Coming to terms in Germany
A visit to Berlin and the Holocaust Memorial shows how a country deals with its darkest chapter in history
The United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution in November designating Jan. 27 as an international date to commemorate the Holocaust.
Germany issued a news release shortly after, welcoming the initiative: “For us Germans, the Holocaust crime continues to be the darkest chapter in our history and a source of particular responsibility.”
What must it be like for German people, coming to terms with the Hitler regime, knowing their grandfathers and great uncles never will be considered heroes the way war veterans of the Allied forces are, bearing responsibility for the murder of six million innocents?
I asked myself the question as the small commuter plane on which I was a passenger landed recently at Berlin’s Tegel Airport, a one-hour hop from Brussels.
The German capital, a city of 3.4 million, still adjusting to a reunited urban environment and overcoming its tumultuous history, itself gives some insight through its urban landscape.
I was invited there as a guest of the Goethe Institute, a German linguistic and cultural agency that operates internationally, funded by the public and the German government.
The city is surely one of Europe’s most chaotic and unfinished civic environments, a city that now has an East and a West undivided by a wall except on the city’s periphery where graffiti-strewn portions of the ugly concrete structure remain standing simply because they don’t get in anyone’s way.
In the very centre of the city, not far from the Brandenburg Gate, the Holocaust Memorial opened in May. It is so awesome and thoughtprovoking that when my translator/ guide, a young PhD student named Judith Wellen, asked me, as a Jew, what was my opinion of it? — I was speechless.
Designed by American architect Peter Eisenman, the prominent memorial consists of 2,700 concrete blocks — in 10 different sizes — that sit in long symmetrical rows atop cobblestones that are just as relentlessly symmetrical. The ground beneath is a large, undulating square city block.
The visitor walks in the narrow spaces between the blocks and there are only questions, feelings of confusion and disorientation, monotony, a sense of being trapped and great sadness.
On the day I was there, a yellow rose had been laid on one of the graffiti-resistant blocks.
A security guard patrolled the silent site, picking up a gum wrapper here, a twig there.
Hitler’s war bunker had been located nearby, which apparently was a consideration that favoured the choice of the memorial’s prominent location.
Where is the monument to the Third Reich? I asked my guide. Surely there is some physical memory somewhere of Adolf Hitler.
Wellen says there is none, in fact even the term Reich has been all but banished from the German lexicon.
She takes me to a reconstructed posh hotel nearby, the Adlon, where it is said Hitler would plot his propaganda campaigns with top officials. But there are no visible commemorations.
In what was once a vibrant Jewish quarter in the city, Wellen calls my attention to the odd cobblestone that is gold rather than grey. I bent to touch the golden cobblestone inscribed in German: “Here lived Regina Schwimmer.” Her date of birth was 1885. She was torn from her home in 1942 and sent to Riga.
Each gold cobblestone tells an individual horror story.
The endeavour started as a private crusade on a local person’s part but is now receiving some funding from government. It is expensive; each cobblestone costs 100 euros (about $140 Cdn.)
The state has taken responsibility for maintaining Jewish cemeteries in places in Germany where there are no Jews left to do so. Some 105,000 Jews currently live in Germany — about a fifth of the number before the Second World War.
Even around Berlin’s core, huge city blocks lie vacant in the form of bombed-out fields strewn with debris. That’s because ownership is still the subject of competing claims — often from Holocaust survivors or their offspring, Wellen says. Even all these years later.
Buildings still bear the scars of bullets. Walking around Berlin, it’s possible to feel as though the war was yesterday.
Passing a Jewish school, I noticed a police officer standing guard in front of a gate, state security provided only to Jewish schools. In the same vein, concrete pylons in front of the synagogue in the Jewish Quarter are meant to thwart acts of anti-Semitism. The Germans clearly want to defend against even the most errant anti-Semitic attack.
Ironically, in 2005, Germany finds itself geographically smack in the middle of a relatively new experiment in harmonization and national fraternity. With 82 million people, it’s the most populous of the 25 EU nations that have come together.
Germany has adopted a liberal policy for Jews wishing to emigrate from the former Soviet countries, reporting its Jewish population as a result has tripled in the past decade. It now has the fastestgrowing Jewish population in Europe.
According a German embassy website: “The Jewish community as a whole continues to face threats from small groups of right- wing extremists. Attempts to stamp out these groups for good are based on the recognition that anti-Semitism and intolerance are attacks not only on individuals, but on the very fabric of democracy.”
The state is also confronting significant problems integrating a large Muslim population from Turkey that has settled in its midst.
Germany is going to need all the lessons it has learned from its sad and brutal past.