Post on 17-Oct-2021
HELMUT KOHL: IN SEARCH OF A UNIFIED PAST
By
BRIANNA LEA WEBB
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS IN HISTORY
WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY Department of History
MAY 2017
© Copyright by BRIANNA LEA WEBB, 2017 All Rights Reserved
© Copyright by BRIANNA LEA WEBB, 2017 All Rights Reserved
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To the Faculty of Washington State University: The members of the Committee appointed to examine the thesis of BRIANNA LEA
WEBB find it satisfactory and recommend that it be accepted.
Raymond C. Sun, Ph.D., Chair
Steven D. Kale, Ph.D.
Brigit A. Farley, Ph.D.
Rachel J. Halverson, Ph.D.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This thesis is a testament to the significant improvement I experienced during my time as
a M.A. student at Washington State University. My growth as a student, writer, and researcher
would not have been possible without the help of my adviser, Dr. Raymond Sun, who offered a
lot of time and thought in the past two years. I owe my biggest thanks to him, where my
appreciation cannot be properly described with words.
I would also like to thank the members of my committee, Dr. Steven Kale, Dr. Brigit
Farley, and Dr. Rachel Halverson, for enthusiastically and critically engaging with me and my
research. There is a tremendous amount of gratitude for the entire History Department at
Washington State University for providing a friendly and supportive environment, and giving me
a chance to mature as a student. Especially with friends like Calen Rau, Renée Torres, Karl
Krotke-Crandall, and Megan Ockerman, I was never lacking in support, encouragement, and
laughter.
Finally, there is tremendous love and appreciation for my family being the best support-
system I could imagine. Thank you to my parents, Lisa and Ira “Butch” Webb, who never
doubted me for a second, and constantly reminded me of my achievements and how proud they
were. And thank you to Jake, Stacy, Rachel, and Lori, my incredible siblings, for tolerating me
and helping me endure the struggles that I encountered. I cannot imagine my success without my
family, and I dedicate this thesis to them.
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HELMUT KOHL: IN SEARCH OF A UNIFIED PAST
Abstract
by Brianna Lea Webb, M.A. Washington State University
May 2017
Chair: Raymond C. Sun
World War II forced the German people to contend with the death and destruction that
their country caused and endured, and during the postwar years the division between East and
West German memory only perplexed the Germans’ past. When West German Chancellor
Helmut Kohl gained chancellorship in 1982, he strove for integration, and wanted to achieve
unity not only through economics and policies, but also through monuments and memorials. The
focus of this research will trace Kohl’s memorial endeavor, where he tried to establish a unified
narrative of struggle and victimization for Germans through a series of commemorations during
the 1980s and 1990s. By examining the Bitburg affair in 1985, the Neue Wache memorial, and
the Holocaust Memorial dedicated in Berlin, I investigate how Kohl attempted to use sites of
memory to manipulate the past in such a way as to achieve unity in memory and national
identity. With a conservative agenda, and the effort to emphasize German suffering rather than
focusing on the Holocaust, these attempts were often met with controversy, which not only
shaped the Kohl government’s later monument building projects, but also demonstrates the
problematic nature of trying to create a singular interpretation of a nation’s past.
The three sites of memory represent Kohl’s changing ambitions, and his learning curve
when confronting Germany’s war past. The Bitburg affair is the beginning of Kohl’s memorial
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journey, where Kohl tried to achieve unity by equalizing German victims and relativize the
Holocaust for the sake of United States Cold War relations. Unsuccessful in that attempt, and
with reunification in 1990, Kohl used the Neue Wache to establish a “clean” site of memory that
represented a collective German identity for West and East Germans. With relative success, and
the lack of proper memorialization for the Holocaust, the final memorial project for Kohl is the
Holocaust Memorial, where Jews, Germans, and international audiences alike can visit a
common site. For Kohl, the underlying goal in all three cases is that Germany needed a unified,
and usable, past.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ............................................................................................................. iii
ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................................... iv
LIST OF FIGURES ...................................................................................................................... vii
CHAPTER
CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................1
CHAPTER TWO: THE 1985 COMMEMORATIONS IN BITBURG AND BERGEN-BELSEN ............................................................................................................................22 CHAPTER THREE: MOVING ON FROM BITBURG: CREATING A MEMORIAL INSIDE THE NEUE WACHE ..........................................................................................43 CHAPTER FOUR: “A WAVING FIELD OF PILLARS”: THE “MEMORIAL TO THE MURDERED JEWS OF EUROPE” .................................................................................77 CHAPTER FIVE: CONCLUSION .................................................................................106
REFERENCES ............................................................................................................................114
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LIST OF FIGURES
Page
Figure 1.1: Map of Germany ...........................................................................................................3
Figure 2.1: Map of major camps in Greater Germany, 1944 .........................................................34
Figure 3.1: Neue Wache Memorial, Berlin ....................................................................................45
Figure 3.2: Pietà by Käthe Kollwitiz, Neue Wache, Berlin ..........................................................46
Figure 3.3: Neue Wache Façade, Berlin ........................................................................................48
Figure 3.4: Inside the Neue Wache, June 1931 .............................................................................53
Figure 3.5: Berlin, Kranzniederlegung im Ehrenmal, March 12, 1933 .........................................54
Figure 3.6: Berlin, Neue Wache Unter den Linden, September 30, 1970 .....................................57
Figure 3.7: Inside the Neue Wache, Berlin ....................................................................................58
Figure 3.8: Pietà, Neue Wache in Berlin .......................................................................................59
Figure 3.9: Käthe Kollwitz, The "Grieving Parents,” Vladslo, Belgium .......................................62
Figure 3.10: Women with Dead Child, Käthe Kollwitz, 1903 ......................................................63
Figure 3.11: Original bronze statuette of the Pietà by Käthe Kollwitz .........................................64
Figure 3.12: Close-up of Pietà, in the Neue Wache, Berlin ..........................................................66
Figure 4.1: Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas, Berlin ...................................................78
Figure 4.2: Christine Jackob-Marks Holocaust Memorial concept drawing .................................86
Figure 4.3: Map of Berlin ..............................................................................................................87
Figure 4.4: Rose at the “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe,” Berlin ..............................90
Figure 4.5: Inside the stelae in the “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe,” Berlin ............92
Figure 4.6: Entrance to the information center ..............................................................................93
Figure 4.7: “Room of Dimensions” and Room of Families” .........................................................94
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CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION
On the fortieth anniversary of the end of World War II, West German Chancellor Helmut
Kohl invited United States President Ronald Reagan to West Germany to participate in a series
of ceremonies. The aim was political—both Kohl and Reagan needed a public gesture that
reinforced Cold War relations between the two nations to achieve individual aims. For Reagan, it
would allow him to move forward with his Strategic Defense Initiative, a missile program that
would strengthen the U.S. nuclear power in Europe against the Soviet Union. As for Kohl, it was
important to strengthen relations with the U.S. to secure the Federal Republic of Germany’s
influence in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and to become fully westernized
and normalized.1 The commemorations were to take place at the Kolmeshöhe military cemetery
in Bitburg, a town near the border of Luxembourg. However, Jewish communities in the U.S.
and Germany, along with veterans, learned about the forty-nine SS soldiers that were buried
along with the German Wehrmacht soldiers, and demanded that Reagan change his visit to avoid
commemorating individuals held responsible for the Holocaust.
During an acceptance speech for the Congressional Gold Medal of Achievement at the
White House on April 19, 1985, Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel
questioned Ronald Reagan: “Mr. President, am I dreaming? Is this but a nightmare?... I belong to
a traumatized generation; to us symbols are important… Your place is with the victims of the S.
S. We know there are political and even strategic considerations—but this issue… transcends
politics, and even diplomacy. The issue here is not politics but good and evil, and we must never
confuse them.”2 As a survivor of the Holocaust, Wiesel expressed the sentiment that many
1 For more information of the political motivations for the commemorations in 1985, see
“Chapter Two: The 1985 Commemorations in Bitburg and Bergen-Belsen.” 2 Elie Wiesel, From the Kingdom of Memory: Reminiscences (New York: Summit Books, 1990),
176.
2
Jewish people felt, and this feeling intensified when a concentration camp, Bergen-Belsen, was
added to the visit to offset the controversy. This addition heightened the controversy, for when
the SS soldiers in Bitburg were placed alongside the victims of Bergen-Belsen, two groups were
being honored together: the victims of the Holocaust, and the perpetrators. Reagan’s visit to
Germany resulted in a political debacle, with outrage from Jewish communities both within
Germany, and internationally. The high level of critique and opposition to the commemorations
exposed Germany’s battle with the past, and forced Kohl to realize that Germany did not have
the proper commemorative site that narrated a usable past for Germany.
3
Figure 1.1: Map of Germany. Photo from maps-of-europe.net.
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Bitburg marks the beginning of Helmut Kohl’s search for a unified past, and his desire to
create a memorial that would provide a stable and unifying symbol of German war memory.
Transitioning from Cold War politics to reunification in 1990, the Kohl administration attempted
to create a traditional ritual space to establish a single German memory of the Second World
War, and thereby reinforce a new, unified German identity. The division of Germany was a
consequence and a reminder of National Socialism, thus the desire to create a memorial that
overcame that past, and create a narrative that included both Germanys. That memorial would be
the “Zentralen Gedenkstätte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland für die Opfer des Krieges und der
Gewaltherrschaft” (“Central Memorial of the Federal Republic of Germany for the Victims of
War and Tyranny”), commonly referred to as the Neue Wache memorial, dedicated on
November 14, 1993. The memorial contains the enlargement of Käthe Kollwitz’s statuette, Pietà,
inside the historical structure, the Neue Wache. For Kohl, the Neue Wache memorial would
achieve what Bitburg failed to do—act as a central monument to all the victims of war and
tyranny, and act as a common site for the unification of the German people and reconciliation of
victims and perpetrators. Kohl used the site to construct a useable past for a recently unified
Germany. After decades of division, and the Bitburg incident in 1985, Kohl believed that a
memorial that unified both victims and Germans would allow the nation to accept its past, and
look forward to a unified future.
Kohl’s hopes for the Neue Wache turned out to be wishful-thinking—during the
dedication, protestors gathered at the site, and objected to the building, the purpose of the
memorial, and the sculpture inside. Kohl had hoped to create a unifying site of war memory for
Germany, but instead generated more divisive debate owing to both the memorial’s location and
the symbolism of the Pietà. The building itself has its origins in Prussian militarism, being a
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guardhouse for the king’s soldiers. Additionally, since the Weimar Republic, the site housed
memorials for the Weimar Republic, the National Socialists, and the German Democratic
Republic, representing the troubled and militaristic history that Germans struggled to contend
with. The Jewish communities were the most vocal critics, claiming that the sculpture excluded
the Jewish victims due to its overtly Christian symbolism. This led to Kohl’s final memorial
attempt—the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. Consisting of concrete pillars (stelae), architect
Peter Eisenman hoped to produce an uneasy and open-ended atmosphere within an outwardly
rational and ordered design. For Kohl, the Holocaust Memorial would be a common space that
Germany, and the capital of reunified Germany, needed to confront its past, and where East and
West Germans alike could recollect memories associated with the Holocaust.
This leads to the question of: what is the significance of choosing a national memory at a
particular time in a particular place? By examining these memorials, I argue that these sites are
representative of a selective memory Kohl tried to propagate, where the collective identity is one
that represents German unity and normalization as a modern nation. German normalcy can be
defined as establishing a presence in the global community as a free democratic nation, and
shedding the pariah label that came with the guilt associated with World War II and the
Holocaust. Kohl used, redesigned, and created official sites of memory explicitly linked to the
war and the Holocaust, to advance this political agenda.
Kohl’s intentions changed over the decades, using World War II sites of memory for
Cold War politics, reunification politics, and normalizing the German past. Therefore, the
success—or failure—of one memorial influenced the design and intended audience for the next.
With the Bitburg cemetery incident, Kohl sought to reinforce relations with the United States at a
point in the Cold War where East and West tensions were high. This attempt was unsuccessful
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considering Kohl linked Holocaust victims and SS soldiers together. Realizing that Germany did
not have a proper commemorative site that could be visited by foreign dignitaries, Kohl wanted
to create a memorial to fulfill such purposes. The desire heightened after reunification in 1990,
and resulted in designs for the Neue Wache. The latter was also confronted with controversy, as
critics from the Jewish population, and those whose family members were not associated with
combat roles, questioned how effectively the memorial represented these victims. With the
questionable success of the Neue Wache, I argue that the Holocaust Memorial was the final and
most ambitious attempt to create a site that, as a national Holocaust memorial, would symbolize
Germany’s normalization through its embrace of this most troublesome chapter of its past. This
site was also met with controversy from the design process to completion. More than a decade
after its opening, it is still debated whether it accurately and effectively represents the Holocaust
experience.3
German Postwar Memory
Germany has struggled for over half a century with how to properly commemorate, or
even discuss, its responsibility for the Second World War and the Holocaust. World War II
forced the German people to contend with the death and destruction that their country caused and
endured, and during the postwar years the division between East and West German memory only
perplexed the Germans’ past. When dealing with their history, Germans developed the term
3 The most recent controversy is with Björn Höcke, member of the Alternative for Germany
party, where he criticized how Germany has confronted its guilt, and that the Holocaust Memorial is a “monument of shame.” This is explained more in “Chapter Five: Conclusion.”
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Vergangenheitsbewältigung, which translates to “mastering the past.” It can be argued that the
legacy of Nazism is the “unmasterable past” for Germans.4
The official break between West and East Germany occurred in 1947 when the Allied
forces could not come to an agreement at the Moscow meeting—the Soviet Union wanted
restoration and reparations for its economy, while the Western allies wanted the revival of the
German economy.5 While this created the initial split of Germany, it was not until the Berlin
Crisis in May 1949 that the desire for a West and East German state heightened. The West
German parliamentary council in Bonn formally passed the “Basic Law,” which officially
established a West German government. The Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) was
established on September 15th, 1949, and Christian Democratic Party member, Konrad
Adenauer, became the FRG’s first Chancellor. As a response, Stalin announced plans for a
complementary East German state. The German Democratic Republic (GDR) was formally
created on October 7, 1949, led by Walter Ulbricht as Head of State.6
The division of Germany went well beyond the political and ideological struggles that
were inherent in the Cold War. The division also occurred in memory, with the FRG and the
GDR developing unique strategies to address the past. In East Germany, the communist regime
focused on commemorating the international character of Nazi victims. They then used their
memorials to impart three basic messages: 1) fascism was responsible for war crimes; 2) the
German working class aided by German Communist Party and Soviets resisted Nazi rule; and 3)
4 Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity
(Cambridge: Harvard Press, 1988). 5 Tony Judt, Postwar Europe: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin Books,
2005),124. 6 Judt, Postwar Europe, 146-147.
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communism (which triumphed over fascism) would prevail over Western Imperialism.7
Therefore, East Germany could claim that there was no Holocaust problem, for it was an
antifascist state. By focusing on specific war memories, East Germans experienced collective
amnesia about their role in Hitler’s Germany.8
The GDR authoritarianism established an official, state-sanctioned memory into all
aspects of war remembrance, maintaining the antifascist discourse, which also maintained its
legitimacy. By linking West Germany and the Nazi legacy, the GDR attempted to
simultaneously distance themselves from Germany’s criminals and de-legitimize West Germany
along the lines of the Cold War.9 East Germans viewed West Germany as the successor state of
Nazism, and affirmed themselves as the resistors or victims of fascism. Embracing these two
labels (or myths) established the commemorative trend of German suffering in East German
society.10
Immediately after the war, GDR Head of State Walter Ulbricht spoke of the need for
shame and guilt for Nazi crimes, and embraced socialist values for the recovery of Germany.
With the advent of the Cold War, the antifascist rhetoric heightened in intensity as an ideological
justification throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and served as validation for the postwar
dictatorships of Eastern Europe. Additionally, it created a social cohesion between East German
intellectuals, political elites, and citizens. A slight shift occurred during the 1980s when GDR
identity was being built on antifascism alongside the revival of German cultural heritage. East
7 Claudia Koonz, “Between Memory and Oblivion: Concentration Camps in German Memory,”
in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, ed. John R. Gillis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 266.
8 Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 101.
9 Siobhan Kattago, Ambiguous Memory: The Nazi Past and German National Identity (Westport: Praeger, 2001), 80.
10 Maier, The Unmasterable Past, 2.
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German’s instrumental interpretation of the Nazi past made antifascism the foundation for East
German identity, but identifying a German heritage transformed the GDR from a socialist state
to a socialist nation.11
West German memory can be described as deeply internalized and conflicted, where
tension between acceptance and repression of the past coexisted. Immediately after the war,
much of the guilt came from the Allies during occupation, where supervised processes of
reconstruction and de-Nazification occurred. This included the Nuremburg trials in 1945-1946,
where the magnitude of Nazi war crimes was broadcasted to the world, and made Germany the
world pariah. Then, with the division of Germany on the onset of the Cold War, the FRG
adopted the policy of avoidance, including efforts to end the purging. In fact, during the
Adenauer era the basic elements of the policy for the past included amnesty, integration, and
demarcation of the present from the past. The goal was to move forward, and to break West
Germany from the war years.12 West Germans used the building of the FRG to start over, and
Stunde Null (zero hour) represented the start of the “forgetfulness narrative” that fostered
selective remembrance in West Germany.13
During the 1950s, West German memory embraced the narrative of German
victimization, and emphasized this to suppress the perpetrator label. According to Robert
Moeller, Germans embraced victimization because trauma and suffering are powerful forces
when shaping communities of memory.14 Therefore, politicians, historians, and artists
11 Kattago, Ambiguous Memory, 111. 12 Norbert Frei, The Politics of Amnesty and Integration, trans. Joel Golb (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2002), xii-xiii. 13Robert G. Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of
Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 17. Stunde Null was a term associated with the end of World War II, and represented the discontinuity between Nazism and postwar reconstruction, especially for restarting of German memory.
14 Moeller, War Stories, 12.
10
propagated the narrative of German suffering, and created the misidentification of victims and
perpetrators. Politicians under Adenauer supported selective remembrance and pushed to
suppress the crimes of the Third Reich to establish a new Republic.15
West German memory shifted from repression and victimization during the 1950s to
mourning and confrontation with the war generation during the 1960s and 1970s. In 1961, the
Adolf Eichmann trial made the Holocaust an international affair, and then became the dominant
feature of twentieth-century German history, and the major challenge to West German
memory.16 A new generation of Germans born after the war started to question how to remember
the Nazi past, the Holocaust, and proper conceptions of a normalized German national identity.
This continued into the 1970s, where the Holocaust was central to collective German memory
and identity, and forced Germans to embrace responsibility within remembrance. West German
memory still included guilt and avoidance, but it was reduced and replaced with the examination
of German perpetrators, and to integrate Nazism into German history. Memory of the Nazi past
expanded to politics and society, and groups such as the Social Democrats and the New Left
challenged the relationship between democracy and memory, and argued that more democracy
required more memory and more justice.17
Also during this time, the ascendency of Willy Brandt as the FRG Chancellor represented
openness and confrontation with the Nazi past to normalize West German relations with Eastern
Europe as part of his policy of Ostpolitik. Brandt argued that public memory in West Germany
15 Herf, Divided Memory, 7. 16 Herf, 334. Adolf Eichmann was a German SS-Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant Colonel), and
one of the major organizers of the Holocaust. In May 1960, Israeli Security Service agents seized Eichmann in Argentina, and took him to Jerusalem for trial in Israeli court. Eichmann was found guilty for his charges and sentenced to death. On June 1, 1962, Eichmann was executed by hanging, and remains the only time Israel has enacted a death sentence.
17 Herf, 334-335.
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should be part of a program of daring more democracy. Brandt and his foreign policy adviser
Egon Bahr argued that public reflection on the Eastern Front during World War II—where the
bloodiest and most intense fighting occurred—was necessary to rebuild trust and normalize West
German relations with Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.18 Ostpolitik looked beyond the Cold
War period, and brought attitudes of remorse and atonement to overcome the “underbalance of
trust” that resulted from criminal activities during the Nazi period, and which had “disgraced the
German name.”19
The West German struggle with how to remember the Nazi past reached a critical point
in the 1980s. While some still tried to disassociate West Germany from the Nazi past, there was
a growing interest in the Holocaust and National Socialism, creating public debate.
Conservatives discussed how to incorporate the Nazi past by embracing German responsibility of
the Holocaust to create a more positive German memory. This conflict is best explained through
the Historikerstreit (Historians’ debate) of the mid-1980s, where revisionist historians and
German nationalists endeavored to “normalize” German history in rendering it qualitatively no
different from histories of other modern nations. The Historikerstreit started in 1986 when
Jürgen Habermas challenged a series of assertions made by historians Ernst Nolte and Andreas
Hillgruber, who tried to justify or rationalize Nazi motivations behind the Holocaust by
equalizing Hitler to other tyrannical regimes, such as the Soviet Union. In doing so, the debates
among intellectuals called for a reevaluation of Germany’s Nazi past. The main issues brought
up in the Historikerstreit were history, memory, and national identity, where conservative
18 During World War II, the term Lebensraum dominated war policy and tactics in the Eastern
Front, which viewed the space in Eastern Europe and Western Soviet Union as desirable land for the expansion of Germany and the Third Reich.
19 Herf, 344. Ostpolitik (Eastern policy) was the normalization of relations between the Federal Republic of Germany and Eastern Europe, particularly the German Democratic Republic, beginning in 1969 under West German Chancellor Willy Brandt.
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intellectuals wanted to move outside a burdened past to create a common history, as well as a
new understanding of German nationhood and national identity. The Historikerstreit went
beyond history, representing the larger confrontation in the political divide between left and right
wings in West German politics.20
Kohl’s 1980s politics sought to reconfigure national identity by de-centering the
Holocaust memory with German suffering. Helmut Kohl became Chancellor of West Germany
as a member of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in 1982. From the beginning of his term,
Kohl saw unification as a long-term objective, and constantly pursued engagement with the
GDR.21 Kohl presented the CDU as an entity that represented a conservative and patriotic set of
values, with a strong commitment to NATO partners, and to normalizing the past by reinventing
its cultural memory.22 Many of the motivations behind the Bitburg commemorations came from
Kohl’s political agenda, his attention to creating a German identity, aims for reunification, and
strengthening relationships with the West.
Striving for German normality, Kohl was influential in the creation of West German
memory. Throughout his career as Chancellor, Kohl’s concern was the continuity of the German
nation, and German identity. He reshaped the memory of National Socialism to emphasize the
suffering of German civilians and soldiers, along with the suffering of Nazi victims. This also
matched with his conservative agenda, where Kohl stressed the continuity between German
history and the democratic stability of the FRG. During the 1980s, reframing German memory of
the Second World War and the Holocaust became central to Kohl’s political agenda: by
20 Peter Baldwin, Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Historians’ Debate (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1990), 4. 21 David F. Patton, Cold War Politics in Postwar Germany (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999),
107. 22 Christian Wicke, Helmut Kohl’s Quest for Normality (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015), 77.
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confronting and overcoming the past, the FRG could establish a positive German national
identity.23
Kohl’s first confrontation with the past, and his realization that Germany needed a proper
memorial site, was at Bitburg in 1985. For Kohl, Bitburg was the opportunity to accept and move
on from the past, and start anew with the West German identity. By asking Reagan to lay a
wreath in honor of German soldiers buried at the cemetery, Kohl sought to put an American
imprimatur on West German conservative sentiment. For the United States, accepting the
invitation to Bitburg would solidify Kohl’s support for the installation of medium-range missiles
in Germany. During this time, Reagan held a hardline stance to the Soviet Union, and on the
fortieth anniversary of the end of World War II, Kohl wanted to reinforce the nature of the
German-United States relationship, and Germany’s relationship to the war with U.S. approval.
Therefore, Reagan’s scheduled visits to Bergen-Belsen and Bitburg were highly political in
nature, acting as a means for both Reagan and Kohl to solidify relations between the United
States and West Germany to pursue Cold War aims. Kohl wanted to use Reagan’s visit to
reinforce West Germany’s status in the Western world, and with NATO; Reagan used this
opportunity to advance his nuclear weapon aims in Europe. As the following chapters will
describe, Bitburg exposed the contentious and divisive nature of German commemoration for
World War II and the Holocaust, and prompted Kohl’s search for a unified past.
Historiography and Methodology: Intersection of Memory and History
The following chapters examine the ways in which Kohl attempted to direct Germany’s
troubled relationship to the Holocasut and the Second World War, notably through the
23 Kattago, Ambiguous Memory, 46.
14
construction of two major monuments in Berlin. Therefore, this thesis falls within two main
fields of scholarship: memory studies and postwar German studies. The combination will aid in
understanding the societal constructs of memory, and how sites of memory are also influential
conduits when creating (or manipulating) memory for Germans during the twentieth century.
Memory studies is not unique to the field of history—sociologists, anthropologists, and
psychologists have also participated in developing memory theory. The complexities of Kohl’s
commemorations and the memorials he directed can be best understood through this prism of
memory studies, specifically the theoretical work concerning the construction of collective
memory and identity.24 Maurice Halbwachs developed the notion of collective memory, and
explains in his seminal work On Collective Memory that individuals and communities recollect
memories through frameworks (families, classes, and religion), which allows one to construct
memory and an identity within that particular framework.25 Therefore, collective memory is a
shared identity or history that can only exist among a common cohort of individuals who
exchange their memories through language. Halbwachs argues that collective memory is
inherently a social construct, and that memory can only exist with these societal forces. He says
that there is “no memory without perception” and the instant an individual is located in society it
is impossible to distinguish the interior observations (what is in one’s mind) from the exterior
observations.26 National memorials are constantly revisited in ceremonies of commemoration,
reinforcing Halbwachs’ concept of “frameworks of collective memory” in which official acts of
remembrance impart a normative understanding and memory of the past, connected to social
24 Individual and private memory exists, but this thesis will focus on official and public memory
in Germany. 25 Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. by Lewis A. Coser (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1992), 39. 26 Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, 168-169.
15
identity and inscribed, or absorbed, through individual acts of remembrance in a social
(collective) setting.27
Halbwachs’ concept of collective memory plays a vital role in postwar identity in
Germany, and issues of remembrance for the Holocaust. After World War II, and again after
reunification, Germans struggled with remembrance, and how to fashion collective memory to
create a usable past, and a workable identity, in wake of enormous traumas of Nazism, war,
Holocaust, and guilt as a perpetrator nation. Collective memory, then, is a constructed identity
that unites individuals or groups. However, to establish a collective memory, it requires selective
forgetfulness.28 French anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot in his seminal work Silencing the
Past is insightful when examining the multiple functions of constructed memory and
forgetfulness. According to Trouillot, “Silences are inherent in history because any single event
enters history with some of its constituting parts missing. Something is always left out while
something else is recorded.”29 Trouillot attributes this action to power—the unequal production
of history reflects the contributions of competing groups and individuals, some possessing more
power to create a narrative. Trouillot argues that for official memory, individuals who choose
what to remember or forget are usually elites possessing enormous power. Thus, the creation of
official memory as a dominant narrative for a society is constructed, shaped, and has an agenda,
usually with political motivations. Therefore, the presence and absence of facts embodied in
sources or archives are not natural, but instead, created.30 Silencing and erasure is prompted by
human beings, who participate in history as both the narrator and the actor; and human beings in
27 Halbwachs, 172. 28 Ibid, 182-183. 29 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston:
Beacan Hill, 1995), 48. 30 Trouillot, 48.
16
this case are not restricted to the professional historian. Trouillot explains that the public is just
as likely to contribute to history, for there is an overlap between history as a social process and
history as knowledge, and participants can enter the production of a narrative before a historian
does.31
Both “silencing” and collective memory can be applied to location and structures, upon
which French scholar Pierre Nora built his theories. According to Nora, memorials, termed lieux
de mémoire, are sites of memory (typically monuments, landscapes, or buildings) and are usually
in opposition to history, acting as a reconstruction of the past. Opposed to memory that is
“organic” and “true,” history is reconstructed, artificial, and sterile.32 For Nora, “Memory is life,
borne by living societies founded in its name… open to the dialectic of remembering and
forgetting, unconscious of successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and
appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived.”33 In short, memorials
are sites of memory that selectively represent the past while simultaneously displacing the
responsibility for remembrance away from the people and onto the site. People continually
construct the lieux de mémoire, appropriating them into national, individual, or societal agendas.
Kohl exemplifies common political usage of major sites of memory to serve presentist national
or social agendas. Kohl used each site of memory discussed in this thesis for remembrance and
mourning for World War II and the Holocaust, while simultaneously acting as a political
motivator to bring unification and national cohesiveness to a reunified Germany.
In addition to the political agenda behind the memorials, Kohl wanted to create a space
appropriate for the performance of memory. This can be considered a ritual space, an idea
31 Ibid, 25.
32 Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” in Representations, 26 (1989): 7.
33 Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 8.
17
sociologist Paul Connerton developed in his work titled How Societies Remember. For
Connerton, collective memory is organized through commemorative ceremonies and bodily
practices. In other words, commemorative acts (parades, memorial services, rituals, etc.) are also
performative, which can also be labeled as a “habit” or ritual activity, which creates memory.34
Connerton also argues that present society is established on the basis that all societies try to
determine a “beginning,” and is connected to bodily practices, which creates a pattern of social
memory.35 Therefore, memory is not only personal and cognitive, but also socially habitual—
each individual thinks or acts in behavior that is incorporated into our bodies as a habit.
Recently, history scholars have developed the concept of memory in landscapes and
monuments, most notably Jay Winter with his Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning. Winter
examines how individuals coped and remembered their losses through a study of bereavement,
which was so widespread and horrific because the First World War affected all European
society. Winter argues that World War I marked a drastic change in twentieth-century warfare,
and ruptured modernist and traditional forms of remembrance. This is not to say that traditional
forms of remembrance were obliterated—in fact, many nations embraced the traditional and
patriotic forms of remembrance. Winter analyzes the development of memory sites, and argues
that traditional forms were reconfigured to match these sites’ fixation on mourning the war dead,
which is a unique occurrence, influenced by the Great War.36
Robert G. Moeller, in his text War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal
Republic of Germany, examines the concept of “selective memory,” where groups and
individuals focus on unifying memories, and choose to suppress memories that represent a
34 Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 5. 35 Connerton, How Societies Remember, 13. 36 Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History
(Cambridge University Press, 1995), 3-4.
18
negative or guilty past.37 An example would be West Germany during the 1950s, where West
Germans chose to repress memories of responsibility and guilt for genocide, and focused on
memories that involved German as victims, such as the Allied bombings.
James E. Young has contributed to the embodiment of memory in architecture, and how
memorials or monuments construct a narrative that can create political dissent. Known for his
texts At Memory’s Edge, The Texture of Memory, and Stages of Memory, his work deals
predominantly with Holocaust memorials, and how those have been accepted and perceived by
the general public, along with the political implications in memorials. Young explores
monuments’ transitions from sites that represent national traumas or tragedies to sites of
collective remorse. He suggests that memorials create memory spaces, but also to come to terms
with the past, in the best case to facilitate active remembrance, healing or closure.38 Young
discusses catastrophic memory associated with the Holocaust, and explains his direct
involvement in how nations—ranging from Germany to Israel, Poland to the United States—
have created memorials expressive of their unique national histories and responsibilities
regarding the Holocaust. Overall, there are many political connotations that accompany the
construction of a memorial, and the narrative it conveys is an intricate matter that does not have a
simple answer.
In addition to these seminal texts, this thesis is influenced by studies on postwar German
memory. One influential text is Jeffrey Herf’s Divided Memory, which gives a comparative study
of East and West German public memory of the Second World War. In this text, Herf exposes
37 Moeller, War Stories, 16. 38 James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1993), At Memory’s Edge: After Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), and Stages of Memory: Reflections on Memorial Art, Loss, and the Spaces Between (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016).
19
the developments of postwar memories of World War II and Nazism through public memory,
manifesting in different forms in East and West Germany. Additionally, both East and West
Germans went through politically and ideologically influenced amnesia over aspects of World
War II and the Holocaust throughout the Cold War, stating “Contemporary enemies had replaced
the shared enemy of the past.”39
There have been other influential works that focus on how Germans addressed the past in
postwar Europe, including works by A. James McAdams and Konrad Jarausch.40 Instead of
looking at how German memory was divided throughout the Cold War, Jarausch and McAdams
look at how Germans tried to achieve unity after reunification in 1990. While these works are
essential for understanding how the Kohl administration addressed the integration of East
Germans, their emphasis is placed on politics and economics. For this reason, my research will
contribute to this discussion by looking at the attempt for unification through the creation of a
common German memory of World War II and the Holocaust that had divided the nation, and
how Kohl used memorials to achieve unity amongst other political maneuvers.
Chapter Outline
In this thesis, I will examine Kohl’s journey to shape German memory through the
purposeful use of World War II and Holocaust memorials and commemorations to achieve a
unified memory, and to reinforce German normality. Each chapter will examine a specific site of
memory to examine how Kohl used it to further his political agenda, and how each site
39 Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1997), 101. 40 For more information, see A. James McAdams, Judging the Past in Unified Germany (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), Konrad H. Jarausch, The Rush to German Unity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), and K. H. Jarausch, After Hitler: Recivilizing Germans, 1945-1995, translated by Brandon Hunziker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
20
influenced, or was influenced by, subsequent memorials. “Chapter Two: The 1985
Commemoration in Bitburg and Bergen-Belsen” will center its focus on the Bitburg and Bergen-
Belsen commemorations in 1985, and how the visit represented the intent of strengthening
relations with the West. During this time, U.S. President Ronald Reagan held a hardline stance to
the Soviet Union, and on the fortieth anniversary of the end of World War II, Kohl wanted to
reset the nature of the German-United States relationship, and Germany’s relationship to the war
with U.S. approval. As Kohl’s first attempt for creating a new German memory, I will trace the
events of May 5, 1985 and why linking Bergen-Belsen and the cemetery in Bitburg created a
furor. I will argue that it was this event when Kohl realized that a German past needed to be
constructed, and sparked Kohl’s desire to create an official German memorial.
The next chapter, titled “Chapter Three: Moving on From Bitburg: Creating A Memorial
Inside the Neue Wache,” will examine Kohl’s transformation of the Neue Wache as a site for
official German memory. The Neue Wache was the first attempt in creating a memorial
motivated by the politics of reunification, and was built with the intent to appeal to both
Germanys. I will look at the relative success of the Neue Wache memorial, in terms of
representation of the German past, and analyze the major controversy for themes, arguments, and
political goals of critics surrounding its dedication in 1993. Here, this chapter will provide an
analysis of memory by looking at the site based on history of the location, the utilization of
Käthe Kollwitz’s Pietà, and Kohl’s politics. In addition, it will look at the symbolism in the
Pietà itself, Käthe Kollwitz and how her art appealed to both East and West Germans, and
analyze how the sculpture was representative for some sectors of society, but intrinsically
excluded others.
21
The final Chapter, titled “Chapter Four: ‘A waving field of pillars’: the ‘Memorial for the
Murdered Jews of Europe,’” will look at creation process for the Holocaust Memorial, and the
controversy that surrounded this site as well. Similar to the Neue Wache, the Holocaust
Memorial would provide a common space for all Germans to visit in order to approach the past.
Being an extension of reunification politics, the Holocaust Memorial was the final attempt for
Kohl to create a memorial that would normalize Germany’s past. This memorial takes on a
different stylistic and organizational approach, with the design being abstract and controlled by a
citizen’s group. While Kohl remained an influential participant, the decision and design process
was arguably a drastic change due to the grievances that resulted from Kohl’s control over the
Neue Wache. This chapter will examine how the Holocaust Memorial tried to address both
German national and international audiences, represented a maturation of Kohl’s memorial
vision, and possibly functioned as a means of conciliations for the Neue Wache controversy.
Overall, Kohl used the Holocaust Memorial as an attempt to find a solution to Germany’s
memorial “problem,” and this chapter will evaluate the premise of finding a solution, and its
effectiveness as a memorial for the Holocaust.
22
CHAPTER TWO: THE 1985 COMMEMORATIONS IN BITBURG AND BERGEN-
BELSEN
On May 5, 1985, President Ronald Reagan unwittingly participated in a political
spectacle, evolving into a diplomatic disaster for both Reagan and West Germany. On the
fortieth anniversary of the end of World War II, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl urged Reagan
to visit the Kolmeshöhe military cemetery in Bitburg after visiting the concentration camp
Bergen-Belsen on the same day. The Bergen-Belsen visit was doomed to be a disaster even
before Reagan arrived. The visit to the concentration camp was a form of appeasement to those
outraged with Kohl and his decision to use Bitburg for a political ceremony despite the discovery
of forty-nine Waffen-SS soldiers. A group of Jewish protestors, barred from the camp grounds
during the ceremony, entered Bergen-Belsen to reclaim the memory of the site after the
ceremony was over.1 And despite the protests by American and German Jews, Kohl persuaded
Reagan to accompany him to honor the buried soldiers as a symbolic gesture that reinforced
Cold War relations between the two nations. However, this act was taken as more than a
conciliatory gesture. When the events at Bitburg were placed alongside those at Bergen-Belsen,
spectators read it as two groups of victims were being honored: concentration camp prisoners
and German SS soldiers.2 Therefore, the visit to both locations placed moral equivalence
1 “Cemetery Protests Reportedly Barred,” The New York Times, May 5, 1985, accessed April 24,
2016, http://www.nytimes.com/1985/05/05/world/cemetery-protests-reportedly-barred.html. 2 Rudy Koshar, From Monuments to Traces: Artifacts of German Memory, 1870-1990 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2000), 256.
23
between the prisoners and SS in German and American memory—both groups were
commemorated equally.3
The effort by Kohl to turn the concentration camp into political platform did not succeed,
because the Holocaust memorial and the German military cemetery held contentious
memories—the Jewish population would not tolerate linking dead Waffen-SS soldiers and Jews.
Ultimately, Reagan and Kohl’s effort to use a Holocaust memorial as a setting to mark a forty-
year alliance during the Cold War failed. Additionally, in the previous decades both Germanys
struggled to confront their past, and especially in West Germany where most discussions related
to the Holocaust and National Socialism tried to identify Germany’s role as perpetrators, as
victims of Nazism. Kohl recognized the necessity in engaging with, and learning from the past,
saying in his address at Bergen-Belsen that Germans have a “historical responsibility… We bow
in sorrow before the victims of murder and genocide.”4 The ceremony evoked public fury and
displayed that Germans (and Americans) would not allow a blatant forgetting or
misremembering of the Holocaust at these powerful sites of memory. Kohl’s rhetoric of remorse
failed to convince his critics. His mission was in fact to move on beyond a fixation on German
remorse to a normal identity and integrated partnership with the U.S. and NATO.
Bitburg and Bergen-Belsen as platforms for a reconciliation ceremony exposed the
complexity of the sites of memory, and made Kohl realize that Germany lacked the proper
3 Sasha Kanick (MA, WSU 2012) did an extensive study on the 1985 commemorations at
Bitburg, and compared the events to U.S. President Barack Obama and Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Buchenwald concentration camp visit in June 2009. It is Kanick’s work that inspired me to pursue the events that happened in 1985. For more information, see Kanick’s MA Thesis: Sasha Rosemary Kanick, “The Politicization of Holocaust Memory: A Comparative Study of the Use of Holocaust and World War Two Memorials by American and German Heads of State in 1985 and 2009,” (master’s thesis, Washington State University, 2012).
4 “Address by Chancellor Helmut Kohl to President Reagan during the Visit to the Former Concentration Camp at Bergen-Belsen, May 5, 1985,” in Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective, Geoffrey H. Hartman, ed (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 252-253.
24
location that possessed a usable past for Germany. Therefore, Bitburg marked Kohl’s attempt to
normalize the Nazi past, but he encountered resistance when he honored the German Wehrmacht
distinct from the Nazi regime, while simultaneously honoring the SS men. Especially in the eyes
of Kohl, he believed that Germany should have a memorial site where Germans and foreign
dignitaries (such as Reagan) could pay respects to the war dead. Having an official memory that
represents a shared experience between both West and East Germans would be an important step
towards the normalization of Germany, which would result in better relations with nations not
only in the European community, but also with the United States. However, Germany possessed
a past that was harder to normalize—a memorial honoring the war dead and heroes would mean
memorializing fallen soldiers and participants in Hitler’s campaign to conquer Europe and
murder its Jews. Bitburg reminded Kohl of this predicament, so afterwards, creating a proper
memorial became Kohl’s ultimate aim in normalizing Germany’s past. Overall, Bitburg marks
the first, faltering step in Kohl’s efforts to use sites of memory to confront Germany’s complex
and divided past to create a narrative for a normalized Germany.
The Politics of Memory
The origins of this trip can be traced to the fortieth D-Day ceremonies in Normandy, in
which the Western Allies did not invite Kohl to the ceremonies in June 1984. Disappointed with
his government’s failure to convince the Western Allies to invite him, Kohl planned a series of
commemorations with Reagan at Kolmeshöhe cemetery near Bitburg. Plans for the visit started
on November 30, 1984 when Reagan met with Kohl in Washington, D.C., and Kohl stressed the
importance of having a commemorative ceremony for the fortieth anniversary of the end of
World War II. And basking in the success of Kohl’s and French President Francois Mitterrand’s
25
visit to the World War I battlefield at Verdun in September 1984, Kohl believed that a similar
visit with Reagan in West Germany would display West Germany’s strong alliance with the
U.S.5 For Kohl, this would establish German normality while also being a means for
reconciliation in relations with the United States and the West. In other words, this visit would
solidify the Federal Republic of Germany’s (FRG’s) full acceptance as a key partner of NATO,
and simultaneously reinforce bilateral relations with the United States, especially important
considering Reagan wanted to install missiles in West Germany.6 Additionally, the reconciliation
ceremonies at Bitburg and at Bergen-Belsen coincided with the Bonn economic summit in May
1985, which was an event that aimed to solidify Western economic unity.
Kohl’s 1980s politics reflected the more direct approach to confronting the Nazi past that
prevailed since the 1970s, and carried over some of Wilhelm Brandt’s Ostpolitik.7 Much of the
motivations behind Bitburg comes from Kohl’s politics, with his attention to creating a German
identity, aims for reunification, and strengthening relationships with the West.8 Kohl shaped
West German memory to emphasize the suffering of German civilians and soldiers, along with
the suffering of Nazi victims.9 Bitburg would allow Kohl to create a new West German identity,
while publicly displaying support for Reagan and the Western alliance.
5 Richard J. Jensen, Reagan at Bergen-Belsen and Bitburg (College Station: Texas A&M
University Press, 2007), 17. 6 Christian Wicke, Helmut Kohl’s Quest for Normality: His Representation of the German Nation
and Himself (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2015), 190. The missiles were part of the Strategic Defense Initiative, proposed by Reagan, which would strengthen the U.S. nuclear power in Europe against the Soviet Union.
7 Wilhelm Brandt outlined a policy towards Poland in 1969, which would soon transform into Ostpolitik, which was a détente in Europe and laid the foundations for a peace and cooperation between East and West Germany. For information on how Ostpolitik influenced German memory, see “Chapter One: Introduction.”
8 Christian Wicke, Helmut Kohl’s Quest for Normality (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015), 77. 9 Siobhan Kattago, Ambiguous Memory: The Nazi Past and German National Identity (Westport:
Praeger, 2001), 46.
26
In 1985, some Germans on the political right believed their nation could move on from
the legacy of Nazism and World War II, and move towards the future.10 As leader of the
dominant Christian Democrats (CDU), Kohl was a driving force behind this attempt at historical
revisionism. Since the start of his position in office in 1982, Kohl advocated (in terms of
memory) forgetfulness and amnesty to reach future peace and German normalcy. Establishing
strong relations with the United States was necessary in reaching German normalcy, and
prompted Kohl to invite Reagan in a reconciliation ceremony.
Most recent literature on German memory studies examines how the collective and public
memory of both world wars were constructed. While these studies are paramount for creating an
understanding of how the war was remembered in Germany, it is necessary to see how Bitburg
and Bergen-Belsen (as sites of memory) did not contribute toward a cohesive national collective
memory, but instead illustrated the complexities and political divisions of engaging with
Germany’s wartime past. These two commemorations triggered a shift in German memory
during the 1980s, and altered (or revealed) how the German public remembered its past. Along
with Historikerstreit and preservations of Holocaust sites, such as Bergen-Belsen, the
controversy at Bitburg evoked discussions on memory and victimhood, proving how improper
remembrance could create global backlash. When Kohl and Reagan commemorated the SS
soldiers at Bitburg, this was a direct approach to the Nazi past. Kohl intentionally persisted in
honoring the SS under the premise that all Germans were victims of the Nazis, and readjusted the
responsibility and guilt for Nazism and the Holocaust to the detriment of a “usable” past.
10 For a detailed overview on the development of West German memory in the post-World War II
years see the Introduction. It is important to note that prior to Kohl’s Chancellery, the Federal Republic addressed the past by reinventing it, or through selective remembrance that focused on German suffering. Starting in the 1960s, memory slowly shifted to Holocaust remembrance, which changed German identity from victims of Nazism to perpetrators.
27
Bitburg acted a political platform for Reagan, with the aim to advance the U.S. nuclear
weapon arsenals in Europe, known as his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), nicknamed “Star
Wars” by its critics. Reagan is known for his conservatism, and his vocalized anticommunist
views, and emphasized the dichotomy between the West and the East. On multiple occasions,
Reagan stressed the United States’ goal to overcome tyrannical systems, such as the Soviet
Union and communism. Reagan promoted this through a “Peace through Strength” foreign
policy, which used SDI to promote democracy to quell the Soviet influence in Europe.11 This
meant a committed alliance with the FRG to protect West Germany from communist influence.
In Reagan’s remarks to the West Germans in 1982, he stated, “In our times, Berlin, more than
any other place in the world, is such a meeting place of shadow, tyranny and freedom. To be here
is truly to stand on freedom’s edge and in the shadow of a wall that has come to symbolize all
that is darkest in the world today.”12 This statement illustrates Reagan’s devotion to alliance with
the FRG, and this strong commitment swayed Reagan to join Kohl in Bitburg, despite the
political backlash that ensued in 1985.
The political motivation behind Bitburg is evident through correspondence between
Reagan and Kohl in the months leading up to the visit. The political aims of the reconciliatory
ceremonies were to strengthen the relationship between West Germany and the United States,
which would in turn establish normalcy for West Germany. Part of the political aims were
pointed towards a strong and unified stance between the U.S. and West Germany towards the
Soviet Union. In a letter dated March 29, 1985 from Kohl to Reagan, Kohl expressed full support
11 Douglas Brinkley, The Boys of Pointe Du Hoc: Ronald Reagan, D-Day, and the U.S. Army 2nd
Ranger Battalion (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2005), 3. 12 Ronald Reagan, “Remarks to the People of Berlin, June 11, 1982,” in The American Presidency
Project, University of California Santa Barbara, accessed March 18, 2017, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=42623.
28
for American bargaining objectives, in particular the “enhancement of strategic stability between
the United States and the Soviet Union and the attainment of large reductions in intercontinental
strategic and intermediate-range nuclear missiles.”13 Kohl also emphasized that “Alliance
solidarity will be crucial for successful negotiations,” and he supported “swift progress” for U.S.
intermediate-range weapons.14 It is obvious in Kohl’s reiteration for support that he highly
valued the relationship between the United States and West Germany—again, reinforcing a
relationship with the West was critical for the normalization of Germany.
Reagan recognized this, and expressed appreciation for Kohl’s support. Reagan stated in
a letter addressed to Kohl on April 1, 1985: “On a more serious note, allow me to express my
personal gratitude for all you have done to preserve and enhance the spirit of friendship and
cooperation between our two countries. At a time when the great challenges before us hold the
potential for great achievements, I sincerely believe that the Alliance, the United States and the
Federal Republic are fortunate to have a man of your vision and leadership helping us to meet
them.”15 While Reagan appeared to be sincere and valued the relationship with Kohl, there were
obvious political motivations. In a memorandum sent by Reagan’s Executive Secretary Nicholas
Blatt to the White House on March 21, 1985, it stated that a personal message would be “an
appropriate gesture of appreciation for the Chancellor’s steadfast support of the Alliance and for
the top priority he has assigned to maintaining the closest possible cooperation between us and
the FRG,” and that “A word of thanks for his attention to these details would be taken by the
Chancellor as a sign of personal attachment and help cement further the close ties which he
13 Sommer, Peter: Files, Federal Republic of Germany I 1985, Ronald Reagan Library, letter,
March 29, 1985. 14 Ibid. 15 Sommer, Peter: Files, Federal Republic of Germany I 1985, Ronald Reagan Library, letter,
April 1, 1985.
29
works assiduously to maintain.”16 In other words, both the United States and Kohl saw the
significance of participating in a ceremony that commemorated not only the conclusion of World
War II, but also the improving relations between the U.S. and West Germany. Politics were even
applied to more personal and light-hearted messages—a second memorandum to Reagan about
writing a birthday note wanted to remind him that the “birthday message also includes a word of
thanks for Kohl’s personal involvement in arranging the schedule for your state visit to the FRG
following the Bonn Summit.”17 In short, it is obvious that both Kohl and Reagan had high
political motivations behind the May 5, 1985 visit. For Reagan, it was maintaining a relationship
in Europe that would maintain a hardline stance against the Soviet Union; and for Kohl, it was
strengthening the German-US relationship for full acceptance in the post-war international
community post-World War II.
Closer to Reagan’s visit, Kohl and Reagan were more expressive of how Reagan’s visit
was important for the demonstration of reconciliation between the United States and West
Germany. Reagan stated prior to his visit in a letter for Kohl: “I fully support issuance of a
declaration commemorating the end of World War II, emphasizing the process of reconstruction
and reconciliation and the fruits of peace, freedom and prosperity enjoyed by our peoples for the
past forty years.”18 From this statement, it is evident that both Kohl and Reagan had full
intentions of using commemorations and memory in Bitburg as political means to buttress
16 Sommer, Peter: Files, Federal Republic of Germany I 1985, Ronald Reagan Library, letter,
March 21, 1985. 17Sommer, Peter: Files, Federal Republic of Germany I 1985, Ronald Reagan Library, letter,
March 29, 1985. 18 Sommer, Peter: Files, Federal Republic of Germany I 1985, Ronald Reagan Library, letter,
March 29, 1985. The letter is undated, but in his closing Reagan stated, “I look forward to seeing you in a few days,” indicating that this letter was sent close to May 5, 1985.
30
relations with West Germany and the United States, and to construct a future with stable
relations.
The Ceremonies
In search for a proper site for the ceremonies, Kohl left the decision to the Reagan
administration. Not only does this exhibit the power relationship between Kohl and Reagan, but
can be argued that this contributed to the overlooking of SS dead at Bitburg, and was a display of
Kohl’s inattention to detail and tactical political mistake that would have repercussions. The
decision was left to White House Deputy Chief Michael Deaver, who traveled to West Germany
to select the site. In February 1985, he chose the military cemetery Kolmeshöhe in Bitburg, due
to its close proximity to an American military base. The original plan included only this location
with a wreath-laying ceremony to honor the war dead, and symbolic handshakes between a
German and American war veteran.19 In April of 1985, the White House announced that Reagan
would visit the war cemetery in Bitburg. There was a setback, when American Jews and veterans
learned that forty-nine SS soldiers were buried in this cemetery alongside the dead Wehrmacht.
The cemetery was already under scrutiny when White House spokesperson Larry Speakes
announced plans for the trip on April 11 in Santa Barbara, California. During the press
conference, Speakes was asked the identity of the soldiers buried in Bitburg, for there were
newspaper reports that the cemetery contained only graves of German soldiers. It was not known
at this point that the SS soldiers were buried at this location. The news broke when reporters
investigated the site the weekend of April 13-14. Amongst the SS solders was Sergeant Otto
Franz Begel, who had earned the German Cross for killing ten Americans in one day.20
19 Jensen, Reagan at Bergen-Belsen and Bitburg, 53. 20 Jensen, 54-55.
31
Many protested and demanded that Reagan change his plans to visit the cemetery. This
included conservative groups within the United States, such as the American Legion who
believed that the president was being insensitive to history by spending “part of his German trip
honoring Nazis.”21 One of the most predominant adversaries was Holocaust survivor and Nobel
Prize winner Elie Wiesel, who made a public statement at the Ceremony for Jewish Heritage at
the White House on April 19, 1985. Responding to the plans to visit Bitburg, Wiesel stated: “I
belong to a traumatized generation. And to us, as to you, symbols are important… I am
convinced, as you have told us earlier when we spoke that you were not aware of the presence of
SS graves in the Bitburg cemetery… But now we all are aware. May I, Mr. President, if it’s
possible at all, implore you to do something else, to find a way—to find another way, another
site. That place, Mr. President, is not your place. Your place is with the victims of the SS.”22
Through this statement, it is obvious that the Jewish population (with Wiesel as its
spokesperson, in this case) rejected their implicit equivalency with the SS. Reagan ignored
Wiesel’s pleas, and continued to Germany—politics triumphed over everything in this case. The
level of controversy with the subsequent discovery that the SS soldiers in question had
participated in a massacre in June 1944 in the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane, a site
preserved in ruins as a national memorial.23 The objection was straightforward—the presence of
21 “About Cemeteries,” Wall Street Journal, April 19, 1985, in Bitburg in Moral and Political
Perspective, Geoffrey H. Hartman, ed (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 173. 22 “Remarks of Eli Wiesel at Ceremony for Jewish Heritage Week and Presentation of
Congressional Gold Medal, White House, April 19,” in Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective, 243. 23 James M. Markham, “SS Unit’s History Overlooked in U.S. Plan on German Visit,” in The
New York Times, April 28, 1985, accessed April 28, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/1985/04/28/world/ss-unit-s-history-overlooked-in-us-plan-on-german-visit.html?pagewanted=all. On June 10, 1944, Oradour-sur-Glane in Nazi occupied France was completely destroyed when 642 of its inhabitants were massacred by the SS soldiers. The town is preserved in its post-massacre state, by the demand of Charles de Gaulle, to preserve the damage Nazi Germany did to France. For more information on the preservation of this site, see: Sarah Farmer, Martyred Village: Commemorating the 1944 Massacre at Oradour-Sur-Glane (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
32
the SS soldiers made the cemetery unacceptable for a symbolic ceremony of reconciliation due to
the collective remembrance of the war that existed in Germany at this time. Germans, Jews, and
the world community viewed the SS soldiers as the perpetrators of the Holocaust, and therefore
the ceremony was a direct confrontation with the past. The controversy forced Kohl to realize the
difficulties of reorienting Germany’s collective war memory.
Despite the controversy around Bitburg, Reagan continued with his plans for a visit.
Reagan stated at a press conference that “those young men [SS soldiers] are victims of Nazism
also… They were victims, just as surely as the victims of the concentration camps.”24 Again,
here victims and perpetrators are being equalized, consistent with Kohl’s narrative of Germany
being a nation of victims who had been oppressed by a tyrannical Nazi regime. To compensate
for the dispute around Bitburg, Reagan revised his itinerary to include a commemorative
ceremony at one of the most notorious concentration camps, Bergen- Belsen.
On the original itinerary, Reagan’s administration team included a visit Dachau during
Reagan’s visit. However, German political advisers in Kohl’s office deemed the visit unwise, for
it would conjure up memories and emotions with the Holocaust that Kohl tried to avoid,
especially with worldwide film coverage and photographs of the visit. Reagan also expressed
concerns for visiting a concentration camp, fearing that it would invoke memories of the
Holocaust that would be unpleasant, and impose feelings of guilt instead of focusing on the
FRG’s forty years of success.25 Since protests would not subdue, Bergen-Belsen was added to
the day’s itinerary to (unsuccessfully) balance out the controversy surrounding the Bitburg plans.
24 Gerald M. Boyd, “Reagan Likens Nazi War Dead to Concentration Camp Victims,” in The
New York Times, April 19, 2985, accessed March 17, 2017, http://www.nytimes.com/1985/04/19/us/reagan-likens-nazi-war-dead-to-concentration-camp-victims.html.
25 Wicke, Helmut Kohl’s Quest for Normality, 191.
33
Kohl and Reagan agreed that including a concentration camp would be suitable. Reagan
explained in an interview with representatives of Foreign Radio and Television at the White
House on April 19: “I received a cable from Chancellor Kohl, that… such a visit to—and it will
be Bergen-Belsen—was included in the trip, and I immediately accepted. I thought it was
appropriate in that way.”26 The decision to use Bergen-Belsen as the compensatory site of
specifically Holocaust memory raises questions, since it is a site that is engrained in British
history, for it was the 11th Armored British Division that liberated the camp on April 15.
Therefore, Americans had not associated themselves with Bergen-Belsen by the 1980s, and only
worsened Reagan and Kohl’s attempt to cultivate Holocaust remembrance.27
26 “Interview of President Reagan by Representative of Foreign Radio and Television, White
House, April 29, 2985,” in Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective, 251. 27 Ilya Levkov, Bitburg and Beyond: Encounters in American, German and Jewish History (New
York: Shapolsky Publishers, 1987), 23-24.
34
Figure 2.1: Map of major camps in Greater Germany, with Bergen-Belsen indicated in Northern Germany. Photo from United States Holocaust Museum.
The two ceremonies were held on the same day, and Reagan and Kohl started at Bergen-
Belsen and laid wreaths. Each gave very brief statements; Kohl, speaking first, emphasized the
role the United States played in liberating the German nation from Nazism, and the necessity to
preserve the relationship between Germany and the U.S. Kohl said, “You, Mr. President,
represent a country which played a decisive part in liberating Europe and ultimately the
Germans, too, from Hitler’s tyranny,” and that “The supreme goal of our political efforts is to
render impossible any repetition of that systematic destruction of human life and dignity… the
Americans and Germans therefore stand together as allies in the community of shared values and
in the defense alliance in order to safeguard man’s absolute and inviolable dignity in conditions
35
of freedom and peace.”28 In this statement, Kohl acknowledged Nazism as the perpetrator behind
the suffering of the victims in Bergen-Belsen, but did not define the victims. Reagan, in turn,
credited Kohl with the moral courage to confront the Nazi past by stating: “Chancellor Kohl, you
and your countrymen have made real the renewal that had to happen. Your nation and the
German people have been strong and resolute in your willingness to confront and condemn the
acts of a hated regime of the past.”29 In both speeches, Kohl and Reagan address the necessity
and the progression towards approaching the actions Germany was responsible for during World
War II.
Kohl and Reagan made similar speeches at Bitburg, with Kohl emphasizing
reconciliation, and Reagan said that they were there to honor the thousands of German soldiers,30
and to “mourn the human wreckage of totalitarianism.”31 Bitburg heightened the level of
controversy around the commemorations, despite it being brief. The events that unfolded at
Bitburg and Bergen-Belsen placed oppressors and victims on the same level, making it difficult
to assign collective responsibility or human agency. It also implicitly suggested that Nazi crimes
were not unique, given other massacres and violence that ensued throughout the twentieth
century. It also came to symbolize the dilemma of forgetting and remembering in Germany.
28 “Address by Chancellor Kohl to President Reagan during the Visit to the Former Concentration
Camp at Bergen-Belsen, May 5, 1985,” in Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective, 252-253. 29 “Remarks of President Reagan at Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, May 5 1985,” in Bitburg
in Moral and Political Perspective, 254. 30 Reagan also claimed Wehrmacht innocence, saying that they too were victims of a tyrannical
force. At this point, it was not well known that the Wehrmacht participated in heinous acts alongside the SS.
31 “Remarks of President Reagan,” in Bitburg, 259.
36
Being a nation housed both the victims of Nazi suppression and the perpetrators, discussing the
past brought an overwhelming sense of guilt. 32
For Kohl, the point of Bitburg was reconciliation; Kohl wanted to find a common ground
between victims and perpetrators, to achieve commonality and downplay and relativize the
Holocaust and German responsibility. This goal fell within Kohl’s memory politics during the
1980s, with the aim to de-center Holocaust memory and emphasized German suffering along
with Nazi victims.33 Bitburg was Kohl’s attempt to normalize the German past, and publicly
acknowledge that the FRG accepted its dark past, and was fully dedicated to the Western alliance
during the Cold War. Kohl used Bitburg and the memory of the past to mark a shift in West
German memory that would invoke a positive national identity elevated from the Nazi past, and
looked forward to a unified and less problematic national identity. For Kohl, Bitburg was the
symbolic act that would mark the end of German guilt, symbolize the normalcy of the FRG and
its participation in the West, and start a German identity that was unburdened by the Nazi past.34
Kohl reiterated the theme of reconciliation, stating in his address at the cemetery that
“Bitburg can be regarded as a symbol of reconciliation and of German American friendship.”35
Kohl also stated that the visit to the graves is a “reaffirmation… and a widely felt gesture of
reconciliation between… the people of the United States of America and us Germans,
32 Discussed in this chapter is predominately the Jewish reaction, and how many Jewish
individuals and organizations were offended by the ceremonies. What is not discussed here is that there was the first SS Panzer Corps reunion in Nesselwang, Germany one week after the ceremonies. As of now, it is known that they met, but more research is necessary to look at this as a radical confrontation with the Nazi past, in which Kohl and Bitburg opened the “window of opportunity.”
33 This conservative outlook on German identity and memory was the precursor to Historikerstreit, the conservative debate the equalized German responsibility for the Holocaust to other regimes, such as Stalin and the Soviet Union. For more information, see “Chapter One: Introduction.”
34 Kattoga, Ambiguous Memory, 49. 35 “Address by Chancellor Helmut Kohl to German and American Soldiers and Their Families at
Bitburg, May 5, 1985,” in Bitburg in Moral and political perspective, 257.
37
reconciliation which does not dismiss the past but enables us to overcome it by acting
together.”36 In response to the criticisms, Kohl expressed in a meeting with TIME magazine that
his objective was “reconciliation over the graves of the past,” and that he wanted to
“commemorate the day as one of remembrance, and far from denying the horrible acts
perpetrated by Nazism.”37 Interestingly (and not surprising), when asked about the symbolism
behind visiting Bitburg and the timing of “reconciliation,” Kohl addressed the U.S. missile
deployment in Western Europe instead of the issue of addressing the Nazi past. Additionally, he
claimed that the controversy at Bitburg was representative of the shifting generations in
Germany. Kohl blatantly stated that he considered establishing closer ties between the FRG and
the West “irreversible and part of our basic political philosophy,” also saying that it is a
“declaration of love for the Americans.” A major objective at Bitburg was to show U.S.
forgiveness for Germany’s past, and to prove that Germany was escaping the “dark ages of the
Nazi era.”38 This expresses the desire for German normality, and overcoming the “dark ages”
that plagued Germany up to that point.
Reagan expressed “great sadness that history could be filled with such waste, destruction,
and evil.” He was direct about the guilt of the SS soldiers, stating that “The crimes of the SS
must rank among the most heinous in human history.”39 This was accompanied with a
redemptive narrative for the sake of friendship with West Germany, and the president concluded
by stating, “The War against one man’s totalitarian dictatorship was not like other wars. The evil
36 Ibid, 256. 37 “Helmut Kohl: My Objective Was Reconciliation,” in Time Magazine, May 6, 1985, accessed
April 24, 2016, http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,967530,00.html. 38 Ibid. 39 “Remarks of President Reagan at Bitburg, May 5, 1985,” in Bitburg: In Moral and Political
Perspective, 259.
38
of Nazism turned all values upside down. Nevertheless, we can mourn the German war dead
today as human beings crushed by a vicious ideology.”40
The Aftermath
As stated before, the series of commemorations at both sites was a public relations
disaster, and proved that heavy resentment for National Socialism existed in German memory.
This is evident from the series of protests that were scheduled both prior to and after the
commemorations at both Bergen-Belsen and Bitburg. On the day of the visit, hundreds of Jewish
protestors from the United States, Europe, and Israel lined the roads to and from the military
cemetery to express their outrage at Reagan and Kohl for honoring the Waffen-SS soldiers. The
authorities in Bitburg were lenient, and allowed the protestors to stay, unlike the scene at
Bergen-Belsen where hundreds of Jewish protestors were removed by the police. In Bitburg,
there was a report of a man shouting at Reagan, saying: “Why did you do it? The SS killed my
father.”41 Similar to Bergen-Belsen, several demonstrators donned yarmulkas and recited
Kaddish. There was supposed to be a Kaddish—a prayer service for the dead—for the Holocaust
victims at Bergen-Belsen, but dissipated when the Jewish leaders who were supposed to lead this
group were amongst a group of protestors in Hannover. After Reagan and Kohl left the site, there
was a Kaddish recited at the concentration camp. The subsequent visit to Bitburg made the issue
of Nazi memory worse, by commemorating SS soldiers responsible for the Jewish victims that
Kohl and Reagan had just memorialized. Henry Siegman, the executive director of the American
40 Ibid, 259. 41 “Hundreds of Jewish Protestors Express Outrage, Anguish at Reagan and Kohl for Visiting
Bitburg,” in The Jewish Telegraph Agency, May 5, 1985, accessed April 26, 2016. http://www.jta.org/1985/05/06/archive/hundreds-of-jewish-protestors-express-outrage-anguish-at-reagan-and-kohl-for-visiting-bitburg
39
Jewish Congress, stated in a Jewish Telegraph Agency (JTA) article: “I and countless other Jews
like me cannot accept to see the President of the United States pay tribute to a cemetery where 49
former SS are buried.”42
West German and American government authorities prohibited protests at Bitburg and
Bergen-Belsen, which deepened the offense felt by Jews. Kalman Sultankik, the then vice
president of the World Jewish Congress, said that when Kohl and Reagan visit, the sites will be
“Judenrein” (“free of Jews”). In the same article, Sultankik stated that 28,000 Jews had said that
they would boycott the ceremonies, and others wanted to demonstrate against it. The protestor’s
main message was that “Reconciliation cannot take place over the graves of murders.”43
Not only did the events at Bitburg have immediate political consequences for both
Reagan and Kohl, but the Bitburg incident also helped initiate an intellectual debate over the
Nazi past. In the Historikerstreit (historians’ dispute) of the mid-1980s, revisionist historians and
German nationalists endeavored to “normalize” German history in rendering it qualitatively no
different from histories of other modern nations. In doing so, the debates among intellectuals
called for a reevaluation of Germany’s Nazi past. The Historikerstreit goes beyond history,
representing the larger confrontation in the political divide between left and right wings in West
German politics.44
At a dinner to welcome Reagan and his wife Nancy to the FRG, West German President
Richard von Weizsäcker gave a statement in the evening of May 5, 1985 about the relationship
between the United States, West Germany, and the past. During his welcoming speech,
42 “Reagan’s Visit to Bergen-Belsen,” in The Jewish Telegraph Agency, May 6, 1985, accessed
April 25, 2016, http://www.jta.org/1985/05/06/archive/reagans-visit-to-bergen-belsen. 43 “Cemetery Protests Reportedly Barred,” in The New York Times, May 5, 1985, accessed April
26, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/1985/05/05/world/cemetery-protests-reportedly-barred.html. 44 Baldwin, Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Historians’ Debate (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1990), 4.
40
Weizäcker recognized the challenges Germans face when addressing the past. He affirmed, “The
suffering caused to our Jewish fellow men in the name of Germany, epitomized by the
Holocaust, to the Russians, the Poles and nearly all our neighbors, but also the suffering of
countless Germans because of persecution, death and the loss of their homeland—none of this
will ever be erased from memory… All of us in Germany, whether old or young, face up to this
dark chapter in our history. We all bear responsibility for its consequences [emphasis from
original source].” 45 In other words, Weizsäcker believed that all Germans have a duty to
remember the Nazi past, and it is a past that all Germans must confront despite their relationship
to World War II. This is another direct confrontation with the past, and proved that there was a
collective sentiment in Germany that Germans needed to take responsibility for the burdens of
their history. What Weizsäcker said here contradicted what Kohl did in Bitburg—while Kohl
tried to use Bitburg to absolve the past, Weizsäcker rejected this notion, and believed that
acceptance, responsibility, and remembrance is the only solution to moving forward.
The Bitburg and Bergen-Belsen visits were Helmut Kohl’s first attempt to normalize the
German past, while being a highly political maneuver to strengthen relations with the United
States. After World War II the German people had to contend with the death and destruction that
their country caused and endured, and during the postwar years the division in German memory
only perplexed the Germans’ past. At Bitburg, Kohl placed oppressors and victims on the same
level, making it difficult to assign collective responsibility for the past. Additionally, he implied
that Nazi crimes were not a unique occurrence considering Kohl was willing to commemorate SS
soldiers responsible for the Holocaust.46 Not only did this create debate among the Jewish
45 “President Weizsäcker’s Speech Bruehl, Germany, May 5, 1985,” in Bitburg and Beyond, 175.
See full speech in Appendix. 46 Koshar, From Monuments to Traces, 257.
41
protestors that accompanied Kohl and Reagan at Bitburg and Bergen-Belsen, but also altered the
way Germans thought about Nazism, the Holocaust, and World War II guilt.
Lessons of Bitburg
The Bitburg affair had many political consequences for both Reagan and Kohl. Bitburg is
considered Reagan’s first political failure in his second term in office, especially when compared
to a highly successful speech for the D-Day commemoration at Point-du-Hoc. On June 6, 1984
in France, Reagan displayed his profound orating ability in front of a crowd of U.S. D-Day
veterans, along with representatives from former wartime Allies, Great Britain and France. He
effectively used a central site of American World War II memory to “re-ignite American
patriotism” after the Vietnam War in the 1970s, and to relate the United States to the present by
evoking collective memory that narrates the United States’ role as a liberating force in Europe.47
Reagan used language to exploit World War II to promote United States strength, linking
liberation on D-Day to liberation from the Soviet Union in 1984.48
As for Kohl, instead of de-centering the Holocaust in German identity, the Bitburg affair
exposed the complex relationship between politics and memory, and brought Holocaust
memorialization to the forefront. Bitburg arguably fueled the Historikerstreit in 1986, which
questioned whether Nazi crimes were unique to Germany, or if it was comparable to other
genocides, such as Stalin’s purges of kulaks in 1929-1933.49 Moreover, the 1985 visit proved that
47 Brinkley, Boys of Point Du Hoc, 9-12. 48 For Reagan’s entire speech, see: “Remarks at a Ceremony Commemorating the 40th
Anniversary of the Normandy Invasion, D-Day,” June 6, 1984, Reagan Library Archives, accessed March 18, 2017, https://www.reaganlibrary.archives.gov/archives/speeches/1984/60684a.htm, or see the video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEIqdcHbc8I, provided by the Reagan Foundation.
49 For more information on the Historikerstreit, see “Chapter One: Introduction,” or see: Peter Baldwin, Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Historians’ Debate (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990).
42
the international community was a powerful critic, and that including German SS soldiers with
the victims of Nazism raised questions of victimhood, and complicated memories not only within
Germany, but also abroad.
It is important to view Bitburg as not only a foreign relations disaster, but also as a
turning point in German attitudes towards its past. For Kohl, the failure of his foray into memory
politics spurred him to seek out a common memorial site that would avoid similar confrontations
that resulted from Reagan’s visit. The effort by Kohl to turn the concentration camp into political
platform failed, because the Holocaust memorial and the German military cemetery held
contentious memories—the Jewish population would not tolerate linking dead Waffen-SS
soldiers and Jews. By trying to move beyond the past, the ceremony evoked public fury and
displayed that Germans (and Americans) would not allow a blatant forgetting or
misremembering of the Holocaust at these powerful sites of memory. While the political
connotations around the Bitburg commemorations are obvious, it is essential to examine these
events to survey the level of controversy and public reactions to understand how Germany felt
about discussing their past through such commemorative actions and venues. This provides a
foundation on how Kohl used memory, and how Bitburg and the 1980s marked the transition in
German memory. Instead of achieving normalcy through the commemorations on May 5, 1985,
the political blunder at Bitburg cemetery, and the intellectual debates on how to remember the
German past, sparked a desire for a proper German memorial. That memorial would be the Neue
Wache memorial, placed in the center of Berlin.50
50 Koshar, 258.
43
CHAPTER THREE: MOVING ON FROM BITBURG: CREATING A MEMORIAL
INSIDE THE NEUE WACHE
On November 14, 1993 Helmut Kohl, accompanied by a large crowd, gathered at the
Neue Wache (“New Guardhouse”) in the new capital of Berlin. Kohl attempted to memorialize a
past that had long been divided by the Cold War, to create a new, coherent national memory for
the recently reunified German state. Kohl dedicated this building, which had stood for decades
and had been used by several German regimes, as the “Cultural Memorial to the Victims of War
and Tyranny,” giving a new life and purpose to this time-honored fixture of Berlin’s
commemorative landscape. Inside, an enlargement of Käthe Kollwitz’s Pietà acted as a
centerpiece, sitting underneath an oculus, exposed to the elements. Outside, a large crowd
gathered around the Neue Wache while Kohl and other German officials were inside
participating in the ceremony. The protestors shouted occasional chants, and behaved
eccentrically at times, forcing security officers to prevent protestors from entering the site,
resulting in a “heavy police presence around the ceremony.”1
Kohl’s commemorative project was not without its critics. Both at the site and in the
press, protestors objected to the building, the purpose of the memorial, and the sculpture inside.
While important, the case of the Neue Wache is not necessarily unique in German history. The
nation’s difficult twentieth century has made public remembrance problematic, as epitomized by
Kohl’s controversial reimagining of a monument used by both the Nazis and the Soviet-aligned
German Democratic Republic. Kohl had hoped to create a unifying site of war memory for
1 Tyler Marshall, “Past Torments as Berlin Honors War Dead: Germany: WWII Memorial, also
dedicated to victims of tyranny, is inaugurated. It has evoked “hysterical” debates,” in Los Angeles Times, November 15, 1993, accessed May 2, 2016.
44
Germany, but instead generated a heated and divisive debate about Germany’s totalitarian past
and its democratic future.
Striving for German normality, Kohl was influential in the creation of West German
memory. Throughout his career as Chancellor, Kohl’s concern was restoring the sense of
continuity of the German nation, and German identity. A key tactic in doing so was normalize
and relativize the Nazi era. He reshaped the memory of National Socialism to emphasize the
suffering of German civilians and soldiers, along with the suffering of Nazi victims. This also
matched with his conservative agenda, where Kohl stressed the continuity between German
history and the democratic stability of the FRG. During the 1980s, this revised, conservative
version of German war memory became representative of Kohl’s political agenda: by
confronting and overcoming the past, the FRG could establish a positive German national
identity.2 The political blunder at Bitburg represents the culmination of these political
confrontations. Kohl and Reagan’s attempt to honor the buried soldiers as a symbolic gesture
that reinforced Cold War relations between the two nations, illustrated the complexities of the
German past, and how divisive commemoration in Germany could be. The effort by Kohl to turn
Bitburg and Bergen-Belsen into political platforms failed, because the Holocaust memorial and
the German military cemetery held contentious memories—the Jewish population would not
tolerate linking dead Waffen-SS soldiers and Jews.
2 Siobhan Kattago, Ambiguous Memory: The Nazi Past and German National Identity (Westport:
Praeger), 46.
45
Figure 2.1: Neue Wache Memorial, Berlin. Photo by author.
46
Figure 3.2: Pietà by Käthe Kollwitz, Neue Wache, Berlin. Photo by author.
The Neue Wache memorial would achieve what Bitburg failed to do—act as a central
monument to all the victims of war and tyranny, and facilitate reconciliation of victims and
perpetrators for a recently reunified Germany. Unification in 1990 further stressed Kohl’s desire
to establish a sacred space, or site of memory, to enact and ritually perform the themes of a
unified German national memory. After decades of division, the Bitburg incident in 1985, and
the Historikerstreit, Kohl believed that a memorial that unified the victims of Nazism and
German victims of war would allow the nation to accept its past, and look forward to a unified
47
future.3 Along with the economic and social adjustments after reunification in 1990, the Kohl
administration attempted to create a traditional ritual space to establish a single German memory.
The division of Germany was a consequence and a reminder of National Socialism, thus the
desire to create a memorial that overcame that past, and created a narrative that included both
Germanys.4
Despite Kohl’s intentions with the Neue Wache, protestors criticized the memorial at its
dedication. The outrage of protests can be summed up in two major points. The first concern was
with the choice to use the Neue Wache as the site for the memorial. The Neue Wache represents
a Roman castrum, with Greek porticoes in the rear and back made from stone, while the façade
consists of brick.5 The Kingdom of Prussia constructed the Neue Wache as a guardhouse in
1818, and had been used for military purposes, and renovated to suit changing regimes and
political ideologies throughout the decades. Entrenched in German military history, and used
prominently by Nazis, many felt that the Neue Wache’s shadowed history made it entirely
inappropriate as a memorial site for the victims of the Second World War. Specifically, critics
charged that the Neue Wache did not properly represent the non-combatants of war, and instead
emphasized the Prussian militarism responsible for two world wars and the Holocaust. In fact,
the structure has served various purposes as a site of memory, and the layers of this accumulated
history obscured Kohl’s desire for the Neue Wache to present a single, unifying memory for
3 For a detailed summary of the Historikerstreit, see “Chapter One: Introduction.” It is important
to identify it as an essential turning point for German memory since revisionist historians and German nationalists tried to normalize German history by making it qualitatively no different from histories of other modern nations. By comparing Nazi actions to the Soviet Union, amongst others, the “Historians’ Debate” called for a reevaluation of Germany’s Nazi past.
4 Karen Till, “Staging the Past: Landscape Designs, Cultural Identity and Erinnerungspolitik at Berlin’s Neue Wache,” in Ecumene 6, 3 (1999): 262.
5 A Roman castrum is a building reserved for military use during the reign of the Roman Empire. Porticoes (singular: portico) are traditional Greek temple style, usually consisting of the iconic pillars placed in the façade.
48
newly reunited Germany. The Neue Wache was built in celebration of the Prussian army’s
victory over Napoleon, renovated during the Weimar Republic to honor those who died during
World War I, used by the Nazis for militarist and political rituals, and then appropriated by the
German Democratic Republic (GDR) for ceremonies and a memorial for the victims of fascism.
Therefore, the building represented the complex militaristic history that Germany struggled to
confront, which only burdened the site further, receiving objections from Germans, and Jews.6
Figure 3.3: Neue Wache Façade, Berlin. Photo by author.
The next factor was the sculpture itself, with a bronze enlargement of Käthe Kollwitz’s
statuette Pietà installed inside the center of the structure. In Kollwitz’s Pietà, the son illustrated
6 Brian Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 217.
49
in the sculpture is huddled on the ground between the legs of his mother. His legs are drawn up
close to his body, which is entirely enclosed by his mother’s embrace. Exposed to the elements,
the sculpture sits in the center of the stone-lined chamber, directly under the oculus enduring the
various weather conditions in representation of the pain and suffering the Germans endured in
World War II. Many saw the imagery of a mother embracing her son as being entrenched in
Christian imagery—the Pietà is a subject in Christian art where the Virgin Mary cradles the dead
body of Jesus, an image from the New Testament. This implicitly excluded the Jewish
population. Furthermore, many believed that the sculpture did not properly represent the women
and children that died from bombings, mass executions, and during the refugee crisis created
following mass expulsions of Germans from Eastern Europe after World War II. Therefore, a
select group of Germans thought that the image was exclusive to soldiers and the mothers of the
soldiers. Because of this, and because the sculpture had its origins before the Second World War,
critics deemed the sculpture as inappropriate. In short, by using a militaristic location and an art
piece that reflected motherhood and Christian motifs, the memorial did not properly reflect the
multiplicity of war experiences in German society. This is why some groups felt excluded in the
memorial, and why protestors criticized the dedication. This was not only limited to on-site
demonstrations. There was also criticism in the press, with the most common criticism being that
it “fails to differentiate between victims and perpetrators.”7
The Neue Wache was more than a simple site of commemoration, but rather an important
tool for reshaping post-unification German memory and identity. Kohl intended to construct a
useable past for a recently unified Germany that intentionally sidestepped much of the nation’s
most controversial episodes. Kohl believed that a memorial that unified both victims of Nazi
7 Stephen Kinzer, “The War Memorial: To Embrace the Guilty, Too?” in New York Times,
November 15, 1993, accessed April 12, 2016.
50
ideological and military policies would allow the nation to accept its past, and look forward to a
unified future. The Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge (German War Graves
Commission) also gave input, and believed that a national commemorative site for the German
war-dead would act as a unifying symbol for Germany.8 Unification of Germany became the
political motivation behind this memorial, with Kohl hoping that using a site where its history
reflected Germany’s history itself would unify Germans and memory. Kohl believed that it could
be a central monument that served the purpose of unification along with reconciliation of victims
and perpetrators, and unify everyone through hatred of tyranny and war.9 This political
motivation is essential with memorials, particularly the Neue Wache memorial since Germany
was still recovering from decades of division, and Kohl strove for the cohesiveness that is
foundational in a nation. Moreover, the Neue Wache was a continuation of the events that
unfolded in Bitburg. Instead of complementing the Cold War politics like Bitburg, the Neue
Wache was built in the post-reunification political atmosphere. This heightened the Neue
Wache’s purpose as acting as a memorial that unified German memory, as well as Germany as a
nation. Therefore, the Neue Wache would be established as a “lesson” of the Bitburg incident,
where Kohl hoped to establish an official site of memory for a recently unified Germany.
However, the Neue Wache (like Bitburg) was a confrontation with Germany’s complex memory
and history, and therefore would ignite powerful criticism from those who feared that it would
ultimately lead to a normalizing and neutralizing of the Nazi past.
8 Henry W. Pickford, “Conflict and Commemoration: Two Berlin Memorials,” in
Modernism/modernity, vol. 12, 1 (2005): 149, accessed December 14, 2015, DOI: 10.1353/mod.2005.0048.
9 Young, “Germany’s Holocaust Memorial Problem—and Mine,” in At Memory’s Edge (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 186.
51
The Neue Wache: A Complex History
The Neue Wache has been renovated many times, its function being changed because of
the varying ideologies and leadership throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century. It is no
wonder it became a point of contention when it reached its latest renovation in 1993, for its
history represents an amalgamation of Prussian, German nationalist, Nazi, and communist
ideology, which are intimately tied to the First and Second World Wars. This did not deter
Kohl’s decision to use the structure for the memorial. With Kohl’s conservative ideologies, he
saw the Neue Wache as the ideal choice for the memorial site. By placing a memorial in a
building of Prussian origins, it would honor national traditions, and recognize a heritage
connected to a noble German past (that is, a past before the decades affected by the world
wars).10 In fact, it is the Neue Wache’s location, architecture, and the relationship between the
military, people, and government that has made the location appealing as a war memorial in the
national scope.11
Originally built in 1818 to house the Prussian king’s soldiers, it simultaneously acted as a
national monument, commemorating the victory over Napoleon. Commissioned to architect Karl
Friedrich Schinkel, the design envisioned the structure as part of the Unter den Linden, acting as
a monumental display of royal power and German pride.12 The site itself is down the street from
the Brandenburg Gate, and accompanies other important public historical sites, such as the
German Historical Museum, and Humboldt University. In 1816, King Friedrich Wilhelm III
10 Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin, 218. 11 Wallis Miller, “Schinkel and the Politics of German Memory: The Life of the Neue Wache in
Berlin,” in A User’s Guide to German Cultural Studies, edited by Scott Denham, Irene Kacandes, and Jonathan Petropoulos (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 238.
12 Till, “Staging the Past,” 257. Unter den Linden is a boulevard in the center of Berlin, where one can find important institutions and structures such as the Neue Wache, Humboldt University, and the Brandenburg Gate.
52
commissioned Schinkel as part of a renovation of the entire center of Berlin. After the
Napoleonic Wars, the King wanted to transform Berlin as a display of military prowess, and as a
capital that belonged to a strong nation. The Neue Wache, when completed in 1818, would act as
a catalyst for the transformation of Berlin.13
The Neue Wache would house the company that guarded the king, acting as one of the
central locations where soldiers could report each day.14 Once the monarchy ended in 1918, the
Neue Wache no longer functioned as a guardhouse, and took on its present-day ceremonial
function. With the establishment of the Weimar Republic after World War I, the building
underwent new renovations. The year 1930 marked the official transition of the structure’s
function to being a site of memory, when the Weimar Republic decided to turn the guardhouse
into a national memorial, the “Memorial Site for the Fallen of the World War (Gedächtnisstätte
für die Gefallen des Weltkrieges). The Republic’s version of the Neue Wache can be considered
an attempt at internal consolidation by the Weimar government during a time of fragmentation
resulting from the economic and political interwar crisis.15 The memorial emphasized the role of
German soldiers as “Germania’s lost sons,” remembering the soldiers who defended the German
homeland. The interior was redesigned by Heinrich Tessenow in 1931, including a large gold-
and-silver plated oak wreath placed upon a black granite cube, alone in the center of the structure
illuminated by an oculus.16 The oculus was the only source of natural light, for Tessnow sealed
off the original side windows, and the entrance was replaced by iron-rod gates.17
13 Miller, “Schinkel and the Politics of German Memory,” 228-232. 14 Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin, 218. 15 Sean A. Forner, “War Commemoration and the Republic in Crisis: Weimar Germany and the
Neue Wache,” in Central European History 35, 4 (2002): 516. 16 Jay Winter explains in his text Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning that the oak was a symbol of
nationalist ideals, and was considered the German tree. This symbol had become common at memorials in German World War I cemeteries, becoming associated with death.
17 Miller, 240.
53
Figure 3.4: Inside the Neue Wache, June 1931. Photo courtesy of the Deutsches Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archive), through Wikimedia Commons.
The “Memorial for the Fallen of the World War” opened on June 2, 1931. Important
representatives of the Weimar Republic, the Prussian state, and the military attended. Unter den
Linden was crowded with onlookers, with marchers who were saluted by groups of National
Socialists. President Paul von Hindenburg, Prime Minister Otto Braun, and Defense Minister
Karl Eduard Wilhelm Groener spoke at the dedication, emphasizing on points of unity, strength,
and loyalty.18 The Neue Wache’s time as a memorial for the Weimar Republic was short-lived,
but Tessenow’s renovations served as a template for the following regimes to use. The first
regime was the Nazis, the entity responsible for World War II and the Holocaust. The Nazis
incorporated the building into the National Socialist society, and co-opted the Prussian legacy.
18 Forner, “War Commemoration and the Republic in Crisis,” 526-532.
54
The design was acceptable to the Nazi leaders, as they kept the memorial almost unchanged, yet
the Nazi performed more ritualist activities at the location.19 Only two years after the Weimar
completed their memorial, the National Socialist regime transformed the Neue Wache into an
altar by adding a large wooden oak cross in the interior room. The structure was renamed a
Reichsehrenmal, or a “Reich” memorial of honor. This site became a site for ritualized mourning
of Germany’s heroes—Hitler and his dignitaries often visited, and laid ceremonial wreaths on
Heldengedenktag (“Hero’s Day”), which occurred annually on March 17.20
Figure 3.5: Berlin, Kranzniederlegung im Ehrenmal, March 12, 1933. Photo Courtesy of Deutsches Bundesarchiv, via Wikimedia Commons.
19 Ladd, 218. 20 Till, “Staging the Past,” 258-259. For a video of the ceremony, see: “German Heldengedenktag
1943 – Hero Day, WWII, Hitler, Goebbels, Göring,” accessed through https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1xdS8ScJcE. The video is a newsreel made for propaganda purposes during the war, and traces the ceremonies on that day placed in front of the Neue Wache. Includes footage of Hitler and his leading officials placing a wreath inside the memorial.
55
During World War II, the Neue Wache received damage, and the oak wreath was stolen.
After the Second World War, Berlin’s historic district was incorporated in the Soviet occupation
zone, and became part of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). During the 1950s, the GDR
restored the bomb-damaged Neue Wache, and rededicated it in 1960 as the “Memorial to the
Victims of Fascism and Militarism.” The title and the memorial served the GDR’s political
purposes, who wanted to target and place blame for the Holocaust and World War II on the
fascist authoritarianism of the past. By associating the perpetrators with “Fascism and
Militarism,” the memorial carried high political connotations that tried to alter German memory
to place the blame directly on fascism, militarism, and even capitalism, illustrating the Cold War
tensions by ideologically centering the memorial against the FRG and NATO.
In 1969, the interior was redesigned, and a glass block replaced the previous centerpiece.
Inside the glass block an eternal flame burned, and the remains of one unknown German soldier
and one unknown resistance fighter placed under the floor’s stone. Surrounding the centerpiece
were urns containing earth from concentration and extermination camps (Auschwitz,
Mauthausen, Natweiler, Dachau, and Buchenwald), and World War II battlefields (Moscow,
Leningrad, Stalingrad, Normandy, Italy, Norway, Prague, and Berlin).21 The memorial was an
interesting and complex connection between the destruction of the war and the victors. The earth
from the battlefields are locations where the Germans faced critical defeat, and Allied
advancement. Connecting these remnants with those of the concentration camps, there is a
relationship between victims and victors in the memorial. Both are critical for propagating the
East German and Cold War narrative of the evils of capitalism and fascism.
21 Ladd, 218.
56
The FRG used the Neue Wache to illustrate its militarism. Two East German soldiers
would stand guard outside the entrance every day, with a ceremonial changing of the guard, and
attracted many spectators when the soldiers goose-stepped into position.22 This continued until
1990; after the East German army disbanded, the goose-stepping guards were withdrawn and the
memorial closed. This centerpiece remained until Kohl’s redesign in 1993, where he replaced all
that was inside with Käthe Kollwitz’s Pietà—Kohl erased all that East Germany built inside. A
visit in Summer 2016 allowed the author to experience how Kohl’s redesigned memorial created
a different atmosphere appropriate to his aims. Upon entering the site, on either side of the
entrance, there is a concrete bench that many visitors sat on and admired the sculpture. Despite
the busy street and traffic noise outside, the inside is calm, and the environment is serene and
quiet. Arguably, the sense of tranquility was purposely done—the space of reflection and
peacefulness with the Pietà is a contrast to the militaristic symbols of the previous regimes. The
plans for the memorial were established in 1990—the unification treaty included a clause that the
Federal Republic would maintain the Neue Wache as a public monument. German Chancellor
Helmut Kohl implemented the project with plenty personal interventions on proposed designs, in
hopes of creating a memorial that exemplified the unification of Germany, and anticipated that it
would lead to a unified nation. Therefore, the Neue Wache was Kohl’s memorial in design and
concept, and represents his personal vision for creating a common basis for national war
memory.
22 Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin, 217. For a video on the changing of the guard, see: “NVA
changing of the guard, East Berlin,” Summer 1989, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydeJt2dQxWg.
57
Figure 3.6: Berlin, Neue Wache Unter den Linden, September 30, 1970. Photo courtesy of Deutsches Bundesarchiv, via Wikimedia Commons.
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Figure 3.7: Inside the Neue Wache, Berlin. Photo by author.
Interpretive Art as a Memorial: Käthe Kollwitz’s Pietà
When Helmut Kohl selected the Neue Wache to be the “Central Memorial of the Federal
Republic of Germany for the Victims of War and Tyranny,” he also decided to install an
enlargement of Käthe Kollwitz’s statuette referred as the Pietà. Originally a fifteen-inch
sculpture completed in 1938, on November 14, 1993 the sculpture was dedicated as a life-size
memorial aimed to demilitarize the site, and to act as a universal symbol of mourning and
maternal martyrdom. Additionally, Kollwitz was honored in both West and East Germany. East
Berlin gave the name Kollwitzstrasse to the street on which she lived in her honor.23 However,
23 Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin, 222.
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by examining Kollwitz’s history, it is evident that the motifs Kohl tried to emphasize were not as
pure as intended. The sculpture had its origins in World War I, motivated by the trauma Kollwitz
endured after the death of her son Peter, who fought for the German army in the First World
War. Many critics deemed the Madonna design inappropriate for World War II where many
women were killed themselves in bombings and mass executions. In addition, the sculpture is
modeled after Christian imagery—Mary mourning Jesus—and implicitly excluded Jews from the
memorial.
Figure 3.8: Pietà, Neue Wache in Berlin. Photo by author. Inscription reads: “To the Victims of War and Tyranny.”
Kollwitz was born into a politically active family. Her father was a socialist, which could
be the reason for her proletarian activism. Kollwitz was recognized early in her career for her
politically charged representation of the impoverished working classes. Kollwitz’s art was
60
reflective of the events that surrounded her. Much of her early work is directly related to her
socialist activism in the late nineteenth century. Kollwitz’s initial success came in the form of her
Weaver’s Revolt (1893-1897), a series of etchings based on an uprising of Silesian workers in
1844. In 1904, the Verbindung für Historische Kunst (Association for Historical Art)
commissioned her work titled Peasant’s Revolt, which was another series of etchings
representing an account of a 1535 peasant revolt in Southern Germany, led by a woman referred
to as “Black Anna.” This subject is representative of Kollwitz’s sympathies towards the
proletariat and her feminist beliefs.24
The themes of radical social activism and feminism were predominant in her art until
World War I, when the death of her son centered her focus on death, grief, and maternal bonds
with sons. Kollwitz expressed her disdain for the war in her diary, and recorded on September
30, 1914: “In such times it seems so stupid that the boys must go to war. The whole thing is so
ghastly and insane. Occasionally there comes the foolish thought: how can they possibly take
part in such madness?... All is leveled by death; down with all the youth! Then one is ready to
despair.”25 It is evident that Kollwitz had the opinion that war was pointless in comparison to the
lives of young men. Her contempt for war grew as the Great War continued, and by the end of
the war her position solidified into activism, as it is evident through a published article in the
Social Democratic newspaper, Vorwärts, where she wrote in response to a recruitment
advertisement in October 1918:
We have had four years of bloodletting—all that is needed is for one more group to offer itself up, and Germany will be bled to death… For the best men would lie dead on the battlefields. In
24 Wendy Slatkin, The Voices of Women Artists (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall,
1993), 182. 25 Käthe Kollwitz, “September 30, 1914: “Down with all the youth!” in The Voices of Women
Artists, 184-185.
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my opinion such a loss would be worse and more irreplaceable for Germany than the loss of whole provinces.
… But what about the countless thousands who also had much to give—other things beside their bare young lives? That these young men whose lives were just beginning should be thrown into the war to die by legions—can this really be justified? There has been enough of dying! Let not another man fall!26
In short, Kollwitz’s political activism emphasized her hatred and contempt for war. This soon
translated into images of war, and the poverty, grief, and death that arose from it in her
artwork.27
Kollwitz’s interest in the Pietà concept can be connected to Kollwitz’s experience of
Peter’s death. For years after Peter’s death, Kollwitz drew out designs for a sculpture that she
wished to dedicate to Peter, and the other young men buried at the Vladslo war cemetery in
Belgium. Her original intent was to include the image of Peter’s body in the sculpture, it being
stretched out while being embraced in Kollwitz’s arms, trying to evoke images of maternity and
an artistic bond between mother and son.28 The interaction between mother and son changed, but
the underlying principle of the sculpture remained the same—expressing the sadness of the
parents over a dead son was paramount. In the end, the sculptures Die trauernden Eltern (“The
Grieving Parents,” installed at Vladslo in 1932) depicted images of a mother and father together,
kneeling with undeniable expressions of sorrow. Currently one of her most famous creations, the
union of family—the mourning parents being placed in the cemetery where Peter lay—created a
26 Kaethe Kollwitz, “October 30, 1918,” in The Diaries and Letters of Kaethe Kollwitz, edited by
Hans Kollwitz, trans. by Richard and Clara Winston (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1955), 88.
27 Whitney Chadwick, Women, Art, and Society (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997), 290-291.
28 Regina Shulte and Pamela Selwyn, “Käthe Kollwitz’s Sacrifice,” in History Workshop Journal, 41 (1996): 201, accessed December 8, 2015.
62
sense of intimacy that all could relate to.29 This is supported by the universal gestures that the
mourning parents are placed in, invoking a familiar position related to sadness. It is unclear
where the original inspiration for the Pietà started, but when Kollwitz complete the statuette in
1938, it carried the same emotions and symbolism as “The Grieving Parents.”
Figure 3.9: Käthe Kollwitz, The "Grieving Parents,” Vladslo, Belgium. Photo by author.
As for the Pietà, the genesis is unclear. The theme of a mother cradling a dead child
became one of Kollwitz’s most powerful images after the trauma of losing her son, taking
different forms in her career. Kollwitz first employed the theme in a drawing she titled Pietà in
29 Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1995), 113.
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1903. Transforming traditional Christian symbolism, Kollwitz appropriated the Christian motif
of the Madonna mourning the dead Christ, and molding it into a statement of motherhood. Along
with the Pietà, the sketch titled Woman with Dead Child shows another mother embracing her
dead son, and emphasizes the notion of grief and loss intensely, capturing the emotions that
come with death.30 While a direct correlation between the illustrations and the sculpture cannot
be proven, it is evident that Kollwitz had explored the artistic rendition of a mother embracing a
dead child in her earlier work, and found this as an appropriate means when expressing grief and
death of a loved one.
Figure 3.10: Women with Dead Child, Käthe Kollwitz, 1903. Image from Elizabeth Prelinger's Käthe Kollwitz
30 Elizabeth Prelinger, “Kollwitz Reconsidered,” in Käthe Kollwitz, Elizabeth Prelinger ed. (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 40-42. The boy depicted in the piece is modeled after her son Peter, foreshadowing his death in the Great War.
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The Pietà installed in the center of the Neue Wache is not the original sculpture—it is an
enlargement of the original bronze relief. On October 22, 1937—the anniversary of Peter’s
death—Kollwitz mentions in her diary that she was working on the small bronze sculpture. She
says that it “has become something like a pietà. The mother is sitting and has her dead son lying
between her knees in her lap. It is no longer pain, but rather thoughtful reflection.”31 Kollwitz
never expressed intent to use the statuette in a public setting in her letters and diaries. And given
its small size, there is no indication that this sculpture was created with the intention of becoming
a public monument.
Figure 3.11: Original bronze statuette of the Pietà by Käthe Kollwitz, in the Käthe Kollwitz Museum in Berlin. Photo by author.
31 Käthe Kollwitz, Die Tagebücher, cited in Henry W. Pickford, “Conflict and Commemoration:
Two Berlin Memorials,” in Modernism/modernity, vol. 12, 1 (2005): 151.
65
Kohl, believed that Kollwitz’s Pietà was a universal figure of mourning, appropriate for
all who would grieve their losses at the Neue Wache. Kohl made the following statement to the
public explaining why he chose the Pietà:
Ich finde, daß diese Skulptur auch einer Erfahrung Ausdruck gibt, die in den meisten Gedenkstätten fehlt—ich wiederhole mich—nämlich dem Wissen um die Frauen als Opfer von Krieg und Gewalt, um die Frauen, die als Mütter oder Witwen von den Schrecken dieses Jahrhunderts in besonderer Weise betroffen waren. [I find that this sculpture gives an experiential interpretation that is missing in most memorials—I repeat myself—namely the knowledge of women as victims of war and tyranny, that women were especially affected as mothers or widows by the horrors of this century.]32
In other words, the image of female martyrdom is symbolic of admiration and mourning, and
acts as a common ground for identification for all Germans. Kohl hoped the enlargement of
Kollwitz’s original bronze statuette would emphasize the grief and contrition that came from a
son’s death in the war. For Kohl, this imagery was essential for establishing a German war
memory, since these represented common feelings all Germans felt. By bringing in a maternal
image for the centerpiece, Kohl attempted to demilitarize the site; but by representing women’s
grief through a mother, the women war victims are not properly represented, and it is insinuated
that women were only victims through the death of their sons.
As stated above, the Pietà is Kollwitz’s own reinterpretation of the Madonna and the
body of Christ, except the figures in Kollwitz’s sculpture are replaced by a peasant mother and
her son. The image is a seated peasant mother, enveloped in a cloak that drapes over the torso of
the son who rests between her legs in the mother’s embrace. The mother’s hand is extended out
to touch her son’s right arm, and she holds her son’s head to her breast. The son’s body is lifeless
32 Statement by Helmut Kohl, cited in Elke Grenzer, “The Topographies of Memory in Berlin:
The Neue Wache and the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe,” in Canadian Journal of Urban Research, 11, 1 (2002): 102.
66
with his head tipped back, and the mother’s eyes are closed with her brow furrowed in grief. This
was, no doubt, an emotional image, especially for those who lost a son in either world wars.
However, many viewed this intimate image as one based on Christian imagery—one can
associate Kohl’s association with the CDU, and his personal identity as a practicing Catholic, as
influence over his choice.33 By choosing this image, the Jewish community was potentially
excluded from the memorial. This contributed to the controversy expressed through media
sources, and sparked protest at the site itself.
Figure 3.12: Close-up of Pietà, in the Neue Wache, Berlin. Photo by author.
33 For more information on Kohl’s political motivations with the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), see the introduction. In short, Kohl presented the CDU as an entity that represented a patriotic set of values, and conservative and Christian values that the CDU held.
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Public Criticism
On the day of the dedication, a large crowd gathered around the Neue Wache while Kohl
and other German officials were inside participating in the ceremony. During the ceremony,
protestors objected to the dedication, and at times, challenged the police guarding the site. An
article from The Los Angeles Times stated that “Eight people were arrested after scuffles between
security officers and demonstrators,” and that there was a “heavy police presence around the
ceremony.”34 The article also stated that the memorial was not open to the public after the
ceremony, because of the security concerns the protesters imposed.35 The protests themselves
received much attention, with many newspapers around the world recording the controversy that
unfolded. Newspapers include Der Spiegel, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and
the Jewish Telegraph Agency—the latter being the most vocal considering many protesters were
from the Jewish community in Berlin. Through German and American newspaper articles, most
of the criticism can be associated to the following categories: 1) The form of the memorial,
concerning both the location and the sculpture; and, 2) concerning which dead should be
commemorated. In a New York Times article, Stephen Kinzer wrote a record of the objections
and the protests that surrounded the dedication. Kinzer explained that the protesters disapproved
of the site, the sculpture, and the inscription, for failing “to portray the horror Germans inflicted
on their own citizens and on citizens of foreign lands,” and that it “fails to differentiate between
34 Tyler Marshall, “Past Torments as Berlin Honors War Dead: Germany: WWII Memorial, also
dedicated to victims of tyranny, is inaugurated. It has evoked “hysterical” debates,” in LA Times, November 15, 1993, accessed April 12, 2016.
35 Marshall, “Past Torments as Berlin Honors War Dead.”
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victims and perpetrators.”36 Kinzer also notes that several dozen protesters arrived at the
dedication, shouting chants of “German murderers are not victims!”37
In Germany, news sources provided direct criticisms on the memorial. One critic was
historian Reinhart Koselleck, whose objections fall into the two categories stated above. In an
interview with Doja Hacker and Johannes Saltzwedel, both journalists for Der Spiegel on March
2, 1997, Koselleck gave extensive criticism of the memorial. He claimed that the memorial was
not properly thought through, and that the advisors for the memorial overlooked the “simplest
matters.” First, Koselleck said that there was uncertainty surrounding the dedication, and that the
distinction between perpetrators and victims be made, especially in the country of the
perpetrators. As for the Pietà, Koselleck argued that the sculpture excludes Jews and women. In
addition, he explained that the sculpture is appropriate for after 1918, where the mothers
mourning their sons was prevalent. After the Second World War, the model is obsolete. He
further explained that the sculpture is an inaccurate and misleading representation of the women
who died in the Holocaust and as refugees, along with the fact that the Pietà has anti-Semitic
overtones.38
While Koselleck represented the intellectual opposition to the memorial, the Jewish
population in Berlin also objected to the dedication. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency published
on article on November 16, 1993 that stated the leader of the Berlin Jewish community, Jerzy
Kanal, purposely stayed away from the memorial’s dedication, for the “murder of the (European)
36 Stephen Kinzer, “The War Memorial: To Embrace the Guilty, Too?” in New York Times,
November 15, 1993, accessed April 12, 2016. 37 Kinzer, “The War Memorial.” 38 Doja Hacker and Johannes Saltzwedel, “Denkmäler sind Stolpersteine,” interview with
Reinhart Koselleck, in Der Spiegel, March 7, 1997, accessed April 12, 2016, http://magazin.spiegel.de/EpubDelivery/spiegel/pdf/8654713.
69
Jews was unique.”39 The article also included quotes from Rabbi Daniel Landes, the director of
national education projects for the Simon Wiesenthal Center.40 Landes stated that “It shows that
Germany wants to close the book on the painful memory of the Holocaust by normalizing World
War II to be a war like all of the other wars,” a criticism shared by many Jews and non-Jews
alike. The article explained that the night on November 9, the 55th anniversary of Kristallnacht, a
group of 40 demonstrators chained themselves to the monument to express discontent, but were
removed by the police.41
These articles emphasize the controversies surrounding the memorial’s dedication, and
they also represent the public memory of Germany at this time. The memorial emphasized the
need to confront the National Socialist past, and how properly to remember those impacted by
the Holocaust. Evident from the articles above, many believed the Pietà did not properly
represent most victims the memorial intended to represent. The Christian imagery created dissent
in the Jewish population in Berlin, while also implicitly ignoring the women who died during the
war as non-combatants. In addition, placing the memorial inside a historical Prussian building
indirectly associated the World War victims to the military past responsible for both world wars,
the Holocaust, the rise of National Socialism, and a recently deposed East German regime that
was a hardline Soviet-style dictatorship. The articles show that there were no objections to
having a memorial, but opposition to the symbols used to remember the victims.
39 “New Berlin Memorial to War Dead Boycotted by Most Jewish Leaders,” in Jewish
Telegraphic Agency, November 16, 1993, accessed April 5, 2016. 40 The Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) is an international Jewish human rights organization
established in Los Angeles, California. It acts as an educational center for anti-Semitism and hate against Jews, while also teaching lessons of the Holocaust.
41 “New Berlin Memorial,” in Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Perceptions after 1993
In his text At Memory’s Edge published in 2000 (seven years after the memorial’s
dedication), James E. Young noted that the political controversy around the Neue Wache
memorial had almost dissipated, and that it had become a center of artistic admiration by tourists
around the world.42 When Kohl installed the Pietà in 1993, tensions from the Cold War were
prevalent, and the World War II generation still had a significant existence in society. Therefore,
when the monument was dedicated, there was a collective group of people that associated with
the memory being conveyed. With its relevancy, the memorial was a political symbol of great
significance and sometimes intimate association. Additionally, the memorial was created very
soon after reunification, with ambitious goals of being the symbol of a unified German war
memory and identity. With the two Germanys reunited, how to convey a unified past was a very
sensitive topic. Since then, reunification has ceased to be a prevalent issue, and has been
replaced by more controversial issues, such as the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin.43
In today’s Germany, the proportion of the population directly impacted or associated with
the memorial are minimal. Over the late 1990s and early 2000s, debates about the design and
purpose of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, and a revival of memories of German wartime
victimization, displaced the controversy over the Neue Wache. The Neue Wache has become a
tourist site, being one of the stops on Berlin’s great monument tours. By looking at Berlin
traveling sites and other travel agencies that advertise Berlin, this becomes more evident. For
example, the tourism website berlin.de says the Pietà “can be admired here” and does not discuss
42 James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge: After Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and
Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 187. 43 For information on the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, see “Chapter Four: ‘A waving field of
pillars’: the “Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe.”
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what the Pietà was intended to commemorate.44 Another website is culturetrip.com, where the
emphasis in their description of the Neue Wache memorial is placed on Kollwitz, her biography,
and the Pietà instead of discussing the reason for the memorial, the audience that it approached,
or the controversy associated with the memorial in length. The website Visit Berlin offers
walking tours of Berlin for 150 Euros. On this tour, a group of individuals can be taken to the
popular Berlin sites, including Unter den Linden, the Neue Wache being one of the stops on the
boulevard. The building is open to the public, where tourists and visitors can walk up the
building and view Kollwitz’s Pietà, and “admire” the artistic work.45 The building is considered
part of historical Berlin, and much of the controversy that surrounded the memorial in 1993 has
become obsolete. While the conclusion ascertained from travel websites can be insufficient in
understanding how the general public perceives the memorial, how the site is advertised signifies
that the sculpture and the artist are what the travel websites hope to captivate an audience with,
as opposed to war memory and politics. The site is not only a memorial, but a site to admire
Kollwitz’s art.
Despite the central focus on Kollwitz’s art, the Neue Wache still acts as the central war
memorial in Germany. Here, ceremonies and visits take place, and is considered one of the more
popular war memorials in Germany. In a BBC News online publication from August 2008, BBC
created a list of the “Most Moving Memorials,” where readers submitted a selection of the “most
moving experiences of monuments.” Among the ten listed, the Neue Wache was included.46 In
addition, in 2004 Queen Elizabeth II laid a wreath at the memorial, for promoting
44 Berlin Tourismus & Kongress GmbH, berlin.de. 45 “Guided Tours: Berlin Tourist Guides,” in Visit Berlin.
http://www.visitberlin.de/en/article/guided-tours 46 “In Pictures: Your Most Moving Memorials,” in BBC News, August 12, 2008,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictures/7556465.stm.
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reconciliation.47 On June 24, 2015, the Queen visited the Neue Wache again, and was received
with military honors in Berlin. Similar to her 2004 visit, the Queen went to lay a wreath at the
memorial.48
Within Germany itself, the Neue Wache still acts as a site of commemoration on
important German dates. For example, on May 7, 2005, the 60th anniversary of the surrender of
Nazi Germany and the end of WWII (May 7, 1945), German President Horst Köhler visited the
Neue Wache to commemorate the 60 years end of Nazi Germany. Joined by German Chancellor
Gerhard Schröder and other high-ranking politicians of parliament, Köhler and his congregation
moved across Unter den Linden to the Neue Wache. At the site, there was a simple ceremony
and the heads of Germany’s five main democratic institutions each laid a wreath.49 During the
commemorations, Schröder asked for forgiveness for Germany’s responsibility for the Holocaust
and World War II.50
Considering the German government used the Neue Wache for foreign relations and
commemoration on essential national-historical dates, and the site is conveyed through the media
as being moving instead of controversial, one can assume that the debate and criticism has been
suppressed, or displaced, in recent years. This could be a result of several factors. One is the
distraction of another controversy centered around the Holocaust Memorial (also in Berlin), built
within the same decade of the Neue Wache memorial dedication. Explained more fully in the
next chapter, the Holocaust Memorial met its own share of controversy and criticism throughout
47 “Queen Honours War Dead in Germany,” in BBC News, November 2, 2004,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3973651.stm. 48 “Queen Elizabeth Received with Military Honors in Berlin,” in Deutsche Welle, June 24, 2015,
web. 49 The five included Federal President Horst Köhler, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, two heads of
the chambers of parliament and the head of the constitutional court. 50 “German President: We Will Never Forget,” in Deutsche Welle, May 7, 2005, accessed April 5,
2016.
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the design process, and at the dedication. As a continuation of Kohl’s memorial ambitions to
achieve a proper German memorial for the Holocaust, many questioned what the design
(thousands of concrete pillars) was supposed to represent.
In addition, in the late 1990s much controversy arose around the topic of “German as
Victims,” with debates over how Germans needed to commemorate other World War II legacies
besides the Holocaust. Topics included the thousands of German rape victims of the Red Army,
the suffering of German citizens at the war’s end, and the victims of Allied bombings and
expellees from eastern Europe.51 At this time, many Germans sought ways to lay their own dead
to rest, and to incorporate them into German war memory. Particularly in 1995, Germans started
to talk about the Nazi past, but paid more attention to the crimes committed against Germans,
comparing the atrocities to the crimes of Germans against Jews. Instead of focusing on the Jews
as victims, German women, men, and children who were driven out of Eastern Europe by the
Red Army became the focus of debate. Memory historian, Robert G. Moeller describes this as
being “selective” in memory, where memories of victimization gave the Germans a collective
identity as victims, and not just perpetrators of Nazism.52 German identity and memory was
shifting during the 1990s, and events such as embracing German victimization and the Holocaust
memorial potentially distracted the controversy surrounding the Neue Wache.
With the transformation of Berlin as the German capital after unification in 1990 came an
attempt to establish a ritual space, or site of memory, to enact a unified German national
51 For more information, see: Robert G. Moeller, “Germans as Victims?: Thoughts on a Post-Cold
War History of World War II’s Legacies,” in History & Memory 17, 1/2 (2005): 147-194, https://doi.org/10.1353/ham.2005.0018, Robert G. Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkley: University of California Press, 2001), and Bill Niven, Facing the Nazi Past: United Germany and the Legacy of the Third Reich (London: Routledge, 2002).
52 Robert G. Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkley: University of California Press, 2001), 16.
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memory. However, by using a militaristic location, and an art piece that reflected post World
War I classical Christian imagery, the memorial did not properly reflect the multiplicity of war
experiences in German society. “Silences” were created by utilizing a building and Kollwitz’s
sculpture to create a narrative that attempted to simplify and normalize the complexities of
German history, and tried to achieve a universal narrative to accelerate the unification of
Germany. The Neue Wache has a complex history with its militaristic background, and multiple
renovations by the Nazi regime and GDR associated the site with two dictatorships that
controlled Germany. This created a point of contention for those who did not want to be
associated with the German past responsible for decades of postwar suffering. As for the
sculpture, controversy centered around the charge that it failed to provide appropriate
representation to all the victims of war and fascism. The Pietà implicitly excluded the Jewish
population with its Christian imagery, and was a product of World War I. Therefore, the imagery
was not appropriate for the Second World War, where millions of Jews were murdered by the
Nazis’ genocidal policies, and millions of women were killed in addition to soldiers. The Neue
Wache is representative of a selective memory Kohl tried to propagate, where the collective
identity is one that represents German unity and normalization as a modern nation.
This attempt was met with opposition, emphasizing the point that Germans were still
trying to properly confront its Nazi past. Additionally, the public criticisms on the symbolism of
the Pietà and the Neue Wache represent the realization that there was some inherent
forgetfulness when confronting the past. The Neue Wache memorial can also fit into a wider
discussion concerning the categorization of victims and perpetrators that was starting to emerge.
At the site itself, many protestors (particularly Jewish protestors) questioned the proper
representation of the victims unassociated with combat roles.
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The dedication of the Neue Wache memorial was not seamless, contrary to Kohl’s hopes
to create a national memorial for Germany. With lessons of Bitburg influencing the construction
of the memorial, the Neue Wache exposed more complexities in confronting the past. This led to
the construction of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, where the site was strictly dedicated to the
Jewish victims that had previously been inadequately represented. The Holocaust Memorial
would be influenced by Kohl and his experience with the Neue Wache, and would be the final
attempt for Kohl to create a German national memorial that would normalize Germany identity,
and establish a proper site of memory that would allow Germans and the international
community to visit. Overall, Kohl used Bitburg and the Neue Wache as political means to
advance German normalcy. The Neue Wache was used to achieve a unified German narrative,
and represents a crucial step to understand how West Germany incorporated East German
politics, memory, and ideology into one nation. This signifies the initial means in which Kohl
furthered his goals for German normalcy in post-unification Germany, leading up to the
Holocaust Memorial.
The criticisms of the Neue Wache were short-lived. In the subsequent near-quarter
century the memorial has become integrated into the memory, political, and touristic landscapes
of Berlin. and has integrated itself into the memory and political landscape of Berlin. Being a
“normalized” site of memory, the memorial was of mixed immediate success, but greater long-
term achievement. Unlike Bitburg, and evident from the examples above, the Neue Wache is an
integral location for Germany’s commemorative landscape, being an important stop for foreign
dignitaries, such as Queen Elizabeth II. Despite the eventual success of the Neue Wache, the
controversial dedication emphasized Germany’s Holocaust commemorative struggle, where
suppressing the Holocaust in German memory only emphasized the lack of a proper memorial.
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Therefore, the Holocaust Memorial plans began in 1994, barely one year after the dedication of
the Neue Wache, taking on a new level of controversy itself. It is arguable that a major reason for
the Neue Wache’s success is the diversion of popular and political attention by the new
controversy surrounding the creation of Germany’s national Holocaust Memorial.
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CHAPTER FOUR: “A WAVING FIELD OF PILLARS”: THE “MEMORIAL TO THE
MURDERED JEWS OF EUROPE”
In May 2005, the “Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas” (“Memorial to the
Murdered Jews of Europe,” or commonly referred to as the Holocaust Memorial) opened to the
public in Berlin.1 It took over a decade to settle on a design for the memorial—the first attempt
in 1994 was a failure, the second design process in 1997 was continually confronted with
controversy, and the final location and design was criticized when it was decided in 1999. In
June 1999, the German Bundestag voted to build the memorial for the Holocaust on a five-acre
piece of real estate in the center of Berlin alongside historical landmarks, placed between the
Brandenburg Gate and Potsdamer Platz. Kohl believed the memorial would serve as an official
memorial site where foreign dignitaries could pay respects, and was a crucial step for the
normalization of Germany. Consisting of 2,711 concrete blocks (or stelae), American architect
Peter Eisenman hoped to embody an illusion of order, while simultaneously creating an uneasy
and confusing atmosphere. However, the monument has been criticized for its inability to
properly convey the scope of the Holocaust’s horrors, and for concealing the complexities of
human emotion.
Through consulting Eisenman’s statements, publications, and interviews, it is evident that
Eisenman encouraged public participation through open access to the field of stelae.
Additionally, the design lacks symbols, signs, or direct messaging on the surface, allowing
visitors to interpret their own meaning, and elicit their own memory. Underneath the memorial,
there is an information center that provides various narratives and exhibits on Jewish families
1 The site’s official title is “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe,” but is colloquially
referred to as the Holocaust Memorial by Peter Eisenman, and by many visitors. For that reason, this thesis will refer to the site as such.
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persecuted by the Nazis. The info center is dark, and is accessed through stairs that lead
downstairs, underneath the stelae on top, and is the only part of the memorial that explains what
the memorial is for. Otherwise, the memorial was supposed to be timeless, offering an open-
ended design aimed to make visitors question the meaning of the memorial, and explore the site
unguided, and unobstructed, by inscriptions or images.
Figure 4.1: Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas, Berlin, photo by Brianna Webb
Inaugurated almost twenty years after Bitburg, and nearly twelve years after the Neue
Wache opened, the Holocaust Memorial is representative of how Kohl’s sense of memory and
skill in designing memorials had evolved. Kohl’s goal remained the same—to achieve a German
identity that normalized Germany’s place in the international community, and establish a
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commemorative site that would promote unity in German memory, and history. How he
accomplished those goals changed over two decades. In Bitburg, Kohl conflated the relationship
between perpetrators and victims, and created a political and cultural furor. While his aim in
1985 was to promote West German normalcy as a modern nation, it did not result in a unifying
identity. In fact, the commemorations in Bitburg and Bergen-Belsen were divisive. This led to
the Neue Wache, where Kohl, on his own precedent, designed a memorial in the center of Berlin,
to establish a common site for East and West German memory, and to create an appropriate
memorial site for dignitaries and international visitors alike. However, the design and location
created minute divisiveness, and once again, exposed Germany’s struggle with commemorating
the Holocaust. As described in this chapter, the Holocaust Memorial is a drastic change
compared to Kohl’s previous memorial endeavors. Instead of organizing it on his own initiative,
Kohl reached out to artists, historians, and architects to form a citizens group that would lead the
memorial design and purpose. The motivation behind the Holocaust Memorial remained to
create unifying narratives, and creating a normalized, usable past. The difference in this case is
how it was achieved.
This chapter will discuss the Holocaust Memorial as evidence that demonstrates how
Helmut Kohl used sites of memory to further his goals for establishing an official German
memory. This memorial would act as the exclamation point to Kohl’s memorial journey—the
Bundestag treated the memorial as a “final solution” to the Holocaust memorial problem.2 The
memorial challenged Germans to take a collective responsibility for the Holocaust instead of the
2 James E. Young participated in the competitions for the memorial, and was openly critical of the
concept of creating a “final solution” to the Holocaust memorial question, which is discussed more in this chapter. For more information, see James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge: After Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), and Young, Stages of Memory: Reflections on Memorial Art, Loss, and the Spaces Between (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016).
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guilt that both West and East Germany tucked away since World War II. For Kohl, the
transformation from guilt to collective responsibility through the Holocaust Memorial would
create a space that proves all of Germany is attempting to confront the responsibility of the
Holocaust. Internationally, the memorial would improve Germany’s status in the global
community, and like Bitburg and the Neue Wache, act as a means to normalize Germany as a
modern nation.
The Holocaust Memorial takes on a different agenda, with a less defined political goal
than Bitburg or the Neue Wache. While Bitburg was designed to reinforce Cold War relations
with the United States, and the Neue Wache intended to act as a memorial for all victims of war
and tyranny in Germany (unifying West and East Germany memory), we come to the question:
why this Holocaust memorial at this time? Memory scholar James E. Young in his text Stages of
Memory explains that the more fragmented and heterogeneous societies become, the stronger the
desire to unify experiences and memories with a common meaning created in common spaces.
Memorials, then, unify competing memories, or if not that, create a shared space for an otherwise
fragmented populace to experience their diverse pasts.3 This chapter will argue that the
Holocaust Memorial was intended to provide the common space that Germany, and the capital of
reunified Germany, needed to confront the Nazi past. The memorial is another attempt (the first
being the Neue Wache) to build a memorial that would create a site of memory that both East
and West Germans could share, and is an extension of the politics of reunification. Additionally,
the Holocaust Memorial contains a compensatory factor, for it was made specifically for the
Jews of Europe, the same group that felt excluded in the Neue Wache memorial.
3 James E. Young, Stages of Memory: Reflections on Memorial Art, Loss, and the Spaces
Between (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), 15.
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At first glance, the Holocaust Memorial takes on a drastically different aesthetic value
than the Neue Wache—instead of being a literal representation of the war experience, the
Holocaust Memorial is abstract, and leaves one pondering its meaning.4 Arguably, the Holocaust
Memorial’s abstract design is a result of the backlash behind the Neue Wache—Kohl may well
have realized that explicit symbolism in memorials can potentially exclude various experiences,
predominantly the Jewish memory of the Holocaust and World War II. For this reason, Peter
Eisenman’s design would allow individuals to create their own memory for the Holocaust
through a common space that would allow Germans and internationals alike to share a site for
commemoration. This was the best compromise for a memorial that tried to not only
commemorate the Jewish experience, but also allow West and East Germans to visit a common
site in the reunified capital of Germany.
The Search for the Holocaust Memorial
Original plans for the Holocaust Memorial were proposed by a citizens’ group headed by
journalist Lea Rosh and World War II historian Eberhard Jäckel in 1988. Rosh had three reasons
to create a memorial: 1) to remember the Holocaust, for Germany could not go on as if the
crimes did not happen, especially after reunification; 2) to have a memorial that honored those
who were murdered within the capital; and, 3) to restore the identity of those who were
murdered.5 Rosh and Jäckel hoped to place a memorial on the Gestapo-Gelände (Gestapo
compound), which was the former site of the Gestapo Headquarters and a vacant lot near the
4 Kohl utilized the Pietà inside the Neue Wache to elicit emotions of familial suffering, and used
the direct representation of the bond between mother and son to represent the emotions of loss. See “Chapter Three: Moving on from Bitburg: Creating a Memorial Inside the Neue Wache” for more information on the design, and Kohl’s hopes for using that sculpture.
5 Peter Eisenman: Building Germany’s Holocaust Memorial, directed by Michael Blackwood (Michael Blackwood Productions, 2005), film.
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Wall in the center of Berlin. The location already carried much controversy, with debates on how
to commemorate victims of the Gestapo. This location was a favorite district of Hitler and the
Nazi party in Berlin, and the SS occupied the district in near entirety after Hitler’s rise to power
in 1933, with the Gestapo establishing its headquarters in the former Museum of Industrial Arts
and Crafts building, which was vacated in 1933. This district remained as the nucleus of
Gestapo, Criminal Police, and SS government (and criminal) actions in Berlin until 1943, when
the Allied carpet bombing reduced the area to rubble, and further demolition in April 1949
turned the architectural evidence of the Nazi past to debris.6
The new task with the wasteland that the Gestapo-Gelände stood as became the focus for
rebuilding Berlin as a modern metropolis in the post-war era. This area also emphasized the East-
West divisions that was apparent in the 1950s and 1960s. One of the main streets, the Prinz-
Albrecht-Strasse, belonged to the Soviet sector, and the buildings along the southern edge were
under American administration. For this reason, the heart of the city remained desolate and
ruined, and acted as a buffer between the East and the West. It remained this way until 1978,
when historians, architects, and other Berliners exposed its historical significance, and
competitions for a memorial ensued in the 1980s.7 In fact, Kohl himself supported a federal
government proposal for using the Prinz Albrecht site for a new German Historical Museum.
The Bundestag halted the project, for Kohl’s opponents accused him of wanting to foster
national pride by “whitewashing the dark spots” of the German past.8
6 James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1993), 82-84. 7 A group of advocates for the confrontation with the Nazi past formed the “Active Museum of
Fascism and Resistance in Berlin.” Ironically, the Active Museum held a symbolic dig on the Prinz Albrecht site on May 5, 1985, the same day of Kohl and Reagan’s commemorations in Bitburg, where Waffen SS soldiers were buried. Whether this was intentional is unknown. For more information, see: Brian Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
8 Brian Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 159.
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Finding a proper memorial for the contested and murderous past of this location proved
impossible, and the vacancy of the area soon transformed into the “Topography of Terror”
exhibit in July 1987.9 Brian Ladd describes this exhibit as “the most self-conscious attempt to
uncover the historical legacy of a particular place in Berlin.”10 The exhibition invited visitors to
explore the overgrown former Gestapo Headquarters, and it attempted to situate the legacy of the
SS and Gestapo in the geography of Berlin and Europe. Thus, this exhibit documented Gestapo
activities of espionage, repression, and terror within Berlin.11 The focus in this exhibit was on the
perpetrators, and attempted to educate visitors on how Nazi crimes were committed by the
leaders of Germany, and how the terror engrained itself into Berlin geography and society. The
Topography of Terror was popular, and the temporary exhibit had multiple extensions. In 1989,
debate ensued on how to make the exhibit permanent, preserve the site, and how to place the
location into a memorial landscape in Berlin.12 For Lea Rosh in 1988, it was still evident that the
future of the Gestapo-Gelände was under debate, and would carry too much controversy with the
construction of a Holocaust memorial.
The Gestapo-Gelände (and the contentious nature of the Holocaust Memorial) is
representative of the wider issue with Holocaust memorials, especially in Germany. This is
because the Holocaust altered the purpose of memorials and monuments’ role in society. Instead
of glorifying national events, accomplishments, or heroic individuals, the Holocaust forced the
German people to view memorials as sites of communal repentance. With German Holocaust
commemoration, the challenge was to find how Germans, as perpetrators, can remember the
victims—in essence, Germans were building memorials against themselves. Thus, Holocaust
9 Young, The Texture of Memory, 86-88. 10 Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin, 154. 11 Ladd, 161. 12 Ibid, 164-166.
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memorials are designed to address multiple audiences—both German and international.
Additionally, memorials often represent multiple meanings, and they use symbols within
complex spaces to extract those various meanings.13 Previously concerned with absence and
irredeemable loss, German artists and architects found a countermemorial vernacular for the
expression of national shame, and the rejection of the traditional authoritarian and complacent
national shrines. The aim, then, would be to articulate the void of Europe’s lost Jews without
filling it in, and express the breach in their faith in civilization without trying to mend it.14
Perhaps the most troubling quality when it comes to Holocaust memorials is that artists
and designers tend to develop a potential for redemption. Particularly in Germany, the use of art
has been criticized for compensating mass murder, which could potentially redeem the past with
the “instrumentalization” of its memory. The Holocaust shatters any aspect of religious or
political dialectic of “from destruction to redemption.”15 In the 1980s, German artists confronted
the fundamental problem of Holocaust memorialization in the form of Gegen-Denkmäler
(“countermonuments”), which James E. Young describes as “brazen, painfully self-conscious
memorial spaces conceived to challenge the very premise of their being.”16 The intention behind
these memorials was to remind viewers of Germany’s responsibility and label as perpetrators,
forcing them to remember instead of forgetting. Artists such as Jochen Gerz, Norbert
Radermacher, and Horst Hoheisel rejected the traditional forms of public memorials, for the
13 Harold Marcuse, “Holocaust Memorials: The Emergence of a Genre,” in The American
Historical Review 115, 1 (2010): 54. 14 Young, Stages of Memory, 4. 15 Ibid, 6. 16 Young, Texture of Memory, 27. See Young’s text, The Texture of Memory, for specific case
studies on how artists used “countermonuments” in Germany to challenge Germany’s memorial problem.
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traditional forms tend to console or redeem viewers from tragedy, and can potentially seal
memory off from awareness.17
The Holocaust Memorial in Berlin can be considered an outlier, or the end of the arc in
the trend of Holocaust memorials—instead of focusing on traditional symbolism and how to
convey a narrative, the memorial allows individuals to develop distinct narratives of the
Holocaust, and perpetuates the fact that Germany’s memorial problem cannot be solved.18
Initially, Rosh and Jäckel did not have enough political backing, but the project gained the
support of the federal government and the Berlin Senate, with both political entities believing
that a memorial as such would provide a strategic distraction from the Neue Wache. Soon, the
government decided on a piece of land by the Tiergarten in the center of Berlin. 19 Within close
proximity to the Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag, and the historical boulevard Unter den
Linden, the Holocaust Memorial would be situated within a landscape of great landmarks within
Berlin.
In 1994, a year after the dedication of the Neue Wache, the first international competition
for designs for a national Holocaust memorial started. The competition attracted artists and
architects, and a total of 528 designs were submitted from around the world. The jury that would
have decided on the memorial consisted of fifteen members who were appointed by the
Bundestag, the Berlin Senate, and the original citizens’ group. There were debates behind the
scenes, but not visible since the jury did not want to make the decision-making process public. In
March 1995, organizers announced the jury’s decision to use a combination of two designs—the
17 Ibid, 28. 18 This is point is based on the surface of the memorial—the visitor center below the field of
stelae provides the specific narrative of the Jewish experience that can be found in most Holocaust memorials. Eisenman did not want this addition, since that would contradict his goals for the memorial, but a compromise was met with Lea Rosh, explained more in this chapter.
19 Young, At Memory’s Edge, 187.
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design that belonged to the first winner, Berlin architect Christina Jacob-Marks, would be the
primary design, but would incorporate elements from New York artist, Simon Ungers. Jacob-
Marks’ design consisted of a 108,000 square-foot and twenty-three-foot-thick tilted concrete
gravestone with the names of 4.2 million murdered Jews engraved, with eighteen boulders from
Masada in Israel scattered over its surface.20
Figure 4.2: Christina Jacob-Marks Holocaust Memorial concept drawing. Photo is a screenshot from the documentary A Jew Among Germans by PBS Frontline.
This memorial held multiple symbolisms—eighteen is the Hebrew number for life. And
Masada was the last stronghold against the Romans at the end of the Jewish revolt of 66-73 C.E.
and is the site of a collective suicide of Jews that prevented the Romans from taking them as
slaves. This narrative of self-sacrifice created discontent, for this narrative was not applicable to
the Holocaust, where millions were murdered. Immediately after the winner’s announcement,
20 Jane Kramer, “The Politics of Memory,” in The New Yorker, August 14, 1995, accessed March
26, 2017, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1995/08/14/the-politics-of-memory.
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critics deemed the gravestone as too big, too divisive, and the representation of a sealed grave
too visual. Jewish community leaders in Germany vocalized their hate for the design directly to
Kohl. The Chancellor, aghast at the “gigantic size” of the monument, rescinded the government’s
support for the winner, and postponed the project.21 Germany remained with its memorial
problem.
Figure 4.3: Map of Berlin, with the location of the Holocaust Memorial indicated by the red dot. Photo from lonelyplanet.com.
Public interest in building a memorial resurfaced in 1997, and the memorial organizers
held various colloquiums throughout the year. Scholar James E. Young reluctantly participated
in the forums, and explained his experience in his text At Memory’s Edge. Young explains that
21 “Despite Kohl’s Objections, Plans for Holocaust Memorial Continue,” in The Jewish Telegraph
Agency, July 6, 1995, accessed February 17, 2017, http://www.jta.org/1995/07/06/archive/despite-kohls-objections-plans-for-holocaust-memorial-continue.
88
the forums were convened to ensure that the memorial would be built “before the Holocaust
receded further into the history of a former century.”22 Young explained that the best way for
them to proceed was by inviting the nine finalists from the 1995 competition, and invite a dozen
more architects and artists to submit new designs. Kohl’s office sent a deputy to participate in the
decision-making process, along with a speaker from the Berlin Senate.23
The 1997 competition is where the citizens’ group decided on Eisenman’s design for the
memorial. The path to Eisenman’s design was met with frustration and multiple roadblocks. An
article titled “Plans for Holocaust Memorial in Berlin Remain at an Impasse” from the Jewish
Telegraph Agency stated that at this time (April 1997), “money for the project is in place, but
plans for the memorial appear to remain at an impasse,” and that Kohl thought that the idea from
the 1995 competition of the plate with the victims’ inscribed names was “megalomania.”24
According to Young, when Eisenman proposed his design, he explained that there is not a single
answer to Germany’s memorial problem, so his design proposed multiple, collected forms
arranged so that visitors would have to find their own path to the memory of Europe’s murdered
Jews—it represented a process of finding memory, instead of a final answer.25
The memorial organization was convinced, and throughout 1998, the organization met
with Eisenman to make the proper revisions. The size was reduced (from forty-two hundred
pillars to about three thousand), and the height of the pillars lowered. However, the main concept
remained—the implied motion in the field of pillars would represent a memory that is not stable
or static in time. Visitors would have to find the memory themselves, and this disrupts the notion
22 Young, At Memory’s Edge, 191. 23 Ibid, 200. 24 “Plans for Holocaust Memorial in Berlin Remain at an Impasse,” in The Jewish Telegraph
Agency, April 17, 1997, accessed February 17, 2017, http://www.jta.org/1997/04/17/archive/plans-for-holocaust-memorial-in-berlin-remain-at-an-impasse-2.
25 Young, At Memory’s Edge, 206.
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of a single, dominant “collective memory,” and replaces it with individual memories created
through direct and active engagement with the site. In June 1999, the German Bundestag
announced its vote for Peter Eisenman’s design. The memorial would be built on the five-acre
piece of land that the committee for the memorial reserved for the memorial, across from the
Tiergarten, and down the street from the Brandenburg Gate.
The Memorial’s Design: Eisenman’s Project
After a total of twelve years of planning, and five years of construction, on May 10, 2005
the “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe” opened. Only two days after the sixtieth
anniversary for the end of World War II, German President Wolfgang Thierse stated at the
inauguration of the memorial, “Two days ago, on 8 May, the Federal Republic of Germany
commemorated the end of the war and the liberation of our country and continent from Hitler’s
barbarism. Today we are formally opening a Memorial which recalls the worst and most
horrifying crime of Nazi Germany, the attempt to exterminate an entire people.”26 The final
memorial consists of 2,711 stelae arranged in a grid pattern covering the five acres in the center
of Berlin. Visitors can enter from all four sides of the lot, and it allows individuals to interact
without symbols or messaging that would construct a narrative. In an interview with Eisenman in
Der Spiegel, Eisenman said that he “wanted people to have a feeling of being in the present and
an experience that they had never had before. And one that was different and slightly
26 “Speech by the President of the German Bundestag Wolfgang Thierse at the inauguration of the
Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe,” in official website for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, accessed March 18, 2017, http://www.stiftung-denkmal.de/en/memorials/the-memorial-to-the-murdered-jews-of-europe/speeches-at-the-inaugiration-of-the-memorial-to-the-murdered-jews-of-europe.html.
90
unsettling.”27 With approximately three feet of space for visitors to walk between the pillars,
Eisenman achieved his goal.
Figure 4.4: Rose at the “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe,” Berlin, photo by author.
Each stela is 95 centimeters wide, and 2.375 meters long, with varying heights (ranging
from zero to four meters high). The pillars are spaced enough for individuals to pass through the
various grids. “In searching for the instability inherent in an apparently stable system,” Peter
Eisenman believed that his design would allow personal expression and interpretation that would
avoid a permanent narrative to Holocaust memory. By using the pillars, that are varied in height,
Eisenman believed that the spaces “condense, narrow, and deepen to provide a multilayered
27 “Spiegel Interview with Holocaust Monument Architect Peter Eisenman: How Long Does One
Feel Guilty?” in Der Spiegel, May 9, 2005, accessed December 15, 2016, http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel-interview-with-holocaust-monument-architect-peter-eisenman-how-long-does-one-feel-guilty-a-355252.html.
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experience from any point.” 28 The main goal, is to create a space that would evoke feelings of
loss and contemplation, elements that Eisenman believed were essential to German memory and
Holocaust commemoration.
Below the “waving field of pillars” is another part of the memorial—an information
center is open to visitors, free of charge, that provides personal histories and narratives for a
select group of Jewish families that were victims of the Holocaust. On the southern edge of the
memorial, there is a stairwell that takes visitors below to the center. Underground, the
atmosphere is very quiet, and the there is little natural or artificial light, making the atmosphere
gloomier. Visitors first encounter a foyer that provides a timeline of the Nazi Party’s reign, from
1933 to 1945 with emphasis on the escalation of violence against Jews. This was the only time
the Nazis or SS soldiers are directly discussed, for the rest of the displays center the narrative on
Jewish individuals or families that were persecuted. At the end of this foyer, there are six large
portraits of Jewish victims that represent the range of victims in the Holocaust, each representing
a specific age or gender group: men, women, children, and the elderly.
28 Peter Eisenman, Blurred Zones: Investigations of the Interstitial (New York: The Monacelli
Press, 2003), 314.
92
Figure 4.5: Inside the stelae in the "Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe," Berlin, photo by author.
93
Figure 4.6: Entrance to the information center, photo by author
The entire exhibit consists of four main rooms. The first room is called the “Room of
Dimensions,” which provides quotations from memoirs from those persecuted. The quotes come
from a variety of texts, such as diaries, or letters that expose the emotions many felt while being
targeted with violence or death. After the “Room of Dimensions” is the “Room of Families,”
which illustrates the transformation of Jewish lives from before persecution up until their deaths.
The room utilizes the fate of fifteen families that were persecuted by the Nazis. This room is also
dark, and the information is displayed on concrete blocks that extend down from the ceiling—
almost a continuation of the pillars from above.
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Figure 4.7: Top: "Room of Dimensions," Bottom: "Room of Families," photo by author
The third room is the “Room of Names,” where a reading of short biographies of Jews
murdered or missing are given over a speaker system. The official website for the “Memorial to
the Murdered Jews of Europe” explains that this room is still being updated, since the National
Socialists destroyed many sources of testimonies. The site also explains that the aim of this room
is to memorialize the dead individually by hearing each testimony separate from another. The
reading of the names with the life stories of the victims presented in this room would take
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approximately six years, seven months and 27 days to read.29 The final room, “The Room of
Sites,” presents historical films and photographs on 200 locations of the persecution and
destruction of Jews and other groups. The locations include concentration camps, ghettos, sites
of euthanasia, death march routes, and sites of mass shootings. There is special attention given to
the seven largest extermination camps, with reports and memories relating to these places can be
accessed in audio stations.30
As for the title of the memorial, the “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe” suggests
that the memorial’s aim was to commemorate only the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, and
distinguishes Jews from other groups of victims. The memorial’s wide-ranging design, and its
explicit dedication to the Jewish victims of Nazism, attempted to mend the “palpable and gaping
wound in the German psyche,” where the memorial had to appear in “Berlin’s otherwise
reunified cityscape.”31 Solely commemorating the Jewish victims can be traced to the failure of
the Neue Wache, which tried to commemorate all victims of war. As explained in the previous
chapter, the Neue Wache aimed to pay tribute to all victims of war, and resulted in the Jewish
community in Berlin to criticizing the memorial’s poor representation of the Jewish experience
of the Holocaust and World War II. And going further back to Bitburg, victims were
commemorated alongside the perpetrators, and resulted in a hard-learned lesson for Kohl and
Germany—Germany needed to provide a site of remembrance for the Holocaust where the
29 The official website to the “Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe,” accessed December
15, 2016, http://www.stiftung-denkmal.de/en/exhibitions/information-centre/room-of-names.html#c1727. This room is also accessible online at www.raumdernamen.com. The goal is to have the victims and their stories available outside the memorial, and to raise funds for the production of more biographies.
30 The seven largest extermination camps are: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sobibor, Malyj Trostenez, Majdanek, Treblinka, Belzec, and Kulmhof. There is also an audio booth for Babij Jar.
31 Young, At Memory’s Edge, 189.
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audience cannot conflate victims with the perpetrators. Therefore, identifying who the memorial
is for brings specificity to an otherwise abstract memorial.
The Public Responds
The public reaction to the memorial varied—some responded positively to the memorial,
while others were critical of the abstract design. An article in Der Spiegel recorded a variety of
reactions from German newspaper articles after the opening event. Der Spiegel itself stated:
“With Tuesday’s [May 10, 2005] official opening ceremonies for the Memorial… a long difficult
chapter in the history of the new capital has come to a close.”32 The article also quoted the
Frankfurter-Allegemeine Zeitung, who said: “Thinking back on the often rabid 17 year long
debate… it’s truly astounding how unanimous, how nearly euphoric the praise for the sprawling,
walk-in sculpture by Peter Eisenman has become.”33 The article closed by saying that the
memorial is a “structural symbol of the incomprehensibility of the crime,” and that “the
Holocaust monument isn’t there to inform us about the mass murder of the Jews,” but there “to
mobilize our feelings.”34
The memorial is not without its critics. During the process of building the memorial,
Jewish community leader Michael May stated “The process was tortuous and… shameful,” and
that “The Jews in Berlin are slightly skeptical.”35 In the same article from The Washington Post,
Craig Whitlock explained that some critics complained that it was “too stark, too visible and too
32 “German Papers: A Monument to Germany’s Holocaust Grief,” in Der Spiegel, May 11, 2005,
accessed December 15, 2016, http://www.spiegel.de/international/german-papers-a-monument-to-germany-s-holocaust-grief-a-355504.html.
33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 Craig Whitlock, “Going to the Heart of the Holocaust,” in Washington Post, May 7, 2005,
accessed February 17, 2017, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/06/AR2005050601318.html.
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painful a reminder for a people who had long confronted the Nazi past,” while others said “the
monument should also commemorate the estimated 5 million other European victims of the
Nazis, including Poles, political opponents, homosexuals and members of the Roma minority,
also known as Gypsies.”36 Carolin Emcke and Stefan Berg, in their article “Extracting Meaning
from Concrete Blocks” in Der Spiegel question the effectiveness of Eisenman’s design. In fact,
they believe that the underground information center, which was included against Eisenman’s
will, “make the memorial into a memorial.”37 They called the information center the “punch line
of history” since the horrendous crime is remembered underground, and ask the question “how
exactly can it [mortal fear] be triggered by this mass of concrete…?”38 Seven years later, Richard
Brody, an American journalist, provides an outside perspective to how the memorial is being
perceived outside of Germany. In his article “The Inadequacy of Berlin’s ‘Memorial to the
Murdered Jews of Europe,’” Brody stated that without its title, “it would be impossible to know
what the structure is meant to commemorate,” and that “The metaphorical possibilities are
varied—too much so. The play of imagination that the memorial provokes is piously generic:
something to do with death.”39 In short, critics of the memorial question the ambiguous meaning
of the concrete pillars, and do not find it appropriate for the Holocaust since it does not provide a
direct form of commemoration.
Marian Marzynski is a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, and spent most of his life
avoiding Germany. Marzynski decided to visit Berlin, the capital for reunified Germany, to
36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. 39 Richard Brody, “The Inadequacy of Berlin’s ‘Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.” In
The New Yorker, July 12, 2012, accessed November 24, 2016, http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/the-inadequacy-of-berlins-memorial-to-the-murdered-jews-of-europe.
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investigate the construction of the memorial and recorded it through a PBS “Frontline” special
titled A Jew Among Germans. Marzynski was not impressed with the memorial from the start—
he criticized the location, describing it as a “no-man’s land” where Hitler’s government once
stood, where “circuses troops pitch their tents,” and called it the “ultimate apology” for the
crimes against the Jews. Additionally, the location conflicted with the modernization of Berlin,
which Marzynski described as being distracting.40
Beyond the location, Marzynski thought critically about how the memorial should be
designed, and sought out individuals who participated in both design processes. Christina Jacob-
Marks was the initial winner, and wanted to make the memorial engraved with Jewish names.
Marzynski says that no Jews would want to be again on a “German roster.” With every name, it
brought guilt and evoked German responsibility for the murders. Dieter Ronte was the director of
the Art Museum in Bonn and acted as one of the five judges. He believed that art was a vehicle
for remembering the Holocaust. Similarly, Genzine Weimiller believed the Holocaust should be
experienced through symbols, and that it is symbols that make the Holocaust personal.
Marzynski objected to this, and later states in the film: “My problem with art… is that is can
easily create an abstraction out of memory. Art and politics: a difficult medley.”41 He ends the
film by denying the notion that the memorial should act as an answer to the “memorial problem.”
Marzynski believes that Germans should feel a “good guilt,” where Germans would remember
the Holocaust, and not move on and forget. He states: “I wish that there would be no German
celebration for the end of World War II, no government-approved memorials, no finishing
40 Marian Marzynski, A Jew Among Germans (PBS “Frontline,” 2005), film, accessed February 9,
2017, https://vimeo.com/141651576. 41 Marian Marzynski, A Jew Among Germans.
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touches. My request to the German people would be that they create for themselves a concept of
good guilt, an honorable one, and within it a proud guardianship of memory.”42
Eisenman criticized the direct symbols many advocated for, and believed that the
Holocaust requires a memorial that steps away from the traditional forms of commemoration. In
an official statement he made for the memorial, Eisenman asserted that “The enormity and scale
of the horror of the Holocaust is such that any attempt to represent it by traditional means is
inevitably inadequate… Our memorial attempts to present a new idea of memory as distinct from
nostalgia… We can only know the past today through a manifestation in the present.”43 He
further explains that this is because nostalgia is specific to feeling sentimental about the past, and
memorials for nostalgia aims to create a living memory, or recreation of the past. To Eisenman,
the Holocaust cannot be remembered in nostalgia mode, for its horror ruptured the link between
nostalgia and memory. Therefore, remembering the Holocaust can only be a “living condition in
which the past remains active in the present.”44 In the memorial, Eisenman’s goal was to have no
goal and end in space—there is only the “living memory of the individual experience,” and focus
on the present.45
In his speech at the opening ceremony for the Holocaust Memorial, Eisenman said that
the memorial held two purposes. “First was to establish a permanent memory, to record what has
been in this capital city. Second, and perhaps more importantly, was to begin a debate with the
openendness that is proposed by such a project, allowing future generations to draw their own
42 Ibid. 43 The official website for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, accessed December 15,
2016, http://www.stiftung-denkmal.de/en/memorials/the-memorial-to-the-murdered-jews-of-europe/field-of-stelae.html.
44 Eisenman, Blurred Zones, 314. 45 Eisenman, 314.
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conclusions. Not to direct them what to think, but to allow them to think.”46 Eisenman did not
believe that the Holocaust memorial would be a “final solution” for Germany, in the way of
trying to find the proper way to commemorate their past. Instead, he hoped to drive the
discussion further by creating a memorial that would allow future generations to interpret their
individual memories, instead of subscribing thoughtlessly to a single collective German memory.
Therefore, the “waving field of pillars” that Eisenman used for his memorial represent the
fluidity and variability in the memory of the Holocaust. Eisenman stated:
The project manifests the instability inherent in what seems to be a system, here a rational grid, and its potential of dissolution in time. It suggests that when a supposedly rational and ordered system grows too large and out of proportion to its intended purpose, it loses touch with human reason. It then begins to reveal the innate disturbances and potential for chaos in all systems of seeming order, the idea that all closed systems of a closed order are bound to fail.47
While the Kohl administration, the citizens’ group that organized the memorial, and the Berlin
Senate had visions for a national memorial that would put an end to the Holocaust memorial
“problem,” Eisenman designed a memorial that would extend the possibilities of
commemoration.
Helmut Kohl’s Legacy
The Holocaust Memorial started as Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s project. Eisenman
recognized Kohl as the driving force behind this memorial, and noted that Kohl had the final say
in many of the decisions for the memorial. In fact, Eisenman believed at one point that “the
project was dead,” because it seemed to be Kohl’s endeavor, and when he lost re-election in
46 “Prof. Peter Eisenman: Architekt,” in the official website for the Memorial to the Murdered
Jews of Europe, pdf, accessed December 17, 2016, 31. 47 Eisenman, Blurred Zones, 314.
101
1998, plans for the memorial hit a lull.48 It was Kohl who overlooked Lea Rosh’s citizens’ group,
who boycotted the first design process, and worked with Eisenman on the design process up until
the end of his term in office. In Kohl’s eyes, the memorial was an investment, and very important
for not only his political career and memorial ambitions, but also for Germany and the
generations after reunification. Kohl recorded in his Tagebuch (diary) on June 25, 1999, the day
the memorial was decided:
On this day, I realize once again how much time I have invested in this extraordinarily important memorial… But both of us [Kohl and Heinz Ganlinksi] combined the honest effort to educate especially the young generation about the crimes of the National Socialists and to give normalcy to the social life of our fellow citizens of Jewish heritage… I myself have participated in the annual discussion on the erection of the memorial with great commitment… I intervened massively when the first drafts for the Holocaust memorial were available because, from my point of view, they were completely unacceptable. After several talks with the American architect Peter Eisenman and long reflection, I have let myself be convinced by his ideas and accepted the revised plans.49
What is evident in this entry is that Kohl saw this memorial as a personal project, that he saw it
as important for German normality, and that he was integral to the completion and decision for
the design. In Kohl’s eyes, the memorial would act as the solution to Germany’s memorial
problem.
Compared to Kohl’s previous commemorative endeavors, the Holocaust Memorial is
very abstract, taking on a new style and inclusivity. Kohl was the driving force behind
Bitburg/Bergen-Belsen and the Neue Wache, while the Holocaust Memorial was controlled by a
citizen’s committee, consisting of historians, artists, and architects. At this point, Kohl had
48 Peter Eisenman: Building Germany’s Holocaust Memorial, directed by Michael Blackwood
(Michael Blackwood Productions, 2005), film. 49 Helmut Kohl, Mein Tagebuch, 1998-2000 (Munich: Droemer, 2000), 75-77. The text here has
been translated from its original German by the author of this thesis.
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learned that organizing and designing memorials on his own was more divisive than inclusive.
Therefore, by placing the responsibility into the hands of the citizens group, Kohl signaled that
German citizens had a significant role in what the memorial would consist of, and it would be the
product of an inclusive selection process, instead of being controlled by the former chancellor of
West Germany. This is not to say that Kohl had a lack of control of the project—evident from
the entry above, the failure of the 1995 competition, and his involvement with Eisenman, Kohl
held a very integral role in the progression of the project. The main difference this time around is
that it was not just Kohl, but also the Bundestag and German citizens. This can be credited to the
probability of a higher public buy-in for this memorial. Initiated and controlled by a citizens
group, there was higher participation from a broad political and international spectrum, with
various professionals, such as historians, artists, politicians, and architects. In the beginning,
Kohl, leader of the CDU, led the project, and it was opened under the chancellorship of Gerhard
Schröder, the leader of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), representing the broad
political involvement with this project.
Additionally, the abstract design contradicts the literal representation of victimhood that
the Neue Wache possesses. Instead of adopting artwork to suit the needs of a German World
War II memorial, the Holocaust Memorial is original, and specifically designed for a memorial
aimed to represent the Holocaust. While Eisenman was very adamant about making the
Holocaust Memorial an individual experience instead of creating a collective narrative, the
abstractness also benefited Kohl’s political ambitions. Without literal representation of the past,
East Germans and West Germans alike could recollect a personal experience at a memorial that
was built on a location that straddles where the former Berlin Wall used to be. In this case,
symbolism is lacking in the memorial itself, which benefits Kohl’s hope for creating a memorial
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for a reunified Germany—anyone can visit and interpret an individual experience, disregarding
ideologies or origins, in the center of the new capital of reunified Germany. However, the
location is significant within Berlin’s political and memory landscape, in relation to both the
Nazi past, and the Cold War.
Did Kohl and the Bundestag solve the memorial problem? That is still debatable; but
when Eisenman’s design was settled on, there was hope that the Holocaust Memorial had
achieved a degree of closure. The German Bundestag announced its resolution concerning the
memorial on June 25, 1999. The resolution stated the following:
With the memorial we intend to honour (sic) the murdered victims, keep alive the memory of these inconceivable events in German history; admonish all future generations to never again violate human rights, to defend the democratic constitutional state at all times, to secure equality before the law for all people and to resist all forms of dictatorship and regimes based on violence. The memorial will be a central monument and place of remembrance, connected to other memorial centres (sic) and institutions within and beyond Berlin. It cannot replace the historical sites of terror where atrocities were committed.50
What can be understood from this statement are two main points: 1) that the memorial would act
as a lesson, and bring a “never again” attitude to the German people; and, 2) complement the
other memorials dedicated for the Holocaust and World War II, most arguably the Neue Wache,
while being the centerpiece of German Holocaust and war memory. Wolfgang Thierse, former
president of the German Parliament, and originally from East Germany, was interviewed in the
documentary Peter Eisenman: Building Germany’s Holocaust Memorial and stated:
Parliament has made the important and correct decision to build in the center of the capital, a reminder of the worst crime in German history. It is an appropriate decision and I find it important that this
50 “Resolution by the German Bundestag of 25 June 1999 concerning the Memorial to the
Murdered Jews of Europe,” in the official website for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (Stiftung Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas), accessed February 9, 2017, http://www.stiftung-denkmal.de/en/foundation/founding-chronology-of-the-foundation/beschluss.html.
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decision is actually realized. Through this memorial we show the publicly that we are not avoiding the dark passages from our history, and that we only choose the pleasant chapters from it. We’re acknowledging here that the memory of the Holocaust and the Nazi crimes are part of the political, moral, and cultural identity. Not in the sense of having a fixation with the past, but as an obligation to the present and to the future.51
The idea of confronting the past and moving forward is reminiscent of the politics of
reunification, where it was necessary for East and West Germans to reach a compromise not only
ideologically, but also in recollecting the past. Therefore, there is no doubt that one of the central
political aims behind this memorial was to reinforce the cultural and political reunification of
Germany. Wolfgang Thierse stated at the opening ceremony for the Holocaust Memorial: “The
decision to build the memorial in Berlin was one of the last resolutions passed by the Bundestag
in Bonn before its move. It was the decision to build the first joint commemorative project of
reunited Germany, and an avowal that this united Germany acknowledges its history, namely by
remembering the greatest crime of its history in its capital city, at its very center.”52 Again, the
memorial not only represented a larger issue of commemorating the Holocaust, and Kohl’s
contentious confrontations with the past, but also with the idea of reunification and rebuilding
the landscape of Berlin post-reunification.
The “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe” is one memorial within the greater
memory landscape of Berlin. Reunification in 1990 initiated subsequent adjustments and
rebuilding of Berlin in an attempt to establish a ritual space, or site of memory, in order to enact
a unified German national memory. Helmut Kohl initiated this transformation, and started with
51 Peter Eisenman: Building Germany’s Holocaust Memorial, directed by Michael Blackwood
(Michael Blackwood Productions, 2005), film. 52 Wolfgang Thierse, “Rede zur Eröffnung des ‘Denkmals für die ermordeten Juden Europas,’ 10.
Mai 2005,” translated by Thomas Dunlap, accessed February 17, 2017, http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/docpage.cfm?docpage_id=3569.
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the Neue Wache memorial, dedicated on November 14, 1993. For Kohl, the Neue Wache
memorial would act as a central monument to all the victims of war and tyranny, and act as a
common site for the unification of the German people, especially after four decades of division
throughout the Cold War. With the Neue Wache’s relative success, Kohl used the Holocaust
memorial as a continuation of creating an official collective memory of the Holocaust, while
offsetting the controversy from the Neue Wache. Along the same reasoning, Kohl believed the
Holocaust memorial would serve as a crucial step for the normalization of Germany, by
providing a powerful symbol that would enable Germany’s social and political unity and
enhancing Germany’s credentials abroad. The Holocaust Memorial was another attempt to create
a site that had the aim to create German normalcy by having a single Holocaust memorial. Kohl
used the Holocaust Memorial to supplement to critiques that resulted from the Neue Wache,
while establishing a unified German narrative. And similar to the Neue Wache, The Holocaust
Memorial would serve as an official memorial for the Holocaust, while normalizing Germany.
The monument has been criticized for its inability to properly convey the scope of the
Holocaust’s horrors, and the abstraction conceals the complexities of human emotion. Eisenman
believed that his memorial is the perfect representation of the Holocaust, since the event reached
horrors that shattered the traditional form of remembrance. Therefore, his concept for a “waving
field of pillars” shows the fluidity of individual memory, and avoids the dangers of having a
collective memory—a struggle Germany dealt with since World War II.
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CHAPTER FIVE: CONCLUSION
In January 2017 during a rally in Dresden, senior state party leader for the political party
Alternative for Germany (AfD) Björn Höcke declared that “German history is handled as rotten
and made to look ridiculous,” referring to the guilt associated with the Holocaust and Nazi war
crimes.1 The crowd responded with enthusiasm, chanting “Deutschland, Deutschland,” a
nationalistic behavior that is typically shunned in German politics. Höcke challenged the
collective national guilt, which has restrained German politics, and claimed Germans were “the
only people in the world to plant a monument of shame in the heart of its capital,” a direct
reference to the Holocaust Memorial.2 Höcke’s critique created a stir in Germany by challenging
Germany’s atonement for the Holocaust, and used nationalistic language that made many
concerned about the rising AfD.
Multiple political leaders and communities in Germany spoke out against Höcke and his
statements. Sigmar Gabriel, leader of the Social Democrats and Germany’s vice chancellor, took
to Facebook and shared an image of a banner across an image of Höcke reading: “To remember
the millions of victims of the Nazis is no weakness. Baiting the helpless to promote yourself is
weakness.”3 Additionally, Jürgen Kasek, the chairman of the Green Party for the state of Saxony,
voiced his disgust through Twitter, and called for the speech to be checked for possible
violations of anti-incitement laws. Kasek accused Höcke of using language that was “in the style
of national socialism.”4 Charlotte Knobloch, former president of the Central Council of Jews in
Germany, in a statement called the comments “deeply deplorable and fully unacceptable.”
1 Amanda Taub, and Max Fisher, “Germany’s Extreme Right Challenges Guilt Over Nazi Past,”
in The New York Times, January 18, 2017, accessed February 20, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/18/world/europe/germany-afd-alternative-bjorn-hocke.html?_r=0.
2 Taub and Fisher, “Germany’s Extreme Right Challenges Guilt Over Nazi Past.” 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid.
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Knobloch told the newspaper Stimme Heilbronn that Höcke’s speech was “unbearable agitation.”
She warned that “the AfD is poisoning the political culture and social debate in Germany,” and
that Höcke is aiming to exclude, ostracize and deprive certain social groups.5 More recently,
Thomas Opperman, chairman of the Social Democrats (SPD) said Höcke is a “Nazi,” and is
“Someone who wants to resuscitate the ethnic ideology of the National Socialists has no place in
a democratic society.”6
Almost a week after Höcke’s speech, and four days before the International Holocaust
Remembrance Day on January 27, the AfD announced that Höcke would be disciplined, but not
expelled, for the panic that resulted from his statements.7 As support for the AfD continued to
fall after Höcke’s disparaging of the Holocaust Memorial, the AfD leaders initiated proceedings
to expel Höcke from the party. A spokesman for the AfD stated that the party conducted a “legal
appraisal and political assessment” of Höcke’s speech, and decided that he should not represent
the AfD any longer.8 Currently sitting at around ten percent of the Bundestag, many are
concerned about the extreme-right party, being the largest right-wing party in Germany since the
National Socialists. This incident demonstrates that Germans still question how to properly
commemorate the Nazi past, and how to confront its history is still engrained in German politics
5 Hans-Jürgen Deglow, “Charlotte Knobloch wirft AfD-Politiker ‘völkishe Hetze’ vor,” in
Stimme Heilbronn, January 18, 2017, accessed February 23, 2017, http://www.stimme.de/suedwesten/nachrichten/pl/Charlotte-Knobloch-wirft-AfD-Politiker-voelkische-Hetze-vor;art19070,3780041.
6 “Leading German politician calls AfD’s Höcke a ‘Nazi,’” in Deutsche Welle, February 25, 2017, accessed February 25, 2017, http://www.dw.com/en/leading-german-politician-calls-afds-h%C3%B6cke-a-nazi/a-37714558.
7 Alison Smale, “German Party Won’t Expel Rightist Who Assailed Holocaust Apology,” in The New York Times, January 23, 2017, accessed February 20, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/23/world/europe/bjorn-hocke-alternative-for-germany.html?emc=eta1&_r=0.
8 “Germany’s right-wing AfD seeks to expel state leader over Holocaust remarks,” in Deutsche Welle, February 13, 2017, accessed March 19, 2018, http://www.dw.com/en/germanys-right-wing-afd-seeks-to-expel-state-leader-over-holocaust-remarks/a-37525199.
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and society. Almost twelve years after the dedication, the Holocaust Memorial is still debated
and criticized—Höcke’s sentiments proves that there is no “final solution” to Germany’s
memorial problem.
The Holocaust Memorial has also received a unique sort of attention through the forum of
social media, through platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. German satirist Shahak Shapira,
who is also a descendent of a Jewish Holocaust survivor, started a project called “Yolocaust,”
where he photo-shopped selfies taken at the memorial into photos from concentration camps.
The website, which has since been expunged of the photos, was designed so a viewer could
hover their cursor over the selfie, which would strip away the background of the memorial and
replace it with scenes from concentration camps, placing the young selfie-takers amongst the
emaciated and dead bodies. Shapira was motivated by witnessing the actions of individuals at the
site, such as jumping, juggling, or posing within the stelae, and posting the images onto social
media with questionable captions such as, “jumping on dead Jews @ Holocaust Memorial.”9
In a BBC News article, Shapira stated that “I felt like people needed to know what they
were actually doing, or how others might interpret what they were doing,” and that “The
controversy comes from the actions of the people.”10 Additionally, Shapira said his project was
9 Sited from www.yolocaust.de, the official website for this project. The images are no longer
available, but Shapira left a letter to the internet, along with select reactions to the project with a wide spectrum of responses. Shapira made a deal with the selfie-takers featured on the website, saying that they must apologize for their behavior to have the photo removed. The fact that the photos are no longer available can be taken as a positive sign. For more information, see www.yolocaust.de, or the following articles for some of the saved images: “Yolocaust: a satirist’s challenge to Holocaust tourist behavior,” in Euronews, January 19, 2017, accessed March 7, 2017, http://www.euronews.com/2017/01/19/yolocaust-a-satirist-s-challenge-to-holocaust-tourist-behaviour, and Joel Gunter, “’Yolocaust’: How should you behave at a Holocaust memorial?” in BBC News, January 20, 2017, accessed March 7, 2017, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-38675835. There is also a video that includes an interview with Shapira, which can be accessed through youtube. See: “Holocaust + Selfie Culture= ‘Yolocaust,’” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjjV_X5re4g.
10 Joel Gunter, “’Yolocaust’: How should you behave at a Holocaust memorial?” in BBC News, January 20, 2017, accessed March 7, 2017, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-38675835.
109
motivated in part by concern in a threat to the lessons of the Holocaust, and Höcke reinforced
this sentiment with his statement just days before the “Yolocaust” website went public.11 While
some responses praised Shapira for widening discussion on appropriate behavior at Holocaust
memorials, some disagreed with this tactic, including Peter Eisenman. In a BBC News article,
Eisenman stated that he thought the website was “terrible.” He further stated that “People have
been jumping around on those pillars forever. They've been sunbathing, they've been having
lunch there and I think that's fine.”12 Eisenman compares the memorial to a Catholic church,
saying that “it’s a meeting place,” and that “A memorial is an everyday occurrence, it is not
sacred ground… there are no dead people under my memorial. My idea was to allow as many
people of different generations, in their own ways, to deal or not deal with being in that place…
but putting those bodies there, in the pictures, that’s a little much if you ask me. It isn’t a burial
ground, there are no people under there.”13
While Höcke’s criticism represents the ensuing debate on how to properly commemorate
the Holocaust within Germany, Shapira’s project is telling of how the public responds to sites
such as the Holocaust Memorial, and how younger generations remember the Holocaust through
commemorative landscapes. This is not to say the select selfie-takers Shapira used for
“Yolocaust” is representative of the entire generation—these are obvious extremes, and the some
of the individuals show a degree of disrespect for the site. Despite this, it represents the wider
question or concern of how the generations that are further removed from the Holocaust interact
with sites of memory, and what is the “proper” behavior at sites commemorating millions of
deaths.
11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid.
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Charlotte Knobloch believes that penalizing visitors for improper behavior is essential for
fostering “historical awareness and sense of responsibility” in Germany, and the German
“democratic powers must emphasize the value and necessity of a culture of remembrance and
political consciousness.”14 When speaking about a man who was fined 1500 euro ($1579) for
urinating on one of the stelae in the Holocaust Memorial, Knobloch believed that the trial was
necessary for not only legal purposes, but also to expose the lack of historical awareness and
thoughtlessness within the global community when it comes to the Holocaust and
commemorative sites.15
These present-day issues prove that Germans still struggle with how to address its Nazi
past; and the intent of this thesis has been to examine one piece of the larger issue of German
postwar remembrance and commemoration, specifically through the example of Chancellor
Helmut Kohl and his attempts to create a normalized, unifying national memory of the Second
World War and the Holocaust. Throughout the Cold War, both West and East Germany grappled
with the multiple and conflicting legacies of the war, influenced by the political divisions
inherent in the anti-capitalist and anti-communist sentiments that existed in the postwar world. In
both in the lead up to and after reunification in 1990, Kohl faced the challenge of trying to
establish a proper memorial site, untainted by the scars of the Nazi past. Kohl’s endeavors prove
that German collective memory is malleable, political, and be highly volatile, eliciting strong
emotional responses from the public. In an attempt to achieve normalcy and cohesiveness in
Holocaust and World War II commemoration, Kohl used sites of memory to mirror his political
14 Nastassja Shtrauchler, “Holocaust memorial urination trial reveals ‘lack of historical
awareness,” in Deutsche Welle, March 2, 2017, accessed March 7, 2017, http://www.dw.com/en/holocaust-memorial-urination-trial-reveals-lack-of-historical-awareness/a-37779877.
15 Ibid.
111
goals, while trying to unify West and East German narratives and techniques for commemorating
the Holocaust. This resulted in the construction of sites after Bitburg, for Kohl saw the memorial
challenge as an important obstacle for Germany to achieve a respected place in the global
community, unburdened by the improper confrontation of the guilt associated with the war and
destruction in the twentieth century.
By examining the three leading examples of Kohl’s memory politics, I have
demonstrated that all the sites—Bitburg, the Neue Wache, and the Holocaust Memorial—are
representative of a selective memory Kohl tried to propagate, where the collective identity is one
that represents German unity and normalization as a modern nation. Bitburg initiated Kohl’s
memorial legacy, while the Neue Wache represents his first attempt to establish a site that could
be used by both Germanys to remember the past, and find closure with the wartime trauma.
Finally, Kohl envisioned the Holocaust Memorial as representing the crown-jewel to his
memorial struggle—in the newly established capital of reunified Germany, having a large
memorial in the center of Berlin would allow Germany to demonstrate definitively its
commitment to fostering the memory of the Holocaust.
The three sites also demonstrate Kohl’s long-term changes in vision and tactics in
memory politics over time. Bitburg was a hard-learned lesson for Kohl in terms of how to
address German sites of memory, where he used both the cemetery in Bitburg and Bergen-
Belsen for political gain, while equalizing both SS soldiers and Holocaust victims. While this
matched with his aim to reconfigure national identity by emphasizing German suffering, the
blatant forgetting of the past proved to be detrimental to both Kohl and Reagan. Moving on from
Bitburg, Kohl realized that Germany needed a “clean” and usable site of memory to address the
past. In other words, Kohl need a location free from the scars of the Nazi past.
112
With the Neue Wache memorial, Kohl’s intentions focused on domestic politics—he
wanted to establish a site that West and East Germans could visit for a common identity in
history. The site itself is drenched in German history. The building has existed as a memorial site
for the Prussian empire, the Weimar Republic, the National Socialists, the GDR, and then
reunified Germany. Additionally, the sculpture inside is from the famous German artist, Käthe
Kollwitz, whose experience with war, death, and grief resonated with Kohl. The memorial was
dedicated to all victims of war and tyranny, which equalized all those afflicted by Nazi terror.
Kohl tried to de-center the Holocaust in German identity by emphasizing collective suffering.
This too was controversial, but to a lesser degree compared to Bitburg. Unlike Bitburg, the Neue
Wache became a long-term achievement, becoming integrated into the political and memory
landscape of Berlin.
Despite the eventual success of the Neue Wache, the controversial opening of the
memorial forced Kohl to realize that suppressing the Holocaust in German memory only
complicated the problem, rather than subduing it. Therefore, while the Holocaust Memorial had
the same political aim of creating a unifying German memory, it was also designed to address
international audiences, controlled by a citizens’ group, and took on a more abstract
representation of the Holocaust. While not definitive, it can be argued that the Holocaust
Memorial’s design—both in the process and the finished product—is a result of the lessons Kohl
learned from the Neue Wache and Bitburg. Instead of using literal representations of the past,
through cemeteries, concentration camps, and sculptures based on Christian motifs, the
Holocaust was designed to allow any generation, from any origin, to remember the Holocaust
within their own identify. Instead of finding a common identity through a structured narrative,
the Holocaust Memorial allows Germans to find a common past through individual narratives.
113
This thesis contributes to the wider discussion on how Germany addressed its past by
examining how Kohl attempted to overcome the split in narrative between West and East
Germans. By using locations and symbols that would represent unity and a shared history, the
Neue Wache and the Holocaust Memorial were designed to overcome the Cold War battles that
existed in commemoration, and achieve locations that all Germans could visit that would not
elicit divisiveness in memory. The success of the Neue Wache and the Holocaust Memorial is
still up for debate—as will most topics Holocaust related in Germany, the effectiveness (or
necessity) of such memorials is highly criticized. This thesis has aimed to elucidate Kohl’s goal
through establishing national memorials—he was searching for, and seeking to create, a unified
and usable past for late-twentieth and twenty-first century Germany.
Today, the Neue Wache continues to be the official monument for World War II in
Germany, and the Holocaust Memorial is the official memorial for the Holocaust, both integrated
into the commemorative and historical landscape of Berlin. From this fact alone, one can
conclude that Kohl was successful in his memorial endeavor. Additionally, both locations
continue to function as “live” sites of memory, with foreign dignitaries, Germans, and
international citizens visiting both locations. Again, the accurate representation of the Holocaust
and German suffering, and the success of a unified narrative is debatable. And how a monument
resonates with the viewer is entirely subjective. Despite the criticism that the Holocaust
Memorial currently receives, and criticism the Neue Wache once received, because of Kohl
Germany possesses official sites of memory that commemorate the Holocaust and World War II.
That is a legacy and an accomplishment that cannot be denied.
114
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