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THE JOURNAL OF SOCIAL POLICY STUDIES_
ЖУРНАЛ
ИССЛЕДОВАНИЙ СОЦИАЛЬНОЙ
политики • ••
ARTICLES iN ENGLISH
Cornelia Siebeck
FROM COUNTER-HEGEMONiC PROJECTS TO state-sponsored iNSTiTUTiONS: MEMORiAL sites
to the nazi crimes and the politics of memory in THE FEDERAL republic OF Germany
The article considers the transformation of memorial sites to the Nazi crimes in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) from counter-hegemonic projects into state-sponsored institutions. It is claimed that this process cannot only be explained with reference to normative-democratic learning processes, but must also be seen in the context of the evolving 'German Question' and respective shifts in the FRG's politics of memory. It is argued that before 1990, and in addition to a general reluctance to confront the Nazi past, official representation of the Nazi crimes would have symbolically undermined the FRG's claim to the restoration of the German nation state, since it would have kept the historical and moral preconditions for its actual historic failure visible in the public space. Therefore, memorial sites to the Nazi past did not become a national project, but had to be initiated and enforced by civil society actors as a counter-cultural project. It was only after German unification and the resolution of the German Question that the Nazi past could be integrated into a new national master narrative, depicting the restored nation state as a country that had successfully 'learnt from its history'. Along with new memorial sites to the injustice committed in the Soviet Occupation Zone and the German Democratic Republic, memorial sites to the Nazi crimes were now officially declared to represent an 'anti-totalitarian consensus' among contemporary Germans. On this basis, memorial sites to the Nazi past could be smoothly incorporated into a new state-sponsored memory scape. In the article, the changing symbol-political status of memorial sites to the Nazi
Cornelia Siebeck - PhD-student, lecturer, Faculty for social science, Ruhr-University Bochum; Department of history, Humboldt-University Berlin, Germany. Email: Cornelia. Siebeck@ruhr-uni-bochum .de
© The Journal of Social Policy Studies. Volume 14. № 2
past is discussed against the backdrop of the overarching discourse on history and identity in the FRG. The article outlines the deeply divisive structure of this discourse in the old FRG, and shows how in the course of German nation building after 1990 these divisions could be bridged through the development of a new national master narrative. Promoting an anti-totalitarian teleology, this narrative provided the basis for a new memorial policy that allowed for the integration of memorial sites to the Nazi past into a representative national memory scape.
Keywords: Memory Politics, Germany, National Identity, Memorial Sites to the Nazi Past, Anti-totalitarianism
In the last 20 years, memorials to the Nazi crimes have become, as head of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation Volkhard Knigge put it in a much quoted essay, 'institutions that potentially belong to the basic equipment of the Federal Republic of Germany, like community colleges, theatres or museums' (Knigge 2001: 136).
This is a remarkable statement, especially when one considers that before 1990 memorial sites to the Nazi crimes in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) had been a decisively counter-hegemonic project. Until well into the 1980s, albeit decreasingly, such memorial sites were still met with indifference, reluctance or outright opposition from the majority of the population and the political establishment. After German unification, however, their symbol-political status radically changed. Within only a few years, they were incorporated into a new state-funded memoryscape.
Growing temporal distance, generational shifts, and overall normative-democratic learning processes cannot sufficiently explain this rather sudden official adoption of memorial sites to the Nazi crimes. In order to understand this striking turnaround, one also has to take into account the different stages in the evolution of the 'German Question', i.e. the notorious question of German national statehood. During the period of Germany's division into two states, the FRG's persistent claim to the restoration of the lost nation state was not only counterfactual, but also contested, since German nationalism was largely discredited for historical reasons. After unification in 1990, however, the German Question was settled, and German national statehood became an empirical fact. This historic turn brought with it a fundamental shift regarding the (im)possibili-ties to narrate the German nation in a coherent and affirmative way. Consequently, also the framework for narrating and representing the Nazi past changed.
In the following article, the changing symbol-political status of memorial sites to the Nazi past is considered against the backdrop of the overarching discourse on history and identity in the FRG. I will first outline the emergence of memorial sites to the Nazi past in the context of the old FRG's invariably precarious and deeply divisive memory discourse. Subsequently, I will show how in the course of German nation building after 1990 these divisions could
be bridged through the development of a new national master narrative. Promoting an anti-totalitarian teleology, this narrative provided the basis for a new memorial policy and an incorporation of memorial sites to the Nazi past into a state-sponsored memoryscape. To conclude, I will briefly depict how this memoryscape has been further developed subsequently, progressively embedding the Nazi past into an anti-totalitarian national success story.
A burdened past, an uncertain future: The old FRG's precarious master narrative
In the old FRG, memorial sites to the Nazi crimes were not considered a national project. Initiated and enforced by international survivor organizations, later also by civil society initiatives and committed individuals, they existed below the federal level, funded - if at all - by regional or local authorities and private associations.
This noticeably contrasted with the other two successor states to the Third Reich, which established national memorials at (selected) sites of former Nazi concentration camps soon after their founding. Mauthausen Memorial was inaugurated as early as in 1949, illustrating Austria's official narrative about having been the 'first victim' of Nazism (Perz 2006). In the German Democratic Republic (GDR), Buchenwald, Ravensbruck and Sachsenhausen were turned into National Sites of Warning and Commemoration (NSWC) by 1961. Employing a Marxist-Leninist teleology, the NSWCs were to epitomize a victorious antifascist struggle resulting in a socialist GDR, whereas the capitalist FRG was portrayed a continuation of fascism (Knigge 1998; Morsch 1996; Eschebach et al. 1999).
While Austria and the GDR thus constructed and objectified coherent storylines of national martyrology and victory, the FRG lacked an unambiguous master narrative regarding its historic-symbolic relationship to the Third Reich. The FRG, too, drew its legitimacy from normatively delimiting itself from the Nazi past. To this effect, and against the backdrop of the Cold War, an anti-totalitarian narrative was used: In place of 'dictatorship', the FRG had created 'democracy', while the GDR had merely swapped dictatorships from 'brown' to 'red'.
At the same time, however, and contrary to the other two successor states, the FRG understood itself as the legal heir of the German nation state, declaring the eventual restoration of this state as its raison d'etre. By positioning itself as the continuer of the German nation state, the FRG formally assumed historical responsibility, but given the telos of reunification, it is not surprising that, before 1990, memorials to the Nazi crimes were not included in its official self-representation. Such memorials would have kept the historical and moral preconditions for the historic failure of the German nation state visible in public space, perpetuating questions of guilt and perpetratorship, thus undermining the claim to national restoration.
By normatively disassociating the FRG from the Third Reich, while at the same time asserting national continuity and declaring itself a mere makeshift solution, the FRG employed a rather tension-filled narrative with an open end. Not least because of this precarious storyline, public memory discourse remained notoriously unsettled, and the theme of how to deal 'adequately' with the Nazi past turned into a key issue in a substantially conflictive discourse about the FRG's present and future (Lepsius 1993).
Ideal-typically, there were two conflicting narratives in play, which Edgar Wolfrum terms 'Normal-Nation-Identity' and 'Holocaust-Identity' (Wolfrum 1999: 355). While proponents of the former were after a positive national identity through reconnecting to a 'good' national past, their counterparts declared that the Nazi past marked an irreversible rupture in the course of German history. They called for breaking with national tradition and an ongoing public reflection on causes and consequences of the Nazi regime. Not uncommonly, and especially from the 1970s onwards, this also entailed a de-prioritization or dismissal of national reunification as well as anti- or post-national concepts of collective identity (Jarausch 2006: 63).
An anti-totalitarian nation of victims?
De- and re-thematizing the Nazi past in the early FRG
In the constitutive decade of the FRG, however, individuals and groups calling for a sincere confrontation with the recent past made up a tiny minority.
Under the banner of societal 'reintegration', Allied policies of denazification and criminal prosecution were quickly abandoned in favor of comprehensive exonerations and amnesties. Policies to compensate the victims of Nazi crimes were highly contested and generally followed a reactive logic that served the goals of international recognition and integration with the West (Frei 1999; Goschler 2008: 125).
All this was accompanied by largely apologetic national rhetoric. According to popular narratives, a long series of misfortunes had hit Germany, including the 'demon' Hitler, a catastrophic war, the flight and expulsion of Germans from the East, the 'victor's justice' of the Allies, the lost nation state, a self-righteous outside world ignorant towards German suffering, and last, but not least, the persistent Soviet threat (Echternkamp 2002).
The predominant self-perception was of that of a victim community. The first memory policy initiatives pursued by the West German government sought to document German suffering during flight, expulsion and war captivity. On the ground, a vibrant memoryscape evolved, displaying countless monuments to the lost Eastern territories, the war victims, victims of Stalinism or unspecified 'violence and tyranny' (Moeller 2001). June 17 was declared a national holiday, commemorating the East German uprising against the GDR-regime in 1953, which in West Germany was immediately coopted
as a testimony to an all-German anti-totalitarian sentiment and the will for freedom and national unity (Wolfrum 1999: 76).
At the same time, there were hardly any commemorative signs hinting at the ramified network of concentration camps and other sites of terror and repression that had penetrated the landscape just a few years before. The sites of former concentration camps were even put to pragmatic new uses. Dachau, for example, was used to accommodate German refugees, in Neuengamme, a penal facility was erected, and Flossenbürg was used for housing and small industry. Only Bergen-Belsen was kept and transformed into a commemorative cemetery, albeit devoid of detailed historical information (Garbe 2005).
Yet there were individuals and groups who did not accept what they identified as a 'contradiction between official democratic culture and unofficial völkisch tradition' (Oy, Schneider 2013: 181)1. Survivor organizations, remigrants, leftist activists and a young cultural elite continuously protested against what they considered a rampant 'repression' of the Nazi past and decried personal continuities within the FRG's establishment (Fröhlich, Kohlstruck 1999). This ongoing discoursive cross current, combined with a sequence of attention-grabbing trials against Nazi perpetrators from the late 1950s onwards, served to ensure that Nazi crimes re-entered public consciousness at the turn of the decade. After an internationally reported series of anti-Semitic incidents in 1959-60, chancellor Adenauer hastened to lay a wreath in Bergen-Belsen. School curricula were reformed and historical-political education programmes were launched. In 1960-61, a group of leftist students could show a travelling exhibition on the persecution and annihilation of the Jews aided by public funding (Glienke 2008).
Nor could persistent demands by international survivor organizations to establish memorial sites at former concentration camps be ignored any longer. In 1965 a large memorial museum was opened at Dachau. Soon after, a historical exhibition was installed at Bergen-Belsen and space for commemorative events was arranged at the margins of the penal facility in Neuengamme (Garbe 2005). It would take twenty more years, however, until representations of Nazi crimes shifted from remote places to the heart of West German everyday life.
Resurfacing sites of Nazi crimes:
Debating national history and identity in the 1980s
From the late 1970s onwards, history workshops and memorial initiatives started exposing historical sites of the Nazi past all over the country. In guided tours, exhibitions and workcamps, as well as through putting signs or erecting memorials, young activists set out to educate themselves and the public about local events between 1933 and 1945.
1 Quotations are given in author's translation.
Claiming that the 'task of a radical overcoming of fascism has not been fulfilled yet' (Garbe 1983: 31), they vehemently denounced what they termed the 'forgotten concentration camps' spread all over the FRG's landscape. In the words of one contemporary activist:
It is not enough that the sites of former concentration camps as well as the buildings in whose walls innocent human beings were exploited, grinded and murdered, were being put to new use as any arbitrary constructions; on the top of it all, one was even tactless enough to install penal facilities, military institutions or riot police barracks at those sites. Teargas exercises in Neuengamme and CS gas experiments in Dachau reveal the utter bankruptcy of the alleged Vergangenheitsbewaltigung [efforts to master the past] (Garbe 1983: 24).
By then, the idea of German reunification had long lost its pragmatic dimension. With the closing of the GDR-FRG border in 1961, the de facto recognition of the GDR and the New Eastern Policy1 pursued by the social-liberal governments from 1969 onwards, a process of 'self-acknowledgement' and increasing acceptance of the German division gained ground (Wolfrum 1999: 211). At the same time, the Nazi past had become much more present in public discourse. Ever since the 1968 students' revolt, the unbewaltigte Vergangenheit (past that has not been overcome) proved to be a powerful argument for the Left to radically challenge the sociopolitical status quo (Kastner 2008). Gradually, state representatives also began paying their tribute. In 1970, chancellor Willy Brandt knelt in respect before the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising monument; in 1977, chancellor Helmut Schmidt visited Auschwitz. At the 40th anniversary of the 'Kris-tallnacht' in 1978, commemorative events were held all over the FRG. The US mini-series Holocaust, broadcast in 1979, found enormous public resonance (Schmid 2009, 2010).
Nevertheless, activists highlighting physical traces of this past in the middle of West German everyday life still encountered vigorous opposition and frequently saw themselves being accused of fouling their own nest (Garbe 1983: 27). Not least out of this experience, the activists positioned themselves in sharp opposition to West German mainstream society. They 'unequivocally took the side of the victims of Nazi terror' (Garbe 1983: 35) and supported the so-called 'forgotten victims'2 in their struggle for acknowledgement and compensation.
With regards to the sites of Nazi crimes, these memory activists demanded Betroffenheit (emotional and political engagement) and reimagined them
1 Under the prominent slogan 'Change through Rapprochement', the social-liberal governments initiated policies of diplomatic relaxation, negotiation and cooperation towards the GRD and the Eastern Bloc countries.
2 The umbrella term 'forgotten victims' referred to victim groups who were hardly present in public awareness and had not been compensated yet, such as millions of foreign forced laborers, persons persecuted as 'gypsies', 'anti-socials' or homosexuals as well as victims of 'eugenics' such as people who suffered forced sterilization (Goschler 2008: 349).
as public sites of learning. Their pedagogical style was grassroots democratic and anti-institutionalist. What mattered was mutual experience and exchange of knowledge while exploring one's historical and present environment. In their understanding, memory work was not only about the past, but also about its continuities and repercussions in the present. With this approach, they formed part of a transnational New History Movement aiming at the construction of counterhegemonic histories and identities (Siegfried 2008): A 'self-acquired historiography "from below"' was to be set against a 'historiography "from above" taught in school and society' (Garbe 1983: 28).
Meanwhile, however, conservative intellectuals and politicians also occupied themselves with West German historical consciousness, especially with creating a positive national identity and maintaining the objective of national reunification. In 1982, the period of social-liberal governments ended. When taking office, Christian Democrat chancellor Helmut Kohl spoke of a 'mental-moral crisis' rooted in a profound 'insecurity concerning the relationship with our history' that had evolved in the last decade (Deutscher Bundestag 1982: 6770). While on an operative level, the Kohl governments carried on with the social-liberal Eastern Policy, on a declarative level they reinforced the rhetoric of reunification and national identity (Wolfrum 1999: 330).
Soon after taking office, Kohl announced plans for a national memorial to 'victims of war and tyranny' in Bonn, deliberately choosing a generalizing formulation well known from the 1950s. At the 40th anniversary of the end of WW2, despite vigorous public protest, he held a reconciliation ceremony with US president Ronald Reagan at a military cemetery where SS men also happened to be buried. In the eyes of his opponents, Kohl aimed at systematically reversing the tediously fought for public awareness of the Nazi past in order to 'normalize' German history and identity. Also his founding of state-sponsored national history museums in Bonn and West Berlin caused a major uproar within the cultural establishment. In this period more than a few leftist and leftist-liberal opinion makers adhered to the notion that the German nation state had discredited itself on its disastrous historic Sonderweg (special path), and, therefore 'normalizing' German national identity was a dangerous endeavor. How to 'adequately' represent German history thus became a highly mooted public issue through the 1980s (Wirsching 2006: 466; Wolfrum 1999: 325).
The ongoing conflict between adherents of a 'Normal-Nation-Identity' and advocates of a 'Holocaust-Identity' (Wolfrum 1999: 355) culminated in the so called historians' quarrel in 1986-1987. This months-long public debate between conservative and leftist-liberal intellectuals ostensibly revolved around the singularity of the Holocaust. On a more fundamental level, the issue at stake was the status of the Nazi past in German history: Could the Holocaust be equaled with Stalinist crimes, and as such be 'relativized'? And if so, why not reconnect to the '1200 years' of German history that occurred before the 'mere 12 years' of the Nazi regime? Or was this an impermissible 'normalization'
of German history in order to foster an unbroken national identity instead of the critical historical consciousness promoted by the West German left and the memory activists in particular?
Despite conservative resistance, the latter proved quite successful during the 1980s. Their lobbying for 'forgotten victims' helped to reopen the debate about compensation and amplify the notion of victimhood under the Nazi regime (Goschler 2008: 345). Even though parliamentary requests calling on the federal government to support existing memorial initiatives failed, the FRG's life world had been ineluctably redefined as a post-National Socialist space. All over the country, memorials and exhibitions at the sites of former Nazi crimes had been created; in urban spaces numerous monuments and commemorative signs indicated a broad range of Nazi crimes and anti-Nazist resistance (Garbe 2005). Memorialization in public space stabilized through voluntary commitment as well as communal, regional and private funding. Nothing, however, gave reason to expect that within just a few years memorial sites to the Nazi crimes would become a prominent state-funded component of the FRG's self-representation.
Rearticulating the nation:
creating a state-sponsored memoryscape in the 1990s
After the unexpected collapse of the GDR and German unification, the FRG's memory discourse underwent fundamental changes. All of a sudden, the nation state was not an issue of theoretical considerations and political confessions but a factual reality. At the same time, German unification caused major historical concerns not only internationally but also on the domestic front. For better or worse, German unification was symbolically conceptualized in terms of a German 'Return into History', as a much quoted slogan put it. Hence a need was felt to mediate the FRG's notoriously divisive memory discourse, and unambiguously reposition the 'Berlin Rebublic' in German national history.
Despite the attempts of conservatives in the 1980s to deemphasize the Nazi past, and contrary to prevalent fears that unified Germany would draw a line under the Nazi past, it remained at the very center of post-unification memory discourse. Against the backdrop of German nation building, the 1990s saw numerous public debates on how this past should be handled, most prominently the controversy about a national Holocaust Memorial in the middle of Berlin's governmental district (Leggewie, Meyer 2005).
At the same time, yet another 'totalitarian' past had entered the public agenda, namely that of the Soviet Occupation Zone (SOZ) and the GDR. As opposed to the Nazi past, however, this past related affirmatively to the German present, since the telos of overcoming the GDR had always been constitutive for the FRG's official self-understanding. The notion that now a 'double totalitarian past' had to be mastered led to a multilayered negotiation process concerning their narrative positioning.
In particular, this debate evolved around the GDR's NSWC at Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen und Ravensbrück, since under the terms of the Unification Treaty, the federal government found itself responsible for maintaining them. Moreover, new initiatives emerged to create memorials at the sites of SOZ/GDR injustice in East Germany. Hence, from 1993 onwards the federal government provisionally funded memorials to 'both pasts' on the former GDR territory and in the capital Berlin. This rather improvised administrative act proved to be the origin of a new federal memorial policy which took shape in a complex interaction between the pragmatics of redesigning the NSWC in situ and developments in the discourse on German history and memory on the federal level (Rudnick 2011; König 2007).
As far as the NSWC and their dogmatic-antifascist layout were concerned, there was broad consensus that they needed fundamental revision. In Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen, however, there was also question of how to deal with the Soviet internment camps for Germans installed there 1945-50 (see, Heitzer 2015). A taboo issue in the GDR and largely absent from recent West German public consciousness, they now served to reactivate public debates about the 'proper' relationing of Nazi and Stalinist crimes.
In order to resolve those conflicts, expert commissions were convened in 1991-92, consisting mostly of professional historians. At both sites, representational priority was attributed to the Nazi camps. It was emphasized, however, that Stalinist injustice must not be relativized either. The experts also defined standards for state-funded memorials; they were to be independent from direct state influence and perform a professional approach in line with scholarly standards. Furthermore, they were envisioned as 'open sites of learning', albeit less in terms of a 1980s-grassroots-style than a professional educational setting (Ministerium für Wissenschaft 1992: 215; Gedenkstätte Buchenwald 1992).
On the federal level, too, a reflexive process of 'ordering history' was set into motion (Beattie 2008). From 1992 onwards, two consecutive parliamentary commissions of inquiry were given the mandate to 'make fundamental contributions to the political, historical and moral analysis' (Deutscher Bundestag 1998 a: 10) of the GDR past.
In order to prepare a Federal Memorial Concept, the second commission was assigned the development of 'All-German Forms of Commemorating Both German Dictatorships and their Victims' (Deutscher Bundestag 1998a: 226). In the commission's final report in 1998, memorial sites were elevated to 'strong-points of a democratic culture of memory in the Federal Republic of Germany' (Deutscher Bundestag 1998a: 250). The premises for memorial work coined by the expert commissions at Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen were largely adopted. It was recommended to continue hitherto funding memorial sites on former GDR territory and additionally finance selected memorials to the Nazi past in Western Germany (Deutscher Bundestag 1998a: 250).
Under the prescriptive headline 'Importance of Remembering and Commemorating for the National and Democratic Self-Understanding of the Germans', in the same document a new master narrative was spelled out as the bedrock for the FRG's future memory policies:
At the end of the 20th century, Germans must live with the memory of two German dictatorships and their victims. The necessity of accounting for the past and commemoration <.. > today forms part of the democratic self-understanding in a unified Germany. The memory of both dictatorships <.. > sharpens the awareness of freedom, justice and democracy. This, as well as the necessary public education on the history of the two dictatorships, is the core of the anti-totalitarian consensus and the democratic memory culture of the Germans (Deutscher Bundestag 1998 a: 227).
A narrative strategy of teleologization was employed here, which federal president Richard von Weizsäcker had already drafted 13 years before in a much celebrated speech at the 40th anniversary of the end of WW2. Quite uncommon for a conservative politician, Weizsäcker had then argued for an intensive engagement with the Nazi past. At the same moment, however, he proposed a narrative suitable for reconciling a 'negative national memory' with a 'positive national identity': While before 1945 Germany had been on the 'wrong track', the FRG had gone through an effective learning process and turned into a renowned democracy. Commemorating the Nazi past could actually serve to reinsure West German society of these positive developments and thereby strengthen a positive national identity (Siebeck 2015). This narrative was adopted and developed further in the quoted report of 1998, integrating the Nazi and the GDR past into an anti-totalitarian teleology: While the old FRG had already drawn the 'correct' lessons from the Nazi past, the 'communist dictatorship' was also vanquished in the end, in favor of a morally purified German nation state that had successfully 'learnt from its history'.
When taking office in 1998, freshly elected chancellor Gerhard Schröder could already claim for Germany 'the self-confidence of an adult nation <...> that confronts its history and responsibility, but with all due readiness to deal with its past still looks ahead to the future' (Deutscher Bundestag 1998b: 61). Under the new red-green government, national memory politics were eventually formalized. From now on, they formed part of the area of competence of a newly installed Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media (Linden-berger 2011). In 1999, after nearly a decade of public debate, the parliament voted for the establishment of a national Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. Simultaneously, the Federal Memorial Concept became effective, following the commissions of inquiry's recommendations (Deutscher Bundestag 1999).
With the Federal Memorial Concept, a 'centralized instrument for governing memory politics' (Meyer 2009: 104) had come into being. Given the fierce opposition to Kohl's comparatively modest attempts to establish national memory politics yet a few years ago, there was surprisingly little
criticism concerning the comprehensive state regulation and institutionaliza-tion of the politics of national memory in the 1990s. Considering the fact that in the old FRG, remembering the Nazi past had traditionally also functioned as a resource to challenge the sociopolitical present as well as attempts to 'normalize' national identity, it is even more remarkable that there was hardly any discussion about the move to absorb this past into an anti-totalitarian narrative depicting the 'Berlin Republic' as a historically purified country.
An embedded nazi past?
Expanding the national memoryscape in the 2000s
To be sure, from the perspective of those who had struggled for decades to install memorials at the sites of Nazi crimes, and for the survivor organizations in particular, a hitherto 'nearly unimaginable' (Garbe 2005: 84) success had been achieved.
50 years after its establishment, the FRG had finally taken responsibility for these sites, and obliged itself to sustainably advance public remembrance of the Nazi crimes and their victims. Unquestionably, since then memory work in state founded memorials has been significantly reinforced. Anyone who wants to learn about the Nazi past in Germany today finds stable venues open for manifold interests and approaches. Visiting those memorials has become an integral part of the educational canon, while on-site educators are still committed to fostering critical historical reflexivity instead of propagating unambiguous 'lessons from history'.
On a symbolic level, however, memorial sites to Nazi crimes have become part of a representative memoryscape that programmatically seeks to affirm a 'good' German present by uncoupling it from an 'evil' German past. As museum institutions governed by professionals, they have lost a good share of their erstwhile unruly character and political liveliness.
Moreover, it seems that the establishment of a national memoryscape to the Nazi crimes constituted a key precondition for the rearticulation of an updated version of themes well known from the FRG's memory discourse of the 1950s: 'Germans as victims' and 'Germans as anti-totalitarian freedom fighters'. Only a few years after the Federal Memorial Concept had become effective, it was radically questioned by the Christian Democrat fraction for allegedly marginalizing the GDR period, discounting German victims of war, flight and expulsion, as well as deemphasizing positive assets of German history (Deutscher Bundestag 2003).
In 2005, a newly elected grand coalition agreed to institutionalize a so-called Visible Sign of Flight and Expulsion in Berlin. In 2008, the Federal Memorial Concept was revised, emphasizing a Nachholbedarf (need to catch up) regarding the commemoration of SOZ/GDR injustice (Deutscher Bundestag 2008). Recently, a Central Memorial for the Victims of Communist Tyranny has
been discussed, while apparently these (German) victims are unanimously considered pioneers for freedom, democracy and national unity (UOKG 2015). In 2007, the parliament voted for a National Monument of Freedom and Unity, 'to commemorate the Peaceful Revolution in autumn 1989 and the retrieval of Germany's national unity but, at the same time, to honor the liberation movements and unification aspirations of the past centuries' (Deutscher Bundestag 2008: 8). Both memorials are planned to be located in close vicinity to the national Holocaust Memorial in Berlin.
***
In my article, I have suggested that, before 1990, ostentatious state representation of the Nazi past would have symbolically undermined the FRG's claim to be restoring the German nation state, since it would have kept the historical and moral preconditions for its actual failure visible in public space. Memorial sites to the Nazi crimes were initiated as counter-hegemonic projects by survivor organizations and young activists searching for countercultural histories and identities. Only after German unification the Nazi past could be integrated into a new national master narrative that radically delimits the German present from its 'double totalitarian past' and depicts the restored German nation state as a country that has successfully 'learnt from its history'. On this basis, memorial sites to the Nazi crimes were declared to represent an 'anti-totalitarian consensus' and incorporated into a representative memoryscape.
As I have briefly sketched out, after the successful incorporation of the Nazi past, this memoryscape has been constantly updated. More emphasis has been laid to the SOZ/GDR past, to 'German victims' and to 'the positive assets of German history'. Thus, memorial sites to the Nazi crimes might soon find themselves in the middle of a national memoryscape that relates the story of a centuries-long struggle for freedom, democracy and national unity, while affirming the 'Berlin Republic' as the happy end of German history.
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