hello and welcome to this week's edition of CHI the contemporary history intervention
this week's video comes to you from Berlin I’m here on academic business but I’ve taken this
Saturday morning off to take you on a tour through Berlin now Berlin has become for Germany what
New York city traditionally is for the us the big city a symbol for what Germany is at the same time
a city that is not very much liked by the natives themselves if you ask Germans about Berlin
you get ambivalent responses at best but well Berlin is a fascinating city not least of all
because of its history it has good history here at Brandenburg Gate that's where the wall used to
be just behind Brandenburg Gate and that's where people celebrate on November the 9th 1989 because
the wall had fallen well that's the good history there is bad history here and there is really bad
history here this was the capital of Nazi Germany and Berlin has come around to talk about this and
make this history visible and I’ll take you on a tour now to several sites here in Berlin
and talk not just about commemoration but also about co-commemoration has evolved and we'll see
some recurring topics here it's about the location where do you put a marker to the past it is about
the fragmentation of memory we no longer remember the Nazi era as one but we commemorate individual
victims while at the same time being aware of the full totality of Nazi crimes
and there is the general question that is overhanging commemoration of the Nazi era
it's the question of aesthetics which translates for us as historians into the questions well how
many words how much text do you actually need to talk about the Nazi past let's go
this is our first stop Wittenbergplatz in the western half of Berlin
and this is where Berlin's commemorative journey started at this central place popular place with
this marker put up in 1967 the year says something by itself about commemoration because for the
first 20 something years commemoration of the Nazi era was not really about monuments and markers but
this marker was put here in 1967 and it reads Orte des Schreckens die wir niemals vergessen durfen
places of horror places of terror that we must never forget starting with Auschwitz
well if you look at this marker in terms of aesthetics there really is not much that you can
talk about this is a monument that draws on your own knowledge in order to understand what this
monument is about you need to know about Auschwitz and Maidanek and all these other places of horror
the choice of this design has something to do with Germany at this time Germany was reeling
well not so much from the Nazi past but from the refugees from what was the eastern half of Germany
territories that became part of Poland and what was then the soviet union is Russia a lot of
Germans were refugees that were remembering their old homelands and there was an entire industry
around it and part of that industry was putting up markers that evoked cities in the former east
of Germany cities that we must not forget and this is the rhetoric that this marker would add
and it said hey there are other cities other places other places of horror
that we must never forget so the choice of this design is really a response to these markers and
an attempt to put the other memory the memory of Nazi atrocities rather than
lens lost to put that at the centre of collective memory now if you look at this in terms of
commemorative politics and commemorative journeys the interesting thing is here there is no
differentiation whatsoever this is a marker that remembers places of terror it remembers evokes
victims though it does not name these victims and it does not differentiate between victims if
you talk about Auschwitz well there were Jews who were killed in Auschwitz there were homosexuals there
were gypsies these there is no differentiation between victims here the victims are not named
which is something that you see will change later in Berlin's commemorative that victims are named
but here it is an evocation of a horror and an attempt to talk about the Nazi era as such and the
Nazi atrocities as one giant whole that is about to change and we only have to move one subway stop
to get to the next stage of commemoration we've moved just one subway stop since the last video
but we've moved on one generation we are now in the 1980s in Berlin's commemorative landscape
the 1980s are a very significant decade in commemoration of the Nazi past that's where
commemoration moved from a general commemoration to a local memory people discovered
found out and reflected on the fact that the Nazi era had specific places that linked to it one of
these places is Nollendorfplatz you see the marker behind me Nollendorfplatz was the centre of
gay life in Berlin before 1933 and you can imagine what that meant after the Nazis seizure of power
many of the restaurants and pubs that cater to gay people around here were closed and the gay people
were prosecuted and put into concentration camps and this marker commemorates this the words
Totgeschlagen Totgeschwiegen it's hard to translate totgeschlagen means hit to death
literally and totgeschwiegen means a deadly silence or a dead silence that's what this alludes
to the fact that these are not just homosexuals in Nazi era were not just people who are prosecuted
and killed and put into concentration camps but there was deafening silence about their
fate after 1945 in fact the laws that allowed for their prosecution remained in place after 1945
and yes these laws were enforced this is what this marker commemorates homosexuals in the Nazi
era you see how the localization of memory leads to fragmentation but also fragmentation
that allows to put a face to individual victims this is a marker for the homosexual specifically
and their peculiar fate and their peculiar place if I’m correctly informed this is still
one of the centres of gay life in Berlin now if you talk about the design it is inspired by a Nazi
insignia of all things this pink triangle this was the sign of homosexuals in the concentration camps
that's the sign that they had to wear in a concentration camp and the tricky thing about
design is always well you need to know these things in order to understand this when they
put up this plaque in 1989 the idea was well people will get it well there was a plaque entered below
this this brass plaque here was added in 1993 to explain exactly that just evoking the Nazi past
with symbols was not enough you needed to put up a plaque just to be sure well this plaque
is I think a significant step in commemoration and please note that many
of the discriminatory laws were still in place laws that have now been repealed that were still
in place in 1989 when this plaque was cut because this wasn't just a statement about the Nazi past
but also something as a statement about contemporary gay politics one thing that
this marker lacks though is grandeur and let me just show you what is behind these walls
well this is what is behind that wall and behind the marker for the gay victims of the Nazi
this is the memorial for the people who worked for Berlin traffic and died in the second world
war and if you look at this monument and the sense of grandeur that it has well there is a difference
here in the kind of mood the celebration that contrasts with the gay memorial you see in the
wall behind inscriptions for the individuals who died while working for the subway system
of Berlin but grandeur is always a challenging category when it comes to commemoration I will
see that in the next stage of our journey through Berlin's commemorative landscape there is a lot
you can say about the trend towards a localized memory I think it's important when you talk about
the Nazi era to make clear well these atrocities didn't happen in some far away place they had roots
places faces that were right there where people live but one of the aspects that I think deserve
attention here is that well many of the places that were significant for Nazi history actually
are not very attractive places and this is one of them Putlitzbrücke in Berlin-Moabit
a bridge that crosses a railroad and before we get know where this gets yes the railroads
were significant for the deportation of Jews all over Europe that's what brought them
to the places of their murder and this is one of the places the rail freight yard in Berlin
will be to this day a hub for commerce and it is a place that needs commemoration it's certainly not
an aesthetically pleasing place and speaking about aesthetics well this is our monument
this is the monument that commemorates deportation and well as with
so many monuments to say different things about it you can point out that there was a
Star of David and steps that lead to nowhere or you can say that this is modern art it's not easy
to talk about the aesthetics of commemoration here though because well first of all
aesthetic and commemoration is something that is open to discussions in more than one dimension
but this monument did not remain uncontested it was put up in 1987. it has seen several layers
of graffiti and it has seen a bomb attack this monument was destroyed in the summer of 1992
and was then rebuilt and reopened in 1993 part of controversies that raged in the wake of
reunification where it was open whether Germany would continue this part of engaging with a
troubling past or would go for a new nationalism memories are never unconscious they're always
about struggles well in this case people rebuild the monument and they put up a plaque that you see
here over my shoulder that commemorates this story I think that is an important part of
the commemorative journey of Berlin we do not just put up monuments that then stand
but these monuments reflect on the people who put them there and we can see that in even
sharper focus at the next and final stage of this journey through commemorative landscape of Berlin
this is the final stop of our journey through the memorial landscape of Berlin and we're actually
pretty close to where we started earlier today in the background you see the Reichstag the German
parliament and a bit closer you see the American embassy and bratton brigade is actually just
behind the American embassy and in the foreground you see a monument that probably needs no
introduction this is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe or as a colloquially known the
Holocaust Memorial at the centre of Berlin close to the places of government back then and today
and very closest to the centres of Nazi terror this monument was opened in 2005 after more than
15 years of debates and the debate on this monument is ongoing as it should be it was
designed by Richard Serra and Peter Eisenman and one of the striking things about this debate is
that the designers of this memorial did not take part in this debate even
Eisenman actually said at one point that he would not want to commit to what is obvious
namely that this monument that these slabs of stone do resemble tombstones now as always
with the aesthetics of admiration you can argue back and forth on whether it is a good thing or
a bad thing but has one important impact namely that there is no predefined reading of this
landscape of this memorial and that has the effect to reflect on what people do in here there is as
it is in Germany there are some rules on how you should behave here but these rules they do
not tell you how to remember this is a monument that reflects on the people who come here and
that kind of mirror actually was there from the very beginning in that the German parliament when
it decided on this monument said well we want a museum here you see the entrance here in the
background the little cubicle in front of the building that is the entrance to the underground
museum and you see they have a website that goes with this memorial it seems that this silence
was intolerable to the makers of the memorial we want to talk about this Nazi past and is that a
good thing is that a bad thing well I’m afraid this edition of CHI doesn't have a punchline
no kind of takeaway lesson here um but just a call to keep talking and keep thinking and keep
remembering because there's one thing that I think you can
say for sure as a historian about memory it is changing but if it ends and the
memory ends on the Nazi era maybe that would be the greatest trouble of them all