Germany's culture of commemoration

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Adam Carr
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Germany's culture of commemoration

#1

Post by Adam Carr » 13 Aug 2008, 12:24

With the permission of a site administrator, I am opening this thread to create a gallery of my photos of memorial sites in Germany and Austria and make some comments about them. I would appreciate it if comments were kept until I have finished posting.

Over the past three years I have travelled extensively in Germany and Austria (and also Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia). I have visited most of the main sites of commemoration of the Third Reich and World War II periods in those countries, including 13 German concentration and/or extermination camps. I have been particularly interested in how modern Germany has chosen to commemorate these events, acting as it does under constant scrutiny and criticism, both domestic and international.

No country – except possibly Russia – carries such a burden of recent history as does Germany, and no country has, in my opinion, been more honest and thorough in documenting the crimes committed by its government and citizens, within living memory, against both domestic minorities and against its neighbours – certainly far more than either Russia or Japan.

A particularly interesting question is how far Germany is permitted to commemorate its own war dead, both civilian and military. The largest memorials in Berlin are those commemorating Soviet war dead and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Berlin has no memorial explicitly commemorating either the 5.5 million German military dead or to the 1.6 million civilian dead (including 600,000 killed in Allied air-raids). More than 60 years after the war, it is striking that the Germans still feel inhibited about mourning their dead in the way all other countries are able to do.

I have deliberately presented these photos in a random order, so as not to create a hierarchy of importance.

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Re: Germany's culture of commemoration

#2

Post by Adam Carr » 13 Aug 2008, 12:25

East German memorial at the Mauthausen concentration camp, Austria. The inscription is from Berthold Brecht: “O Deutschland, bleiche Mutter! / Wie haben deine Söhne dich zugerichtet / Dass du unter den Völkern sitzest / Ein Gespott oder eine Furcht!” (O Germany, pale mother! How have your sons treated you, that you sit among the nations, a mockery or a terror!). Although these lines were written in 1933, they have become widely quoted as a piece of German postwar reflection.
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Re: Germany's culture of commemoration

#3

Post by Adam Carr » 13 Aug 2008, 12:26

Memorial to the 96 members of the Weimar Reichstag (mainly Communists or Social-Democrats) murdered by the Nazis, outside the renovated Reichstag building, Berlin.
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Re: Germany's culture of commemoration

#4

Post by Adam Carr » 13 Aug 2008, 12:27

German school students tour the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp site. The inscription on the stone they are looking at reads “Here lie 2,500 dead.” Today, even the grandparents of these students are probably too young to have been among the perpetrators of the crimes of the Nazis, but it still cannot be an easy experience for young Germans to visit these sites.
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Re: Germany's culture of commemoration

#5

Post by Adam Carr » 13 Aug 2008, 12:28

Nuremberg’s Stasse der Menschenrechte (Human Rights Street), in which sections of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights are inscribed on pillars in 30 languages, starting with Yiddish. The street is in the area of Nuremberg completely destroyed by Allied bombs.
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Re: Germany's culture of commemoration

#6

Post by Adam Carr » 13 Aug 2008, 12:29

Memorial to Walther Rathenau, Jewish foreign minister in the Weimar Republic murdered by right-wing extremists. Although this is not strictly a Third Reich memorial, its erection in 1946 was obviously part of Germany’s coming to terms with the events that led to Hitler’s rise.
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Re: Germany's culture of commemoration

#7

Post by Adam Carr » 13 Aug 2008, 12:30

The spot at the Army headquarters in the Bendlerblock where Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg and his colleagues were shot on 20 July 1944 after the failure of the attempt to assassinate Hitler. The street, which still houses the German Defence Ministry, is now called Stauffenbergstrasse. The plaque says they “died for Germany.” Thus a group of officers who violated their oath of allegiance and tried to assassinate their commander-in-chief in wartime have assumed a central place in German patriotic commemoration.
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Re: Germany's culture of commemoration

#8

Post by Adam Carr » 13 Aug 2008, 12:31

Memorial marker at the site of the Peendmünde rocket test facility, where the V-2 rocket was developed by Wehrner von Braun. The stone says “In memory of the victims.” There is thus a memorial in Germany to those killed by German rockets in other countries - as there should be - but none to the 600,000 Germans killed by Allied bombs.
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Re: Germany's culture of commemoration

#9

Post by Adam Carr » 13 Aug 2008, 12:32

Memorial on the site of the Leipzig synagogue, destroyed on Kristallnacht in November 1938. German thoroughness in memorialising the sites of destroyed synagogues compares with Polish indifference. I visited several synagogue sites in Poland which were completely unmarked.
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Re: Germany's culture of commemoration

#10

Post by Adam Carr » 13 Aug 2008, 12:33

Germans get a lecture on the Nuremberg Trials in the courtroom where they took place. The lecturer was very hardline, saying that the defendants were all criminals who deserved to hang, as did many others who were never brought to trial. The German listeners did not seem to demur.
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Re: Germany's culture of commemoration

#11

Post by Adam Carr » 13 Aug 2008, 12:34

The House of Memory at Neuengamme concentration camp, where the names of all the 55,000 people who died in the camp are recorded.
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Re: Germany's culture of commemoration

#12

Post by Adam Carr » 13 Aug 2008, 12:35

Memorial at the home of Rudolf Breitscheid, a Social-Democratic politician who died in Buchenwald concentration camp in 1944. There are markers like this all over Berlin and other cities.
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Re: Germany's culture of commemoration

#13

Post by Adam Carr » 13 Aug 2008, 12:42

Tourists outside the ruins of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche (Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church) in western Berlin, which was destroyed by Allied bombs in 1943. Although the church was preserved in its ruined state as a memorial to the 25,000 victims of the bombing of Berlin, this is nowhere actually stated.
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Re: Germany's culture of commemoration

#14

Post by Adam Carr » 13 Aug 2008, 12:42

Grave-marker of two brothers, both Gebirgsjäger (mountain troops), killed in the Caucasus in 1942, Berchtesgaden cemetery. It is unlikely that they are actually buried here – few bodies were brought back from Russia.
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Re: Germany's culture of commemoration

#15

Post by Adam Carr » 13 Aug 2008, 12:43

Memorial in Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin, to “resistance fighters killed by the fascists.” This was the usual wording used on memorials in the German Democratic Republic – all those killed by the Nazis were “anti-fascists” and “resistance fighters” and, by implication, communists. This is reinforced by the red triangle motif: communists in Nazi concentration camps wore a red triangle.
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