Preserving Problematic History

Preserving Problematic History: Lessons from Germany and the Successful Handling of the Relics of the Third Reich

Submitted to the Faculty of the Preservation Design Department in Support of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in Preservation Design, Savannah College of Art and Design Aline Andreolla Feijo Capstone Project, Spring 2020

Abstract Since the collapse of the Third Reich at the end of World War II, Germans were confronted with the daunting task of handling Nazi relics appropriately. After failing to erase it or even ignore it, Germans reckoned with the fact that the War and the Holocaust shaped their country and national identity forever. Through public and private education efforts, memorialization of victims, artistic expression, and adaptive reuse, Germany today developed a cohesive national collective memory of the darkest chapter in its history.

Keywords: Preservation, Architecture, Germany, Heritage, Holocaust, Memory, Memorials, Nazi, Dark History.

Andreolla Feijo 1

Table of contents

Andreolla Feijo 2

Abstract

page 1

Table of contents

page 2

Introduction

page 3

Timeline

page 4

Literature Review

pages 5 - 11

Data Analysis

pages 12 - 14

Conclusion

pages 15 - 16

Inventory of Images

pages 17 - 18

Bibliography

pages 19 - 21

Introduction Germany has built an image to the world, becoming a country that is both admired and feared. That same image is the result of what Germany inherited throughout its history as the epicenter of world events time and again: the Reformation, both World Wars, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. It did not emerge as a modern nation until 1871, leaving the German people in a frantic search for an authentic German identity for generations. Today, Germany has the world’s fourth-largest economy and is a standard-bearer of liberal democracy.1 But most importantly, Germany has a strong sense of its cultural heritage and identity, through the careful studies and the preservation of both its tyrannic and its glorious pasts to shed light on the present.

German art and architecture has become a quintessential aspect of German culture and a reflection of its cultural heritage. As a pioneer of modern architecture, German architecture also developed its aesthetics in close proximity to dictators.2 After the Treaty of Versailles at the end of the first World War, Germany stood powerless in the international arena. In a desperate attempt to rebuild itself, its people elected a Chancellor who vowed to restore the nation at any cost. As part of numerous plans for unification, Hitler turned to architecture, commissioning various monumental buildings with a shared purpose: to serve as symbols of nationalism to dominate the masses.3 The architecture of the Third Reich took over German cities, and Nazi values were made visible via the commission of buildings, statues, and the placement of the Nazi banners throughout city streets. By the end of World War II, after the Allied bombings, Germany was left with the ruins of 1 James Hawes, The Shortest History of Germany: From Julius Caesar to Angela Merkel—A Retelling for Our Times (New York: The Experiment, 2019), 20.

2 Alexander Scobie, Hitler’s State Architecture: The Impact of Classical Antiquity (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), 20-30.

3 Ibid.

Andreolla Feijo 3 the Third Reich, and Germans with the challenging task of rebuilding their nation once again.

Over the last seventy years, ever since the Third Reich’s collapse, Germans attempted to erase and to ignore the darkest chapter of their history, all which led to coming to terms with an enduring confrontation of it. Today, Germany is a leading example of a nation that handled the relicts of its problematic past efficiently in a way that preserves and exposes the horrible history of the Third Reich while memorializing those who lost their lives unjustly. The German nation did this by choosing what architectural elements from the Third Reich to preserve by re-contextualizing them appropriately and eliminating others entirely.

The efforts Germany took expose the Nazi terrors and memorialize Jewish loss will be analyzed in the essay in an effort to create a broad set of guidelines for other nations that currently struggle to appropriately preserve their difficult histories. The goal is to wrestle with questions about how working off the past can support the ground for freer futures, but also how coming to terms with history can become a process that blocks access to it instead.

The aim is to explore how the past should, and should not, be used in thinking about moral and political futures.

The opening part of this research identifies some of the challenges Germany faced with the preservation of the architecture of the Third Reich, highlighting why state-commissioned architecture by a tyrannic rule is so problematic. The second part of the literature review will explore the aftermath of the fall of the Third Reich, and the attempts Germany took to come to terms with its Nazi past. Three different case studies will be used in this review to present a holistic overview of the German approach to the politics of memory and coming to terms with the past via the preservation of problematic history.

One case study focuses on a contemporary adaptive reuse of monumental Nazi architecture, another on contemporary an educational interpretation in the form of a public exhibit, and a third on the memorialization of victims.

Timeline of Major Historical Events 1920

Treaty of Versailles is established, Germay thus stands powerless in the world arena

1932

Hitler is unanimously elected as chancelor

1936

Berlin Olympic games and the commission of the Berlin Stadium

1949

Ban of any Nazi flags, symbols or monuments

1945

Allied forces defeat the Nazis ending World War II

1989

Fall of the Berlin Wall

1995

Wehrmacht Exhibit sets a new tone for handling Germany’s Nazi past

2002

Adaptive reuse of the Berlin Olympic Stadium

Andreolla Feijo 4

Literature Review Art and architecture play an instrumental role in defining the cultural identity of a nation. With the Nazi seizure of power in Germany in 1933, the German cultural identity took a turn to the political definition of identity. The Nazi building slogan, Blood and Soil, followed a traditional attitude emphasizing racial purity, militarism, and obedience, and architecture served as the perfect propaganda to install the Third Reich’s beliefs upon citizens.4 The Third Reich’s ability to revitalize Germany, left stagnant after World War I, reinstalled an identity of pride within Germans as they witnessed their country rise as a result of a new political rule. Therefore, the architecture of the Third Reich achieved unprecedented political significance, awakening and unifying the German people more than anything else.5 With dozens of architectural commissions, ranging from urbanist projects to grand structures, Nazi values were made visible. Henceforth, the built environment created a perpetual reminder of how powerful the Third Reich, and consequently, Germans had grown to become.6

Eventually, by 1945, the Allied bombings following the conclusion of the war decimated German cities, destroying a great deal of Nazi architecture.7 Nevertheless, as a result of meticulous engineering, many Nazi commissioned structures endured. By the time the Allied forces left Germany, Germans were confronted with a dilemma: what to do with the physical remains of the Third Reich.

Initially, Germans were eager to replace and destroy all architecture that could associate their post-war identity

4 Marchus Hackel, Identity and German Architecture: Views of a German Architect (Berlin: Architect Berlin University of Technology, 2008), 42.

5 Scobie.

6 Hackel.

7 J. Jordan, Structures of Memory: Understanding Urban Change in Berlin and Beyond (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 17.

Andreolla Feijo 5 to that of killers.8 However, wiping out every structure affiliated with Nazism was unrealistic. The evidence of the Third Reich included entire city blocks constructed in Hitler’s treasured Neoclassical style. Besides, blowing up structurally sound buildings or the highways Hitler expanded into a Reichsautobahn network would have further damaged a nation left in ruins.9 The German government discerned that the nation required a pragmatic compromise, consequently, buildings were retained for new functions driven by necessity,10 and heritage protection became an essential aspect re-urbanization;11 a strategy which arguably allows for Germans to ponder upon its Nazi reign endlessly.12

Although the German government made the unanimous decision to reuse a great deal of the architecture of the Third Reich adaptively, they made evident efforts to establish a distinct ideological separation from that of Nazis. In 1949, the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) criminalized the display of swastikas; the symbol was also scraped and sometimes removed from buildings. The federal-state systematically destroyed statues and monuments, razed some Nazi architectural struc8 Clare Copley, “Stones Do Not Speak for Themselves: Disentangling Berlin’s Palimpsest,” Fascism 8, no. 2 (2019): 40, https://doi.org/10.1163/22116257-00802006.

9 Heather Suvain Horn, “Facing Up to the Past, German Style,” The New Republic, October 31, 2019, https://newrepublic.com/article/155546/facing-past-german-style.

10 Shelley Hornstein, Losing Site: Architecture, Memory and Place (New York: Routledge, 2016), 80.

11 Brigitta Ringbeck, “Monument Protection in Germany,” Historic England, 2017, https://historicengland. org.uk/whats-new/debate/recent/town-and-country-planning-act-70th-anniversary/monument-protection-in-germany/.

12 Yuliya Komska, The Icon Curtain: The Cold War’s Quiet Border (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

Andreolla Feijo 6 tures, and executed military and civilian officials in mass, burying their bodies in unmarked graves so that their resting grounds could not be converted into Nazi shrines.13 The official directive reads:

Any monument, memorial, poster, statue, edifice,

street or highway name marker, emblem, tablet,

or insignia which tends to preserve and keep

alive the German military tradition, to revive

militarism or to commemorate the Nazi Party, or

which is of such a nature as to glorify incidents of

war, and the functioning of military museums and

exhibitions, and the erection, installation, or post

ing or other display on a building or other struc

ture of any of the same, will be prohibited and

declared illegal.14

Nevertheless, the physical destruction of iconography was no instant antidote to extremist ideology. Though statues had been blown up and flags burned or shredded, many Germans in the 1950s resisted political reeducation.

Allied officials sometimes required adults to view footage of liberated concentration camps before they could receive ration cards; one memoirist recalled that most of the people he sat with in a theater in Frankfurt turned their heads and simply refused to watch the film.15 Five years after the war, surveys revealed that one-third of the country thought the Nuremberg war crime trials had been “unfair.” Majorities believed that Nazism had been a “good idea, badly applied,” and consistently, over a third of the population continued to prefer that the country be free of Jews. As late as 1955, 48 percent of respondents felt that Hitler would have been one of Germany’s greatest lead13 14

Hawes, 20-25.

Germany law directory.

15 Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (New York: St. Martins Press, 2020), 24.

ers, “but for the war.” It was only by the 1960s and 1970s that Germany fully reckoned with the moral weight of its Nazi legacy.16

The construction and reconstruction of new and old squares, streets, buildings, parks, and the debates surrounding the projects often serve the political function of demonstrating Germany’s commitment to explicitly and officially coming to terms with its past.17 But the identity of Germany and the attitudes of coming to terms with the past is not shaped by the unified vision of a country’s past, but by decades of artistic activity, historical research and public debate. In this context, Germany’s memorials and preservation efforts are expected to represent a new generation of citizens and politicians committed to historical responsibility for the Holocaust and the fight against contemporary racism.18

Germany’s efforts attempts to fulfill three functions; to mourn and commemorate the dead, to educate their audiences, and to politically and socially represent contemporary German citizens. A key rationale for keeping the painful memories of the Holocaust alive is to promote ethnic tolerance and integration. To foster an ethnically inclusive form of collective memory in Germany would be a bitter irony. Germans thus appropriately 16 Joshua Zeitz, “There Are No Nazi Statues In Germany,” Politico Magazine, 2017, https://www.politico.com/ magazine/story/2017/08/20/why-there-are-no-nazi-statues-in-germany-215510.

17 Ulrich Baer, ed., “Niemand zeugt für den Zeugen”: Erinnerungskultur und historische Verantwortung nach der Shoah ,” [Nobody testifies for the witness ”: Culture of Remembrance and Historical Responsibility After the Holocaust] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2000), 16.

18 Kirsten Harjes, “Stumbling Stones: Holocaust Memorials, National Identity, and Democratic Inclusion in Berlin,” German Politics & Society 23, no. 1 (2005): 30, www.jstor.org/stable/23740916.

Andreolla Feijo 7 looked to collective memory as a force of sociopolitical cohesion.19

When people point to Germany’s attempts to come to terms with its criminal past, the Wehrmacht Exhibit is the quintessential example.20 Crimes of the German Wehrmacht: Dimensions of a War of Annihilation, 1941-1944, as the Hamburg Institute for Social Research describes, documented the participation of the Wehrmacht (the German Army) in crimes committed during World War II. The exhibition showcased the genocide perpetrated against Soviet Jews, the mass death of Soviet prisoners of war, starvation as a strategy of war, the war against partisans, and reprisals and execution of hostages.

The exhibition demonstrates that the war of annihilation did not occur in a realm governed by some abstract form or power, but was characterized by various levels of decision-making and individual responsibility.21

Opening on March 5, 1995, the exhibition was a photographic documentation of the ways in which the German Army conducted warfare in the Ukraine, Belorussia, and Serbia. The exhibition consisted of nearly one thousand photos, some taken by army propaganda companies, others by soldiers to send home or save as mementos.

These photos depict the murder of Jews and so called partisans by shooting, hanging, and burning homes and villages. The photographs show endless columns of POWs and newly dug mass graves filled with newly shot victims of a campaign fought outside the rules of war. Everywhere in these photos there are members of the Wehrmacht, ordering, passively watching, poetically enabling, often 19 Christa Wolf, “Abschied von Phantomen-Zur Sache: Deutschland,” [A Farwell to Ghosts: Germany] Auf dem Weg nach Tabou (Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1994), 339.

20

Neiman, 76.

21 Mary Nolan, Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Historians Debate, ed. Peter Baldwin (Durham: Duke University Press, Fall, 2001), 113-132.

actively participating, and always legitimating the crimes that were occurring. These photos were accompanied by excerpts from army orders and reports as well as from the letters and diaries of officers and draftees.22

Figure 1: Images from the Wehrmacht Exhibit: SD officers prepare to hang victims.

The exhibit attacked the myth of the clean Wehrmacht, a vision which dominated West German public opinion until the 1980s.23 Philosopher Susan Neiman paraphrased the arguments from personal interviews of everyday Germans that defended a clean memory of the Wehrmacht: “Terrible things happen in war. It was bad for us, too. Our cities were destroyed. Our young men were

22 Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung, Crimes of the German Wehrmacht: The Dimensions of a War of Annihilation 1941 - 1944, An Outline of the Exhibition (Hamburger: Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung Edition, 1995).

23

Neiman, 80 -95.

Andreolla Feijo 8 murdered. We were occupied by foreign troops.”24 A Nazi brother or uncle was “just defending his homeland.”25 But contrary to widely held popular belief, the exhibit argued, the Wehrmacht did not stand apart from the Nazi system, the SS, and the genocidal war those institutions waged.

Rather, the Wehrmacht was a thoroughly Nazified institution, from its officer corps through its enlisted men and draftees.26

No one expected that over 800,000 visitors in 33 German and Austrian cities would contemplate these horrifying and disturbingly thought provoking photos during the four years to follow.27 By 1995, the majority of historians regarded the exhibition’s central thesis, namely, that the Wehrmacht was involved in planning and implementing a war of annihilation against Jews, prisoners of war, and the civilian population, as virtually indisputable.

However, reception of the exhibition by the general public showed that even fifty years after the end of the war the imagine of the “unblemished Wehrmacht” was still firmly rooted in parts of German society. Throughout the four years in which it was shown to the public, the exhibition received a great deal of approval and recognition. But on the other hand, criticism and massive protests followed.

By 1999, criticism heightened centered around incorrect attributions to several photographs and legends within the exhibition. The exhibition’s committee concluded that charges against them could not be upheld.28 However, they 24 Deborah E. Lipstadt, “Slavery and the Holocaust: How Americans and Germans Cope With Past Evils,” The New York Times, Aug. 30, 2019, https://www.nytimes. com/2019/08/27/books/review/learning-from-the-germans-susan-neiman.html?auth=login-facebook.

25 Ibid.

26 27

Nolan, 113-132.

Neiman, 76-80.

28 Verein zur Förderung der Ausstellung Vernichtungskrieg: Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941 bis 1944, (Hamburger: 2000).

recommendation that the exhibition would not be shown again until further revision and possible new design.29

The organizers of the Wehrmacht exhibit were criticized for presenting horrifyingly detailed descriptions of shot and hanged victims, mass graves, and masses of POWs and civilians on their way to the grave. The visual representations of the exhibit proved even more challenging, compelling, and disturbing than the written word had previously done and reached a far wider and more diverse audience. What the exhibit portrayed was the beginning of the process, not its end; the face-to-face, day to-day roundups and executions, hangings and shootings, forced marches and mass burials on the Eastern Front that preceded and later accompanied the extermination camps.

It depicted the individuals and small groups who participated, observed, ordered, enabled, and often photographed these events.30

Figure 2: Images from the Wehrmacht Exhibit: Jews captured by SD & SS troops.

The Wehrmacht Exhibit was the first time when memories of the Holocaust and memories of the war were fused, breaking decades-long silence about Germany’s past. For some, the confrontation of public history and private memories provided an occasion to acknowledge, admit, explain, or try to persuade others of the truth of what was shown. For others, it was a chance to deny or to argue that others were involved, but they were not. For 29 30

Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung.

Nolan, 113-132.

Andreolla Feijo 9 children who are now middle aged, it was a chance to confront and ask forbidden questions or to deny the very possibility that people they had known and loved could have done such things. A year after the Wehrmacht exhibit was closed, the Historians’ Commission established to review the charges against the exhibit rendered its verdict.

“The fundamental claims of the exhibit are scientifically correct,” the commission determined, and “the claims of falsification leveled against its authors lack all basis.”31

The Wehrmacht Exhibit was the first privately funded and organized attempt, which received national attention, to confront Germany’s problematic past. The exhibit thus set the stage for further public and private initiatives of fostering a cohesive social-political collective memory. The attempts that followed took different forms, yet a kind of effort that deserves particular attention is the adaptive reuse of monumental Nazi structures. On one hand the push for converting structures from the Third Reich begun as a public initiate to reconstruct German cities based on necessity shortly after the war. In contrast, following institutional efforts such as the exhibit, private initiatives for the adaptive reuse of monumental Nazi structures begun to take place. Arguably this time, driven by the understanding of the importance of keeping history alive via re-contextualization of Nazi architecture.

In the early 2000s, Germany made the unanimous choice to restore and repurpose the Third Reich’s prized Olympic Stadium. A decision that remains a subject of dispute amongst scholars, attempting to understand if its reuse is indeed successful. Built for the 1936 Summer Olympic Games, the Berlin Olympic Stadium was home for the world’s most controversial games. Constructed entirely of German stone, and with a capacity of 100,000 spectators, the Olympic Stadium suited Hitler’s adored Neoclassic style. Blank and orderly, the stadium acted as a crisp reflection of Nazi ideology and military power identity, and a perfect expression of their desired symbols of 31

Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung.

national pride.32 The stadium matured into the quintessential physical embodiment of Nazi Germany’s architecture, and the entire world saw its splendor on tv throughout the games. When the Olympics ended, the world was left the utterly false impression of Germany as a unified, prosperous and welcoming country, greatly as a result from the architecture of the Third Reich.33

By 1945, the Allied bombings following the end of the war partially destroyed the stadium, and its remains were later occupied by the British military.34 It remained quasi-abandoned for years, until 1990 when the debate around the Olympic Stadium and its dark history commenced. Speculation rose on the idea of destroying the stadium, while other wished to let it decay like the Roman Colosseum.35 Some people argued that Germany should build an entirely new stadium, or alter the existing one so drastically, forcing it to shy away from its Nazi roots and the underlying meaning of its foundations.

Ultimately, the Office of Monument Protection of the State of Berlin decided to conserve the landmark to its original conditions.36 The foundation to their argument is the historical significance of the building, as one of the largest and most spectacular monuments of the National Socialist-period, deeply characterized by the highly logical architecture, was highly symbolic to the new Berlin 32 Randall Ott, German Façade Design: Traditions of Screening from 1500 to Modernism (London: Routledge, 2017), 30-40.

33 Allen Guttmann, Alan Tomlinson, and Christopher Young, Berlin 1936: The Most Controversial Olympics, in National Identity and Global Sports Events: Culture, Politics, and Spectacle in the Olympics and the Football World Cup (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006).

34 Louis Marchesano, Nazi War Criminal Records, (Los Angeles: Interagency Working Group at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, 1999).

35

Copley, 219–249.

36 Ibid.

Andreolla Feijo 10 planning.37 The building was thoroughly restored, and by 2006 the stadium that was once the jewel of Hitler’s 1936 Summer Games received a new purpose: to host the FIFA World Cup. Its restoration and modernization cost over $250 million, completed by the Hamburg-based von Gerkan, Marg and Partners. Their approach to adaptive reuse and design is possibly among Berlin’s bravest attempts to make a Nazi landmark relevant to the contemporary city.38

Figure 3: Berlin Olympic Stadium, 1936.

Figure 4: Berlin Olympic Olympic Stadium, 2018.

The repurposing of the Berlin Olympic Stadium did not escape some criticism, largely rooted in the idea that by adaptively reusing Nazi architecture, the tyrannic 37 Barbara Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics in Germany, 1918-1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 20-30.

38 Shelley Hornstein, Losing Site: Architecture, Memory and Place (Routledge: Manchester School of Architecture, 2016), 80-85.

reasoning behind constructing those same buildings would fade as a consequence of reuse.39 The world has witnessed the end of societies that had long assured the transmission and conversation of collectively remembered values.40 Spaces are invested in memory, and the permanence of physical building embodies memory. But memories evolve as new generations associate structures with new meanings. However, ever since the late 1990s, Germany has not allowed for the repurposing of Nazi architecture to attempt to erase, not that it ever could, the dark origins of such structures. In the case of the Berlin Olympic Stadium, plaques of the 1936 Olympic games stand in contrast to contemporary signage, highlighting the chilling history behind the stadium’s commission.

In addition to the adaptive reuse of structures from the Third Reich, Germany has turned to memorialization of the victims of the Holocaust as strategic tool to foster a cohesive social-political collective memory.

Notable historical events are most commonly commemorated by state-sanctioned monumental structures designed as collective memorials.41 In contrast, Gunter Demnig’s Stumbling Stones are small and privately funded anti memorials set in the vernacular landscape. Known as Stolpersteine, or stumbling stones, the memorial is a small brass stone embedded directly underfoot in the cobblestones of the street. There are now more than 70,000 such memorial blocks laid in more than 1,200 cities and towns across Europe and Russia. Each stone commemorates a victim outside their last-known freely chosen residence.42

The stones represent a new vision of urban remem39

Copley, 200–230.

40 Pierre Nora, Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire. In Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory (Irvine: University of California, 1898), 100120.

41 James Young, The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History (New York: Prestel. 1994), 50-60.

42

Neiman, 80.

Andreolla Feijo 11 brance. While large monuments, set in the governmental heart of German cities emphasize the scale and political culpability of the Holocaust, the Stolpersteine focuses on its individual tragedies.43 Rather than presenting a ready-made interpretation of German history, this type of memorial aims to make people think. It emphasizes the educational over the commemorative and representative functions of memorials, and it incorporates a view of historical education as dependent upon active, critical engagement with the past. Since they are placed at unexpected locations, through their plentitude, their inconspicuous locations, and their lack of explanatory text or documentation, the stepping stones can, on the one hand, surprise and irritate those who pass by. On the other hand, these decentralized memorial pieces can blend into the city like pieces of furniture, becoming familiar, unnoticed objects to the people who see them everyday.44

stone educates people to do the right thing, reminding them of the law, rules, and etiquette of their culture. To the prophet Isaiah (8:14), the symbolic stone over which a wrongdoer or an entire people living in violation of God’s law must stumble is a reminder to live life in fear of God and gauge that tells whether one has lived the proper life of not. In the New Testament, the stumbling stone makes those gall who disobey God, but it is a blessing to the faithful, a cornerstone of their godly lives.

Figure 6: People walking past Stolpersteine in Berlin.

Figure 5: A set of Stolpersteine in Berlin commemorating one family.

Inspired by a biblical metaphor, “stumbling stone” implies both a potential journey toward righteousness, the stone becoming a cornerstone of good. The stumbling 43 J. Neumann, “Gunter Demnig, Award Nomination,” Obermayer German Jewish History Awards,

Berlin: 2005, http://obermayer.us/award/2005/O-English-308_05.pdf.

44 Eliza Apperly, “Stumbling Stones’: A Different Vision of Holocaust Remembrance,” The Guardian, February 18, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/ feb/18/stumbling-stones-a-different-vision-of-holocaust-remembrance.

The stumbling stones offer a more open, more democratic path to collective memory in which citizens themselves develop a conception of national identity and historical responsibility from the bottom up. This small yet powerful memorial serves as a demonstration of Germany’s commitment to explicitly and officially coming to terms with its past, shaping a new national identity in Germany.45

45 Kirsten Harjes, “Stumbling Stones: Holocaust Memorials, National Identity, and Democratic Inclusion in Berlin,” German Politics & Society 23, April 2005, www. jstor.org/stable/23740916.

Data Analysis State-commissioned architecture has an instrumental role in the establishment of authority and government, alongside formulating powerful memories associated with these structures.46 Nazi architecture served to fulfill the political party’s political agenda by influencing public behavior and conduct, meanwhile, it acted as a quintessential reflection of the ideologies of a nation who unanimously appointed Hitler as Chancellor. Hence, when Germany lost the war, the nation was staggered and left with the ruins of the Third Reich that no one had the money or will to destroy.47 Every Nazi terror was ultimately instituted within everything constructed by the Third Reich, henceforth resulting in a divided and crippled collective memory of entire city blocks, parks, homes, and buildings.

The ghosts of the Third Reich thus persisted, not only through remaining relics, but in the shared memory of German citizens. Consequently, the attempt to annihilate anything that could associate post-war Germany to Nazis failed. By the 1949, neo-Nazi sentiment persisted.

It was not until the German government made it into law that any celebration of the Nazi Party, whether be an architectural commission or the flying of a flag, be illegal that Germans begun to face the ghosts of their past.48

Coming to terms with the past therefore became the quintessential ethos adopted in Germany. Starting with public political efforts, Germans begun to fully reckon with with the moral weight of its Nazi legacy, first with the banning of any Nazi celebration, and by the mid 1950s, through strategically redevelopment of city centers.

The German government tackled its remaining Nazi relics quickly, arguably because they understood just how much state architecture influences public behavior and conduct, and the geographical zones in which the remaining relics laid legitimized their existence. A government or institution’s ownership of such an issue shows a great deal of 46

Scobie, 55.

48

Hawes, 30-35.

47

Neiman, 7.

Andreolla Feijo 12 strength, and owning up to a nation’s guilt was a considerable step that Germany took towards coming to terms with its past.

Shame can be the first step toward responsibility and, with that, toward a genuine national pride. While public efforts were the initial highlights of coming to terms with the past, privately funded efforts proved just as effective. When the Wehrmacht Exhibit opened in 1995, it marked the largest privately initiated attempt to come to terms with Germany’s criminal past. The exhibit played a significant role on fostering a cohesive social-political collective memory. It was the first time memories of the war and of the Holocaust were fused.

The exhibit proved that a significant portion of the German population were culprits in the war. The exhibit attacked the myth of the clean Wehrmacht, a vision which dominated West German public opinion until the 1980s.

Because contrary to widely held popular belief, the exhibit argued that the Wehrmacht did not stand apart from the Nazi system, the SS, and the genocidal war those institutions waged. Rather, the Wehrmacht was a thoroughly Nazified institution, from its officer corps through its enlisted men and draftees, hence exhibiting that the German crimes were not just about beliefs of motives of a political system, or about the actions of specific war perpetrators, and the fate of particular victims. It was about whether Germany initiated, as well as carried out, genocide.

A powerful exhibit, such as the Wehrmacht Exhibit, acted as a harsh wake-up call to many Germans who, since the end of the war, were either oblivious, or refused to own up to the crimes of their nation. Hence, a widely sustained movement of wanting to come to terms with the past, and create a national collective narrative gained strength throughout Germany. As post-war reconstruction continued, architects and planners took it as a perfect opportunity to demonstrate a contemporary Western approach to architecture and urban design. Architecture carries a great deal of weight when placed in the right context, however, structures can defamiliarize themselves

Andreolla Feijo 13 from their past given their current reality.49

New concepts in German architecture showcased international modern post-war style, a bright contrast to the pre-war Nazi monumental architecture and urban design.50 While in one hand, the redevelopment of German cities aided in the creation of a new German identity far from that of the Third Reich. On the other hand, it created a vacuum for the interpretation of remaining Nazi relics which people could fill however they wanted. With little historical information, and lack of purpose, abandoned structures of the Third Reich were transformed into sites which people could layer whatever meaning they wanted upon them.51 As a result from little critical context, public entities felt the urge to give abandoned Nazi structures a new meaning through adaptive reuse.

A prime example of reuse was that of the Berlin Olympic Stadium, one of Hitler’s most prized architectural commissions. In 2002, the building was thoroughly restored. By 2006, the stadium that was once the jewel of Hitler’s 1936 Summer Games, received a new purpose; to host the FIFA World Cup. This approach to adaptive reuse and design is possibly among Berlin’s bravest attempts to make a Nazi landmark relevant to the contemporary city.52 The Berlin Olympic Stadium thus marks a significant milestone in coming to terms with the past. Because in contrast to Nazi buildings that were repurposed after the war based largely on necessity, the stadium was restored with the intent of protecting a monument.53

Ever since the Wehrmacht Exhibit, Germany begun to reckon with its past, understanding that there is a cultural responsibility that falls upon contemporary gener49 Barbie Zelizer, Visual Culture and the Holocaust (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 117.

ations to keep in contact with the past of survivors, to integrate them and their history into the present, no matter how painful or uncomfortable that past may be. The Berlin Olympic Stadium is not the only architectural commission of the Third Reich that has been adaptively reused. Indeed, many other buildings that serve as difficult reminders of the war still stand, repurposed in ways in which their histories still show. These structures scar the tissue of German cities, but they do so intentionally, highlighting the importance of education and presenting historical information.

As an example, when the Berlin Wall came down, it left behind prime real estate in the heart of the city.

Instead of selling it to one of the many bidders, Parliament decided to dedicate 4.5 acres to what became the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Alongside many smaller monuments scattered throughout the city, like Gunter Demnig’s Stumbling Stones, Berlin’s public space represents conscious decisions about what values the reunited republic should commit itself to holding.54 These reinterpretations of the built environment, whether monumental like a stadium, or installed within the vernacular, install remembrance and foster new memories that belong to everyone and no one, due to the realization that the separation between the Germany and the Holocaust is impossible. The Holocaust and Jewish expulsion shaped Germany forever.55 As a result, Germany’s history told in its post-war reconstruction will be forever problematic and incomplete of what is no longer.56 Nonetheless is is effective in encouraging people to reflect on a dark past through weaving memorializations into the fabric of

51 Despina Stratigakos, Hitler at Home (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017).

54 Susan Neiman, “Germany Has No Nazi Memorials,” The Atlantic, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/ ideas/archive/2019/09/germany-has-no-nazi-memorials/597937/.

53

56 Ibid.

50

Hackel, 40.

52

Hornstein, 78.

Copley, 219–249.

55

Zelizer, 100 - 120.

Andreolla Feijo 14 everyday life.57

57 Peter Baldwin, Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Historians’ Debate (Boston: Beacon, 1990).

Conclusion This research is founded on inductive reasoning and the acknowledgment that Germany can teach the world a lesson through the exploration of the social phenomena of how Germans chose to handle the relicts of the Third Reich after World War II. Through an in-depth collection involving multiple sources of information rich in data, research constructed internal validity that it is possible to preserve a nation’s dark past and proved that Germany’s approach is a valid preservation strategy.

Contemporary Germany’s preservation efforts serve as evidence that no country is ever a blank slate. No amount of bombing or bulldozing can fully eradicate the traces of what came before, either in the landscape itself or in the memories and habits of its residents. Even in the midst of dramatic political, economic, and material change, traces of the past persist in the urban topography, as well as in technocratic practices and individual collective memory.

Germany’s landscape today is shaped by decades of decisions that cemented official collective memory. These decisions, why were they are made, and the form and content of their imprint on the landscape were reinterpreted throughout the postwar period in Germany. But, they did so in uneven ways, mediated through decades of political wrangling, economic fluctuation, and artistic and historiographic processes. This kind of memory is rooted not only in the landscape but also in professional journals, high school and university curricula, museum studies, guidebooks, and an array of governmental and private organizations.58 Germany has thus achieved, though challenging, a widely accepted and coherent national political collective memory. This acceptance is something that other nations that currently struggle to appropriately preserve, as their problematic history can learn from Germany’s success.

To understand Germany’s social phenomena, and prove the country’s successful preservation of its problematic history, it is key to grasp when and how coming to 58 Jordan.

Andreolla Feijo 15 terms with the past was installed as a national movement.

Secondary research shows that Germans began to fully reckon with their past when debates about history and memory became more contentious. They no longer centered primarily on the uniqueness of the Holocaust or the structural causes of genocide. Rather, they began to focus on identity, behavior, and motives of the perpetrators and on the appropriate commemoration of and compensation for victims. This fueled a counter discourse in German history and German identity, which for many years recognized Germans as victims and their war ancestors as honorable.

Yet, by the 1960s, civil engagement by the German public served as a breakthrough in coming to terms with the past. A new generation came of age. They realized that their parents and teachers had been Nazis, or at least complicit in Nazi atrocities, and were outraged. A small and often controversial vanguard insisted on digging up history that older generations had refused to discuss. From that generation on, Germany attained closure with its Nazi heritage due to the realization that closure in and of itself was neither tenable or desirable. Admittedly, the German people carry the weight of its dark past.59 Visual representation and education became a key player in the politics of memory and the establishment of a coherent and widely accepted national narrative.60 Exhibits like the Wehrmacht Exhibit served as the visual evidence to Germans of what their country had done. But at the same time, the exhibit acted as a stepping stone to coming to terms with the past through admitting to the crimes that were committed.

Hence, Germans do not learn about the Holocaust in just one way. The evidence of its history is something no one can escape. It is installed in art works, in literature, in movies, in television, done in different keys and in 59 Komska.

60 Geoffrey H. Hartman, “German-Jewish Memory and National Consciousness” In Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994).

Andreolla Feijo 16 different registers. There is no one message. Visual evidence, memorials, and museums are in the fore, creating in German cities, especially in Berlin, cityscapes filled with the architectural and commemorative evidence that the separation between Germany and the Holocaust is impossible. The Holocaust and Jewish suffrage shaped Germany forever. 61

While in the international arena, monuments usually choose to overshadow events that showcase national shame or shed light on bloodstained history; monuments and memorializations in Germany take a different approach. When walking through a city like Berlin, in addition to the famous Holocaust Memorial built on the most prominent piece of empty space in the reunited city, there are more than sixty-one thousand much smaller but more unsettling stumbling stones, which the German artist Gunter Demnig has hammered into sidewalks in front of buildings where Jews lived before the war. Imagine, for comparison, a monument to the Middle Passage or the genocide of Native Americans at the center of the Washington Mall. Suppose one could walk down a street in New York and step on a reminder that this building was constructed with slave labor.62

This difficult endless confrontation with history is how Germany has reckoned with its past, and Germans realized that their dark history is a part of their national identity. They understand how to appropriately preserve their problematic past. For example, taking down Nazi flags was not an insult to Nazi soldiers, but simply an acknowledgment that the cause for which they fought for was wrong. 63 61 62

Zelizer, 145.

Neiman, 30.

63 Frank Wolff, “The Home That Never Was: Rethinking Space and Memory in Late Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Jewish History,” Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung 38, no. 3 (2013): 197-215, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23644532.

While no two histories are ever entirely alike, any nation’s confrontation of the past is endlessly complicated.

Which streets should be renamed, which statues dismantled, how those who committed crimes should be remembered and how their wrongs should be requited—none of these questions can be decided abstractly, once and for all. However similar national crimes may be, they are also relentlessly particular, and any attempt at reparations must be particular too. Only direct analyses of particular cases and contexts can help to get the balance right.

So what is the solution? Building museums and memorials? This would not erase its history (what would?), but it would at least take control of the narrative surrounding it. At the end, politics of memory are intertwined with the renewed emphasis on the nation and efforts to develop a cohesive collective memory, which agrees that problematic history must be preserved, but never celebrated.

Inventory of Images

Andreolla Feijo 17

Figure 3: Berlin Olympic Stadium, 1936. “Olympic Stadium, Berlin, Germany.”Wartime Northen Ireland, accessed May 20, 2020. https://wartimeni.com/location/olympic-stadium-berlin-germany/.

Figure 1: “Images from the Wehrmacht exhibit: SD officers prepare to hang MosheKogamm (left) and Wolf Kieper on the market square in Zhitomir, August 7, 1941.” The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, accessed May 3, 2020. https://www.ushmm.org/search/results/?q=Wehrmacht.

Figure 4: Berlin Olympic Stadium. SeeInBerlin, accessed May 20, 2020. https://seeinberlin.com/2017/01/20/berlin-olympic-staduim-olympiastadion/.

Figure 2: “Images from the Wehrmacht Exhibit. Jews captured by SS and SD troops during the suppression of the Warsaw ghetto uprising are forced to leave their shelter and march to the Umschlagplatz for deportation.” The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, accessed May 3, 2020. https://www.ushmm. org/search/results/?q=WehrmachtCrimes

Inventory of Images

Figure 5: People walking past Stolpersteine (stumbling stones) in Berlin. NPR Chicago, accessed May 2, 2020. https://www.npr.org/local/309/2019/07/26/744964748/remembering-chicago-s-1919-race-riotswith-public-art.

Figure 6: A set of Stolpersteine (stumbling stones) in Berlin commemorating one family. The Guardian, accessed May 2, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/ cities/2019/feb/18/stumbling-stones-a-different-vision-of-holocaust-remembrance.

Andreolla Feijo 18

Bibliography

Andreolla Feijo 19

Apperly, Eliza. “‘Stumbling Stones’: A Different Vision Guttmann, Allen, Alan Tomlinson, and Christopher

of Holocaust Remembrance.” The Guardian, Feb

Young. “Berlin 1936: The Most Controversial

ruary 18, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/cit

Olympics.” In National Identity and Global Sports ies/2019/feb/18/stumbling-stones-a-different-vi

Events: Culture, Politics, and Spectacle in the sion-of-holocaust-remembrance.

Olympics and the Football World Cup. 60-70.

Albany: State University of New York Press. 2006.

Augé, M. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology

of Super-modernity. London: New Left Books, Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung. “Crimes of the 1995.

German Wehrmacht: The Dimensions of a War of

Annihilation 1941 - 1944. An Outline Copley, Clare. “Stones Do Not Speak for Themselves:

of the Exhibition.” Hamburger: Hamburg

Disentangling Berlin’s Palimpsest.” Fascism 8,

er Institut für Sozialforschung Edition, 1995.

no. 2 ( 2019): 219-49. https://doi. org/10.1163/22116257-00802006.

Hartman, Geoffrey H. “German-Jewish Memory and

National Consciousness.” In Holocaust Remem The Cambridge Academic Content Dictionary, s.v. “mon

brance: The Shapes of Memory. Cambridge: Black

ument.” Accessed May 13, 2020. https://dictionary. well, 1994. cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/monument.

Harjes, Kristen. “Stumbling Stones: Holocaust Memorials, Dvorak, Petula. “America’s Missing Slave Memo

National Identity, and Democratic Inclusion in

rials: It’s Time to Truly Acknowledge Our Bloody Berlin.” German Politics & Soci

Past.” The Washington Post, August 28, 2017.

ety 23, no. 1 (2005): 138-151. https://www.jstor. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/americas- org/stable/23740916?seq=1. missing-slave-memorials-its-time-to-truly-ac knowledge-our-bloodypast2017/08/28/9beeb6d4- Hawes, James. The Shortest History of Germany: From Julius 8c1a-11e7-8df5-c2e5cf46c1e2_story.html.

Caesar to Angela Merkel—A Retelling for Our Times.

New York: The Experiment, 2019.

Geyer, Michael, and Miriam Hansen. “German-Jewish

Memory and National Consciousness”. In Horn, Heather Suvain. “Facing Up to the Past, German

Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory.

Style.” The New Republic, October 31, 2019.

Blackwell. Cambridge, 1994. https://newrepublic.com/article/155546/facing- past-german-style.

Groeneveld, Josh, and Ruqayyah, Moynihan. “German

Army Is still Struggling to Come to Terms with Hornstein, Shelley. Losing Site: Architecture, Memory

Its Nazi Past.” Business Insider Deutschland, April and Place. New York: Routledge, 2016.

3, 2020. https://www.businessinsider.com/ why-german-army-still-wont-address-na Jordan, J. Structures of Memory: Understanding Urban zi-past-2019-6.

Change in Berlin and Beyond. Stanford: Stanford

University Press. 2006.

Bibliography Komska, Yuliya. The Icon Curtain: The Cold War’s Quiet Bor der. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2015.

Ladd, B. The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History

in the Urban Landscape. Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 1997.

Andreolla Feijo 20 Neumann, J. “Gunter Demnig, Award Nomination.”

Obermayer German Jewish History Awards.

Berlin: 2005. http://obermayer.us/award/2005/O- English-308_05.pdf.

Nolan, Mary. Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust,

and the Historians Debate. Durham: Duke Uni

versity Press. Fall, 2001. 113-132.

Lipstadt, Deborah E. “Slavery and the Holocaust: How

Americans and Germans Cope With Past Evils.”

The New York Times, August 30, 2019. https://www. Ott, Randall. German Façade Design: Traditions of nytimes.com/2019/08/27/

Screening from 1500 to Modernism. London: books/review/learning-from-the-germans-susan-

Routledge, 2017. neiman.html?auth=login-facebook.

O’Sullivan, Feargus. “The Fate of Hitler’s Birth Place.”

Marchesano, Louis. “Nazi War Criminal Records.” Los

CityLab, 2016. https://www.citylab.com/equi

Angeles: Interagency Working Group at the Si

ty/2016/10/hitler-birthplace-demolished-

mon Wiesenthal Center, 1999. austria/504611/.

McElvoy, Anne. “Learning from the Germans by Susan Nora, Pierre. Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de

Neiman; Hitler: Only the World Was Enough

Memoire. In Special Issue: Memory and Count

by Brendan Simms. A Study of How the US er-Memory. Irvine: University of California, 1898.

and Germany Have Dealt with Their Racist

Legacies; and a New Theory of What Pleasant Grove City v. Summum, 555 U.S. 460, 470–471

Drove Hitler.” The Guardian, September 16, (2009).

2019. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/ sep/16/learning-from-the-germans-susanneiman- Ringbeck, Brigitta. “Monument Protection in Germa hitler-only-the-world-was-enough-brendan- ny.” Historic England, 2017. https://historicen simms-review. gland.org.uk/whats-new/debate/recent/ town-and-country-planning-act-70th-anniversary/ Neiman, Susan. Learning from the Germans: Race and the monument-protection-in-germany/.

Memory of Evil. New York: St. Martins Press, 2020.

Scobie, Alexander. Hitler’s State Architecture: The Impact of Neiman, Susan. “Germany Has No Nazi Memorials.” The Classical Antiquity. University Park: Pennsylvania Atlantic, September 14, 2019. https://www.theat

State University Press, 1990. lantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/germa ny-has-no-nazi-memorials/597937/.

Stratigakos, Despina. Hitler at Home. New Haven: Yale

University Press. 2017.

Bibliography Stangl, Paul. The Vernacular and the Monumental: Memory

and Landscape in Post-war Berlin. Washington:

GeoJournal, 2008. doi: 10.1007/s10708-008-9206- 0.

Strafgesetzbuch (German Criminal Code), section § 86a.

Accessed May 13, 2020. https://ec.europa.eu/an ti-trafficking/sites/antitrafficking/files/criminal_ code_germany_en_1.pdf.

Widdicombe, Lizzie. “What Can We Learn from the

Germans About Confronting Our History?” The

New Yorker, October 21, 2019. https://www. newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/what- can-we-learn-from-the-germans-about-confront ing-our-history.

Young, James. The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials

in History. New York: Prestel. 1994.

Zelizer, Barbie. Visual Culture and the Holocaust. New

Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001.

Zeitz, Joshua. “There Are No Nazi Statues In Germany.”

Politico Magazine, August 20, 2017. https://www. politico.com/magazine/story/2017/08/20/why- there-are-no-nazi-statues-in-germany-215510.

Andreolla Feijo 21