Memorials and Memory Holes

The building on the left is the back of the Neue Wache, a memorial with a winding history. Here is an excerpt from page 884 of Alexandra Richie's great "Faust's Metropolis: A History of Berlin" which I was kindly given last summer:

The Neue Wache has already served as the Kaiser's guardhouse, as a war memorial for the Weimar Republic, as a memorial for the Nazis and as a shrine for East Germans guarded until 1989 by goose-stepping soldiers. In 1993 it was renamed the 'Central Memorial of the Federal Republic of Germany for the Victims of War and Tyranny' and the long inscription now commemorates resistance fighters, homosexuals, Jews, gypsies, soldiers who fell on the front, people killed in the bombing raids - indeed all those who were victims of war and terror. It reflects Helmut Kohl's view that there is a 'community of victims', all of whom should be remembered together.
It is right for Germans to have a place to mourn all those who died tragically during the Second World War; however, the idea of a 'community of victims' glosses over one very important aspect of the Nazi past: it implies that a young man who was forced into the army against his will and then died on the front can be compared to a young man killed in Auschwitz, or that a Berlinerin who met her death in a bombing raid can be compared to a young Russian woman burned to death in a barn in 1942. There is a difference between those who were victims of the 'horrors of war' and those who were specifically targeted, hunted down and murdered by the Nazis themselves - not only victims of war, but victims of the Germans as well.

She's very tough on the Germans, like an angry mother trying to force a child to look at what he's done. If this is necessary in parenting it is even more necessary when a nation tries to annihilate another people. The author is a generation older than I am and knows immeasurably more, but my experience is that Germans of my generation carry an immense amount of guilt still and haven't forgotten why. They don't talk about it a lot, however, and a friend of mine thinks that the next generation, kids in school now, is and will remain completely unaware of this guilt and the necessary reflection it entails. He doesn't believe that nationalism is dead.

This article in the Guardian (via Al Daily) entitled The loneliness of being German makes an argument that the Germans are in love with Ireland because it represents a national identity that they are no longer able to have. He goes on to suggest that Germans are the first truly internationalist people, an identity bolstered by their resistance to the Iraq war. The article overreaches on almost every point, but there is a kernel of useful truth in there.

The emotional attachment to home, to the land, to the place in which you are born, is something hereditary that lies deep in the human psyche, which is why it could be so abused by Nazi ideology. The result of this abuse is the systematic denial ever since of any feelings of belonging, a denial that has become so pervasive in German consciousness that it has erased these human instincts almost completely.

I think it's worth mentioning that the disconnection with any one place is not a specifically German phenomenon. And I don't think it necessarily has anything to do with a "systematic denial...of any feelings of belonging." People simply don't stay where they were born any more. Here in the US this has been true for a long time. My family history is probably typical. My great-grandparents emigrated from Denmark at a young age, settling in southern Nebraska. My grandpa grew up there and married my grandma, but when my dad was seven, I believe, their nuclear family moved to northern Iowa where my dad grew up and married my mom. Half of the next generation grew up there, my three older brothers and I, but my younger siblings and mother moved a few hundred miles and my younger brother is growing up in yet another different place. I'm just not buying his assertion that attachment to land is buried 'deep in the human psyche.'

Of course the Germans have feelings. They fall in love, they have desires like everyone else, they feel passionate about football and you can hear the odd person proclaim "I love Berlin" or "I love Bavaria". Of course they feel sadness and grief, compassion, friendship, the entire spectrum of human emotions. But there was always something missing too. They had no dream-life, at least not until the Wim Wenders movie Himmel über Berlin came out. Or maybe it started again when the Berlin wall came down, with people crying and embracing each other on the streets.

Statements like 'They had no dream-life' kind of get to me. Sweeping generalizations may be appropriate, they're certainly ubiquitous, but one can't make them and then say it was all swept away by one film. His contention that the German love of Ireland is due to one book is equally tenuous.

Up to now, Germans have trained themselves to feel no pain, no sense of loss, no compassion for themselves. Nowhere in the world was the father and son gap so wide as it was in Germany. From the late 60s, young people prosecuted their parents and reshaped the German conscience. All this was essential for German renewal, but it also led to a dislocation, a kind of orphaned state. In the process of exorcising the Nazi crimes, generations of Germans also denied their own heritage and severed an emotional link with their own people.

It is right that Germans have turned their back on the arrogance of nationalism. They are the only people in the world who have so comprehensively examined their own past. They have been to hell and back with guilt, and their overriding sense of duty towards their victims is unheard of in any other society. Remembering the Holocaust has replaced the crucifixion of Christ as a leading icon in our society. Memorials have become religious sites that provide a new kind of holiness and guide us towards a fair and racially tolerant society. If there is such a thing as absolution, it is only by remembering and revisiting these sites.

It's worth noting here that Richie notes a little later in her book, while praising a memorial that sought to remember and face the Holocaust wrote, that, "of the 1 million people who came [to the memorial] in 1993, half were foreigners." Many, probably most, people here in the Midwest still go to church every week. It's another overreach to call these 'religious sites.' To suggest that these sites, so infrequently visited and thought about, can 'guide us towards a fair and racially tolerant society' is a superficial, kitschy pipe dream.

On a visit to Dublin some time ago, Bernhard Schlink was asked if he could explain what was so special about the German concept of Heimat, or home, to which he answered simply that he was born in Hamburg and went to school there. Maybe it is not a priority for German writers, and his extraordinary book The Reader demonstrates this contemporary German view best of all, a book in which the main character's parents are unseen.

One final point, more petty than the others. Bernhard Schlink's book (Der Vorleser) is one of the worst I've read in recent memory. I'll wait for a request before I give it a book review.