MEMORIALS AND MEMORY: REFLECTIONS
ON BERLIN’S CONTESTED PASTS
Nicholas K. Johnson
5. November 2015
BACKGROUND: THE FREE UNIVERSITY’S PUBLIC
HISTORY PROGRAM
 Freie Universität Berlin
 Founded in 1948; West Berlin’s main university
Only German Public History Program, began in 2007
Averages 20 students per year; collaboration with the Center for Contemporary
History in Potsdam (ZZF)
 My exchange was funded by a joint IU/FU Graduate Student Exchange Fellowship
SA PRISON PAPESTRASSE MEMORIAL
 First discovered in mid-1990s
 Permanent Exhibition 2013
 Only historic site in Berlin with
unequivocal traces of Nazi seizure of
power still visible
 Part of the early concentration camp
system in Berlin; operated from 1933
until 1934
 Torture cellar for political prisoners
SA PRISON PAPESTRASSE 1933-1934
The SA now part of Berlin’s police force
during this period
 Mass arrests soon after the Nazi seizure
of power; the Papestrasse was an initial
detainment site
 Most of those targeted were
communists, trade unionists, social
democrats, and prominent Jews
 At least 10 prisoners confirmed
murdered in the cellar; likely number
much higher
GRAFFITI FROM 1933
Swastika and “F.J.K. III.B” which is
an SA unit designation
TRACES OF VIOLENCE EXHIBIT
 Temporary exhibit fully researched,
designed, and built by Public History MA
students from the Free University,
October 2014-March 2015
 Focused on the lasting effects of torture
and unlawful imprisonment of 6 former
inmates and their families
 Oral History interviews with family
members; archival research
 Budget of around 1200 EUR
EXHIBIT INSTALLATION, MARCH 2015
AUDIENCE AND TRANSLATION
 Translation an important issue in
German exhibits, especially in Berlin
 Often a weak point of historical
exhibits due to translators’ lack of
familiarity with history terminology
 Over half of tourists now non-German;
non-German audience often lacks prior
knowledge of both German history and
language
 Issues encountered: Passive voice,
double entendres, style.
 Literal vs. “spiritual” translation?
PLACES OF REMEMBRANCE: BAYERISCHER VIERTEL
 “Berlin’s Most Unsettling Memorial” –
NYRB, 2013
 “Decentralized” memorial designed by
artists Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock
in 1991
 80 signs depicting anti-Jewish laws
placed throughout neighborhood
Photo courtesy Nick Sacco, June 2015
EXAMPLES
DECENTRALIZED MEMORIALS: STOLPERSTEINE
DECENTRALIZED MEMORIALS AND PUBLIC
HISTORY
Renata Stih on “Places of Remembrance”: “[W]e want it to be uncomfortable. We don’t
want people to say, ‘We didn’t know.’ ” NYRB, 15 June 2013
Historian Joseph Pearson on Stumbling Stones: “…the inscription is insufficient to
conjure a person. It is the emptiness, void, lack of information, the maw of the forgotten,
which gives the monuments their power and lifts them from the banality of a statistic.”
The Needle Berlin, August 2010
Is there room for decentralized memorials in the American public history landscape?
BERLIN WALL
MEMORIAL,
BERNAUER
STRASSE
A: The Wall and the
“Death Strip
B: The City’s
Destruction
C: The Construction
of the Wall
D: It happened at the
Wall.
BERLIN WALL WALKING
TOUR
•
Exhibit is mostly outdoors including
weatherproof video and audio stations
•
Very large for a memorial within a city
•
Visitor’s center marred by simplistic, triumphalist
narrative with fall of the wall “solving” German
history
FURTHER EXAMPLES
CONFLICTED MEMORIES OF BERLIN WALL
 Bernauer Strasse Memorial from
(government) historians’ point of view.
Sober, remembers the dead, offers a
reconciliatory narrative.
 Majority of tourists first encounter the
wall at the East Side Gallery, a
preserved section of the wall coated in
street art and graffiti.
 East Side Gallery simultaneously a
touristic cliché and subversive public art
“My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love,” Dmitri
Vrubel, 1990 (Brezhnev and Honecker)
THE COLD WAR AND FALL OF THE WALL IN
GERMAN PUBLIC HISTORY
 Increasingly present in exhibits, film,
and television
 Generation born in late 1980s now
entering the field and “historicizing” this
period
 Questions both official triumphalist
narrative and “Ostalgie (Nostalgia for
the East)”
 Focus on everyday life in East Germany
 Hottest trend at the moment
Photo courtesy Nick Sacco, June 2015
BERLIN-HOHENSCHÖNHAUSEN
MEMORIAL
Former Stasi (East German
Secret Police) Prison Complex
EYEWITNESS-LED TOURS
 Most guided tours of BerlinHohenschönhausen are conducted by
former inmates
 Our tour guide, Hans-Jochen Scheidler,
was imprisoned in 1968 for distributing
leaflets. His imprisonment completely
destroyed his career aspirations.
 Focused on his own experiences
including arrest, interrogation, solitary
confinement, psychological torture, and
total surveillance.
EYEWITNESS-LED TOURS
THE STASI POST-1989
 Stasi Records Agency (BStU): Federal
body tasked with maintaining and
investigating Stasi records
 Stasi Archive; people allowed to look
up their own files
 Names and photographs of informants,
Stasi agents, etc. all publicly mentioned
in exhibit text
 “This is your future” - Scheidler
GERMANY IN 2015: “THE WALL IN THE HEAD”
 Economically weak former East
compared to former West
 Rising anti-EU, anti-immigrant rightwing (PEGIDA, AfD) in former East
Germany
 Many former East Germans see
reunification as a “raw deal”
 Lack of critical historical attention on
pre-1989 West Germany currently a
big blind spot in public memory
CODA:
REBUILDING
THE KAISER’S
PALACE
THE PALACE OF THE REPUBLIC
 East Germany’s Parliament Building
 Huge symbolic importance for East
Germans
 Contaminated with asbestos, closed in
1990. Cleared of asbestos by 2003.
 Demolished in 2008 to make room
for…?
GDR Palace of the Republic, 1976
THE BERLIN CITY PALACE
 Berlin residence of Kaiser Wilhelm and
the Hohenzollern family
 Heavily damaged during WWII,
demolished by the GDR due to its status
as a symbol of “Prussian imperialism”
 New site (so-called “Humboldt Forum”)
 Reconstructed façade
 Ethnographic collection
Berlin City Palace, 1920s
CONTROVERSY
 Most former East Germans opposed the reconstruction of the city palace on various
grounds
 Others, particularly urban planners, see the palace as anachronistic
 Proponents argue demolition a triumph over modernist architectural styles favored
by both “soulless” communist and neo-liberal ideas
 One theory sees reconstruction as a result of an “inability to grieve" the loss of
Germany's old “glory” as an Empire. Is this really more “palatable” past than that
represented by the Palace of the Republic?
SUMMARY
 Internationalization of Public
History
 Challenges of interpreting
German history
 Practical challenges: audience,
translation, digital history
QUESTIONS?