Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin. Alexandra Richie

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СКАЧАТЬ be preserved. In 1983 a group calling itself the ‘Active Museum of Fascism and Resistance in Berlin’ dedicated to confronting the Nazi past began to excavate the site. Part of the cellar complex was cleared and a temporary exhibition created, which included details of the orders issued from there, the prisoners who had been brought there, the people executed there. It explained the system of terror which had extended out from the buildings until it oppressed almost all of Europe, but it was concerned both with those in command and their victims. It remains a thoughtful presentation and has attracted many visitors – although its director Herr Lutz said that of the 1 million people who came in 1993, half were foreigners.⁹¹

      Many Berliners, like the members of the Active Museum, feel that the city could use more initiatives and memorials of this kind. Rather than being demolished or covered up, they argue, the Nazi past should be exposed, demystified and scrutinized; rather than concentrating only on victims Berlin must, as Gerhard Schoenberner put it, counter the portrayal of the Gestapo or the SS as ‘people from Mars who attacked and invaded a peaceful Germany’.⁹² It has been suggested that instead of being destroyed, the Chancellery bunker, which is about to disappear for ever under the new Federal Representative Offices, might be turned into a museum in the mode of the Topographie des Terrors. Alfred Kernd’l, former head of the Municipal Archaeology Office, lobbied to save a bunker covered with paintings created by SS men during their fight to defend Hitler in April 1945, arguing that it was a truly amazing phenomenon: even as bombs rained down on them and as their capital city went up in flames, some soldiers were still able to paint pictures of the invasion of England.⁹³ The future of the paintings has not yet been decided, but it is likely that they will be destroyed – ostensibly for fear that they will become neo-Nazi monuments.

      Berlin is now being rebuilt as the capital of a new Germany, and it would be ludicrous to preserve all artefacts from the Nazi period; the city centre would be little more than a windswept wasteland. Nevertheless, the argument that none of these things can be saved because they might become neo-Nazi shrines is both insulting to Berliners and worrying to all Europeans, implying as it does that the authorities see Fascism lurking just behind Berlin’s new facade. Hitler’s Wolfschanze bunker complex in the former East Prussia is open to the public, but far from becoming a neo-Nazi shrine it exposes the ghastly mentality of the men who hid in these cramped, dingy buildings to plot the deaths of innocent people. It is a powerful reminder of an abhorrent regime.

      The debate about the preservation of such artefacts is linked to the question of how the Holocaust itself should be commemorated in Berlin. Apart from a few minor sites set up in the west before 1989 no separate memorial has yet been created in memory of the Jews who were murdered between 1933 and 1945. Historians, planners and politicians alike have tried to address this issue and in 1995 a competition was held for the development of a five-acre site near the Brandenburg Gate for which DM16 million had been set aside. There were 527 entries ranging from gigantic boxcars to monstrous sculptures of ovens, but on 17 March 1995 the chairman of the jury, president of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Arts Walter Jens, awarded the first prize to a design in the form of a huge slab the size of two football fields to be inscribed with the names of over 4 million known Jewish victims, a design also favoured by the television talk-show host Lea Rosh, who funded a group known as ‘Perspective Berlin’ which campaigned for the monument. The project was criticized by many Berliners on the grounds of its enormous size, and was eventually vetoed by Helmut Kohl. A second competition was held in 1997 and a new monument is set to be inaugurated on 20 January, 1999, the 56th anniversary of the Wannsee Conference. Those making the choice of what to build on the site took over a decade to decide, precisely because they were faced with the terrible question of how Berlin can appropriately pay tribute to people whose deaths were ordered from its very core.⁹⁴ And Berliners were responsible.⁹⁵ On 16 October 1941 Hans Frank, who presided over the General Gouvernement in Poland, reported on a recent discussion with his superiors about how to deal with the Jews under his jurisdiction: ‘We were told in Berlin, “Why all this bother? We can do nothing with [the Jews] either in the Ostland or in the Reichskommissariat. So liquidate them yourselves.” ’⁹⁶

      The creation of a memorial in Berlin is contentious partly because of where the actual killing took place. The murder of Europe’s Jews was directed from Berlin, but there were no killing centres in Germany itself. Unlike concentration camps such as Bergen-Belsen or Dachau or Sachsenhausen, the extermination camps were located some distance away. Kulmhof (Chelmno), where 360,000 people were killed and three people survived, was located in western Poland. Belzec, where 600,000 people died and two survived, Sobibór, where 250,000 people died and sixty-four survived, and Treblinka, where over 870,000 people died and fewer than seventy survived, were all located in eastern Poland.⁹⁷ Around 1 million Jews and 270,000 non-Jewish Poles were killed in Auschwitz, in southern Poland. The thousands of Jews who survived Auschwitz did so only because it had a dual function both as an extermination camp (Birkenau) and a concentration/slave labour camp. This relatively ‘high’ survival rate came about because some Jews were selected to be worked to death rather than gassed upon arrival. This is one of the reasons why Auschwitz has become something of a symbol for the Holocaust – there were simply no witnesses left to tell of what had happened elsewhere.⁹⁸ If one counts only the number of Jews murdered in the first four extermination camps listed, and excludes those killed in Auschwitz, it would be tantamount to murdering over half Berlin’s 1939 population – more than 2 million people. The survivors could easily fit into an average Berlin apartment.

      Because so few non-Jewish Germans were interned in the extermination camps, and because so few people survived, the mass murder of Jews has entered German memory as something of a figurative rather than a literal experience. As James Young has put it,

      had it not been for the massive, last-ditch evacuations of Jewish prisoners from death camps in Poland … the mass murder might have remained a foreign phenomenon altogether. German experience of the prisoners’ plight in the camps was limited largely to either helping Jewish neighbours or watching quietly as they disappeared, guarding the camps or being forced by Allied soldiers to march through them after liberation. As a result, what we call Holocaust memorials in Germany tend to be highly stylized when remembering the Jews.⁹⁹

      Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in West Berlin’s existing memorial to the camps.

      As one approaches the pretty Wittenberg Platz U-Bahn station one sees a sign which looks rather like a bus timetable. There is another nearby. As one comes closer one sees that it is not a timetable but rather a list of twelve concentration and extermination camps headed by the words PLACES OF TERROR THAT WE SHOULD NEVER FORGET. The signs were erected in 1967 and they are astounding in their inadequacy.¹⁰⁰ They show why so many felt Berlin needed a central monument to the Holocaust, however controversial it might be. On another level, independent groups have recently set up a number of other more convincing memorials on historic sites, such as the projection of the names of deported Jews on to a blank wall near the building in which they once lived in Steglitz, or the imaginative description of the history of the Sonnenallee slave labour camp located next to an ordinary playing field in Neukölln.¹⁰¹ There is a new interest in other sites as well; the siding at Grunewald train station, one of the points from which 36,000 Berlin Jews were deported, is to be preserved; there is to be a plaque there and another at the Putlitzstrasse station. There is now a sculpture and plaque at the Tiergarten 4 site next to the Philharmonie, where the euthanasia programme was devised. Another place in Berlin dedicated to remembrance is Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum, an annex to the Berlin Museum. The structure has been built in the form of a distressed Star of David with a space in the centre, creating a void into which one can look, but cannot enter. The museum will show the long history of Berlin’s Jewish citizens; how they were crucial to its prosperity, its culture and its identity. It will also show what the loss of so many Berliners – Jewish Berliners – meant to a city in which they had played such an important role. In 1992 the villa at Am Grossen Wannsee 56–58, the site of the Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942, was finally turned into a Holocaust Memorial Centre, and signs were put up both at the Jewish retirement home in Grosse СКАЧАТЬ