm of memorials and commemoration, demonstrating how pre-1945 commemorative practices survived the moral and political ruptures of the National Socialist years often for pragmatic reasons (because alternative ritual forms or institutional structures were not readily available) – though such continuities became less ‘innocent’ as the years progressed. The ‘messiness’ of memorial activity derives also from the fact – demonstrated in many of the contributions – that memorial culture does not only consist of ‘memory contests’ of the kind that produce a clear winner and a clear loser: on the contrary, competing memory discourses often co-exist without directly clashing, even where they come into contact with one another. Arnold finds evidence that, in the post-war years, citizens of Germany’s ruined cities quietly appropriated municipal commemorations to serve their own, private needs, which ran counter to the intentions of the municipality. Georg Götz shows that those responsible for memorial discourses in the naval town of Wilhelmshaven continued to celebrate

Bill Niven and Chloe Paver 9

the same German naval traditions as before 1945, often using identical ritual and rhetoric, while also laying claim to a new international spirit which would allow Germany to play a role within the new Europe. Alexandra Kaiser shows how the two parts of an official national ceremony in commemoration of the dead – one part more liberal and inclusive, the other based on an exclusive notion of the ‘German’ dead – for years pulled against one another in terms of their meanings and symbolism, without this tension ever coming to a head. Finally, case studies and archival work can call into question the kinds of political categorizations that are taken for granted in debates about post-war memory. By studying the nitty-gritty of civic disputes about contentious street names, Christian Lotz discovers that the conventional Left-Right paradigm that is generally assumed to operate in political attitudes towards the National Socialist past breaks down in particular cases: Lotz reminds us, for instance, that the expellees from Germany’s former Eastern territories, who have become a byword for right-wing attitudes to the past, initially included social democrats as well as conservatives.14 Similarly, Markus Urban’s case study of Bavarian ‘perpetrator sites’ reveals that the campaign for a proper public documentation of the Nuremberg Party Rally Grounds benefited from the landslide victory, in local elections, of the conservative CSU over the previously dominant Social Democrats (SPD). By contrast with historians, scholars whose training is in the Arts are more likely to be interested in narrative structures, iconographical traditions, and processes of symbolization, in other words in the visual and verbal rhetoric of memorials. On the whole, memorials (as distinct from memorial sites, which generally contain museums) favour the visual over the verbal, but the very fact that any text featured on a memorial is artificially restricted makes it an interesting object of study. The terseness of monumental inscriptions – which cannot contextualize and relativize as scholarly and political discourse may do – favours those memorial-makers who want to convey programmatic messages, such as the expellees whose memorials are analysed by Hans Hesse and Elke Purpus, and those wishing to obscure awkward particularities such as the distinction between perpetrators and victims or between different kinds of victim. The best known example of this, the New Guardhouse (Neue Wache) memorial in central Berlin, re-dedicated in 1993 to ‘The Victims of War and the Rule of Violence’, provides a reference point for several of our contributors, while Katie Rickard points to a provincial example: the bust of Sophie Scholl in the national pantheon of Walhalla, whose glib dedication to ‘all those who bravely resisted the injustice, violence, and terror of the “Third Reich”’ belies the fact that resistance took widely differing forms, some of which – unlike the resistance carried out by the hugely popular Scholl – stand little chance of national memorialization. Susanne Knittel provides a positive counter-example, a memorial that rejects the categorical statements of the traditional inscription: drawing on a Jewish story about a man who invites God to form prayers from the alphabet he recites, Diane Samuels’ memorial at Grafeneck provides only individual, scattered letters, from which the viewer must form names or sentiments. However, attempts to counter

10

Introduction

the foreshortening tendency of inscriptions are not always so successful: Hesse and Purpus show that simply supplementing an existing, now politically unacceptable inscription (which makes territorial claims on lands forfeited in 1945) with a more long-winded, politically acceptable one fails to re-signify the memorial. Anna Saunders shows how a recent attempt to reform the conventional inscription by borrowing its epigrammatic form but replacing the confident, unambiguous statement with an open-ended question – made yet more hesitant by the use of a subjunctive – ended only in a failure of communication and the scrapping of a worthwhile memorial project. If the demands of concision can unhelpfully limit the expressiveness of the memorial text, the visual signification which is the dominant language of the memorial may be dangerously uncontrolled. Daniela Sandler argues that largeformat images of burning churches, once detached from a textual narrative, encourage an emotional response to the terrors of fire (and thus an ahistorical identification with the victims). More positively, Chloe Paver argues that some historical exhibitions, while deliberately employing art installations to evoke emotional responses, maintain a responsible framework of meaning through the dominant historical discourses in the exhibition as a whole. Several contributions consider the significance of the vertical and horizontal planes in the visual language of memorialization. Not for nothing are the verbs ‘to erect’ and ‘to put up’ commonly collocated with the noun ‘monument’ in English, since the vertical is the traditional plane of monumentality. Livingstone discovers that, on German war graves abroad, flat crosses were perceived as less threateningly nationalistic than erect crosses. Tomberger questions whether the much vaunted ‘counter-monument’ can ever really neutralize the masculine symbolic power of the soaring vertical simply by sinking it in to the ground, while Paver finds examples of the use of the anti-monumental horizontal plane in art installations that, while located within exhibitions, serve a clearly commemorative function. Analyses of the rhetoric and symbolism of memorials may sometimes run the risk of treating the memorial as a static object, one that might just as well be viewed as a photograph in a catalogue. Two kinds of approach ensure that this does not happen in this volume as a whole. In the first, which may be grounded variously in performance studies, visual theory, or cultural geography, the memorial is understood from the point of view of the participant, conceived either as an embodied viewer who physically experiences the memorial space (as in the chapters by Haakenson and Sion) or as a tourist and consumer (in Ulrike Dittrich’s analysis); in the second approach, which tends to be based on an analysis of institutional publications, the memorial is seen as ‘coming alive’ only through the institutional practices that publicize, frame, and explain it (see chapters by Dieter Buse, Caroline Pearce, and Lynne Fallwell). This Introduction has attempted to convey a sense of the complexity of the questions at issue in memorializing Germany’s past, in particular its National Socialist past. That complexity is evident both in the approaches taken to the material and in the insights gleaned from it. To help orientate the reader we end

Bill Niven and Chloe Paver

11

with a rather more conventional summary of the content of the five sections. Section 1 considers the often problematic ways in which the non-persecuted German majority has remembered its ‘own’ losses and sufferings: soldiers killed in action, civilians killed and towns destroyed in the air war, and the trauma of flight and expulsion from the former Eastern territories. Section 2 addresses two related questions: the memorialization of (often unjustly neglected) victims of National Socialism, such as POWs, homosexuals, people with disabilities, and those active in resistance; and the problems of finding an appropriate memorial form and an appropriate use for sites associated with the activities of the National Socialists and their supporters. Section 3 examines a range of ways in which Jewish suffering and loss has been commemorated, from the early endeavours of Jewish survivors to the divided memory cultures of the Cold War and the most recent memorials and exhibitions. Section Four focuses on memory in the GDR and memory of the GDR, from the heroic traditions of Socialist Realist sculpture to the toppling of statues after the collapse of communism and the building of new memorials and museums in memory of the GDR past. In Section Five, the volume acknowledges that Germany has more ‘pasts’ than just its two dictatorships. Throughout the post-1945 years, Germany has looked back – though rarely in straightforward celebration – at pasts as diverse as the Reformation, Prussia, the brief colonial era, the First World War, and the Weimar Republic.

Notes 1. The official title appears to be ‘Konzeption der künftigen Gedenkstättenförderung des Bundes’ (Strategy for the Future Funding of Memorial Sites by the Federal Government), though the strategy is known, in government documents and publicly, by its shorthand ‘Gedenkstättenkonzeption des Bundes’ or ‘Gedenkstättenkonzeption der Bundesregierung’. Archived under: Deutscher Bundestag, 14. Wahlperiode: Drucksache 14/1569. 2. Ibid., p. 3. 3. For more on the Berlin memorial, see B. Niven, Facing the Nazi Past: United Germany and the Legacy of the Third Reich (London and New York, 2002), and C. Pearce, Contemporary Germany and the Nazi Legacy: Remembrance, Politics and the Dialectic of Normality (Basingstoke, 2007). 4. For an excellent discussion of the memorializing activities of such groups in the city of Nuremberg in the 1950s, see N. Gregor, Haunted City: Nuremberg and the Nazi Past (New Haven, 2008). 5. For an overview of the debates, see B. Niven (ed.), Germans as Victims: Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany (Basingstoke, 2006). 6. For more on this discrepancy see H. Welzer et al., ‘Opa war kein Nazi’. Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis (Frankfurt am Main, 2002). 7. See V. Knigge, ‘Stellungnahme zur Fortschreibung der Gedenkstättenkonzeption durch den Beauftragten der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien vom 22. Juni 2007 für die Anhörung des Ausschusses für Kultur und Medien des Deutschen Bundestages am 7. November 2007’, at http://www.bundestag.de/ausschuesse/a22/anhoerungen/gedenkstaettenkonzept-nicht__ffentlich/Stellungnahmen/Knigge.pdf (accessed 18 February 2009). 8. For the revised version, see ‘Fortschreibung der Gedenkstättenkonzeption des Bundes: Verantwortung wahrnehmen, Aufarbeitung verstärken, Gedenken vertiefen’ (Deutscher Bundestag, 16. Wahlperiode: Drucksache 16/9875, 19 June 2008), at http://www.

12

9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

Introduction bundesregierung.de/nsc_true/Content/DE/__Anlagen/BKM/2008-06-18-fortschreibunggedenkstaettenkonzepion-barrierefrei,templateId=raw,property=publicationFile.pdf/ 2008-06-18-fortschreibung-gedenkstaettenkonzepion-barrierefrei (accessed 18 February 2009). See Pierre Nora (ed.), Les Lieux de mémoire, 3 vols (Paris, 1992). E. François and H. Schulze (eds), Deutsche Erinnerungsorte, 3 vols (Munich, 2001). For a particularly rich range of virtual exhibitions, see The Topography of Terror Foundation’s website at http://www.topographie.de/en/index.htm. One particularly noteworthy exhibition offered by the Foundation which leads a purely virtual existence is Der 20. Juli 1944: Erinnerungen an einen historischen Tag. Reden und Gedenkfeiern, at http://www.20-juli-44.de/index1.html (accessed 19 February 2009). In contrast to physical exhibitions, virtual ones can be easily updated – as is the case with the 20 July 1944 exhibition. See J. E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, 1993). See Shoah Resource Center, ‘Excerpt from Interview with Professor James E. Young’ (24 May 1998), at www1.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%203852.pdf (accessed 19 February 2009). Similarly, Dagmar Kift notes in her chapter that the Czech Republic has belatedly begun to commemorate – initially in the form of an exhibition – opponents and victims of Nazism who were expelled from Czechoslovakia after 1945 on the same basis as those Germans that had consented to National Socialist rule.

Section 1 Remembering German Losses

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1.1 The Volkstrauertag (People’s Day of Mourning) from 1922 to the Present Alexandra Kaiser

‘Back to the old Volkstrauertag’, proclaimed the People’s League for the Maintenance of German War Graves (Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge, hereafter Volksbund or VDK) in its newsletter Kriegsgräberfürsorge in 1950.1 While the year 1945, an undoubted watershed in German memorialization, is rightly taken as a starting point for this volume, a sweeping characterization of 1945 as Germany’s ‘Zero Hour’ (Stunde Null) fails to do justice to the Volkstrauertag which, as the opening quotation hints, survived the historical caesura of 1945. Introduced in the 1920s as a commemoration day for the dead German soldiers of the First World War and continuing as Heldengedenktag (Heroes’ Remembrance Day)2 in the Nazi era, it was retained in West Germany (the FRG) but not in the east (the GDR). With unification, it came to be observed nationwide3 and is currently celebrated on the November Sunday two weeks before the beginning of Advent. The main Volkstrauertag ceremony has been held in Berlin since 1992, with parallel events in communities throughout the country. As in the Weimar Republic, the Volksbund remains the chief impetus behind the commemoration day. The organization is mainly active abroad (see this book’s chapter by David Livingstone), but the Volkstrauertag both encapsulates its ideology and serves as its central domestic public forum. The institutionalization of the VDK’s commemoration day in spite of its origins in private rather than government initiative can be seen as reflecting the political difficulties inherent in commemorating soldiers ‘fallen’ for a lost cause or publicly assigning a higher meaning to their deaths. Like the Second World War, the First World War made it impossible for official Germany to connect reverence for the dead with a normative national identity. The Volkstrauertag played the role of ‘surrogate’ in the absence of an official holiday. Following a review of its history in the Weimar Republic and the Nazi era, this chapter will focus on continuity and changes in the meaning and ritual procedures of the Volkstrauertag after 1945. Given the Wehrmacht’s role in a war of aggression and its record of atrocities, the most striking question is how it proved possible to continue the tradition at all. How could honouring German soldiers in a public ritual after the Second World War be even remotely tenable? Part of the answer can be found in the Volkstrauertag’s outward transformation, from the 1960s onward, 15

16

The Volkstrauertag from 1922 to the Present

into a Commemoration Day for all Victims of War and Violence (Gedenktag für alle Opfer von Krieg und Gewalt) that included not only the dead soldiers and other German war dead but also those who were persecuted under Nazi rule. But how was this transformation of the commemoration day managed? How was its new face popularized? And how has the day’s ostensible role changed since unification? In trying to answer these questions the chapter draws, to a large extent, on previously untapped archival sources.

From Volkstrauertag to Heldengedenktag: The commemoration day from 1922 to 1945 After the First World War new memorial days and commemorative rituals for dead soldiers were introduced in every European country that had taken part in the war. But given its defeat and the change in the political system, remembering the war dead was problematic in Germany, despite its two million ‘fallen’.4 There was no political consensus in Germany on the war itself or the legacy of the soldiers’ deaths. Thus, notwithstanding repeated efforts, the government failed to establish a national commemoration day. Instead, the Volksbund succeeded in popularizing its conception of a Volkstrauertag, with an essentially anti-Republican thrust. On 5 March 1922, the VDK announced its first call for participation in a commemorative ceremony to honour the fallen at the Reichstag in Berlin.5 A commemorative ceremony on the national level was held every year thereafter, beginning in 1924, and local VDK chapters organized parallel events all over Germany. The VDK saw the Volkstrauertag not merely as an act of commemoration, but as a means of ‘healing’ dissension within the German Volk (a term that the Volksbund would continue to use even after 1945, despite its contamination by National Socialism).6 Thus, the VDK had always insisted on an additional, non-denominational commemoration day to be staged as a unifying event for all Germans, dramatizing the difference between death under ‘normal’ circumstances and ‘honourable’ death in war. Secondly, the VDK wanted a date in springtime to symbolize the resurrection of the German nation after its defeat.7 Positioning the Volkstrauertag six or (from 1926 on) five weeks before Easter, on Reminiscere Sunday,8 suggested an image of the fallen as ‘heroes’ who had sacrificed their lives for Germany’s better future. That interpretation of the commemoration day made it possible for the National Socialists to adopt the VDK’s conception without a hitch: according to Nazi ideology, the ‘sacrifice’ of the fallen had fulfilled its purpose with the rise of the Third Reich. In 1934, the Volkstrauertag was renamed Heldengedenktag and made a national holiday. Responsibility for its organization was delegated to the Ministry of Propaganda and the Ministry of the Interior.9 At the centre of interest was now the annual state ceremony in Berlin, consisting of a ceremony at the state opera house (Staatsoper) or, from 1940 onwards, in the Zeughaus on Unter den Linden, followed by a pompous wreath-laying by the Führer in the nearby New Guardhouse (Neue Wache), framed by a detachment of troops. In 1939, the commemoration day was severed from the ecclesiastical year, but it still took place in

Alexandra Kaiser

17

spring, on the Sunday before 16 March.10 In 1940, the commemorations began referencing the ‘fallen heroes’ of the Second World War.

Reviving the tradition: Reintroducing the Volkstrauertag after 1945 After the Second World War, Germany had to come to terms with the deaths of more than five million soldiers and roughly half a million civilians.11 Unknown numbers were disabled, refugees, or prisoners of war. And beyond the victims in its ‘own’ ranks, the nation was forced to face the consequences of crimes committed by Germans both at home and abroad, suffering what Bernhard Giesen has called a ‘trauma of perpetrators’.12 In VDK ideology, neither 1933 nor 1945 constituted a caesura in its conception of the Volkstrauertag or its function of commemorating the ‘fallen’. The continuity in meaning is most clearly reflected in the uninterrupted use of the ‘Song of the Good Comrade’ (‘Lied vom guten Kameraden’).13 With its melancholy tune and lyrics, the song functions as the commemoration day’s most fundamental symbol. Without giving any reason for the war and emphasizing the arbitrariness of a soldier’s death, the ballad had been one of the most popular songs among German soldiers in the First World War. In the Weimar Republic it was sung annually at the Volksbund’s main ceremony and it was later adopted into the ritual of Heldengedenktag. After 1945, the song again became an essential element of Volkstrauertag rites, and it can be heard at the central commemoration in Berlin to this day. After the Second World War, the VDK extended its conception of commemoration: German civilians who had died in the war and its aftermath were to be explicitly included. From the perspective of the VDK, the role of the Volkstrauertag was (still) to commemorate one’s ‘own’ dead, that is the German war dead, but it tacitly excluded those Germans (and people of other nations) who were persecuted and killed by the Nazis, that is those who had already been excluded from the ‘folk community’ (Volksgemeinschaft) during the Third Reich as ‘foreign elements’ (Gemeinschaftsfremde). From the government’s standpoint, however, it was impossible – in light of German atrocities – to retain the exclusive focus. Aleida Assmann has postulated a ‘memory of suffering’ (Leidgedächtnis) in German families, represented by the Volksbund, in contrast with the ‘memory of guilt’ (Schuldgedächtnis)14 embodied by the state; to survive, the Volkstrauertag had to encompass both aspects. In 1950, the Volkstrauertag was officially revived. The VDK – on Reminiscere and exactly 28 years after its first commemoration in Berlin – organized a commemoration ceremony in the Bundestag in Bonn, with a wreath-laying at the nearby war cemetery in Ittenbach.15 The twofold structure, consisting of a commemoration ritual and a wreath-laying following the example of the official ceremony on Heldengedenktag, became typical for the VDK commemorations after the Second World War. Since 1951, the wreath-laying has normally been held at Bonn’s North Cemetery.16 In 1952, the Volkstrauertag was moved to the autumn. On 16 November 1952, the commemoration day was held simultaneously in all federal states for the first time,17 and it has since been celebrated every year in November.

18

The Volkstrauertag from 1922 to the Present

The re-establishment of the Volkstrauertag in the FRG marked the end of a ‘state of transition’18 in German public memory culture that characterized the period from 1945 to 1949. In the years immediately after the war, German society not only suffered from a loss of meaning and the lack of a new master narrative, but also lacked – after the suspension of Nazi rituals and symbolic language, but before the establishment of new memorial forms or the rehabilitation of older ones – stable structures for a public commemoration.19 Moreover, under the protection of the Allied occupation forces, those who had been persecuted in the Third Reich were able to influence the public culture of memory to a greater degree than in later years.20 Before the two separate German states came into being, commemorations for the ‘victims of fascism’ were celebrated throughout Germany, even though most German people were unable, or rather unwilling, to identify with such commemorations: the dead to be remembered were – unlike those later honoured by the Volkstrauertag – not conceived as ‘their own’. In 1947, with support from the Association of the Persecutees of the Nazi Regime (Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes or VVN), a Commemoration Day for the Victims of Fascism (Gedenktag für die Opfer des Faschismus) was fixed on the second Sunday in September, bringing together the antifascist commemorations. That commemoration day was preserved in the GDR and became an element of the SED’s official antifascism, but it quickly lost its significance in the FRG.21 The National Commemoration Day of the German People (Nationaler Gedenktag des Deutschen Volkes) on 7 September 1950 was intended as a direct counterpart to the commemoration day of the VVN,22 which in the FRG had been disparaged as a communist front since 1948. Held on the anniversary of the first sitting of the Bundestag, it indicated more than mere symbolic separation from the GDR; it was also the sole attempt in FRG history to link public commemoration of the war dead and victims of the Nazi regime with reference to the state’s democratic foundations and thus with a positive national identity.23 But the ‘experiment’ was not repeated. Celebrations in 1951 and 1952 no longer included the dead. That task was re-assigned to the Volkstrauertag – and thus put to a large extent under the control of the Volksbund. In 1954, National Commemoration Day in September was replaced by the Day of German Unity (Tag der deutschen Einheit), celebrated on 17 June.24 In 1948, soon after its readmission in the Allied occupation zones (later FRG), the VDK began to demand a revival of the Volkstrauertag.25 Dismissing its recent past, the VDK stressed the day’s roots in the Weimar Republic, proclaiming it a way for a ‘fundamental and positive use of this war catastrophe for the life of our people’ that would make ‘the deepest experience of suffering by the German people in its history . . . productive’.26 Thus, by gathering the bereaved, the Volkstrauertag would constitute a forum for staging a Volksgemeinschaft after the collapse of the Third Reich. In early articles and memoranda produced by the VDK, a sacrificial interpretation of soldiers’ deaths clearly predominates. By emphasizing their ‘duty’ and ‘good faith’ in defending the beloved native land (Heimat), the Wehrmacht

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soldiers could be cast as heroes whose deaths should be revered. The inclusion of civilians in the Volkstrauertag commemorations did not entail an ideological rupture; they became ‘fallen’ – and thus implicitly ‘heroic’ – in the Volksbund’s vocabulary as well. Paralleling the ideological continuity, the post-1945 VDK clung to the Volkstrauertag’s traditional date, demanding not only an additional commemoration day to supplement the ecclesiastical memorial days but, again, striving to attach it to Reminiscere. The Ministry of the Interior and the federal states, as well as the Protestant church, preferred to reschedule the day due to its symbolism.27 The date in November was a compromise. No longer suggesting a national resurrection – and with it, the controversial notion of death in war as ‘sacrifice’ – a damp, grey Sunday in late autumn would emphasize grieving for the dead. Significantly, the compromise did not satisfy the demands of the Protestant church. It had asked to combine the Volkstrauertag with its own memorial for the dead (of all eras, in war and in peacetime) on the last Sunday of the church year,28 and thus to respond – in a different way to the VDK – to the high rate of casualties among civilians and ‘normal’ Germans.

Expanding the concept: The Volkstrauertag as a Commemoration Day for All Victims of War and Violence The rescheduling was not the only change to the Volksbund’s original conception. The Bundestag ceremony and the cemetery wreath-laying were held in the presence of senior representatives of the state. Although the Volksbund was mainly responsible for it, the federal government identified with the event and exerted an influence on the arrangements. This became especially apparent in the late 1950s, when, against the background of FRG membership in NATO and the reintroduction of compulsory military service, remembering German soldiers acquired a new political significance. Thus, it was the government that ordered the increased Bundeswehr presence at the wreath-layings from 1960.29 But while promoting the day’s militarization, the government had also begun, much earlier, to compel the VDK to mention the victims of Nazism.30 The Bundestag ceremony was the stage where the expanded commemorative conception of the Volkstrauertag was acted out. Politicians invited as guest speakers were the first to advocate it openly. In 1951, Hermann Ehlers (CDU), then President of the Bundestag, made reference to resistance fighters and those murdered in concentration camps.31 In 1952, Federal President Theodor Heuss (FDP), whose speech can be viewed as a prototype for later collective memory strategies, told his audience that he wished ‘on purpose’ to equate the fallen soldiers on the battlefields with those killed in air raids, victims of the concentration camps, and the dead in Jewish cemeteries.32 Since 1954, a text honouring the dead (the so-called Totenehrung) has been recited each year by a representative of the government – since 1976 by the German Federal President. The necrology, naming different groups of dead to be recalled on Volkstrauertag, represents a kind of closure or counterpart to the ‘Song of the Good Comrade’ (with its restriction to dead soldiers). Today, each

20

The Volkstrauertag from 1922 to the Present

central commemoration ceremony in the Bundestag ends with the Totenehrung and a performance of the song – followed, since 1983, by the German national anthem. From 1958 onwards, victims of Nazi crimes were regularly included in the Totenehrung’s catalogue. In 1973, at the suggestion of Chancellor Willy Brandt (SPD), the Totenehrung was introduced with the sentence ‘Wir gedenken der Opfer von Krieg und Gewalt’ (‘We remember the victims of war and violence’).33 The introductory phrase became something of a motto for the Volkstrauertag. While the VDK had resisted the inclusion of the victims of Nazism during the 1950s, it adopted an expanded conception from the 1960s onwards, calling Volkstrauertag a commemoration day for all victims of war and violence, especially towards the end of the decade. Likewise, in the 1970s when families’ grief had faded, the Volksbund de-emphasized the day’s function of helping to overcome the past, but directed its message ‘toward the future’, even calling it a Day of Admonition to Peace (Friedensmahntag).34 By accepting the inclusion of those persecuted by Germans, the VDK followed a general shift in public opinion and memorialization in the FRG. After the crimes of the Nazis and the Wehrmacht began to enter public awareness in the late 1950s (helped in part by the foundation, in 1958, of a central West German office for the investigation of Nazi crimes), it became increasingly difficult to demand a distinctive or extraordinary form of reverence for fallen soldiers. The re-branding of the Volkstrauertag can thus be regarded not only from a moral perspective, but first and foremost as a strategy: only by erasing the distinction between those who had fought for the Third Reich and those who were persecuted by it was possible to ‘honour’ the former group any longer in the public eye.35 At the same time, the blurring of different cohorts of the dead, which facilitated the sublimation of German guilt, might be interpreted as a means of coping with a ‘trauma of perpetrators’. The ‘all-victims-together’ model, as Bill Niven has termed it, which became quite widespread in memorialization in the FRG beginning in the mid-1960s, is reflected in the phrase ‘alle Opfer von Krieg und Gewalt’ (or ‘Gewaltherrschaft’, the rule of force). The levelling function of this dedication is reinforced by the ambiguity of the German word ‘Opfer’, which can mean either ‘sacrifice’ or ‘victim’. That is, a central term in German public memory allows no differentiation between giving one’s life voluntarily and the involuntary suffering of helpless victims. The use of the term Opfer enabled the transformation of Wehrmacht soldiers – would-be ‘heroes’ whom defeat had turned into ‘perpetrators’ – into ‘victims’, and at the same time helped them save face as, if not heroic, then at least decent men.36 The annual event in the Bundestag, with speeches by politicians and prominent personalities and the recitation of the Totenehrung, served to embody the politically motivated ‘memory of guilt’. It presented the Volkstrauertag’s ‘new look’ as a day for all victims of war and violence and – being disseminated by mass media, notably on television37 – dominated public perceptions of the Volkstrauertag, at least on the level of national politics. But the Volkstrauertag’s position – between commemoration of the ‘fallen’ and commemoration of ‘all victims’ – was always ambivalent. That ambivalence is reflected in the juxtaposition of the Totenehrung

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and the ‘Song of the Good Comrade’ in the Bundestag ceremony, but it is also evident in the duality of the celebration’s overall structure. The wreath-laying, rather than conforming to the new image of the Volkstrauertag, stressed its traditional aspects. Likewise, the victims of Nazi crimes, however conspicuous in the Bundestag event, were not commemorated appropriately by a wreath-laying clearly devoted to soldiers. This was readily apparent not only in the martial atmosphere evoked by the stark presence of the Bundeswehr and the display of elements of military tradition, but also in a glance at the list of participating (military) organizations and a consideration of the locality: while the North Cemetery contains graves of German soldiers of both World Wars and non-combatant victims of Allied air raids, there is nothing to remind participants and viewers of Germans persecuted or murdered for religious, racial, or political reasons, much less to remind them of other ‘peoples’. The ‘traditional’ face of the Volkstrauertag remained particularly prominent at the local level. Ute Frevert has noted: ‘The greater the distance to the capital, the more the commemoration became restricted to the fallen soldiers.’38 In most communities, people gathered at local war memorials or the graves of ‘fallen’ family members, places naturally devoid of reference to those killed by the Wehrmacht or the Nazis. The expanded conception of a commemoration day for all victims of war and violence thus failed to influence the great majority of Volkstrauertag commemorations. It never filtered down to the local level, where families’ memories of their ‘own’ dead have always dominated and still do – a reality unaffected by German unification. But how did unification alter the function of the Volkstrauertag on the public, political level?

Remembering ‘one’s own dead’: The Volkstrauertag’s function since unification The unification of the two Germanys opened a new chapter in German memorialization. Not only has the perspective on the German past changed, but the pattern of the construction of national identity as well. At the same time, shifts in public discourse and ruptures or lapses in memory culture in the Berlin republic have influenced the Volkstrauertag. The ‘all-victims-together’ model that had been the basis of public memory culture in the ‘old’ FRG is disintegrating. The official culture of memory is no longer dominated by the elision of difference between victims and perpetrators, but is instead characterized by extensive public presentation and dramatization of German crimes. Like the Holocaust Memorial in the heart of downtown Berlin, the Commemoration Day for the Victims of National Socialism (Gedenktag für die Opfer des Nationalsozialismus) held each year on 27 January – the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz – exemplifies the shift in perception of Germany’s past and the phenomenon Bernhard Giesen has called the ‘public confession of guilt’.39 The new commemoration day, inaugurated in 1996 by German President Roman Herzog,40 clearly suggests that the Volkstrauertag never achieved acceptance as a commemoration day for all victims (of war and violence). By questioning this role,

22

The Volkstrauertag from 1922 to the Present

the new day posed direct competition while, at a political level, the Volkstrauertag reverted – almost automatically – to the function it had always retained at a local level: the (exclusive) commemoration of the German dead.41 The significance of the Volkstrauertag at the local level has receded with fading memories of the Second World War. Today, it is largely the elderly who attend local ceremonies. Not least in view of the competition from 27 January, one might therefore expect a decline in its relevance on the political level as well. But that is not the case: public attention has increased since German unification. On Volkstrauertag 1993 (14 November), the New Guardhouse was dedicated as a National Site of Admonition and Remembrance (Nationale Mahn- und Gedenkstätte). Annually – and with extensive coverage from TV and print media – wreaths are laid in front of the Kollwitz pietà in the guardhouse by representatives of the five branches of government (Figure 1): the Federal President, the Chancellor and cabinet, the Bundestag (parliament), the Bundesrat (a body composed of delegates from the federal states), and the Bundesverfassungsgericht (supreme court). While the main Volkstrauertag ceremony, held in the Bundestag’s new quarters in the former Reichstag since 1999, is still directed by the VDK, the wreath-laying in the guardhouse has become an act of state organized by the Ministry of the Interior. The government has thus reasserted at least partial responsibility for public commemoration of the German war dead, avowing the past in a novel way. At the same time, the wreath-laying is evidence of a new conception of German national identity: after the return to normalcy symbolized by unification, the

Figure 1 Representatives of Germany’s five constitutional bodies (the five Bundesverfassungsorgane) lay wreaths in the New Guardhouse in Berlin, 14 November 1993 (photo reproduced here courtesy of the German Federal Press Office)

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German government sees itself as entitled to mourn its losses just as any other nation might.42 With regards to the Volkstrauertag’s current political role, another striking change can be noted. In 2006, Bundeswehr soldiers killed during recent military operations abroad were included in the Totenehrung by Federal President Horst Köhler for the first time.43 Their deaths were assuredly not in compliance with the Volkstrauertag’s positioning as a commemoration of the ‘victims’ of war, but conform instead to the notion of active, voluntary ‘sacrifice’. Their inclusion thus ushers in a revival of the Volkstrauertag as a commemoration day for German soldiers, re-emphasizing the sacrifice-related rationalization of the commemoration. In a sense, Volkstrauertag came full circle in the 1990s, reset to its original meaning as a day of mourning for German losses. The expanded conception of Volkstrauertag as a ‘commemoration day for the victims of war and violence’ that had served to mask its purpose since the 1960s became dysfunctional. At the same time, the linking of today’s Bundeswehr to the fallen of previous generations has established a new and troubling memory construction whose consequences have yet to be fully discussed.44

Notes 1. Anon., ‘Warum Volkstrauertag?’, Kriegsgräberfürsorge 26:2 (1950), 11. 2. For ease of reading, I will use the German terms Volkstrauertag, Heldengedenktag, and Volksbund/ VDK instead of the English translations in this chapter. 3. In the new Germany (as in the Weimar Republic and in the ‘old’ FRG) holidays are under the jurisdiction of the individual federal states. The Volkstrauertag is not an official nationwide commemoration day, but its status is similar, since it is observed in all states and city-states without exception. See also T. P. Petersen, Die Geschichte des Volkstrauertages (Bad Kleinen, 1999). 4. On this period of the VDK’s history see A. Kaiser, ‘“Allerheldentotenfest”: Politische Sinnstiftung und rituelle Formung des Gefallenengedenkens im Volkstrauertag’, in G. Korff (ed.), Alliierte im Himmel. Populare Religiosität und Kriegserfahrung (Tübingen, 2006), pp. 83–125. 5. Anon., ‘Unsere Gedenkfeier im Reichstagshaus’, Kriegsgräberfürsorge 2:3 (1922), 26. 6. Anon., ‘Jahresbericht 1920’, Kriegsgräberfürsorge 1:1/2 (1921), 2–6, here 5. 7. Ibid. 8. During the 1920s, there were extensive discussions about the date of a Volkstrauertag or rather about whether to initiate a commemoration day for the ‘fallen’ at all. See F. Schellack, Nationalfeiertage in Deutschland von 1871 bis 1945 (Frankfurt am Main, 1990), pp. 148–56, 204, and 231–46; M. Lurz, Kriegerdenkmäler in Deutschland, 6 vols (Heidelberg, 1985–87), vol. 4, Weimarer Republik, pp. 414–22. 9. Petersen, Geschichte des Volkstrauertages, p. 22. 10. Ibid. The date was reminiscent of 16 March 1935, when Hitler had introduced military service in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. 11. On this chapter in the VDK’s history see A. Kaiser, ‘“Sie wollen gar nicht, dass wir mit lauten Worten sie ‘Helden’ nennen”. Der Volkstrauertag und der Mythos vom Sinn des Sterbens im Krieg’, in H. Hein-Kircher and H. Hahn (eds), Politische Mythen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert in Mittel- und Osteuropa (Marburg, 2006), pp. 63–80.

24

The Volkstrauertag from 1922 to the Present

12. B. Giesen, ‘The Trauma of Perpetrators. The Holocaust as the Traumatic Reference of German National Identity’, in J. Alexander et al. (eds), Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (Berkeley, CA, 2004), pp. 112–54. 13. The lyrics were written by the German poet and politician Ludwig Uhland (1787–1862) in 1809 and set to music by Friedrich Silcher (1789–1860). 14. A. Assmann, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit. Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik (Munich, 2006), pp. 203–4. 15. Anon., ‘Ihr seid nicht allein und verlassen in Eurem Leid’, Kriegsgräberfürsorge 26:4 (1950), 26–7. 16. Between 1964 and 1968 it was moved to the Hofgarten park in Bonn. 17. Anon., ‘In Stadt und Land gedenken wir der Kriegstoten’, Kriegsgräberfürsorge 28:12 (1952), 125. 18. S. Behrenbeck, ‘Between Pain and Silence: Remembering the Victims of Violence in Germany after 1949’, in R. Bessel and D. Schumann (eds), Life after Death: Approaches to a Cultural and Social History of Europe during the 1940s and 1950s (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 37–64, here p. 40. 19. For the memory culture of the immediate post-war years see also F. Maciejewski, ‘Trauer ohne Riten – Riten ohne Trauer. Deutsche Volkstrauer nach 1945’, in J. Assmann et al. (eds), Der Abschied von den Toten. Trauerrituale im Kulturvergleich (Göttingen, 2005), pp. 245–66; G. Margalit, ‘Gedenk- und Trauerkultur im Nachkriegsdeutschland. Anmerkungen zur Architektur’, Mittelweg 36 13:2 (2004), pp. 76–92. 20. Behrenbeck, ‘Between Pain and Silence’, p. 41. 21. For the history of the commemoration day, see H. Coppi and N. Warmbold, Der zweite Sonntag im September. Gedenken und Erinnern an die Opfer des Faschismus. Zur Geschichte des OdF-Tages (Oswiecim, 2006). 22. See proposal of the Federal Minister of the Interior Gustav Heinemann (CDU, later SPD) from 14 August 1950, Bundesarchiv Koblenz (BArch) B106/77151. 23. See announcement of the Federal Press Office dated 30 August 1950, BArch B106/77151. 24. For a brief history of the National Commemoration Day see BArch B106/77151; B106/77152; B106/77153; S. Behrenbeck, ‘Rituale des Zwiespalts. Politische Feiertage in Ost und West’, in H. Hastedt et al. (eds), Zeichen und Mythen in Ost und West. Rostocker Philosophische Manuskripte, NF 6/1999 (Rostock, 1999), 45–70. 25. A first discussion paper (Denkschrift) was published in October 1948 (others were to follow in the succeeding years), Archive VDK (Kassel). 26. ‘Denkschrift über den Volkstrauertag’ (28 December 1949), Archive VDK. 27. There were further complex discussions about fixing the date of the Volkstrauertag in the early 1950s. See BArch B106/104109; B122/2238; B136/3003. 28. See Evangelisches Zentralarchiv Berlin (EZA), 2/4416. 29. For the state’s interventions in the organization of the Volkstrauertag, see BArch B106/77166; B136/4931; B122/5150. 30. The government communicated its desires to the VDK explicitly at a meeting in 1953. See ‘Niederschrift der Präsidiumssitzung vom 17.3.1961’, Archive VDK. 31. See the transcript of Ehler’s speech, Anon., printed in Kriegsgräberfürsorge 27 (1951). 32. ‘Kriegsleid bindet Menschen und Völker’, Kriegsgräberfürsorge 28:12 (1952), 141–5, here 142. 33. See Bulletin des Presse-und Informationsamtes der Bundesregierung, No. 149 (20 November 1973), 1135. 34. See, for instance, Anon., ‘“Volkstrauertag ist Friedensmahntag”’, Kriegsgräberfürsorge 56:1 (1980), 4–7. 35. See, for instance, the programmatic title ‘Der Tod hat alle Unterschiede ausgelöscht’ (Death Has Eliminated all Differences) which was given to an article in Kriegsgräberfürsorge 39:5 (1963), 90–1. 36. G. L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York, 1990), p. 216.

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37. Already in the 1950s and 1960s, people could follow the entire celebration in the Bundestag as a live broadcast. 38. A. Assmann and U. Frevert, Geschichtsvergessenheit – Geschichtsversessenheit. Vom Umgang mit deutschen Vergangenheiten nach 1945 (Stuttgart, 1999), p. 210. 39. Giesen, ‘The Trauma of Perpetrators’, p. 146. Originally, Giesen applied this interpretative model to Chancellor Willy Brandt’s gesture of kneeling in the Warsaw ghetto in 1970. 40. Thus, the commemoration day in Germany was a forerunner of Holocaust Remembrance Day, officially introduced by the UN in 2005. 41. This has, however, not (yet) affected the Volksbund’s propaganda, which continues to conform to the ‘all-victims-together’ model. 42. B. Niven (ed.), Germans as Victims: Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany (Basingstoke, 2006), p. 19. 43. Anon., ‘Gedenken an getötete Bundeswehrsoldaten’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 20 November 2006, 1–2. 44. For an analysis of some of the problems involved in constructing a ‘tradition’ for the Bundeswehr see the chapter by Jörg Echternkamp.

1.2 Beyond Usable Pasts: Rethinking the Memorialization of the Strategic Air War in Germany, 1940 to 1965 Jörg Arnold

Recent scholarly research into the cultural impact of Second World War bombing has done much to dispel simplistic notions about an alleged absence of the bombing war from the political cultures of the two successor states of the Third Reich.1 In the German Democratic Republic, the Communist elites were quick to exploit collective memories of urban destruction and mass death for the political confrontations of the Cold War. As Gilad Margalit, Matthias Neutzner, and others have shown, it was above all the bombing of Dresden on 13–14 February 1945 that served state-sponsored propagandists as a powerful symbol of both ‘imperialist’ atrocity and German victimhood.2 Meanwhile, the air war also occupied a prominent place in public discourse west of the inner-German border, albeit on the communal rather than the state level. In cities such as Hamburg, Pforzheim, Kassel, and many others, annual commemorations were held in memory of the bombing, attracting a considerable number of residents.3 In West German cities, public memory was dominated by the local elites of City and Church, who harnessed the air war to the task of physical and spiritual reconstruction while largely avoiding thorny questions of agency and causality. Much of this scholarship adopts a functionalist approach to the study of memory, working on the premise that the memory of past events serves the needs of the present. On this view, memorial cultures are best explained by looking at the social contexts and political motivations of the present rather than the lived experiences of the historical events themselves.4 Such an approach has done much to shed light on the politics of memory, demonstrating the bewildering array of contradictory myths to which narratives of Second World War bombing have contributed – myths of resilience and sacrifice, overpowering and victimhood, guilt and atonement. It has also considerably broadened our understanding of the ‘agents’ of public memory and their goals of political mobilization, social integration, and community building. Yet, for all its merits, the present historiography shows a troubling tendency to prioritise questions of function and usability over ‘existential’ issues of loss and bereavement.5 This imbalance is in part a consequence of the broader framework of Vergangenheitsbewältigung within which most studies operate. There are, of course, perfectly valid reasons for an approach that examines the post-history 26

Jörg Arnold 27

of the strategic air war through the lens of German society’s inability to come to terms with the Nazi past. However, there is a danger here of reducing the cultural repercussions of urban catastrophe to a relational history between competing groups of victims, and thus to histories of Aufrechnung.6 All too often, the result is a history of the memory of Second World War bombing with the bombing ‘left out’.7 This chapter seeks to go some way towards redressing the imbalance between ‘function’ and ‘grief’ in the current historiography on air war memory. Drawing on evidence from the cities of Heilbronn, Darmstadt, Pforzheim, Hamburg, Kassel, Magdeburg, and Dresden, it applies Jay Winter’s argument about inter-war commemorations to the memory of Second World War bombing. ‘Sites of memory’, it is argued, were not only sites of social integration and political mobilization but also ‘sites of mourning’ – in post-1945 Heilbronn or Dresden no less than in post-1918 London or Paris.8 At the same time, the author seeks to question Winter’s contention of a fundamental break with tradition in the post-Second World War commemorative landscape.9 Locally, traditional languages continued to provide the most important vocabulary of commemoration well into the 1960s, not despite but because of the unprecedented nature of the war.

The problem of non-combatant death in the air war Any investigation that seeks to uncover the cultural impact of Second World War bombing on post-war urban communities across Germany must begin with the phenomenon of violent mass death. Without death in the bombing raids, there would be no memory of the bombing.10 Precise estimates are difficult but most scholars agree that anywhere between 360,000 and 410,000 German noncombatants died in the strategic air war of 1940–45.11 Although substantial, the death toll amounts to no more than six per cent of German overall losses of 6,350,000 soldiers and civilians during the Second World War.12 Yet, when the focus is shifted from the national to the local, a radically different picture emerges. In urban communities that suffered indiscriminate air raids in the Second World War,13 the ratio of air war casualties to fallen soldiers was not one to twenty but two to one. In Kassel, for example, the overall death toll amounted to 15,000, of which more than 9000 had died in the air war.14 At a time when a combination of medical and sanitary advances had pushed once ubiquitous death further from the centre of urban life than ever before, the phenomenon returned in the form of airborne catastrophe.15 In addition to the scale of the slaughter, there was the nature of the killing. In urban communities such as Kassel, Heilbronn, Würzburg, or Dresden, the death toll did not result from a process of gradual accumulation but from single raids whose duration could be measured in minutes. The consequence was a compression of mass killing into a very brief period of time. Moreover, the victims of the air war did not simply pass away but were, in the words of one contemporary, ‘hit by heavy bombs, torn apart by explosions, burnt to death in their homes, suffocated in cellars or died of lack of oxygen’.16 Partly as a consequence

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Rethinking Memorialization of the Air War

of the overwhelming presence of the dead in the aftermath of the raids, burial occurred in a manner that defied all received cultural norms of propriety and dignity.17 Although the profound shock over the return of mass death is most commonly associated with the mass slaughter of soldiers on the Western Front in the First World War,18 non-combatant death in the air war posed a challenge that was qualitatively different. Ever since the Napoleonic wars, there had been cultural props in place that rationalized the violent death of the citizen-soldier as a sacrifice for the higher goal of the nation.19 The fallen soldier was a central element of what George L. Mosse has called the ‘Myth of the War Experience’, which sanctified the death of the soldier as an imitation of the passion of Christ.20 But could the same be said of the non-combatants who had been killed in the air war? Did the residents of the big cities, with a disproportionate number of elderly people, women and children among them, really fall into the same category as the soldiers killed on the battlefield? During the war, the National Socialists thought that non-combatant death could be reconciled with the Myth of the War Experience, or, at least, they pretended that they thought so. National Socialism made strenuous efforts to integrate the civilian casualties of the air war into the National Socialist cult of the dead.21 As ‘soldiers of the Heimat’,22 they were said to have sacrificed their lives on the altar of the fatherland just as the fallen soldiers in both world wars and the ‘martyred’ National Socialist ‘fighters’ during the ‘time of struggle’ had done.23 In Nationalist Socialist rhetoric, the meaning of civilian death was closely linked to a successful outcome of the war. The death of non-combatants obligated the racial community to carry on with the struggle until ‘final victory’.24 While the dead were placed at the centre of elaborate funeral ceremonies, both symbolically and literally, the Nazi cult of the dead provided few if any emotional outlets for the bereaved other than hatred of the enemy.25 The ostentatious display of confidence notwithstanding, there was, however, uncertainty even among National Socialists about the extent to which death in the air war could really be equated with death in battle. In a commemorative address that was reprinted in the official circular of the Party Propaganda Office (Reichspropagandaleitung) in January 1945, a functionary admitted as much when he spoke about how difficult it was to find meaning in the death of men and women, and in particular of children, on the home front.26 From a different angle, a ‘racial comrade’ complained to the Party Chancellery in April 1943 that the practice of awarding military decorations to injured civilians amounted to a ‘desecration’ of the sacrifice of soldiers who had been wounded in battle.27 And indeed, alongside the celebration of the air-raid casualties as heroic ‘soldiers of the home front’, there coexisted in Nazi propaganda an alternative conceptualization that described the dead as innocent civilians who had fallen victim to a crime by a sadistic enemy. The motif was employed in exemplary fashion by propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels when he spoke at a funeral ceremony in Wuppertal in June 1943 of a ‘defenceless civilian population’ that had been subjected to ‘malicious’ and ‘insidious’ ‘air terror’.28

Jörg Arnold 29

To the post-war world, Nazism left a deeply problematic legacy. Throughout the cities of the Reich, regional and local Nazi functionaries had laid claim to the civilian casualties of the air war as pledges to ultimate victory. Nazi idiom had permeated the experience of aerial bombardment while public narratives about the meaning of death in the bombing raids had been shaped in accordance with National Socialist ideas of heroic sacrifice and innocent victimhood. Elaborate public ceremonies had been staged in order to commemorate the dead while their burial sites had been laid out according to National Socialist designs.29 Yet, this legacy was uneven. Whereas in the middle phase of the war of 1942–44, the Nazi Party generally responded to air raids by organizing public funeral ceremonies in order to demonstrate its unbroken hold over German society,30 by late 1944 and early 1945, even heavy air raids with thousands of casualties were no longer commemorated by the regional and local branches of the Nazi Party.

Sites of memory, sites of mourning Scholars of the post-history of the air war have frequently noted the connection between the emergence of memorial cultures and the Cold War. With the founding of two German states in 1948/49 and the outbreak of the Korean War in the following year, memories of Second World War bombing became politically usable in the ideological struggles of the day. This was especially pronounced in the German Democratic Republic where the ruling Socialists turned the anniversaries of the bombing of Dresden into ‘anti-imperialist’ ‘day[s] of struggle’ that were celebrated by mass rallies throughout the country.31 In West German cities, too, the 1950s witnessed a noticeable upsurge in commemorative activity. In Kassel, Darmstadt, Pforzheim, and elsewhere, the tenth anniversaries of heavy air raids were commemorated extensively as days of municipal ‘rebirth’ that were designed to bring together the residents of the post-war city as a community of shared pain and reconstruction.32 Yet, as a closer look reveals, the history of post-war commemoration cannot be reduced to a history of usable pasts. For a start, in many urban communities, and in particular in those cities that had been bombed during the final months of the Second World War, attempts to commemorate the dead pre-date the onset of the Cold War. In Heilbronn, for example, provisional mayor Emil Beutinger requested permission from the military government to hold a ‘commemoration for those residents killed in the air raid of 4 December and thereafter’ as early as August 1945.33 The request was denied but a religious ceremony was eventually allowed to go ahead three weeks later.34 East of the emerging inner-German border, too, Dresden City Council asked the Soviet military governor for permission to hold ‘mass rallies’ on the first anniversary of the air raid of 13 February 1945.35 Here, the occupation authorities were more accommodating but stipulated that the event should be held in an optimistic, forward-looking spirit.36 To be sure, the question of public memory was not taken up by all city councils with equal urgency. In Kassel, for example, the municipal authorities initially showed little inclination to single out the anniversary of the city’s ‘day of death’

30

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by way of a public commemoration. Here, the last Sunday before Advent was chosen in 1945 to hold a funeral ceremony for ‘all the victims of this great murder of nations’ (Völkermorden), as the local newspaper put it.37 Similarly, in Magdeburg, in the Soviet zone of occupation, the city council did not organize annual commemorations until the early 1950s.38 But whenever the subject was ignored by the highest political representatives of the city, alternative agents tended to step into the vacuum. Often, this role was taken on by the Churches, as was the case in Hamburg, where memorial services were held from 1945 onwards.39 At other times, political interest groups managed to establish themselves as the arbiters of air war memory. In Kassel, for example, the emergence of a commemorative tradition was in large measure due to the initiative of the so-called League of Air Raid Victims (Bund der Fliegergeschädigten), who claimed to represent all non-expellee citizens who had lost property in the war.40 How is one able to account for this widespread concern about public memory at a time when the everyday life of many Germans was characterized by hunger and material deprivation? Part of the answer must surely be sought in the realm of politics, but not just in the politics of the Cold War: also in the politics of identity. By taking over from the Nazi Party the organization of public funeral ceremonies, the reconstituted municipal authorities staked a claim to the status of genuine representatives of the local body politic. Not unlike the National Socialists before them, they professed to act as the legitimate mediators between the dead and the living. At the same time, city councils considered public funeral ceremonies an opportunity to foster a sense of community among a dispirited and divided population.41 In memory of the dead, the living would put their differences behind them and reach out to each other. Yet, any explanation that conceives of public memory solely in terms of politics, even at communal level, runs the danger of reducing a complex phenomenon to its functional aspects. In particular, such an approach tends to overlook the extent to which the emergence of urban memorial cultures was influenced by a complex interplay between initiatives ‘from above’ and expectations ‘from below’. In organizing public ceremonies, the Church and the City did not only engage in a politics of identity but also responded to a number of emotional needs among broad sections of the population, in particular the needs of the bereaved and of the evacuees. Prominent among these was the need to demarcate anew the boundaries – both real and symbolic – between the dead and the living; the need to reach some kind of closure through a ‘dignified’ burial ceremony; and the need to provide a site – both temporal and spatial – for public and private mourning. Ever since the publication of W. G. Sebald’s influential On the Natural History of Destruction in 1999, it has become customary among cultural critics to bemoan the post-war memorialization of the air war as formulaic in form and apologetic in content.42 And indeed, examples are not difficult to find of commemorative practices that strike present-day observers as peculiar at best and mendacious at worst. In Darmstadt, in 1954, prominence was accorded to the ode ‘To the Peoples of the World’ (‘An die Völker der Erde ) by the Catholic convert and representative

Jörg Arnold 31

of ‘inner emigration’, Werner Bergengruen (1892–1964). The poem claimed that throughout the years of 1933–45 the German people had suffered ‘on behalf’ of all the peoples of the world as the first victim of a European-wide break-away from the Christian faith.43 Anticipating this self-serving rhetoric, the Social Democratic mayor of Kassel, Willi Seidel, had spoken in 1953 of the air war as a ‘natural disaster’ that had struck ‘our poor city’ seemingly out of nowhere. In the same address, Seidel had urged his audience to put the past to rest for the sake of a brighter future.44 Here, as elsewhere, public discourse on the recent past appeared to be characterized by a twin tendency of evasion and self-victimization.45 What has sometimes been under-appreciated in the scholarly literature, however, is how extraordinarily difficult it was for the post-war carriers of public memory to find a frame of reference that would endow non-combatant death with meaning in the wake of total defeat. Not only had the National Socialist rationalizations become discredited by the physical and above all the moral collapse of the Third Reich, even on the National Socialists’ own terms the ‘soldiers of the Heimat’ had died in vain with the failure of ‘ultimate victory’ to materialize. In West German urban communities, different agents of the City, the Church, and civil society responded in different ways to this challenge, but very few were prepared to entertain the notion that the death of thousands of residents had been without any meaning whatsoever. Above all, they sought to reclaim the dead as members of the local community, to fetch them home as ‘our dead’. Protestant Bishop Adolf Wüstemann expressed this idea in a commemorative address in Kassel in October 1951: ‘We commemorate the dead as those who have shared their lives with us in this city.’46 However unsatisfactory and incomplete these rationalizations may appear in view of the support of broad sections of urban society for ‘Hitler’s war’, it is important to recognize that they were not necessarily considered as problematic or shallow by contemporaries. Although questions of audience reception are notoriously difficult, the available evidence suggests that commemorative practices such as the above found a receptive audience among the survivors of urban catastrophe in the late 1940s and throughout the Adenauer years. In a letter to Seidel of 23 October 1953, F. W. Schluckebier spoke of how deeply he had been touched by the mayor’s words the previous evening. He added that ‘many residents’ had responded to the address ‘with their hearts’, and some had expressed ‘their genuine and deeply felt appreciation’.47 In Kassel that evening, there had been 10,000 residents present; in Darmstadt the following year, the crowd numbered 20,000. In Heilbronn, on every 4 December throughout the 1950s and 1960s, thousands of residents would make the journey to the ‘cemetery of honour’ on the outskirts of town in order to listen to a commemorative address that, from a present-day perspective, contained little more than moral platitudes and vague generalizations.48 By contrast, in Darmstadt, where there was a tendency among Social Democratic councillors to use the memorial day as a platform for political interventions in the debate about the armament of the Federal Republic, popular attendance was – with the exception of the tenth anniversary in 1954 – much lower.49

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While there is a need for much more detailed empirical research, the preliminary evidence suggests that public commemorations in the 1950s tended to be most popular where they conformed to contemporary notions of ‘pious’ and ‘dignified’ remembrance. Residents who had come to remember personal loss did not want to be reminded of the horrific details of death under the hail of bombs. Nor did they want to be lectured about cause and effect. They had come to mourn and they expected to be consoled. Commemorations were most popular where these expectations were met, however incomplete the resulting confrontation with the historical events. Even east of the inner-German border, where the ebb and flow of popular participation in public ceremonies was much more directly circumscribed by political directives from above, the eyewitnesses and bereaved found ways to appropriate state-orchestrated memory to their emotional needs. In an internal report from Magdeburg, written in 1953, the ‘peace council’ that had been in charge of a ‘memorial rally’ (Gedenkkundgebung) on 16 January noted with some misgiving the many unauthorized wreaths that had been placed in front of a provisional memorial.50 Similar observations were made in Dresden seven years earlier when the City Council had first organized mass rallies in memory of 13 February 1945. According to an internal city district report, the population had used the occasion to share lived experiences of the ‘day of horror’. As a consequence, the event had taken on the character of a ‘return of the day of death’ rather than of ‘the beginning of the reconstruction’, as had been intended by the municipal authorities.51

Traditional languages In their attempts to articulate loss, local communities everywhere turned to the traditions available to them. Recent literature on the cultural ramifications of the First World War has rightly pointed towards the continuation of traditional modes of expression, alongside the ‘birth of the modern age’ (M. Eksteins), in the crucible of the First World War.52 The same literature has, however, been too rash in positing a sharp cultural rupture for the Second World War.53 The past may have been ‘shattered’ by Nazism, war, and genocide but it was from this fractured past that local communities attempted to retrieve languages that would give meaning to the experience of airborne disaster. These languages were ‘traditional’ in the sense that they drew on a well-established canon of classical, Christian, and romantic motifs and images that dealt with urban catastrophe.54 In Magdeburg, for example, politicians, pastors, and journalists turned to the precedent of the Thirty Years War in order to articulate the destruction of their home town in the final months of the Second World War. Here, the near-total destruction of the late-medieval town in the so-called ‘marriage of blood’ of 10 May 1631 furnished a readily available frame of reference for making sense of the devastation in the air raid of 16 January 1945.55 In Hamburg, meanwhile, the air raids of July 1943 were interpreted as merely the latest chapter in a long history of ‘new beginnings’ in which catastrophes such as the fire of 1842 had been overcome by the resilience of a specifically ‘Hanseatic spirit’.56 More broadly, ideas

Jörg Arnold 33

of Kultur and Heimat were used to frame urban destruction while Christian funerary rites were combined with elements of the nineteenth-century festive culture in order to address the problem of mass death.57 Yet, there was a two-fold problem with this use of traditional frames of reference. The first problem was that in many urban communities, there simply were no local precedents for the devastation of the Second World War. In Kassel, for example, where local development had come to be imagined as a history of continuous progress since the Middle Ages, the invocation of tradition only served to throw into even sharper relief the catastrophic rupture of the air war.58 The second problem was that most traditions had already been appropriated by National Socialism during the war. In Hamburg, the ‘Hanseatic spirit’ had first been invoked by Nazi propaganda in the aftermath of the disaster of July 1943.59 In Magdeburg, the first reference to the Thirty Years War had appeared in the Nazi-controlled press in late January 1945.60 The carriers of the post-war memorial culture tended to react to this challenge by adopting uneasy compromise solutions. Traditions were stripped of what was considered to be their National Socialist, militaristic, or nationalist patina. They were loaded with meanings that they had never been designed to carry. In Darmstadt, for example, the committee that had been charged with preparing the commemoration in 1954 decided to open the ceremony with the funeral march from Samson by Georg Friedrich Handel but edited the original text, replacing the terms ‘hero’ and ‘honour’ with ‘brother’ and ‘pain’.61 In a similar manner, the committee suggested after extensive deliberations that the tune of the German national anthem be played as a closing rite, but without the lyrics. While the City Council approved the edited version of the funeral march, it rejected the proposal about the national anthem, decreeing that the funeral march by either Wagner or Beethoven be used as a closing rite instead. If this was problematic in view of the popularity that both pieces had enjoyed in the National Socialist cult of the dead, the additional stipulation that the flags be raised during the playing of the funeral march was even more so. The practice that was intended to symbolize the victory of life over death echoed directly the ways in which the National Socialists had attempted to rationalize non-combatant death during the Second World War.

Conclusion Drawing on published and unpublished sources, this chapter has suggested alternative ways of understanding the peculiarities of German post-war memory. It has investigated the memorialization of the air war in a number of urban communities in order to argue for an approach that conceives of public memory in ‘existential’ as well as ‘functionalist’ terms. In cities that had suffered indiscriminate bombing raids in the Second World War, the emergence and durability of post-war memorial cultures was as much a function of the lived experiences of broad sections of the population as of the political concerns of national and municipal elites. After 1945, no less than after 1918, sites of memory were also sites of mourning, in addition to being sites of political mobilization and social integration.

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Notes 1. D. Süß, ‘Review Article: Memories of the Air War’, Journal of Contemporary History 43:3 (2008), 333–42; J. Arnold, D. Süß, and M. Thießen (eds), Untergänge und Neuanfänge. Erinnerungen an den Luftkrieg in Europa (Göttingen, 2009). I would like to thank Dr Neil Gregor, Dr Dietmar Süß, Dr Malte Thießen, and the editors of this volume for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. 2. G. Margalit, ‘Der Luftangriff auf Dresden. Seine Bedeutung für die Erinnerungspolitik der DDR und die Herauskristallisierung einer historischen Kriegserinnerung im Westen’, in S. Düwell and M. Schmidt (eds), Narrative der Shoah (Paderborn, 2002), pp. 189–207; M. Neutzner, ‘Vom Anklagen zum Erinnern. Die Erzählung vom 13. Februar’, in O. Reinhard, M. Neutzner, and W. Hesse (eds), Das rote Leuchten. Dresden und der Bombenkrieg (Dresden, 2005), pp. 128–63. 3. See M. Thießen, ‘Die “Katastrophe” als symbolischer Bezugspunkt. Städtisches Gedenken an den Luftkrieg in der BRD und der DDR’, in N. Stegmann (ed.), Die Weltkriege als symbolische Bezugspunkte. Polen, die Tschechoslowakei und Deutschland nach dem Ersten und Zweiten Weltkrieg (Prague, 2009), pp. 91–108. 4. M. Thießen, Eingebrannt ins Gedächtnis. Hamburgs Gedenken an Luftkrieg und Kriegsende 1943 bis 2005 (Hamburg, 2007), p. 19. 5. S. Goebel, The Great War and Medieval Memory: War, Remembrance and Medievalism in Britain and Germany, 1914–1940 (Cambridge, 2007), p. 2. 6. O. Groehler, ‘Dresden – Kleine Geschichte der Aufrechnung’, Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik (1995/92), 137–41. 7. A. Confino, ‘Telling about Germany: Narratives of Memory and Culture’, in Confino (ed.), Germany as a Culture of Remembrance: Promises and Limits of Writing History (North Carolina, 2006), pp. 188–213, here p. 194. 8. J. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge, 1995). 9. Ibid., p. 9. 10. D. J. Davies, A Brief History of Death (Oxford, 2005), pp. 24–5. 11. R. Blank, ‘Kriegsalltag und Luftkrieg an der “Heimatfront” ’, in J. Echternkamp (ed.), Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg, vol. 9/part 1 (Munich, 2004), pp. 357–461, here pp. 459ff. The figures apply to the German Reich in its 1937 borders, that is excluding Austria, and do not include soldiers and firefighters killed in action, or foreign labour. 12. Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg, vol. 10/part 2 (Munich, 2008). 13. This is not to argue that all RAF raids were indiscriminate but to recognize that many were, and deliberately so, in particular those area raids of RAF Bomber Command that did not target any particular industries but rather built-up urban areas as a whole. 14. Hauptamt Statistik Kassel to author, 3 September 2004. 15. D. Cannadine, ‘War and Death, Grief and Mourning in Modern Britain’, in J. Whaley (ed.), Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death (London, 1981), pp. 187– 242, here p. 193. 16. Landeskirchliches Archiv Kassel [LKA Kassel], SB Wüstemann, No. 22. 17. ‘Bericht über meine Tätigkeit auf dem Ehrenfriedhof in Heilbronn vom 6.12.1944 bis 19.4.1945’, in Stadtarchiv Heilbronn [StA Heilbronn] ZS 1322/1 (1945–65). 18. Cannadine, ‘War and Death’, pp. 196–202. 19. R. Koselleck and M. Jeismann (eds), Der politische Totenkult. Kriegerdenkmäler in der Moderne (Munich, 1994), pp. 9–50. 20. G. L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York and Oxford, 1990). 21. S. Behrenbeck, Der Kult um die toten Helden. Nationalsozialistische Mythen, Riten und Symbole (Vierow bei Greifswald, 1996), p. 525.

Jörg Arnold 35 22. Hoe, ‘Sie sind unsterblich geworden’, Magdeburgische Zeitung, 10 August 1944, p. 4. 23. Kreisleiter Trübenach, ‘Auch Ihr seid nicht umsonst gefallen!’, Die neue Gemeinschaft 10/12 (December 1944), 575–6. 24. ‘Gedankenführung der Ansprache für die Opfer des Bombenterrors in der Stadt M’, Die neue Gemeinschaft 10/8 (August 1944), 375–6. 25. Behrenbeck, Kult, pp. 507–19. 26. Gau Magdeburg-Anhalt, ‘Gedenkfeier der NSDAP. für die Opfer des Luftkrieges’, Die neue Gemeinschaft 11/1 (January 1945), 35. 27. Bundesarchiv Berlin [BArch] NS 18/1063, fol. 71–9, here fol. 73. 28. ‘Die Schuld am Luftkrieg gegen die zivile Bevölkerung trägt eindeutig der Feind’, Völkischer Beobachter, 19 June 1943, 1–2. 29. Thießen, Eingebrannt, pp. 67–70. 30. Ibid., pp. 61–71. 31. Groehler, ‘Kleine Geschichte’, p. 139; Neutzner, ‘Vom Anklagen’, p. 139. 32. Jörg Arnold, ‘In “Quiet Remembrance”? The Allied Air War and Urban Memory Cultures in Kassel and Magdeburg’, 1940–95 (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Southampton, 2007), pp. 108–24; Stadtarchiv Darmstadt [StADa] 1c. Stadtgeschichte: Luftangriff 11.9.1944/Brandnacht: Gedenkfeiern bis 1969; C. Groh, ‘ “Sehen wir Pforzheim!” Der Bombenkrieg als Trauma der Stadtgeschichte’, in B. Fraisl and M. Stromberger (eds), Stadt und Trauma. City and Trauma. Annäherungen – Konzepte – Analysen (Würzburg, 2004), pp. 123–43. 33. Mayor to Military Government, 3 August 45, StA Heilbronn, ZS 1322/1, p. 1. 34. S. Schlösser (ed.), Chronik der Stadt Heilbronn 1939–1945, vol. 5 (Heilbronn, 2004), entry of 26 August 1945. 35. Neutzner, ‘Vom Anklagen’, p. 133. 36. Ibid., p. 133. 37. ‘Kassel gedenkt seiner Toten’, Hessische Nachrichten, 28 November 1945. 38. Arnold, Quiet Remembrance, pp. 58–65. 39. Thießen, Eingebrannt, pp. 129–31. 40. Arnold, Quiet Remembrance, pp. 109–12. 41. I. Eschebach, Öffentliches Gedenken. Deutsche Erinnerungskulturen seit der Weimarer Republik (Frankfurt am Main and New York, 2005), p. 9, and passim. 42. W. G. Sebald, Luftkrieg und Literatur, 3rd edn (Frankfurt am Main, 2002), pp. 32, 86 (On the Natural History of Destruction, trans. Anthea Bell (London, 2003)). 43. ‘Komitee für die Vorbereitung der Zehnjahrgedächtnisfeier’, StADa. ST 24.11 Kulturamt No. 4/166.1c. 44. StAK, NL Seidel, Ansprachen, no. 84. 45. R. G. Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley, CA, and London, 2001). 46. ‘Ansprache am 22. Oktober 1951’, in LKA Kassel, SB Wüstemann. 47. F. W. Schluckebier to Mayor, 23 October 1953, in StAK A.1.10. No. 398. Trauerfeier am 22.10. (1951–68). 48. StA Heilbronn, ZS 1322/1 (1945–65). 49. StADa ST 24.11 Kulturamt No. 4/166; ‘Das Mahnmal ruft’, Darmstädter Echo, 11-9-58. 50. Landeshauptarchiv Sachsen-Anhalt, Abteilung Magdeburg [LA Magd. -LHA-], Rep. P 2. Bezirksfriedensrat Magdeburg No. 54. Berichte, Statistiken, Arbeitspläne und Presseartikel des Kreisfriedensrates Magdeburg, pp. 376–9. 51. Neutzner, ‘Vom Anklagen’, pp. 133ff. 52. Winter, Sites of Memory, p. 5. 53. Ibid., p. 9. 54. Ibid., p. 5. 55. Arnold, Quiet Remembrance, pp. 58–65. 56. Thießen, Eingebrannt, p. 52.

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57. D. Düding, P. Friedmann, and P. Münch (eds), Öffentliche Festkultur. Politische Feste in Deutschland von der Aufklärung bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg (Reinbeck, 1988). 58. J. Arnold, ‘ “Krieg kann nur der Wahnsinn der Menschheit sein!” Zur Deutungsgeschichte des Luftangriffs vom 22. Oktober 1943 in Kassel’, in D. Süß (ed.), Deutschland im Luftkrieg. Geschichte und Erinnerung (Munich, 2007), pp. 135–49. 59. Thießen, Eingebrannt, p. 52. 60. Arnold, Quiet Remembrance, pp. 61–2. 61. ‘Komitee für die Vorbereitung der Zehnjahrgedächntisfeier’, StADa ST 24.11 Kulturamt No. 4/166.

1.3 Roads to Revision: Disputes over Street Names Referring to the German Eastern Territories after the First and Second World Wars in the Cities of Dresden and Mainz, 1921 to 1972 Christian Lotz

On a sunny morning in May 1964, Genosse Fritz Müller, a member of the local branch of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) in the borough of Dresden-Bühlau, prepared himself for a Party meeting in Leipzig that afternoon. He took his small briefcase, closed the door, walked through the front garden, and stepped out onto Insterburger Straße. He walked down the street, turned left into Elbinger Straße, and, crossing Kolberger and Ortelsburger Straße, reached Bautzner Landstraße. Turning left again, he followed the street, passing Memel-Straße, Braunsberger Straße, and Königsberger Straße before reaching the tram station between Thorner and Bromberger Straße. He took the number 11 tram, going all the way down to Dresden-Neustadt, where he got off at the Schlesischer Platz to board his train to Leipzig. In view of Mr Müller’s morning walk, it is surprising that many historians today consider the history of the flight and expulsion of Germans, or the history of East Prussia, Pomerania, and Silesia, to have been taboo in the GDR.1 By exploring the history of street names in East and West Germany, this chapter attempts to shed light on the specific ways in which the history of flight and expulsion, and the loss of the Eastern territories, were commemorated after 1945. It seeks to outline the different politics of memory, taking into account the interrelations between the two German states. The history of expulsion and its commemoration has been the subject of much discussion across several disciplines, from history to cultural studies. This chapter will not only address the debate about a so-called ‘taboo’ in East German memory, but also a number of other debates. These centre on aspects of cultural integration and political strategies, as well as on the question of how to contextualize the expulsion of Germans within a broader European history of forced migration.2 Studies of street names mostly concentrate on the twentieth century because of the manifold changes that occurred during that time. Both Germany and other countries in Western and Eastern Europe that experienced fascist, communist, or 37

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other authoritarian regimes offer many and various examples.3 For Germany, most research has focused on streets named after people, such as Kaiser-Wilhelm-Straße, Rathenau-Straße, Adolf-Hitler-Straße, Karl-Marx-Straße, and their renamings. By contrast, spatial aspects related to street names and processes of street naming have so far been neglected. Although comparative perspectives analysing aspects of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) have proved to be fruitful, they are still rarely employed. This chapter will therefore focus on a comparison of two cities, one in East and one in West Germany, highlighting the developments of remembrance and the politics of memory in both German states. It examines how and why the topography of memory relating to the Eastern territories of the German Empire changed (and, in some cases, why it stayed the same); it analyses conflicting ideas about how the history of these territories should be remembered; and, finally, it considers which groups or individuals succeeded in establishing their preferred concept or topography of memory. The chapter takes Dresden and Mainz as examples. Although, the two cities are different in size (in the 1960s, Dresden had about 510,000 and Mainz about 190,000 inhabitants), they are suitable for a comparative analysis since both cities were and are administrative centres, for Saxony and Rhineland-Palatinate respectively. Dresden and Mainz were therefore given special public attention and set examples for other towns and cities in their regions. Due to an ongoing increase in the urban population in the 1920s and 1930s, areas adjoining cities were developed, establishing new urban boroughs; at the same time, outlying villages were incorporated into the growing cities. Amongst other issues that had to be discussed and decided, city councils had to create names for the new streets. In both Dresden and Mainz the city councils decided that, at least in one new borough of their cities, the streets would be named after regions that Germany had lost after the First World War. Such a decision may have been a pragmatic party-political compromise, for there was a consensus among German political parties that the new borders of the German Empire drawn by the Versailles Treaty in 1919 were unacceptable, at least in the East. It was easier to reach agreement on naming streets after Posen or Kattowitz, for instance, than to agree on whether Karl Liebknecht, Walter Rathenau, or Albert Leo Schlageter should be the patron of a new street. In 1921, the city of Dresden incorporated some small villages, amongst others the village of Bühlau.4 Almost the whole borough of Bühlau, its old village streets and streets in the newly developed areas, was given street names that derived from towns and places in the Eastern border regions of Germany. From Königsberger to Graudenzer Straße, from Danziger to Posener Straße, the borough’s streets imprinted the revisionist attitude of the late Weimar period and, even more so, of the Nazi era on the city map. The situation in Mainz was very similar. A new part of the town near Zahlbach, next to the remains of a fortification from the seventeenth century, was developed during the 1920s and completed in the 1930s.5 Its streets were given names such as Schlesische Straße, Beuthener, Plesser, and Annaberg Straße. The

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whole borough referred to places and towns in Upper Silesia. Soon it was called Frontkämpfer-Siedlung (which might be rendered as ‘Front Fighters’ District’). Annaberg-Straße in particular recalled the struggles between German and Polish nationalists in 1918/21. The outcome of this conflict was that the Polish state incorporated the eastern part of Upper Silesia, the area’s industrial stronghold, while German nationalists continued to agitate against such a partition. During the Weimar period and the Nazi era, then, the political context in Mainz and Dresden was, as far as street names were concerned, broadly similar. By contrast, after the Second World War politics and society in the occupied zones in East and West Germany quickly developed in different directions. However, both the French administration in Mainz and the Soviet one in Dresden exerted only an indirect influence on the naming of streets, for example by issuing guidelines for newspapers, talking to city council representatives, or putting them under pressure.6 In both cities, the first efforts to rename streets focused on those streets that clearly harked back to the Nazi era, such as the Adolf-Hitler-Platz and HermannGöring-Straße. At the same time, a lively debate about new street names started on both city councils, as well as amongst the public. A wide variety of proposals was announced and it quickly became clear that a consensus would not be easy to achieve. Of course, nobody publicly fought to keep Nazi street names. The archival materials used here, such as council records and articles from newspapers, do not hold any accounts of the views of Nazi supporters, because even if they did not lose their jobs, Nazi supporters mostly did not dare to enter the debate in the immediate aftermath of the war. It is necessary to take this kind of ‘blind spot’ into account when analysing the debates.7 Remarkably, disagreements about street names did not follow the traditional Right–Left scheme of party politics. Instead, debates were characterized by changing alliances and coalitions. In Mainz, during spring 1948, a couple of communist deputies on the city council launched an extensive proposal criticizing all kinds of names that they associated with Germany’s imperial past. They not only rejected the Kaiser Straße but objected to a whole range of geographical names, starting with Beuthener Straße and proceeding through the alphabet from ‘Eupener Straße [. . .], Gleiwitzer Straße, Hultschiner Straße, Königshütter Straße, Oderstraße, Oppelner Straße, Saarstraße’ and Schlesische Straße, to Weichselstraße. In their place, the KPD suggested the names of people they considered to represent peaceful and humanistic traditions in German history, such as August Bebel or Käthe Kollwitz.8 The communists were by no means the only voice that argued against keeping geographical names linked with imperial history. In September 1950 the head of the Europa-Bildungswerk, Rudolf Binapfl, urged the mayor and the council of Mainz to encourage understanding among European nations. There were still, he complained, many street names in German cities ‘recalling the time of European fragmentation [Zersplitterung] such as Sedan-, Orleans-, Coulmiers- or Verdun-Straßen’. Changing those names, he argued, would be ‘a contribution to overcoming historic reminiscences that have hindered European understanding’.9 By contrast, deputies who tried to keep street names as long as they did not

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explicitly refer to Nazi names did not speak with one voice. Of course, many of them were in favour of names commemorating glorious aspects of German history. However, there was no clear consensus on which parts of German history were the glorious ones and therefore suitable for street names. Representatives of expellee organizations could be found on every side of the debate. Among them were Social Democrats as well as conservatives, Catholics as well as Protestants, and therefore supporters of Karl Marx as well as those of Kaiser Barbarossa. With respect to street names referring to geographical places in the East, however, expellee organizations spoke with one voice, arguing vehemently for Danziger and Breslauer Straße, Ostpreußen- and Pommern-Allee. In the summer of 1949, the city council met such requests by naming three small new streets within the existing Frontkämpfer-Siedlung as Breslauer, Beuthener, and Schweidnitzer Straße.10 However, in doing so and by including the name Beuthen, the council created a situation which illustrates well the complicated structure of the debate. The city council’s decision ignored the proposal of the university’s council that had criticized names from Upper Silesia because they ‘seem[ed] not to be very suitable due to the current political situation’.11 The university was probably trying to distance itself from nationalist claims to the eastern part of Upper Silesia that had already become part of Poland in 1918/21. By suggesting that the names of towns in Lower Silesia be used as street names, however, the university implicitly agreed with the common attitude not to accept the Oder–Neiße border. Some years later, the city council of Mainz decided to name additional new streets in the ‘Frontkämpfer-Siedlung’ after places in the East. A small street off Oder-Straße was named Neiße-Straße after the city’s construction department had argued that linking these two names stressed the ‘tragic role’ of the ‘Oder–Neiße Line’.12 It was not just the expellee organizations that supported naming streets after places in the German Eastern territories: so, too, did the Federal Government, the governments of the Länder, and several other institutions, such as the Deutscher Städte- und Gemeindetag, a standing assembly of German city representatives.13 Further attempts by the expellee organizations to introduce street names referring to the Eastern territories were – in most cases – unsuccessful.14 Probably the city council took the expellees’ memorial at the Fischtor-Platz, which declared ‘Germany is indivisible’ (‘Deutschland ist unteilbar’), to be their place of commemoration, making further acts of remembrance such as street names unnecessary. At the same time, the city council opted to keep even Annaberg Straße in the Frontkämpfer-Siedlung,15 and in doing so it paved the way for ongoing misunderstandings about the geographical and political connotations of street names pointing East. In general, the policy of Mainz’s city council for choosing place names from the Eastern territories was not consistent. On the one hand, the city map of Mainz included street names such as Oder-Straße that could be understood as asserting Germany’s continued claim to the Eastern territories lost after 1945. Such a political attitude was widespread in West Germany until the 1960s. On the other hand, the map showed Beuthener Straße and even Annaberg Straße. Beuthen was lost to Poland as early as 1921, while Annaberg was obviously evocative of the

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armed confrontation between Polish and German nationalists during the struggle for Upper Silesia in 1918/21. That those territories that had been lost after the First World War should be regained was certainly a minority view in West Germany, one held only by the nationalistic fringe.16 The fact that Mainz City Council did not distance itself from street names with nationalistic overtones helped blur the line between West Germany’s broadly consensual struggle to regain territories that had been lost after 1945, and the over-the-top nationalistic propaganda of some expellee organizations. For their part, the communists argued strongly against using the German names of places in the Eastern territories: ‘He who says “Breslau”, wants revenge’ (‘Wer Breslau sagt, will Revanche’), communist propaganda argued.17 As a result, a process started in which place names were no longer just geographical references but gained or re-gained political connotations. That process resulted from the specific interrelation between communist propaganda, expellee organizations’ propaganda, and the partly indecisive attitude of council representatives, such as those in Mainz. In Dresden, during the first years after the war, the city provided the stage for a lively debate about new proposals for street names. As early as June 1945, the city archives issued a seven-page overview of Dresden’s street names and their meanings. The overview included suggestions for replacing street names that the Nazis had introduced, proposing the names of scientists, authors, and philosophers, as well as local places that might be suitable for streets in the respective area. As far as was possible, the archive suggested reverting to the names that were used before the Nazis had changed them.18 The city council of Dresden followed the archive’s proposals in most cases. In doing so, it not only restored the honour of street names that the Nazis had expunged,19 but also ‘embellished’ the borough of Bühlau. They abandoned the street names Tannenberg and Ostmark, both introduced during the 1920s: Tannenberg referred to the German victory over the Russian army in 1914, a memory that might have appeared inappropriate given the situation after the Second World War. Ostmark was linked with organizations such as the German Eastern Borderlands Society (Deutscher Ostmarkenverein) and Pan-German League (Alldeutscher Verband), which had notoriously enforced Germanization in the Eastern territories and encouraged eastward expansion since the late nineteenth century. Eventually, these two streets changed their names to Pillau and Braunsberg, both East Prussian towns. In this way the council created an almost homogeneous set of East Prussian street names in the Northern part of Bühlau, which people soon started to call Ostpreußenviertel (the East Prussian quarter). In Dresden’s city centre and in other boroughs, only a few geographical street names were changed in 1946. Obviously, the city council found it most important to abolish Bozen, Memel, and Saar. These streets were given new names that referred to the local landscape, while the Danziger Freiheit was changed to Siegfried-Rädel-Platz, named after a communist member of the German Reichstag (parliament) who was murdered by the Nazis. By contrast, the city council kept not only Königsberg but also Bromberg and Graudenz. Other geographical names

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alluding to the East, including the busy Schlesischer Platz in front of the railway station in Dresden Neustadt and several street names on the south-eastern side of the Elbe (such as Aussiger Straße), which referred to the town of Aussig (U¸sti nad Labem) in Czechoslovakia, were not even an issue and were kept. This specific constellation of continuity and change gives insight into the mental political topography of the city council in the first years after the war. Names such as Bozen, Memel, and Saar were perhaps perceived to be an expression of far-reaching territorial claims associated with Nazi revisionist politics. Moreover, Tannenberg and Ostmark probably had to be changed because of their strong link to nationalist propaganda. Yet other street names which were by no means free of political connotations, such as the Bromberger and Thorner Straße, remained unchanged. During the 1920s and 1930s, those names had been given to point to the ‘tragic’ situation of the Reich’s ‘wounded borders’ (‘blutende Grenzen’) in the East and the loss of ‘German’ territory due to the Treaty of Versailles. But by 1946 those names had presumably lost their strong nationalistic connotations. Perhaps in comparison to Bozen, which never belonged to Germany, and Tannenberg, which celebrated a victorious battle, place names such as Kolberg, Insterburg, and others were understood as ordinary parts of Germany; even Bromberg and Posen seemed to be less problematic or politically ‘suspect’. Finally, Schlesischer Platz and Aussiger Straße were seemingly without political connotation, as Schlesischer Platz had been given its name as early as the nineteenth century and referred purely to the railway line to Silesia that started out from the train station by the square. After the first wave of change during 1945/46, the naming of streets and places in the city remained an issue in Dresden’s public sphere. This was partly due to the heavy damage inflicted on the city by the bombing in February 1945. The air raid had left some inner boroughs of the town without any traces of their former thoroughfares. Therefore, some areas received a completely new set of streets, squares and crossroads, all of which had to be named. Soon, the city council set up a small commission for the naming of streets, which met from the early 1950s onwards. The city council, as well as the city’s Museums and Galleries Department (Städtische Sammlungen) and Planning and Construction Department (Abteilung Stadtplanung) sent a few representatives to sort out the necessary changes and provide proposals for street names. Although the Ostpreußenviertel and its streets did not appear on the meeting agendas of the first few years,20 they were heatedly debated in the public sphere.21 The complaints made about names in the Ostpreußenviertel were similar to those raised about the Frontkämpfer-Siedlung in Mainz: Danziger Straße for instance, was deemed to be too closely associated with Nazi politics (the Nazis had used the town as a ‘bridgehead’); several people pointed out that ‘today Danzig has a Polish name’.22 The head of the Planning and Construction Department, Bronder, collected the different proposals, but he made it clear that the council did not intend any further changes of street names at the time.23 Despite this official stance, the commission had been asked several months earlier, in spring 1954 – probably by the city council – to provide proposals for street names. The reasons for that initiative

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seemed to be twofold. On the one hand, the plans for incorporating further villages made new names necessary to avoid double usage. On the other, it seemed that Dresden’s newspapers, which were by that time controlled by the SED, drove the debate about street names referring to places beyond the German borders, thereby pressurizing the city council into preparing changes.24 Indeed, in November 1954 a list was compiled that included a wide range of proposals for street names in the Ostpreußenviertel, as well as in other parts of the city.25 The commission suggested naming the Ostpreußenviertel’s streets after local places, as well as after famous philanthropists (such as Karl Preußker), social democrats, and communists (such as Max Keilson). The proposals also included well-known Prussian generals and reformers from the beginning of the nineteenth century, such as Yorck and Gneisenau.26 In December 1954, having searched for several months for biographical and geographical details on all these new names, the commission handed the list, containing more than a hundred names with accompanying explanations, to the SED headquarters in Dresden.27 Nothing happened, however. Due to large gaps within the documentary records of the commission and the city council in the city archive, it is not easy to find an answer as to why it took until 1966 to implement the name changes. The only hint the documents give points to the Ministry of the Interior, which allegedly blocked attempts to change names in the 1950s.28 Hopefully, further progress towards the opening up of archival records in Dresden will help answer these questions.29 When the commission finally reconvened in January 1966, the city’s archive representative, Lange, proposed renaming the streets in the Ostpreußenviertel, as well as all those names in town that could be traced back to ‘territorial claims of German imperialism’.30 Thus, almost all streets in Dresden that referred to the former Eastern territories were renamed. The Ostpreußenviertel, whose streets were given mostly regional place names, was not the only district to see a major change: even the busy Schlesischer Platz in Dresden Neustadt had its name changed, to Dr-Friedrich-Wolf-Platz. There were two exceptions in this comprehensive process of renaming: firstly, a few streets on the southern side of the Elbe alluding to the East, such as Aussiger Straße, were kept because – as the commission argued – those names were not linked to imperial claims for territory.31 This seems a surprising decision, because it clearly disregarded the Munich Agreement in 1938, which led to the German occupation of parts of Czechoslovakia, and it ignored the revisionist propaganda of the Sudetendeutsche Landsmannschaft. Secondly, while changes were made to all place names in Bühlau such as Pillau and Thorn, thereby abandoning all references to the Baltic Sea region, one reference was kept: Königsberger Straße was changed to Kaliningrader Straße, keeping the geographical meaning and shifting its political meaning in one stroke. Notwithstanding these exceptions, between 1945 and the end of the 1960s, a process of politicization and re-politicization of memory took place. The reason for that process can be found in an interaction between communist propaganda on the one hand and expellee organizations’ propaganda on the other. The expellee organizations utilized street names and other forms of remembrance

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pointing to the ‘German’ history of the Eastern territories as arguments against the Oder–Neiße border. In their propaganda, the Communists developed a counterargument that suited their own purposes. They referred to the fact that the Polish government and Polish people had stated clearly that Poland would under no circumstances negotiate about Eastern Prussia, Pomerania, and Silesia. Therefore, so the Communists in Germany argued, any argument against the Oder–Neiße border was an argument for war, while references to the ‘German’ history of these territories were also an argument for war because such references were constantly used by expellee organizations to undermine the legitimacy of the Oder–Neiße border.32 In the long term the communists and expellee organizations created, from their opposing viewpoints, a certain undertow within the politics of memory, in particular when it came to judging Eastern politics. Each statement that touched, in whatever way, on the history of the Eastern territories could be utilized to justify or condemn the border, if its author or speaker did not explicitly distance himself from such politicization. However, as time progressed, even such distancing required increasing rhetorical skill. Thus, the communists and the organizations of expellees unwittingly entered a kind of alliance which increasingly politicized the history of the Eastern territories, despite their opposing interests. The communist position was supported by the GDR government, the position of the expellee organizations (until the end of the 1960s) by the Federal government; but within society, both positions had supporters and opponents in East and West Germany. The most tangible expression of such a politicization was the Schlesischer Platz in Dresden. In the late nineteenth century, when the square acquired its name, it basically referred to the railway line to Silesia that started there. Thus, the meaning of ‘Schlesien’ in the square’s name was a geographical one. This meaning prevailed until the beginning of the 1960s. In 1966, however, when the council again debated the renaming of streets, the Schlesischer Platz was renamed because, in the meantime, the meaning of the name had changed completely: ‘Schlesien’ no longer had just a geographical meaning, it had also acquired a political one. Now, the term ‘Schlesien’ sounded like ‘revision’ and ‘war’ and therefore had to be abolished in the ‘Country of Peace’ (‘Friedensstaat’) that the communist government proclaimed the GDR to be. In the course of politicization, the debates focussed firstly on names of larger regions or bigger towns, such as ‘Schlesien’ and ‘Königsberg’. Later, as the debates continued and political pressure increased, names of smaller towns or even villages from the East found themselves likewise subject to the politics of memory.

Conclusion In Dresden, street or square names that alluded to the East for geographical reasons, such as the Schlesischer Platz at the railway station in Dresden Neustadt, have existed since the 1880s. In Dresden and in Mainz during the 1920s, streets in new town boroughs were given street names referring to the loss of territory after 1918, such as Bromberg, Posen, or Beuthen. After 1945, those street names

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alluding to the East were kept in both cities, except in a few cases. However, geographical names taken from the Eastern territories of the German Empire soon became a topic of debate in post-war Germany. Expellee representatives urged the use of German instead of the Polish place names, for example Danzig instead of ´ Gdansk, because they perceived German place names to be a proof of the German history of those territories and therefore an argument in support of the reclaiming of this territory. In contrast, communists argued for the use of Polish place names to refer to Polish history, in deference to Poland’s claims on these territories. Almost every aspect of German or Polish history within the disputed territories could be used as an argument in favour of or against the Oder–Neiße border. While there had been debates in Mainz and in Dresden about politically suitable or unsuitable street names immediately after the war, it took some 20 years for street names to gain or regain their strong political connotations. When this happened, it was not just because of communist propaganda against the use of German place names from the Eastern territories – a use understood to be the expression of German revisionism. It was also a result of propaganda by the expellee organizations, which certainly did seek to use those names with revisionist intentions. Furthermore, the decision of Mainz City Council to keep even those names such as Annaberg that explicitly referred to armed German–Polish confrontations has to be taken into account. Responsibility for politicization was shared.

Notes 1. M. Grottendieck, ‘Egalisierung ohne Differenzierung? Verhinderung von Vertriebenenorganisationen im Zeichen einer sich etablierenden Diktatur’, in T. Großbölting and H.-U. Thamer (eds), Die Errichtung der Diktatur. Transformationsprozesse in der SBZ und in der frühen DDR (Münster, 2003), pp. 191–221, here p. 208; M. Schwartz, Vertriebene und ‘Umsiedlerpolitik’. Integrationskonflikte in den deutschen Nachkriegsgesellschaften und die Assimilationsstrategien in der SBZ/DDR 1945–1961 (Munich, 2004), p. 415, p. 629, and p. 1196; H.-W. Rautenberg, ‘Die Wahrnehmung von Flucht und Vertreibung in der deutschen Nachkriegsgeschichte bis heute’, Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte (APuZ) 47/53 (1997), 34–46, here 45; B. Faulenbach, ‘Die Vertreibung der Deutschen aus den Gebieten jenseits von Oder und Neiße. Zur wissenschaftlichen und öffentlichen Diskussion in Deutschland’, APuZ 52/51–52 (2002), 44–54, here 53. 2. An overview of the various debates is given in E. Wolfrum, ‘Zwischen Geschichtsschreibung und Geschichtspolitik. Forschungen zu Flucht und Vertreibung nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg’, Archiv für Sozialgeschichte (AfS) 36 (1996) 500–22; C. Lotz, Die Deutung des Verlusts. Erinnerungspolitische Kontroversen im geteilten Deutschland um Flucht, Vertreibung und die Ostgebiete (1948–1972) (Cologne, 2007), pp. 1–20. For the broader context, see K. J. Bade, Europa in Bewegung. Migration vom späten 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, 2nd edn. (Munich, 2000); N. M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Harvard, 2001). 3. For a useful discussion and references to further research, see J. Sänger, Heldenkult und Heimatliebe. Straßen- und Ehrennamen im offiziellen Gedächtnis der DDR (Berlin, 2006); P. Hnatyszyn, Dzieje nazewnictwa zabrzaskich ulic (w granicach administracyjnich z roku 1950) (Zabrze, 1996); B. Niven, Facing the Nazi Past: United Germany and the Legacy of the Third Reich (London, 2002), pp. 84–9. 4. R. Lorenz, Stadtteilgeschichten Bühlau, 2nd edn. (Pappritz, 2005).

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5. F. Schütz, ‘Vom Ersten zum Zweiten Weltkrieg’, in F. Dumont, F. Scherf, and F. Schütz (eds), Mainz. Die Geschichte der Stadt (Mainz, 1998), pp. 475–509, here p. 489 and p. 497. 6. Stadtarchiv Mainz [StAM], 1995/29/688, Oberregierungspräsidium Hessen-Pfalz/ Abteilung Innere Verwaltung an Landräte und Oberbürgermeister (16 March 1946), betr. Straßennamen. 7. For an analysis contrasting the perspectives of political party leaders, newspaper journalists, and ‘ordinary people’ (among them Nazi supporters) after the Second World War, see T. Klemm, C. Lotz, and K. Naumann (eds), Der Feind im Kopf. Künstlerische Zugänge und wissenschaftliche Analysen zu Feindbildern (Leipzig, 2005), pp. 39–138. 8. StAM, 1403/1951, KPD Hessen-Pfalz an Oberbürgermeister von Mainz (9 March 1948). 9. StAM, 1403/1951, fol. 10, Europa-Bildungswerk (Rudolf Binapfl) an Oberbürgermeister von Mainz (25 September 1950). 10. StAM, 1403/1951 (A 1403/1/49), fol. 2, Niederschrift über Stadtratssitzung (15 December 1949). 11. StAM, 1403/1951 (A 1403/1/49), fol. 4, Universität Mainz (Ritter) an Oberbürgermeister von Mainz (5 August 1949). The original quotation is ‘scheinen im Augenblick der politischen Lage wegen für nicht sehr glücklich’. 12. StAM, 1403/1952/1955 (1403/2/54), Tiefbauamt an Baudezernat (19 March 1954). 13. StAM, 1403/951 (A 1403, 5/51), Tiefbauamt an Kulturdezernent (12 September 1951). See also Deutsche Presseagentur ‘Erinnerung an deutschen Osten’ in Allgemeine Zeitung (Mainz), 29 May 1951. 14. StAM, 1403/1956-1960 (1403, 1/56), fol. 1, Tiefbauamt an Baudezernat (20 September 1955); StAM, 1403/1951 (A 1403, 5/51), Niederschrift über die Sitzung des Verwaltungsausschusses für das Bildungswesen (2 May 1952); StAM, 1995/29/688, Stadtverwaltung Mainz/ Tiefbauamt an Kultur- und Schulverwaltungsamt (1 February 1966). 15. StAM, 1403/1951 (A 1403, 1/45), fol. 1, Aktennotiz zur Sitzung des Verwaltungsausschusses für Theater- und Kulturangelegenheiten (11 June 1948). 16. Anon., ‘Begegnungen, die zu denken geben’, Die Freiheit, 8 August 1947. 17. H. Kaisch, ‘Breslau oder Wroclaw?’ [sic], Blick nach Polen 1:2 (1949), 33. 18. Stadtarchiv Dresden [StAD], Straßennamen-Collection (AE Ch-Mappe), fol. 1, Stadtarchiv an Stadtrat Matern (21 June 1945). 19. Anon., Verzeichnis der neuen Straßennamen von Dresden mit kurzen Erläuterungen, Stand vom 1. Juli 1946 (Dresden, 1946). 20. StAD, Straßennamen-Collection (AE 210-Mappe), fol. 180, Protokoll der Sitzung der Straßenumbenennungskommission (10 December 1953); as well as: StAD, Coll-Str (AE 210-Mappe), fol. 80, Rundschreiben des Rates der Stadt mit Liste der Straßenumbenennungen (27 January 1954). 21. StAD, Straßennamen-Collection (AE 210-Mappe), fol. 31, Sächsische Zeitung an Rat der Stadt (20 August 1954); StAD, Coll-Str (AE 210-Mappe), fol. 113, Sächsische Zeitung an Rat der Stadt (4 March 1954). 22. StAD, Straßennamen-Collection (AE 210-Mappe), fol. 113, Sächsische Zeitung an Rat der Stadt (4 March 1954). 23. StAD, Straßennamen-Collection (AE 210-Mappe), fol. 19, Rat der Stadt (Abteilung Stadtplanung/Bronder) an Sächsische Zeitung (21 September 1954). 24. StAD, Straßennamen-Collection (AE 210-Mappe), fol. 3, Rat der Stadt/Abt. Stadtplanung an Sekretär des Rates der Stadt Dresden, betr.: Straßenneubenennungen und -umbenennungen (20 November 1954); as well as: StAD, Straßennamen-Collection (AE 210-Mappe), fol. 2, Neues Deutschland/Bezirksredaktion Dresden an Rat der Stadt Dresden (17 December 1954). 25. StAD, Straßennamen-Collection (AE 210-Mappe), fol. 97, Protokoll über die Sitzung der Straßenumbenennungskommission (4 March 1954); and: StAD, StraßennamenCollection (AE 210-Mappe) fol. 3, Abteilung Stadtplanung und Architektur an Sekretär des Rates der Stadt Dresden, betr.: ‘Straßenneubenennungen und -umbenennungen’, Anlage: Liste ‘I. Neubenennungen’ und ‘II. Umbenennungen’ (20 November 1954).

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26. StAD, Straßennamen-Collection (AE 210-Mappe), fol. 3, Abteilung Stadtplanung und Architektur an Sekretär des Rates der Stadt Dresden, betr.: ‘Straßenneubenennungen und -umbenennungen’, Anlage: Liste ‘I. Neubenennungen’ und ‘II. Umbenennungen’ (20 November 1954). 27. StAD, Straßennamen-Collection (AE 210-Mappe), fol. 1, Rat der Stadt Dresden/Stadtplanung und Architektur an Bezirksdirektion Neues Deutschland, betr.: Straßenumbenennungen im Gebiet Weißer Hirsch, Bühlau (21 December 1954). 28. StAD, Straßennamen-Collection (AE Ch-Mappe), Rat der Stadt Dresden, Protokoll ‘über die Beratung der zeitweiligen Arbeitsgruppe zur Umbenennung des Ostpreußenviertels am 25. Januar 1966’ (27 January 1966). 29. Letter from Herr Volker Schubert (Hauptstaatsarchiv Dresden, AZ: 23-7512.2-2/7898) to the author, re. ‘Straßenumbenennungen in Dresden / Unterlagen der SED-Stadtleitung Dresden’ (5 June 2008). 30. StAD, Straßennamen-Collection (AE Ch-Mappe), Rat der Stadt Dresden, Protokoll ‘über die Beratung der zeitweiligen Arbeitsgruppe zur Umbenennung des Ostpreußenviertels am 25. Januar 1966’ (27 January 1966). 31. StAD, Straßennamen-Collection (AE Ch-Mappe), Rat der Stadt Dresden, Protokoll über die Ortsbesichtigung am 1. Februar 1966. 32. Lotz, Deutung des Verlusts, pp. 206–8, pp. 224–5, and pp. 261–2; K. Struve, ‘Vertreibung und Aussiedlung’, in M. Czaplinski, H.-H. Hahn, and T. Weger (eds), Schlesische Erinnerungsorte. Gedächtnis und Identität einer mitteleuropäischen Region (Görlitz, 2005), pp. 281–305.

1.4 Monuments and Commemorative Sites for German Expellees∗ Hans Hesse and Elke Purpus

Expulsion was a stigmatized issue. The fact that we can now look forward to a happy ending to the story of the documentation centre means that a previously uncharted area of our commemorative landscape will finally be mapped out. This is overdue, helps to consolidate our pan-German identity, and offers some consolation to the expellees.1

From the perspective of Erika Steinbach, Chair of the League of Expellees (Bund der Vertriebenen, hereafter LoE), things seemed to have a ‘happy ending’. In their coalition agreement of 2005, the Christian Democratic Union and Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU), and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) committed themselves to ‘both the social and the historical re-assessment of enforced migration, flight, and expulsion’, and decided to ‘erect a visible sign in the spirit of reconciliation in Berlin in order to [. . .] commemorate the injustice of expulsions and to outlaw expulsion for good’.2 This ‘visible sign’, detailed in a cabinet resolution on 19 March 2008, is to be erected under the auspices of a dependent foundation, with the German Historical Museum (Deutsches Historisches Museum) being named as the supporting legal entity. Apart from members of the German Parliament, the Federal Government, and the German expellees, other social groups have been called to sit on the supervisory body of this dependent foundation. Moreover, an advisory board will be established, including international experts, in particular from neighbouring countries. The intended site is the state-owned Deutschlandhaus in Berlin-Kreuzberg. At the time of going to press there is at best sketchy agreement on the precise form of this ‘visible sign’, and the success of the whole enterprise will essentially depend on how far Steinbach is not going to be involved in it.3 The working title of this enterprise, however, is certainly ill-chosen. The term ‘visible sign’ suggests – and the quote by Steinbach from the beginning of this chapter implies something similar – that the Federal Republic of Germany of today has * no ‘visible signs’ to commemorate expulsion. Steinbach even speaks of an ‘uncharted area’ in the Federal Republic’s commemorative landscape. 48

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It is, of course, a moot point what we understand by a ‘commemorative site’. Broadly interpreted, every commemorative plaque, every commemorative stone, every monument could be termed a ‘commemorative site’, as these places and sites serve the purpose of commemorating expulsion. In a more precise sense, however, a ‘commemorative site’ not only requires an object to trigger off memorialization, but also a documented history, such as that of concentration camps, and, as a third element, an authentic location. Germany’s numerous memorials to concentration camps certainly fulfil these criteria, but where in the country is an authentic location to commemorate expulsion? The term ‘visible sign’ suggests something else as well: namely the existence of scholarly investigations of this topic that, having dealt critically with the monuments and commemorative sites to expellees and expulsion, have established that such a ‘visible sign’ is still lacking. Yet this is not the case. Despite publications by individual regional associations of the League of Expellees, for instance in Hesse, Baden-Württemberg, and Thuringia, and notwithstanding a synopsis by the League’s head office (published on the Internet), a comprehensive scholarly treatment of this issue has yet to be undertaken.4 The present chapter attempts to provide a first overview.5 Its main focus is on the analysis of the following aspects: the number of monuments, the categories of monument, the inscriptions, the initiators, and the dates of their construction. Both an analysis from the viewpoint of art history and an account of the genesis of individual monuments lie beyond the scope of this chapter.

The quantitative dimension More than 1300 monuments are known at the present time, 59 for the new federal states (neue Bundesländer), and 1287 in the states of the old Federal Republic.6 In percentage terms this means that 96 per cent of all these monuments are found on the territory of the former West Germany (hereafter West Germany) and only 4 per cent on the territory of the former East Germany (hereafter East Germany). Of the states that made up the old Federal Republic, Baden-Württemberg (291) and Bavaria (283) have the biggest number of memorials to expulsion. Taken together, 45 per cent of all West German expulsion memorials are to be found in these two regions. The most densely populated federal state, North RhineWestphalia, stands in fourth place (195) and thus illustrates the tendency that monuments to German expellees are chiefly located in rural areas and are underrepresented in large cities. Whereas Cologne, Germany’s fourth biggest city, has only one commemorative plaque in its Town Hall, four exist in the neighbouring Rhine-Erft region. This trend of erecting monuments in the wider landscape mirrors the fact that most German expellees settled in rural regions. Forty-six per cent of all East German monuments (27 of 59) were erected in Thuringia, whereas the figures for the other four new federal states are between 10 and 17 per cent. It appears as if the Thuringian local associations of the League of Expellees are, and always have been, particularly active. This is also evident in the

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brochure listing all monuments.7 One decisive factor in this large East–West difference is the belated start of monument dedications in East Germany. Monuments commemorating expulsion did not exist in East Germany before 1989, because the former GDR had a strict taboo on commemorating the expulsion. In contrast to West Germany, the GDR acknowledged the permanence of its eastern borders early on (1950), with the result that hopes for a return to the lost territories, but also commemoration of the ‘old home’, would have jeopardized Eastern Bloc alliances. Public commemoration was considered revanchist, so that commemoration was only possible within the private sphere. An example is the replacement of the term ‘expellees’ by ‘resettlers’ in official usage.

Categories of monument The differences outlined between the old and the new federal states, but also among the latter, are also reflected in the categories of monument. All monuments can be subdivided into 13 categories. The six most frequent ones are: high crosses, commemorative stones, commemorative plaques, ‘foundling stones’ (large, undressed rocks dating from the Ice Age), monuments proper, and commemorative complexes (combinations of several commemorative elements, for instance a high cross and a commemorative stone). At 20 per cent of all monuments, the high cross with the inscription ‘To the Dead of our/the/East German homeland’ is the most frequent form of monument to the German expellees. In almost all cases, it is located in a cemetery. At first glance, then, these high crosses seem to have been religiously motivated, creating a bridge between the cemeteries in the new homeland and the graves of relatives, now beyond reach in the old. However, at the same time they symbolized the call not to give up the ‘old homeland’. Moreover, these early monuments already focused on memorializing the (old) homeland rather than the expulsion and they reserved the term ‘homeland’ (Heimat) – exclusively, one might argue – for the regions which used to belong to the former German East. These high crosses are characteristic of federal states with a predominantly Catholic population. In the northern federal states Lower Saxony (9 per cent) and Schleswig-Holstein (3 per cent), and in North Rhine-Westphalia (13 per cent), each with a Protestant majority, they play a minor if not entirely insignificant role. In these regions, foundling stones dominate as carriers of commemoration and memorialization. These untreated, rough rocks with inscriptions or with plaques affixed, and ‘commemorative stones’, which differ by having been treated and designed, are mainly found in these federal states (foundling stones: Lower Saxony 30 per cent, Schleswig-Holstein 22 per cent, North Rhine-Westphalia 18 per cent; commemorative stones: Lower Saxony 27 per cent, SchleswigHolstein 22 per cent, North Rhine-Westphalia 16 per cent). The reason for this – apart from religious explanations – can doubtless be found in the reduced material costs, as the fourth most frequently used category is traditional monuments, which are designed with much greater elaboration, sometimes even with artistic additions. In the new federal states, by contrast, commemorative

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stones (50 per cent of all objects) and foundling stones (26 per cent) are the dominant forms.

Inscriptions The domination of the high cross as a monument category in the old federal states has its counterpart in the types of inscription. Fifty per cent of all monuments carry the inscription: ‘To the Dead of the Homeland’ or a variation thereof. This is true for all old federal states, with the exception of Schleswig-Holstein. There, another group of inscriptions prevails which comes in second place in other federal states. These are inscriptions which refer to a lost home, such as ‘Lost Homeland, it is Thee My Soul is Searching For’, ‘Never Forget the German East’, ‘Unforgotten Home’, ‘Faithful From Afar’, ‘Firm and Faithful’, or ‘Expelled From Earthly Soil, yet Not Homeless’. Twenty-two per cent of all inscriptions belong to this group. This finding comes as a surprise, for one might have expected to find a domination of inscriptions dealing with expulsion and flight, or with the dead of expulsion and flight, among the monuments of German expellees. A look at the new federal states shows a different result. There, the dominant inscription is ‘To the Memory of the Victims of War, Violence, and Expulsion’ (48 per cent), followed by ‘To the Memory of the Victims of Flight and Expulsion’ (29 per cent) or its variants. These differences suggest that the inscriptions in West Germany predate those in East Germany. Analysing the timeline of dates on which monuments were dedicated or inscriptions unveiled confirms this assumption. Close scrutiny of the two federal states with the largest number of monuments reveals that the inscription ‘To Our Dead’ took a 65 per cent share in Baden-Württemberg in the 1950s, which dropped continuously in the ensuing decades: 55 per cent in the 1960s, 42 per cent in the 1970s, 31 per cent in the 1980s, and 25 per cent in the 1990s (for Bavaria the corresponding figures are: 75 per cent, 82 per cent, 55 per cent, 7 per cent, and 25 per cent for the 1990s), whereas the share of the inscription: ‘In Memory of the Victims of Flight and Expulsion’ gradually rose: from only 6 per cent in the 1950s to 18 per cent, 33 per cent, 17 per cent, and then 59 per cent in the 1990s (and for Bavaria: from 12 per cent in the 1950s to 67 per cent for post-2000 monuments). This means that the development of inscriptions, from memorialization in the often revisionist tone of Heimat rhetoric to the commemoration of flight, expulsion, and their victims, was a slow and gradual process which took several decades. This finding is even more striking when one includes inscriptions with explicit revisionist demands, such as ‘Germany Should be Whole’, ‘German East Forever’, ‘Protect the Homeland’s Holy Soil, German It Shall Stay’, ‘We Demand Our Homeland’, ‘Only a Cause That Is Given Up Is Truly Lost’, ‘Indivisible Germany’, or ‘What is Right Must Remain Right, Including Our Right to Home’. In combination with maps etched into bronze plaques that show Germany in its borders of 1937, these statements are tinted by an aggressive, revisionist colouring (this also holds true for the so-called ‘East-Land Crosses’ (Ostland-Kreuze) which were erected in

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exposed geographical surroundings and in order to underline the possessive claim on regions in the former German East). Initiators As far as the originators and initiators of monuments to expulsion are concerned, it can be said that in the old federal states, 50 per cent of the memorials were initiated by expellees. An initiative started by the community, town, or region was ascertained as the originator of 32 per cent of all examples, with only 17 per cent being attributable to the LoE (others: 1 per cent). The situation in the new federal states is entirely different, with 66 per cent of all monuments erected by the LoE, only 13 per cent by expellees, and 14 per cent by the community, town, or region (others: 7 per cent). These findings reflect the circumstance that the largest portion of monument dedications in the old federal states took place before the foundation of the LoE, whereas most initiatives in the new federal states during the 1990s were started by the political lobby of the expellees. This conclusion comes with a caveat, however, since this interpretation can only be validated for one third of all examples with any degree of certainty.

Dates when the memorials were erected The dedication of new monuments in the new federal states of the FRG reached a highpoint in the 1990s. For the old federal states, on the other hand, two waves can be ascertained: the first wave of monuments was constructed in the 1950s. Thirty-two per cent of all monuments were dedicated in that decade, whereas dedications decreased markedly in the ensuing decades. It was not until the 1980s that the number of monument dedications rose sharply again: 17 per cent of all monument dedications took place during that decade and afterwards once more decreased sharply. Only in North Rhine-Westphalia did developments follow a more level course: whereas 26 per cent of all monuments were opened in the 1950s, this figure remained at 28 per cent in the 1980s. Both developments show, however, that the memory and commemoration of expulsions and flight were not a hallmark solely of the 1950s. The reasons for the second wave of monument dedications in the 1980s were, on the one hand, the fortieth anniversary of the war’s end, on 8 May 1985, and, on the other, the formation of the conservativeliberal coalition government in Bonn in the year 1982. In contrast to East Germany, West Germany did not see a new wave of monument dedications after the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989. As already mentioned, no monuments to expellees existed in East Germany before 1989, so that there was a deficit to be made up, but West Germany shows a diametrically opposed evolution which, at present, is still hard to quantify. After both German parliamentary bodies – the Bundestag in West Germany and the Volkskammer in East Germany – had accepted the finality of the German–Polish border along the Oder–Neisse Line on 21 June 1990, and the Two-Plus-Four Agreement had been signed on 12 September of the same year, campaign groups in West Germany started to demand the dismantling and/or transformation of a number

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of expulsion memorials. In future, monuments showing Germany in its 1937 borders through maps or inscriptions, and demanding a reunification along these borders, could no longer be justified by reference to the German constitution (the Grundgesetz or Basic Law).8 Several examples can be offered. In Osnabrück the monument inscribed ‘German East Forever’ was dismantled following a decision by the City Council in 1992. In the town of Tornesch, Schleswig-Holstein, in northern Germany, the monument carrying the inscription ‘There Is Only One Germany’ and showing a map of Germany in its 1937 borders (Figure 2), was given the new inscription ‘In Memory Of Our Unforgotten Home’ after prolonged arguments in 1997 (Figure 3). A similar development can be observed in Oberschleissheim near Munich, where the memorial site of the East and West Prussia Foundation (Ost- und Westpreußenstiftung)9 is being transformed. This site consists of several objects, among them a landing boat (Landungsboot) used for escaping over the Baltic Sea, a monument dubbed ‘Little Tannenberg’ by critics because it features a miniature version of the former National Monument in Tannenberg, and a commemorative wall with soil from former areas of expulsion. This, Germany’s largest expulsion memorial, which also includes an exhibition, has been given a completely new political thrust, as it is set to become a location for youth exchange, the Internationales Jugendhaus der Verständigung (literally ‘International Youth House of Communication’),10 run independently by the East and West Prussia Foundation. In other cases, the old monuments have been supplemented with additional commemorative plaques serving as explanations of what have now come to be seen as potentially misleading statements on the original versions of the

Figure 2 Expellees’ Monument in Tornesch, Schleswig-Holstein. The inscription reads ‘There Is Only One Germany’ (photo Hans Hesse)

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Figure 3 Expellees’ Monument in Tornesch, Schleswig-Holstein, after the inscription was altered in 1997 to read ‘In Memory of Our Unforgotten Home’ (photo Hans Hesse)

monuments. The town of Schenefeld, Schleswig-Holstein witnessed heated controversies as early as summer 1989, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, over the inscription of the community’s expellees’ memorial. It reads: ‘Protect the Homeland’s Holy Soil, German it Shall Stay Through All Turmoil. Through All Turmoil, Joy, or Grief, German it Shall Stay For all Eternity’. The monument was dedicated on 17 May 1953. As late as 8 June 1989, only a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the General Secretary of the LoE wrote in a letter to the town’s mayor that this inscription’s removal would illustrate that ‘the political forces responsible for the removal were not willing to uphold the continued existence of Germany in conformance with international and constitutional law.’11 He finished by declaring: ‘I do not intend to keep from you that a removal of the inscription on the homeland monument would lead to severe protests by expellees throughout Germany.’12 In September 1990, after the collapse of the Wall, the local government agreed unanimously on adding a second inscription to the monument: ‘Let Us Honour Freedom and Work for Peace. Let Us Keep to What is Right.’ In addition, the old inscription was to be furnished with the date of its composition, ‘1952’, the new one with ‘1990’. The new inscription comes from an influential speech given by the then President of the Federal Republic, Richard von Weizsäcker, on 8 May 1985, the fortieth anniversary of the war’s end. The sentences are those immediately before the final sequence: ‘Let us serve our inner measures of justice. Let us face the truth, as best we can, on this Eighth of May.’13 To ‘face the truth’, or to accept it, was something the town was only able to do in 1990, after the Wall’s collapse, not in 1985 when von Weizsäcker delivered his speech. Apart from inscriptions of this nature, it is in particular – as for instance in Tornesch – the maps which show the German Reich in its 1937 borders on the

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memorial objects that, in combination with an inscription, gave and continue to give rise to criticism. Whereas critics see this as a revanchist reassertion of the former German Reich, the various Associations of Expellees point out that these maps do nothing more than show the historical geography of Germany. This latter viewpoint, however, is of course a reinterpretation of the maps, as the LoE refuted all pre-1989 criticism of expulsion memorials with the argument that no valid peace treaty had been signed which determined Germany’s borders for good. The town of Bad Arolsen, in the state of Hesse, saw a discussion of its local expulsion monument after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It displays a map of Germany in its borders of 1937 and the inscription: ‘Indivisible Germany’. Eventually, a plaque with an inscription was added to the monument, although for a while its complete dismantling was also discussed. The inscription reads: ‘Since October 3rd, 1990, the united Germany encompasses the areas of the Federal Republic of Germany, of the German Democratic Republic, and all of Berlin. The united Germany holds no territorial claims whatsoever against other nations and will not enforce such claims in the future. The confirmation of the borders of the united Germany is an essential component of the peaceful order within Europe.’ Does this inscription explain the statements of the original monument? Does the new inscription constitute a distancing from the old monument or is it merely a declaration that willingness to accept the borders is now finally prevalent? In our view, the solution realized must be rated as insufficient, as it does not answer these questions. A demolition of the monument would have been less ambiguous. One final point. A further issue must be highlighted in this context of the dates on which the monuments were erected: 2 per cent of all monuments were erected before 1950. Even if the absolute number may appear modest, it is nevertheless surprising as a pointed reminder of the very early start of commemorating expulsion. The monuments commemorating expulsion are thus among the earliest memorials of the immediate post-war period in West Germany.

Conclusion – from monuments to ‘stones of contention’? Back to the starting point of this chapter. Is it correct, in the light of our findings, to talk about ‘uncharted areas’ in the commemorative landscape of the Federal Republic? Are there indeed no ‘visible signs’? Has the memorialization of expulsion been stigmatized? The very number of memorial objects speaks against the assumption that there are no ‘visible signs’. Memorials to expulsion are spread widely around the rural areas of West Germany. If we add the so-called Heimatstuben (‘one-room homeland museums’) and Heimatmuseen (‘homeland museums’) not treated in this chapter, as well as the hundreds of city adoptions (or Patenschaften – Cologne, for example, ‘adopted’ the city of Breslau (Wroclaw)) and the large number of street names commemorating the regions of the former German East, there is a comprehensive commemorative infrastructure within the Western Federal Republic. It also indicates that the topic of ‘expulsion’ has not been stigmatized, but, on the contrary, was anchored in the federal commemorative landscape at a rather early date. Only in the big cities are considerably fewer commemorative objects displayed

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than in the rural areas. ‘Visible signs’ can be found everywhere. Whether these are recognized, however, is a different matter that cannot be fully addressed here. Yet a loss of significance cannot be denied, as the example of what used to be the largest commemorative site to the expellees in Oberschleissheim near Munich bears out. This loss is also illustrated in the old-fashioned ‘Commemorative Site to the German East’ in Schloss Burg near Wuppertal which was opened by the first President of the young Federal Republic on 21 October 1951: plaster is falling from the ceiling onto the showcases, cobwebs enshroud the sculptures, and parts of the location are sometimes used as a drinks warehouse. The number of visitors is so low that the commemorative site is generally locked and visitors must fetch the entry key themselves. Issues which fuelled a heated debate more than 50 years ago nowadays seem only fit for a museum, as if coming from an unknown age. Taking all our findings into consideration, it is clear that the monuments to expulsion reflect the commemorative stance of German society over a period of almost 60 years and have always been more strongly exposed to its various moods and trends than other monuments which are collectively younger, for instance those relating to the Third Reich. Today many monuments create a museum-like impression, as if overtaken by the course of events, and nowadays they pose more questions than they can answer. Commemoration and memorialization of expulsion and flight, as represented in the monuments, memorials, commemorative plaques, commemorative stones, and so on, of the German expellees has been marked by various phases and developmental stages since the first monument openings in the late 1940s and early 1950s. These monuments have been, and will remain, subject to change. For one thing, they have been literally turned into ‘stones of contention’ (the German expression is a ‘stone of contention’ rather than a ‘bone of contention’); for another, German unification has rendered some of the monument statements obsolete, as for instance in the case of the monument in Osnabrück which used to have the inscription ‘German East Forever’ but which was dismantled in 1992, or in the case of the Tornesch memorial where the inscription ‘There Is Only One Germany’ was changed into ‘In Memory Of Our Unforgotten Home’. Quite often, monuments such as these no longer exist, as time has worn them out or vandalism has destroyed them. The monument inscriptions have witnessed a change in commemorative politics: instead of the former political claims for ‘home’ from the 1950s, younger monuments now shift the focus of commemoration and memorialization on to the victims of flight and expulsion.

Notes ∗

Translated from the German by Goeran Nieragden. We kindly thank Jeffrey Paul Luppes for a critical reading of the first draft. 1. E. Steinbach, Chairwoman of the League of Expellees (Bund der Vertriebenen), interview with Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 4 November 2007, p. 6. 2. Federal Government of Germany, ‘Lebenswertes Deutschland’, http://www.bundesregierung.de/Content/DE/StatischeSeiten/Breg/koalitionsvertrag-7.html#doc47278body Text2 (accessed 5 January 2009).

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3. Editors’ Note: Erika Steinbach has since requested that her nomination to represent the League of Expellees on the planned foundation’s supervisory body be withdrawn. See Anon., ‘Bund der Vetriebenen Verzichtet auf Steinbach-Nominierung’, Tagesspiegel, 4 March 2009 (accessed 18 May 2009). 4. BdV-Landesverband Baden-Württemberg (ed.), Dem Vergessen entrissen. Gedenkstätten und Mahnmale der Vertriebenen, Flüchtlinge und Aussiedler in Baden-Württemberg (Stuttgart 2002); BdV-Landesverband Hessen (ed.), Mahn- und Ehrenmale der Heimatvertriebenen in Hessen (Wiesbaden 1992); BdV-Landesverband Thüringen (ed.), Gedenksteine in Thüringen. Den Opfern der Vertreibung gewidmet (Ilmenau, no date); E. Hahn and H. H. Hahn, Flucht und Vertreibung, in E. François and H. Schulze (eds), Deutsche Erinnerungsorte, vol. 1 (Munich, 2001), pp. 335–51. 5. The authors of the present chapter are working on a monograph on the whole thematic complex. 6. This survey is chiefly based on three sources: 1. the Kurt Schmidt Private Collection (see below), which undertook the first photographic documentation of monuments to expellees, 2. a synopsis on the homepage of the League of Expellees which in turn is informed mainly by the Schmidt Collection, and 3. the authors’ personal research. Monuments outside Germany, and objects which mention expellees only in passing but which primarily commemorate the Second World War more generally, are not considered here. K. Schmidt, Gedenkstätten und Mahnmale der deutschen Heimatvertriebenen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Martin-Opitz-Bibliothek, Arbeitsberichte; 4, Registerband zur Dokumentation (Herne, 2004). 7. Cf. BdV-Landesverband Thüringen (ed.). 8. Cf. in more detail note 10. 9. According to its Articles of Association, the East and West Prussia Foundation, founded in Munich in 1971, has set itself the task of preserving, cultivating, and fostering East and West Prussian cultural assets as an essential element of German culture that helps shape the character of the whole German people; more specifically, it promotes a continuation of the cross-cultural relations between Bavaria and the German East which have operated for centuries (Cf. http://www.owp-stiftung.de (accessed 5 January 2009)). Alongside various activities, the large-scale commemorative complex in Oberschleissheim forms part of this endeavour. The first part was opened in 1984, consisting of the landing boat (Landungsboot), the Wall of Homeland Soil, and a belfry. A so-called ‘Monument of Honour for the German Soldiers of former East and West Prussian Units Land – Air – Sea who were killed in action, went missing, or died in captivity in two World Wars’ was added in 1995. 10. This institution is to be run by the Municipal Youth Association (Kreisjugendring) in Munich. According to a preliminary proposal, the area is to be redesigned for the purposes of the Association. The monument space is to highlight the statement ‘No more war’. 11. Here, he alludes to the German constitution, the Basic Law. Article 116 stipulates: ‘Unless otherwise provided by statute, a German within the meaning of this Constitution is a person who possesses German citizenship or who has been admitted to the territory of the German Reich within the frontiers of 31 December 1937 as a refugee or expellee of German ethnic origin or as the spouse or descendant of such a person.’ Together with a clause from the constitution’s Preamble, which remained valid until 3 October 1990 (‘The entire German People remains obliged to fulfil the unity and freedom of Germany in free self-determination’), this was used to claim an obligation to work towards re-unification within the 1937 borders. 12. Copy of letter sent as an answer by the Municipal Archive Schenefeld of 17 March 2006. 13. The speech can be read online, for instance at: http://www.dhm.de/lemo/html/ dokumente/NeueHerausforderungen _ redeVollstaendigRichardVonWeizsaecker8Mai 1985/index.html (accessed 5 January 2009).

1.5 A Memorial Laissez-Passer? Church Exhibitions and National Victimhood in Germany Daniela Sandler

Church exhibitions on the Second World War are a common facet of German memorial culture. Overlooked by scholarship – perhaps for lacking the aesthetic sophistication and curatorial self-awareness of many contemporary memorials and museums – these exhibitions are still part of a public realm of discourses on memory demanding critical examination.1 Church exhibitions are heterogeneous in form, content, and tone; they are unified by the use of Christian imagery and values. The explicit presence of religious symbolism inflects the representation of Nazism, the war, and reconstruction by evoking ideas of sin, punishment, and redemption. These themes are potentially problematic in narratives of the German past, decontextualizing German victimhood and suggesting the possibility of historical expiation and normalization.2 Some exhibitions avoid these pitfalls by presenting a broader historical background; others emphasize German suffering without mentioning the war origins, aggressions perpetrated by Germany, or the complicity of some civilians and clerics with the Nazi regime. Taken as a whole, church exhibitions present a variegated, often dissonant discourse on the German past; nonetheless, recognisable types emerge. One type of church exhibition, which I will call broader historical chronicles, includes representations of wartime destruction in the whole history of the church edifice. The war comes up as a pivotal episode among others, such as architectural transformations, artistic endowments, fires, and religious shifts. These exhibitions are usually permanent. A second type of exhibition, which is most commonly temporary, focuses exclusively on the Nazi era and Second World War; I will refer to this type as thematic exhibitions.3 This distinction is important, as the placement of Nazism and the war within a longer historical continuum suggests an impulse towards normalization. Thematic exhibitions are more explicit about the complicated position of churches in the war and the Nazi era, openly addressing instances of collaboration and resistance. This chapter focuses on broader historical chronicles, which usually pose more problems in representations of the German past; as a whole they are also more convergent in structure and tropes. Thematic exhibitions are not only more varied, but they also tend to be more critical and pedagogically aware. Their supporting role here as counterpoint to the first type should not lead the reader to infer 58

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that they are less representative; in fact, this chapter does not aim to present an all-encompassing account, but rather spotlight recurring patterns, which express a significant and complicated component of the memorialization of the Second World War in churches. The broader historical chronicles with which this chapter is concerned are permanent displays on the history of the building, most commonly set in hallways at the entrance to the nave, at the base or top of tower stairs, and on side aisles. They can be as simple as a cardboard sheet with pasted photographs, or as elaborate as spatial structures with professionally designed posters (Figure 4). The displays are fairly common. Out of a sample of 26 Catholic and Protestant churches in Berlin, Cologne, Lübeck, and Dresden, 18 contained such exhibitions (please see the footnotes for a list of these churches and their English translations).4 Five others represented destruction through the ruined or damaged body of the building itself, sculptures, and plaques. Two evoked the war in other ways (the Herz-JesuKirche in Lübeck contained a memorial to priests who fought Nazism; and the other, Cologne Cathedral, is a notorious example of war damage and reconstruction, not only because of media representations and tourist materials, but also because until recently it bore the physical signs of a hasty reconstruction). Only one, the Jakobikirche in Lübeck, did not refer to wartime destruction at all, which is unsurprising since it was left relatively unscathed by Allied air raids.5 The abundance of these displays in German churches, even beyond the four cities examined here, makes their absence from scholarship intriguing – all the more so since the literature on German memorialization is extensive.6 Art historians dissect artworks and monuments; cultural and literary scholars examine books, films, music, and television series. Church displays fall somewhere in

Figure 4 Exhibition chronicling the history of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche, Berlin (photo Daniela Sandler)

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between. They are not artworks – graphic design is a better rubric. They are not mass media objects either.7 The methodological questions are correspondingly thorny. Aesthetic criteria from art history are inadequate to assess these displays, and yet they perform symbolic and iconographic functions. It is also difficult to ascertain origin and authorship, as there is often no record of the conception and production of the exhibitions. In order to discuss their semantic and symbolic implications, I will regard them from the viewpoint of visual culture. An iconological investigation will be guided by a consideration of socio-historical context as informative of potential meanings and interpretations.

Apocalypse and redemption The church exhibitions examined here pose at least three related problems. First, they delineate a narrative of apocalypse and redemption, which trivializes the unredeemable destruction of ethnic, sexual, and political minorities in the war and in the Holocaust. Secondly, they emphasize German victimhood, simultaneously de-emphasizing German responsibility. Finally, they omit, for the most part, a critical consideration of the larger context that brought about the attacks on churches: the rise of Nazism as a widely supported movement in Germany; the complicated and often contradictory stance of the Catholic and Evangelical Churches; the socio-political repression under National Socialism; and the destruction carried out by Germany through military attack and in the Holocaust. The displays will be analysed with relation to three criteria: first, their narrative structure as a representation of apocalyptic imagery; second, the visual trope of the ruined church as an icon and index of suffering; and third, the absence of historical context. Church displays follow a similar template. Posters or boards are arranged sequentially, from the origins and transformations of the building over hundreds of years to the climactic destruction in the Second World War and, finally, reconstruction. Images include the intact church in the early twentieth century; wartime photos of raging fires; the ruined nave, roofless and filled with rubble; post-war views of scaffolding; and the reconstituted church at the end. A comparison between eastern and western federal states (Länder) does not yield significant variations. The iconic and narrative path is repeated in Dresden and East Berlin as much as in Cologne, Lübeck, and West Berlin.8 The form of the exhibitions depends on the church. All of the Romanesque churches in Cologne, for example, are supported by the Cologne Romanesque Churches Foundation (Förderverein Romanische Kirchen Köln). The displays in these churches were produced by the Foundation according to the same principles: they are tripartite, movable metal structures framing double-sided, black-and-white printed posters with images and a large body of text in Arial typeface. In other churches, displays often look less planned or professional. In the Parochialkirche in East Berlin, four posters mounted on wood bases hang from nails on the wall of the hallway leading from the narthex to the nave. Text and images are pasted on the grey background, and some are peeling or stained. In the Dreikönigskirche in Dresden, it is the location that seems improvized. Eight large

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posters hang on the wall opposite the altar, sandwiched between light sconces above and a row of chairs below. The chairs, set against the wall, partly obstruct the posters. A few alternative formats attempt to circumvent both the institutional, ‘tradefair’ feel of professionally produced panels, and the amateurish look of handmade posters. The displays in the Marienkirche in Lübeck are made of sheer white fabric printed with large images and brief titles, supported by metal structures cantilevered from the wall. Placed in a dim, tall hallway, they are softly backlit. The posters appear to float away from the wall; when seen upfront, the backlight subtly animates the photographs. The effect is particularly effective in the large, poster-length photo of the burning church on the night of the 1942 Palm Sunday air raid. The re-enactment of the same sequence of visual tropes in different church exhibitions can be seen at first as self-evident. After all, chronologies are intuitive narrative structures. However, the similar pacing of the stories creates an unspoken narrative with symbolic resonances. Photographs and text converge towards the bombing and burning of the church body, and the narrative resolves with reconstruction. Apocalyptic imagery is evoked by the sequence of individual signifiers: the flaming or damaged church as ‘the end of time’; the ruined nave in the aftermath as the moment of taking stock, or judgment; and reconstruction as the redemption of ‘good souls’. The reference to a biblical apocalypse is encouraged by the church settings, which contain religious paintings, mosaics, frescoes, sculptures, reliefs, and altarpieces. The environment provides visual, spatial, and aural cues of biblical symbolism. Not all allusions are to the apocalypse, but the combination of suggestive architecture and art creates an enveloping atmosphere of Christian religion. In some cases, the juxtaposition of displays and sacred art yields powerful implications, especially with reminders of human mortality. For example, in the Dreikönigskirche in Dresden the displays are lined up below Christoph Walther I’s famous Dance of Death frieze (Dresdener Totentanz) dating from 1535.9 In Cologne’s St Maria am Capitol, the displays are positioned near historical tombstones and a candleholder for votives. And in the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche in Berlin, the displays are surrounded by recovered mosaics on the walls, ceiling, and floor; the mosaics are all the more poignant because of missing patches filled in with cement. The spatial and symbolic context supplies meanings and associations connecting the displays to a larger biblical narrative of judgment and redemption, regardless of the intention of display designers. Yet the biblical apocalypse is an inadequate allegory for the Second World War. The apocalypse, both in the sense of ‘end of time’ and ‘revelation’, implies a predetermined fate set by divine powers. The unavoidable destiny of all men is beyond any man’s control – except for piety, which can ensure a soul’s salvation. If this subjacent narrative tinges the perception of history, it removes responsibility from social groups and individuals as if their actions and decisions had no bearing on historical events. In addition, the redemptive aftermath of the apocalypse suggests a break with the past, and the

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beginning of a new era. It might have been an understandable desire in post-war Germany to start anew at the Zero Hour, but the repression entailed by such a break left unresolved historical tensions and unacknowledged continuities.10 The question of redemption is even more complicated. Redemption carries two connotations. The final images of the displays, with the church ‘made whole again’, suggest redemption as recovery of what was lost.11 The perspective of Christian religion expresses another meaning – redemption as forgiveness for sins. A plaque on the outside of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche, for instance, calls for ‘reconciliation in Jesus Christ’, implying the harmonious reunion of all parties through, one would assume, forgiveness. While elaborate memorial processes have attempted to reconcile Germans and their former victims, ‘reconciliation in Jesus Christ’ oversimplifies the painful and enduring labour of working through the past. There is yet another implication. The idea of Germans redeemed after the war also suggests Germans as victims themselves – of the Nazi regime, its brutalities, deceits, and the war.12 This focus on the suffering of Germans becomes clearer when a particular visual trope, the ruined church, is examined in more detail.

The ruin and the church Photographs of bombed churches seize the viewer’s attention with an indexical representation of destruction. Their luridness not only captures the gaze, but also causes a slippage between visual perception and emotional reaction; between the present experience of the visual record, and the awareness of the past event.13 This awareness is not necessarily a complex intellectual understanding, but a phenomenal consciousness or acknowledgment of the fact in itself. The sensorial, immediate appeal of destruction scenes can overshadow the task of critical and historical engagement. This is compounded by the layout of the posters, in which the images overshadow the text. From afar, even larger bodies of text recede into the background as images stand out. Up close, a sequence of posters with a large quantity of text does not offer the best conditions for attentive reading and thoughtful reflection. The displays at Berlin’s Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche and at the Marienkirche in Lübeck show exceptional awareness that posters are more than blown-up book pages, and that exhibitions must respond to inhabited space as their medium. In these two churches, photographs take up the whole display, and captions are brief. While these two examples address the visual and embodied nature of exhibitions, they do not quite redress the balance between the pictorial and verbal dimensions, shifting it rather towards the former. The pervasive photographs of ruins stand out as central motifs, which are often reworked through the presence, in the exhibition space, of ruination. The interior of the Parochialkirche (Berlin) was kept raw, with exposed bricks and timberwork, although the exterior was pristinely restored. The Petrikirche in Lübeck is similarly set up, with a whitewashed bare nave. In the entrance hall, a glass plate encases a scraped patch of wall; while the plate might be a protective device, it also frames the scraped surface as a fragment. This fragment and the partially restored traces of decoration throughout the church draw attention to the whitewashed walls that

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surround them – in other words, the spotlighted fragments throw into relief the missing, irretrievable whole. Likewise, in the restoration of the Frauenkirche in Dresden, soot-covered stone blocks are interspersed with lighter, clean masonry as a visual record of the former damage to the church and a reminder of its recent reconstruction.14 In some cases, the whole church is preserved as a ruin. The Kaiser-WilhelmGedächtniskirche is an extant chunk of the original building that was cleaned, secured, and adapted into a memorial and exhibition hall.15 The Klosterkirche in central Berlin is a ruin preserved and maintained as a public space. It is roofless, but still provides a sense of enclosure through enveloping walls, columns, and the main portal. The Klosterkirche does not contain an exhibition, but the ruin serves as a spatial reminder of destruction. The Marienkapelle in Lübeck is also only a ruin, complemented by a glass-encased model of the original chapel. Ruins have historically been used and interpreted from multiple perspectives. The Enlightenment’s study of Classical sites and fragments is different from Romanticism’s fascination with the mysterious qualities of dilapidated Gothic structures.16 The closest paradigm for church displays is the use of ruins as commemorations of war loss.17 Photographs of burning or ruined churches become national monuments and memorials, inscribing traumatic events within cohesive histories of national identity that try not only to make sense of demoralizing or tragic losses, but also recast them in a redeeming light. They are produced within a ‘matrix . . . [that] emplots the story of ennobling events, of triumphs over barbarism, and recalls the martyrdom of those who gave their lives in the struggle for national existence’.18 The church displays function in tandem with preserved ruins as memorial pieces that not only record their own particular traumas or losses, but that also belong in the broader commemorative landscape of the nation. Part of the collective import of these displays is the repetition and recurrence of tropes and structures. This re-enactment might be understood in the light of religious liturgy, which relies on the reproduction and recreation of actions, words, and images according to predetermined structures. The displays are relevant not only because they are produced by specific congregations and placed within particular church buildings, but also as iterations of a broadly shared religious worldview. The last point is important because the study of church displays prompts the issue of particular histories in individual parishes. A number of pastors and priests resisted Nazism, and many were victims of the regime.19 But many clerics were complicit with the Nazi system, from tacit acceptance to active participation.20 The same considerations apply to parishioners. When a church represents the history of Second World War destruction as a narrative of redemption and victimization, it could be tempting to condemn it on the basis of a particular congregant’s history of collaboration, or to praise it in the presence of histories of resistance. But the aim of my argument is different: I want to point towards an understanding of social and historical responsibility by institutions and the groups associated with them. This includes the impact of church exhibitions on a broad audience of Germans and foreigners from diverse social, educational, and ethnic backgrounds.

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Telling absences This brings me to my final point: what is missing from the kind of church displays studied here is as telling as what is included. Most of the exhibitions limit themselves to the construction, destruction, and rebuilding of the church. There is scant mention of the role and status of the church during the Nazi era (either the particular parish, or the Church as an institution). The exceptions are cases of priests and pastors who resisted Nazism – for example, in the Herz-Jesu-Kirche in Lübeck, and in a temporary memorial in St Ursula in Cologne. As importantly, the broader historical context of Germany and Europe is rarely addressed. Visitors familiar with the period might easily understand images of such devastation with relation to the rise of Nazism, German military aggression, and the Allied strategy; those with partial or uncertain knowledge, however, might interpret these images as unjustified violence. The increasing diversity of foreign visitors through mass tourism, and the temporal distance between the Nazi era and newer German generations make it difficult to presume consistent knowledge levels or critical perspectives. Is it unreasonable to suggest that church administrators, clerics, and educators keep in mind the potential didactic role of exhibitions and displays? A few examples suggest that these concerns can be taken into account without undermining the primary goal of recording the history of particular churches. In the Marienkirche in Lübeck there is a multimedia station at the entrance. The coinoperated station offers two animations in several languages: the story of the church, and tales for children. The story of the church starts in the Middle Ages; despite lavish attention to architectural and artistic developments, the narration devotes considerable time to the Second World War. At one point, the voiceover states, ‘as a consequence of the German bombing of Coventry, Lübeck was bombed by the British on the night of Palm Sunday in 1942’. While historians might take issue with such a reductive sound bite, the narration provides a fuller perspective than most displays, and at the very least suggests questions for further investigation. A second example of historical perspective is the Dreikönigskirche in Dresden. The posters include a long passage on the Nazi era, acknowledging the Nazi takeover of church offices and elections by the German Christians (Deutsche Christen) and the resistance of the Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche). The text recognizes that these oppositions ran deep within the local community, but ultimately aligns the true allegiance of the church with resistance, representing Nazism as a foreign takeover of the church and community. While the representation of Nazism as a strange invasion of the German body poses its own problems, the poster in the Dreikönigskirche is one of the most complete and balanced in comparison to the other displays. The Frauenkirche in Dresden is a more intriguing example. For part of the long reconstruction, the building site was set up with billboards providing historical background. These billboards mentioned the bombing of Coventry in connection with Dresden; they also directed visitors to the reconstructed synagogue a few

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Figure 5 Frauenkirche, Dresden, monument comprising a piece of the original dome, whose silhouette is represented on its face (photo Daniela Sandler)

blocks away. Not only were these billboards informative, but they also attempted to redress the balance somewhat between the attention-grabbing church and the peripheral synagogue (thus perhaps establishing a symbolic balance between Protestants and Jews). Reconstruction was finished in 2005, and the billboards were removed. Current memorialization in the church is strikingly laconic, relying on abstract artworks. The crypt contains two installations of stone sculptures devoted to themes of loss and reconstruction; short texts provide interpretations of the artworks without historical details. Outside the building, a monument represents the fallen original dome through a large piece of stone recovered from the ruins, a bronze plaque and a cut-out of the dome’s silhouette (Figure 5). While the reliance on abstract representation is not in itself a memorial liability, the elision of historical context in the reconstructed Frauenkirche relates to a broader erasure of the church’s long history as the city’s most eloquent pile of rubble.21

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The narratives examined in this chapter are very different from those in thematic church exhibitions, which openly address connections between particular churches and Nazism, and provide ample historical background. The difference between the two types of exhibitions might suggest that it is easier to develop a more critical approach when the Nazi era is isolated from the rest of German history (or from the history of a particular church). The fact that many of the thematic exhibitions are temporary might further reinforce the view of Nazism as a separate chapter that can be ‘closed’. In this light, the recurrence of accounts structured according to the sequence ‘apocalypse followed by redemption’ in so many permanent exhibitions in central, touristic urban churches might represent the normalization of the German past invoked by politicians and historians at least since unification. Perhaps these churches hold a memorial laissez-passer, which allows otherwise repressed views to return and emerge publicly as part of broader constructions of national identity.

Notes 1. This public realm also includes exhibitions set up in schools, government offices, hospitals, and other institutions and public service spaces. See C. Paver, ‘Exhibiting the National Socialist Past: An Overview of Recent German Exhibitions’, Journal of European Studies 39 (2009), 227–51. 2. On German victimhood, see B. Niven (ed.), Germans as Victims (Basingstoke, 2006). On normalization, see J. K. Olick, ‘What Does It Mean to Normalize the Past?’, Social Science History 22 (1998), 547–71; R. G. Moeller, ‘War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany’, American Historical Review 101 (1996), 1008–48; and S. Taberner and P. Cooke (eds), German Culture, Politics, and Literature into the Twenty-First Century: Beyond Normalization (Rochester, 2006). 3. A notable example is the Martin Luther Memorial Church in Berlin, which was dedicated in 1935 and whose history and architecture are closely associated with the Nazi era. Permanent displays and images address this history clearly and from a critical perspective. For information on this and other thematic exhibitions about the Nazi era in German churches, see Chloe Paver’s research website at http:// people.exeter.ac.uk/cpaver/exhibitions_ausstellungen.html (accessed 25 March 2009). 4. The churches were chosen for their urban or touristic centrality, meaning that they attract a larger and more diverse audience than local or fringe parishes. The examples range from cathedrals to smaller structures; they include Catholic and Protestant congregations, and sometimes accommodate alternative cultural uses. The churches with their German names and English translations are: Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche (Kaiser-Wilhelm Memorial Church), Parochialkirche (Parochial Church), Klosterkirche (Cloister Church), and Berliner Dom (Berlin Cathedral), all in Berlin; Dresdner Dom (Dresden Cathedral), Frauenkirche (Church of Our Lady), Dreikönigskirche (Three Kings Church), and Kreuzkirche (Cross Church) in Dresden; Kölner Dom (Cologne Cathedral), St Mariä Himmelfahrt (Mary’s Assumption), Antoniterkirche (Antonites), Minoritenkirche (Minorite Church), St Georg (Saint George), St Aposteln (Holy Apostles), St Gereon (Saint Gereon), St Kunibert (Saint Cunibert), St Maria am Kapitol (Saint Mary in the Capitol), and St Ursula (Saint Ursula), all in Cologne; and finally the Lübecker Dom (Lübeck Cathedral), Jakobikirche (St Jacob’s), Marienkirche (St Mary’s), Marienkapelle (St Mary’s Chapel), Petrikirche (St Peter’s), Herz Jesu (Heart of Jesus), Katharinen (St Catharine), and St Aegidien (St Egidius) in Lübeck. I visited these churches several times between July 2002 and June 2007.

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5. D. Wölfel, ‘St. Jakobi-Chronik 1945–2000’, Festschrift zum 775jährigen Jubiläum von St. Aegidien, St. Jakobi und St. Petri in Lübeck (Lübeck, 2002), p. 64. 6. To mention only a few: J. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, 1993); K. Till, The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place (Minneapolis, 2005); R. Koshar, From Monuments to Traces: Artifacts of German Memory, 1870–1990 (Berkeley, 2000). 7. Only a few churches attract a mass public. The Frauenkirche in Dresden, for example, attracted 2,200,000 visitors in 2007. This is an exceptional number; like Cologne Cathedral, the Frauenkirche is a ‘veritable tourist magnet’, as Dresden’s tourism office put it (see Tourismusbericht der Stadt Dresden 2007 (Dresden, 2007), p. 2 and p. 21). 8. This is notable considering the differences between memorialization of the Second World War in East and West Germany, explored for example by J. Herf in Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge, Mass., 1997) and by Young in The Texture of Memory. The similarity between East and West might be partly due to the fact that most of the displays were set up after unification. But perhaps it is also related to membership in a larger religious body (the Roman Catholic Church in Germany, the German Evangelical Church). Dominant views and practices of the religious system may override local, ideological, historical, or political particularities. 9. C. Hertel provides a reading of Walther’s work alongside two other others – Alfred Rethel’s engravings of 1849 and Richard Peter’s photographs from 1949 – as three Dances of Death that contribute to representing post-war Dresden as ‘a city of death’. In ‘Dis/Continuities in Dresden’s Dances of Death’, The Art Bulletin 82 (2000), 83–116. 10. See for instance T. Adorno, ‘The Meaning of Working Through the Past’, in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (New York, 1998), pp. 89–103; and J.-P. Bier, ‘The Holocaust, West Germany, and Strategies of Oblivion, 1947–1979’, in A. Rabinbach and J. Zipes (eds), Germans and Jews since the Holocaust: The Changing Situation in West Germany (New York and London, 1986), pp. 185–207. 11. Holocaust theory suggests that this ‘making whole again’ is impossible with respect to the social and individual losses of the Holocaust. This adds yet another dimension; however, the distinctions between the Holocaust and the war destruction experienced by Germans are too complex to be explored in this chapter. On the unredeemable nature of the Holocaust, see L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven, 1991); D. LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca, 1994). 12. Niven (ed.), ‘German Victimhood at the Turn of the Millennium’, in Germans as Victims, pp. 1–25; Herf, Divided Memory. 13. R. Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York, 1981). 14. For a discussion of the building’s reconstruction, see C. Hertel, ‘Beyond In/Authenticity: The Case of Dresden’s Frauenkirche’, in J. Ockman (ed.), Architourism: Architecture as a Destination for Tourism (New York and Munich, 2005), pp. 42–9. 15. Technically, the Memorial Church is not the extant ruin alone, but rather contains it as part of the broader ensemble that encompasses the two Modernist towers designed by Egon Eiermann in 1959. 16. See, for instance, M. S. Roth and others, Irresistible Decay: Ruins Reclaimed (Los Angeles, 1997); C. D. Armstrong, ‘ “Il faut ruiner un palais . . .”: Fragmentation and Human Nature in Leroy’s Les Ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Grèce’, in B. Bergdoll and W. Oechslin (eds), Fragments – Architecture and the Unfinished: Essays Presented to Robin Middleton (London, 2006); A. F. Janowitz, England’s Ruins: Poetic Purpose and the National Landscape (Cambridge, Mass., 1990). 17. The most famous example might be the Archaic temple of Athena in the Acropolis, burned by the Persians in 480 BC and left in ruins in Pericles’ reconstruction of the Acropolis. See G. Ferrari, ‘The Ancient Temple on the Acropolis at Athens’, American Journal of Archaeology 106 (2002), 11–35. Ferrari makes a connection between the Ancient Temple and the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche (p. 28).

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18. Young, The Texture of Memory, p. 2. 19. See D. J. Dietrich (ed.), Christian Responses to the Holocaust: Moral and Ethical Issues (Syracuse, NY, 2003). The resistance of local clerics in Cologne and Lübeck is documented in H. Moll, Wenn wir heute nicht unser Leben einsetzen. Martyrer des Erzbistums Köln aus der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus (Cologne, 1998); and in B. Templin and I. Klatt, ‘Lösch mir die Augen aus. . .’. Leben und gewaltsames Sterben der vier Lübecker Geistlichen in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus, exh. cat. (Lübeck, 1994). 20. See M. Perry and F. M. Schweitzer, Antisemitic Myths: A Historical and Contemporary Anthology (Bloomington, IN, 2008); M. Burleigh, Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics from the Great War to the War on Terror (London, 2007); and Dietrich, Christian Responses to the Holocaust. 21. Hertel, ‘Beyond In/Authenticity’.

1.6 Remembering on Foreign Soil: The Activities of the German War Graves Commission David Livingstone

‘Reconciliation over the graves’ (‘Versöhnung über den Gräbern’) is a slogan of the People’s Association for the Maintenance of German War Graves, or VDK (Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge), an organization that has built and maintained German military cemeteries and memorials since 1919. The VDK was formed in the aftermath of the Great War to recover and commemorate those Germans who had been killed fighting mainly in foreign countries.1 During the war, this task had been the responsibility of the Prussian Ministry’s Central Identification Office (Central-Nachweise-Amt), disbanded in 1918 following the Versailles Treaty.2 The VDK was typical of many post-war völkisch factions with members that included disenchanted soldiers and right-wing radical groups. These individuals espoused the revanchist myth of the ‘stab in the back’, according to which Germany’s soldiers would have won the war had it not been for the undermining efforts of leftist conspiracies on the home front.3 The VDK conceptualized this radicalism in its memorials and cemeteries both at home and abroad.4 These sites were dominated by stone structures called ‘fortresses of the dead’ (Totenburgen) that emphasized heroism and the primacy of the nation over the individual.5 Thematically, VDK projects reflected the ‘stabin-the-back’ legend and provided the right wing with a means by which to refocus aesthetically the memory of the war. Historian George Mosse has asserted that these cemeteries were the focal point of what he called the ‘cult of the fallen soldier’.6 Henceforth, the VDK promulgated the Nazi world-view (Weltanschauung) throughout the Weimar Republic and Third Reich eras. In 1922, it advocated the institution of the People’s Day of Mourning (Volkstrauertag), an annual occasion central to the Nazi commemoration of the war. Later, this was changed to the Heroes’ Day of Commemoration or Heldengedenktag (see the chapter in this volume by Alexandra Kaiser). During the Third Reich, the VDK also strictly forbade the inclusion of Jewish soldiers on its war monuments. By 1945, Germany was again defeated and 5.3 million of its soldiers had been killed, most of them in foreign countries.7 The current chapter will examine several examples of the VDK’s controversial role in German memorialization from 1945 to 2005. During this era, the Cold War, unification, and the passing of the Second World War generation all had 69

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an influence on how it conducted its work. Given the fact that it was originally founded upon right-wing ideology, one might expect that its projects would be undertaken in a manner which prevented the glorification of Nazi soldiers so as not to offend their victims, especially at those sites on foreign soil. Nevertheless, organizational policies and personnel often overlooked Nazi victims, or afforded Nazi soldiers, who were depicted as victims of the senselessness of war in general, a status equal to that of Nazi victims. There has been little contemporary scholarship published on the VDK.8 The examples presented here will reveal that, while on the one hand it provided closure for many German families, on the other it opened old wounds for Nazi victims. It has consistently fallen short of its reconciliation pledge, and is unable to contribute positively to German memorialization because it is not truly committed to changing its past practices. Unlike some of the problematic approaches to memorialisation analysed in this volume, which have now been consigned to the past, this is arguably an ongoing story that still awaits a resolution.

From collapse to division: The VDK from 1945 to 1949 When the world learned about the terrible crimes of Nazism, the very idea of an organization that commemorated its executors was unsettling. In 1946, the Allied occupation governments officially ordered the demolition of many monuments, museums, and anything else associated with the military heritage of National Socialism.9 But for those families who had lost someone at the front there was an emotional need to know the whereabouts of their loved ones.10 The German Red Cross attempted to provide families with some information, but poor record-keeping at the end of the war left many cases open.11 In 1945, the VDK went through a hasty de-Nazification process and began assisting the Red Cross. The diligence in providing surviving families with information on burial sites was arguably its best and least controversial involvement in German memorialization.12 Consider the case of 20-year-old Luftwaffe pilot Paul Riessbeck who was shot down over Normandy in 1944 and buried by locals near a church at Chatellier. On behalf of Riessbeck’s father, the VDK learned that Paul had originally been exhumed by the American Battle Monuments Commission and re-interred at Champigny-St-André. In another instance, the VDK helped the family of 20-year-old Corporal Manfred Kolb, who had been reported ‘missing in action’ in Normandy. Kolb had also been buried by the Americans, but his records were lost in the post-war confusion. VDK representatives worked closely with American officials and traced Kolb to the Orglandes cemetery in France.13 In both situations, these soldiers’ families gained a sense of closure that would probably not have been possible without the VDK. It resolved countless other missing-in-action cases in the same fashion and maintained a vast archive that helped families still searching for lost relatives.14 Despite these successful recoveries, the inconsistency of Allied de-Nazification policies at the beginning of the Cold War allowed many Nazi-era personnel to remain in the VDK.15 For example, in November 1945, VDK architects Oswald

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Langerhans and Wilhelm Hübotter were commissioned by British occupation authorities to construct a victims’ monument on the site of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.16 Both men had been fervent Nazis during the war, and Hübotter designed Heinrich Himmler’s Saxons’ Grove, a gathering place for the SS just 50 kilometres east of Belsen. Their designs angered the Central Committee of Liberated Jews who complained that they produced ‘a naïve belief that the camp could be removed from the memory of history’. This was precisely the kind of ignorance and insensitivity the VDK’s officials were criticized for in connection with many of the VDK’s post-Holocaust memorials.17

The early Cold War: The VDK between 1949 and 1969 Excepting its Bergen-Belsen venture, the VDK primarily continued its recovery program across Western Europe and the Mediterranean without opposition. However, in 1949, Germany was officially divided, and the disposition of the war-dead in the East was assigned to the churches by the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Consequently, the manner in which Germans looked back upon the Nazi era also followed this divide.18 In the Federal Republic (FRG), the Nazi past was overshadowed by the greater threat of communism, while in the GDR Nazism was viewed as the end product of greedy western capitalists.19 Although the Cold War ended any chance of the VDK operating in the east (where most of Germany’s war dead were located), the political tension from the divide allowed it to revive many of its conservative policies without eliciting any critical attention. Quite frankly, the occupation authorities in Europe were far more concerned with geopolitical issues than how the VDK conducted itself. Therefore, most of its sites continued to include the heroic themes and images of the Third Reich era with no consideration for Nazi victims.20 In 1950, the VDK reinstituted the Volkstrauertag and gradually began participating in more commemorative activities. By 1952, it had obtained Allied authorization to construct war memorials within Germany, and many of the First World War sites were adapted to include the names of those killed during the Nazi era.21 With a staff consisting of former soldiers, including members of the Waffen SS, the VDK helped to encourage the myth that the majority of those who fought for Hitler were blameless for his crimes.22 It operated under this ideology throughout the Cold War and extended it abroad as it became the FRG’s ambassador for war graves. In 1964, it crafted an agreement with the United Kingdom’s Commonwealth War Graves Commission to build a cemetery at Cannock Chase in Staffordshire. The cemetery holds the remains of 4929 soldiers from both world wars,23 many of who had been crew members of zeppelins and bomber aircraft responsible for the deaths of innocent civilians. At the entrance of the cemetery, every visitor must pass a dark statue of an anguished body lying in repose, which seems to convey a sense of grief for those inside. A VDK brochure available at the site describes the sculpture simply as ‘a reminder of the consequences of war’, without making reference to the victims of those interred on its grounds.24

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In 1966, the VDK took over the task of administering the German cemeteries in France from the French Burial Service (Service Français des Sépultures). Over 250,000 German soldiers were killed in France during the Second World War, and there were numerous burials resulting from the First.25 The architecture at the French sites continued to reflect a general insensitivity towards Nazi victims by including many of the same design features prominent in the Nazi era. For instance, the Norman cemeteries at La Cambe and Mont-d’Huisnes included centrally located burial mounds reminiscent of the Totenburgen of earlier designs. The French population was still living with the memory of Nazi occupation and often protested the construction of these sites near its communities. In response to the negative attention in France and elsewhere, the VDK began designing its foreign cemeteries to blend in with local features.26

The VDK in the Twilight of the Cold War: 1969–1989 Throughout the era of Christian Democratic Union (CDU) rule in the FRG, the personnel and policies of the Volksbund remained conservatively based. This changed somewhat when Willy Brandt of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) became Chancellor in 1969. Brandt’s attitude towards reconciliation differed from that of his CDU predecessors and he preferred to view the Nazi past with humility instead of disregard.27 Accordingly, the VDK’s work was influenced to some extent by this shift, especially at its foreign sites. In France, Belgium, and Italy, cemeteries were built with hedges that concealed the graves. Markers in the form of Maltese crosses were discreetly set flat into the ground instead of upright like earlier versions. Any references to nationalism such as the famous Langemarck inscription, ‘Germany must live, even if we must die’, were removed.28 The VDK also developed summer work programs that gave German teenagers the opportunity to provide foreign countries with cemetery maintenance while hopefully educating these youngsters about the realities of war.29 As the Cold War entered its final years, Helmut Kohl gained the chancellorship for the CDU, triggering another shift in how Germans in the FRG confronted the past. Kohl set the tone for this transition by bolstering the idea that coming to terms with the Nazi era meant eliminating the dividing line between victim and perpetrator. This exactly matched the views of the conservative VDK.30 Given that the FRG was critical towards the anti-communist stance of the West, it is not surprising that President Ronald Reagan’s 1985 trip to the VDK cemetery near Bitburg opened old wounds for all Nazi victims. Prior to the trip, Reagan’s staff learned that there were several Waffen SS soldiers buried there, including SS Staff Sergeant Otto Bengel, who was awarded the Nazi Cross in Gold for killing ten Americans.31 Letters for and against the trip flooded the White House when Reagan insisted on going despite the SS graves; these letters clearly demonstrate the ambiguity of the general victimization ideals expressed by Kohl and most of those within the VDK.32 Reagan Library archival sources reveal that some of the letters were supportive and even played a role in Reagan’s controversial speech, such as one by

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American veteran Robert Bullard. Bullard, speaking of the burial of a young SS soldier, claimed: ‘these men, too, were Hitler’s victims.’33 Another letter by Monika Roberts, the daughter of a Wehrmacht soldier buried at Bitburg, urged Reagan to visit the cemetery and spoke about the VDK’s help locating his grave. She closed by stating: ‘only a handful of SS troopers are buried at Bitburg, the rest of the graves are those of many Germans like my father, who were forced to serve under the Nazi regime.’34 More telling are those who spoke out against the trip, including Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, who said: ‘that place [Bitburg], Mr. President, is not your place. Your place is with the victims of the SS.’35 Another American veteran wrote: ‘by even considering visiting a place where Waffen SS Officers are buried, you have already opened old, deep wounds.’36 However, Reagan remained committed to go, and prior to the trip he told the Conference on Religious Liberty that ‘my purpose was, and remains, not to re-emphasize the crimes of the Third Reich in twelve years of power, but to celebrate the accomplishments of the German people.’37 His visit may not have re-emphasized the crimes of the Third Reich, but his on-site address certainly distorted the memory of its victims when he stated: ‘the war against one man’s totalitarian dictatorship was not like other wars. The evil wars of Nazism turned all values upside down. Nevertheless, we can mourn the German war dead today as human beings crushed by a vicious ideology.’38 Reagan’s remarks precisely captured the self-exonerating ‘victim of totalitarianism’ ideal of the VDK during the Kohl era. However, when Germany was united in 1990, the VDK faced new challenges that called into question its moral foundation.

The VDK and unified Germany: 1990–2005 The VDK’s most significant challenge after unification was securing access to the sites of eastern front battlefields; such access became easier following the collapse of the Soviet empire. Unification significantly changed how Germans memorialized Nazism, because responsibility for the crimes of the Holocaust had to be borne by one nation instead of two. The end of the geographical and cultural divide provided the opportunities for Germans to view their past collectively and confront the difficult issues of Nazism.39 Nevertheless, the VDK remained rooted in conservative ideology and failed to make policy adaptations as the new era began. At the VDK cemetery in Costermano, Italy, citizens complained that three notorious architects of Hitler’s euthanasia program were buried among the German dead and listed in a ‘book of honour’. One of them, Christian Wirth, had served as a Commandant and director of euthanasia at Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor.40 Public protests and debates in both the Italian and German press brought European-wide attention to the case. Italian citizens submitted a written demand for the three men’s exhumation and removal, but VDK officials refused on the grounds that the men were buried in mass graves. The Italian government responded by cancelling the observance of Volkstrauertag at the cemetery, and the German Consul General to Italy, Dr Manfred Steinkühler, resigned his post in protest, calling the VDK ‘insincere and misleading, an insult to victims and

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an enduring shame for Germany’.41 In 1992, after nearly four years of protest, the names of Wirth and the others were removed from the ‘book of honour’ at Costermano. Nevertheless, the organization had only acted after negative public pressure forced its hand, proving that its sensitivity to the issue of Nazi victimhood was insufficient. VDK insensitivity was further exhibited in 1997 when the organization erected steel poles at the Buchenwald memorial to commemorate the Germans who died there under Soviet captivity after the Second World War; yet many of those who had died had been Nazi functionaries (albeit low-level ones). By inscribing the poles with the word ‘unknown’, the VDK implied that these Germans had as it were died in battle, which diminished Nazi crimes in the face of Stalinism, something memorial site director Volkhard Knigge wanted to avoid at all costs.42 Problems also emerged at the VDK’s sites in Poland and Russia when public concerns over the memorialization of former enemies developed among local citizens. At Nadolice cemetery outside of Warsaw, locals protested when they learned that members of the SS who had been guards at Auschwitz were buried there. The VDK acted swiftly (perhaps learning from Costermano) by sponsoring an inquiry, which was ultimately inconclusive.43 VDK spokesman Fritz Kirchmeier said that Nadolice was not built to memorialize German soldiers, but rather to provide them with a proper burial, which revealed an organizational shift away from commemorative events that glorified Nazi soldiers without considering those who had been their victims.44 Kirchmeier’s comments also indicated that the VDK was beginning to reconsider what contribution, if any, it really had to make towards reconciliation. Unified Germany’s willingness to confront its past and the diminishing Nazi era generation, made its previous themes unappealing to most contemporary Germans, many of who felt no wish to support its work with donations. Time for new strategies and financing was running out as tensions rose in former Eastern bloc nations such as Albania, where the government suspended the VDK cemetery near the city of Tirana after veterans protested that it was too close to a partisan memorial.45 Similarly, in the Czech Republic, the remains of 4000 Germans were stored unceremoniously in the basement of a plumbing factory near Prague, because a suitable burial site could not be agreed upon by its citizens. The VDK also came under fire in 2002 for a planned ceremony at a Great War memorial in Israel that included the names of Nazi era soldiers; at Kaliningrad in 2003, it attempted to build a Wehrmacht memorial near a cemetery for victims of SS medical experimentation. In Russia, where the recovery effort was greatly needed, local residents looted German burials for war souvenirs as their post-Cold War economy deteriorated.46 The Russians themselves were divided on the value of cemeteries that commemorated enemy soldiers who had waged a brutal war against their country for four years. In 2004, at the Sologubovka cemetery, where many of the Germans who had besieged Leningrad are buried, the VDK built memorials that recognized Russian victims, funded reconstruction of an Orthodox church, and spent nearly 1 million Euros in improvements for the local community. They also brought Russians and Germans together at the dedication ceremony, but feelings about the site remained

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mixed. Photographer Michael Stephan documented the event and felt the site was an insult to Russians. He observed: ‘many [German veterans] still speak of themselves as victims and claim they were unaware of civilian deaths.’ Lida Titarenko, who was enslaved by the Germans when they occupied Sologubovka in 1941, believed that their effort was good because they were rebuilding what the Nazis had destroyed. But Russian Veterans’ Committee President Zoya Kornilyeva felt that German money and rebuilding efforts did nothing to compensate for the crimes of Nazism.47 Germans and their former enemies remain divided over the VDK. While it has shown some post-unification advancement, its work does not go far enough to accomplish its motto of ‘reconciliation over the graves’. As fewer Nazi era veterans fill out its ranks, the potential for organizational change is better, but despite this trend, it still manages to attract neo-Nazi activists and other radical movements. Its value within the broader framework of German memorialization depends upon an intensified organizational commitment to move away from the conservative themes of its past. But in the final analysis, it may be that the VDK would better serve society by staying out of the memorialization business all together and simply sticking to the recovery of remains. Perhaps Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin (who died before the war) best characterized the true problem with an organization like the VDK when he expressed his idea that ‘remembrance as a means of healing may perpetrate injustice by covering up crimes and thereby protecting their perpetrators’.48

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8.

9. 10.

P. Haythornthwaite, The World War One Sourcebook (London, 1993), pp. 54–5. G. L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (Oxford, 1991), p. 82. I. Kershaw, Hitler: 1889–1936 Hubris (New York, 1999), p. 97. The terms of the Versailles Treaty limited the jurisdiction of the VDK abroad until the late 1960s. J. Bulmahn, Places of Commemoration: Search for Identity and Landscape Design (Georgetown, 2001), p. 242. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, p. 80, p. 86, and p. 106. R. Overmanns, Deutsche Militärische Verluste im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Munich 1999), p. 316; D. Bankier, ‘Hitler and the Policy-Making Process on the Jewish Question’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 3:1 (1988), 1–20, here 11; G. Megargee, War of Annihilation: Combat and Genocide on the Eastern Front, 1941 (Lanham, 2006), pp. 1–4; Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, p. 82. Former VDK director Hans Soltau published an anthology of speeches from the Volkstrauertag during the 1951–95 period titled Wir Gedenken. Reden zum Volkstrauertag 1951–1995 (Kassel, 1995). See also: H. Boehlke, Zum Zentralinstitut und Museum für Sepulkralkultur. Geschichte der Arbeitsgemeinschaft Friedhof und Denkmal e.V. Zweiter Teil 1977–1992 (Kassel, 2007), which contains some references to the VDK; M. Lurz, Kriegerdenkmäler in Deutschland 6 vols (Heidelberg, 1985–87); and E. Siegel, ‘Graveside Reconciliation: The German War Graves Commission in Russia’, Osteuropa 58 (2008), 307–15. Lurz, Kriegerdenkmäler in Deutschland, p. 123. Anon., ‘Search for the Fallen in a Now Quiet Forest’, Los Angeles Times, 2 May 2007.

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11. Many grave sites were concealed by the Wehrmacht during their retreat to prevent local civilians from desecrating them. See S. Schmitz, A Stranger to Myself: The Inhumanity of War in Russia, 1941–1944 (New York, 2005), p. xi. 12. There is as yet no significant scholarship on the de-Nazification of the VDK. See US National Archives RG-260/OMGUS. 13. F. Avril, Gardens of Remembrance: The Men and Their Destiny (Cully, 2006), pp. 40–4. 14. Ibid. The author visited both cemeteries in Normandy in 2004 and 2005. 15. H. Marcuse, Legacies of Dachau: The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp, 1933– 2001 (Cambridge, 2001). See in particular the section ‘Denazification and Brown Collar Criminals’, pp. 88–94; Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, p. 213. 16. Bulmahn, Places of Commemoration, p. 281. 17. Ibid., p. 280. 18. B. Niven, Facing the Nazi Past: United Germany and the Legacy of the Third Reich (London and New York, 2002), p. 5. 19. J. Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Harvard, 1997), p. 73 20. Ibid., p. 3. 21. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, p. 217. 22. A. Reith, Denkmal Ohne Pathos. Totenmale des Zweiten Weltkrieges in Süd-WürttembergHohenzollern (Tübingen, 1967), p. 16. 23. Author’s 2002 visit to Cannock Chase. 24. Author’s 2002 visit to Cannock Chase. See also the VDK brochure, Cannock Chase (Kassel, 2002) (author’s private collection). 25. Avril, Gardens of Remembrance, p. 37. 26. Ibid., pp. 38–9. 27. Niven, Facing the Nazi Past, p. 105. 28. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, p. 212. 29. H. O. Weber, Dienst am Menschen Dienst am Frieden. 75 Jahre Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge (Kassel, 1994), pp. 144–5. 30. Niven, Facing the Nazi Past, p. 105. 31. ID#301482, TR-123-01, WHORM (White House Office of Records Management): Subject File, Ronald Reagan Library. 32. The entire collection of Bitburg letters can be accessed under TR-123-01, WHORM: Subject File, Ronald Reagan Library, Simi Valley California. For Kohl and the VDK, see W. Kansteiner, In Pursuit of German Memory: History, Television, and Politics after Auschwitz (Ohio, 2006), p. 271. 33. ID#301485, TR-123-01, WHORM: Subject File. See also OA# 205-206, White House Office of Speechwriting, Speech Drafts, Ronald Reagan Library. 34. ID#301487, TR-123-01, WHORM: Subject File, Ronald Reagan Library. 35. Elie Wiesel’s Congressional Gold Medal acceptance speech (19 April 1985) ID#301619, TR-123-01, WHORM: Subject File, Ronald Reagan Library. 36. ID#301580, TR-123-01, WHORM: Subject File, Ronald Reagan Library. 37. ID#275503, TR-123-01, WHORM: Subject File, Ronald Reagan Library. 38. OA#17890, ‘Remarks: Lunch at Bitburg Air Force Base’, White House Office of Speechwriting, Ronald Reagan Library. 39. Niven, Facing the Nazi Past, p. 2 and p. 4. 40. T. Segev, Soldiers of Evil: The Commandants of the Nazi Concentration Camps (New York, 1998), pp. 202–11. 41. M. Brieger, Auf dem Soldatenfriedhof in Costermano werden die Spuren von Widerstandskämpfern und Kriegsverbrechern verwischt (Germany, 1993), p. 3, http://www.resistenza. de/content/view/88/58/ (accessed 13 January 2009). 42. Niven, Facing the Nazi Past, pp. 46–8. 43. Anon., ‘Relatives Help Inaugurate Cemetery in Poland for Thousands of German Soldiers Killed in WW II’, Associated Press, 5 October 2002.

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44. B. Pasek, ‘Poland Probes Burial of German Soldiers’, Associated Press International, 3 February 2004. 45. L. Cota, ‘Albania Halts Monument to German Soldiers’, UPI, 25 April 2002. 46. Anon., ‘Nazareth Memorial for German Soldiers Delayed after Rebuke for Including Nazis’, The Jerusalem Post, 28 October 2002; ‘Killers Honored at Their Victims’ Gravesides’, www.german-foreign-policy.com/en/fulltext/33036 (accessed 7 May 2003); A. Hall, ‘Russian Treasure Hunters Robbing German Graves to Sell Nazi Medals’, Scotland on Sunday, 28 September 2002; R. Boyes, ‘German War Dead No One Wants to Remember’, The Times, 7 June 2008. 47. I. Traynor, ‘A Corner of Russia that is Forever Germany’, The Guardian, 11 September 2000; M. Jones, Leningrad: State of Siege (New York, 2008), pp. 2–3. 48. Quoted in J. Winter, War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 1999), p. 5.

1.7 Neither Here nor There? Memorialization of the Expulsion of Ethnic Germans Dagmar Kift

In February 2008 German newspapers reported on an agreement reached between the German and the Polish governments on the controversial German plans to erect a ‘Visible Sign against Flight and Expulsion’ (‘Sichtbares Zeichen gegen Flucht und Vertreibung’).1 The new Polish government under Donald Tusk will not be participating in this venture but did not preclude the involvement of Polish historians. For its part, the German government promised to take the deportation of Polish people into consideration. This agreement ended a controversial debate on how (and where) to commemorate the flight and expulsion of the German population from those parts of Germany which were handed over to Poland and the (former) Soviet Union after 1945 (East Prussia, Silesia, parts of Pomerania, and East Brandenburg), and of ethnic Germans from their areas of settlement in the former Czechoslovakia, in Hungary, Romania, and the former Yugoslavia. The ‘Visible Sign’ will be based on the main narrative of the exhibition Flight, Expulsion, Integration (Flucht, Vertreibung, Integration), staged by the Federal Republic’s House of History (Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland) in Bonn. It was one of three major exhibitions which in 2005 and 2006 tackled the issues of flight and expulsion and the history of the refugees and expellees in post-war Germany. The other two were Rebuilding the West (Aufbau West. Neubeginn zwischen Vertreibung und Wirtschaftswunder) by the LWL Industrial Museum in Dortmund, curated by the author of this chapter, and Forced Transits (Erzwungene Wege) by the Centre Against Expulsions (Zentrum gegen Vertreibungen), which is closely linked to the League of Expellees (Bund der Vertriebenen). This chapter is mainly concerned with how these three exhibitions positioned themselves in the historiography and politics of flight and expulsion, narrated the expellees’ history, and reflected and influenced public discussion. The composite term ‘flight and expulsion’ stands for a chain of events that started with the evacuation of the Transylvanian Saxons from Hungary in 1944.2 People began to flee from East Prussia and Silesia when the Red Army crossed the German borders in January 1945. The next phase was marked by the so-called ‘wild’ (that is, unofficial and/or un-coordinated) expulsions whereby tens of thousands of people were marched or driven by train to the Allied occupation zones and left to their fate. Since it was nearly impossible to house and feed such masses 78

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of people – many of whom had arrived without any possessions – the Allies at the Potsdam Conference in August 1945 agreed to put the expulsion process on a more organized footing. Most ‘organized’ expulsions (with time plans and agreed contingencies) took place in 1946. In October 1946, roughly 6 million refugees and expellees were living in the western occupation zones, the later Federal Republic of Germany (FRG).3 Four years later, the figure had risen to 8 million. Four and a half million were counted in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), many of whom subsequently fled to the West.4 In 1966 Alfred M. Zayas estimated that there were 10.6 million refugees and expellees living in the FRG and 3.5 million in the GDR. Just over 2 million ethnic Germans are estimated to have lost their lives or gone missing during flight or expulsion.5 In the GDR, out of consideration for its ‘socialist brother states’, no official memorialization of these events took place.6 In West Germany, the first visual memorializations concerned the territories that had been lost:7 monuments and street signs kept the names of towns and regions in public memory