Ambiguous Memory: The Nazi Past and German National Identity

AMBIGUOUS MEMORY

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AMBIGUOUS MEMORY

T H E NAZI P A S T A N D GERMAN NATIONAL

SlOBHAN

PRAEGER

IDENTITY

KATTAGO

Westport, Connecticut London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kattago, Siobhan, 1966Ambiguous memory : the Nazi past and German national identity / Siobhan Kattago. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-275-97343-3 (alk. paper) 1. National socialism—Psychological aspects. 2. Historiography—Germany (West) 3. Historiography—Germany (East) 4. Historiography—Germany. 5. Nationalism—Germany—History—20th century. I. Title. DD256.5.K287 2001 943.086'07'2043—dc21 2001016355 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 2001 by Siobhan Kattago All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2001016355 ISBN: 0-275-97343-3 First published in 2001 Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.praeger.com Printed in the United States of America The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984). 10

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

Copyright Acknowledgments The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge permission for use of the following material: Material from Siobhan Kattago. "Narrating the Histories of Buchenwald." Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory 5, 2 (June 1998): 266-282. Copyright © Blackwell Publishers Limited. Material from Siobhan Kattago. "Representing German Victimhood and Guilt: The Neue Wache and Unified German Memory." German Politics and Society 16, 3 (fall 1998): 86-104.

For Gertrude Murphy, My grandmother & mentor

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Chapter One Introduction

ix 1

Chapter Two The Ambiguity of Memory and Identity

11

Chapter Three West German Internalization of the Past

35

Chapter Four East German Universalization of the Past

79

Chapter Five Unified Germany's Double Past

117

Chapter Six Conclusion: Memory and Forgetting in a Democratic Culture

169

Bibliography

173

Index

193

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank a number of friends and colleagues for reading and commenting on drafts during their various stages of completion: Andrew Arato, Elizabeth Brewer, Hubertus Buchstein, Jeffrey Goldfarb, Tony Judt, and Vera Zolberg. I would like to express my appreciation to several institutions for their assistance during the writing of this book: the New School for Social Research for research time in Frankfurt, Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) for research time in Leipzig and Berlin, the Remarque Institute at New York University for a postdoctoral fellowship focused on collective memory in Europe and Germany, and Eugene Lang College for a postdoctoral fellowship enabling me to teach courses related to this book. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewer comments and editorial assistance at Praeger Publishers. I thank Constellations and German Politics and Society for allowing me to reprint revised versions of published articles. Chapters 4 and 5 contain revised parts of "Narrating the Histories of Buchenwald," originally published in Constellations. Chapter 5 contains a revised version of "Representing German Victimhood and Guilt," originally published in German Politics and Society. Special thanks are due to my students at New York University and Eugene Lang College for insightful comments and ideas. My parents, grandmother, and husband supported and encouraged the project from the very beginning. Our children, Alice and Paul, provided special inspiration.

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CHAPTER O N E

INTRODUCTION With the city of Berlin as the largest construction site and architectural playground in recent history, one cannot help reflecting on the relationship between the desire to forge a new future and the necessity to dig through the past. As construction workers dig deeper into the center of unified Berlin to lay the foundations for new buildings, bulldozers discover remnants of Hitler's cavernous bunkers beneath the soil. And so Berliners are once again engaged in discussions with historians, politicians, artists and community leaders as to what the correct response should be. Should the bunkers be destroyed or made into educational sites? In a way, the discovery of Goebbels's bunker beneath the proposed Holocaust Memorial in the heart of Berlin confirms what Walter Benjamin wrote about memory: "Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past, but rather a medium. It is the medium of that which is experienced, just as the earth is the medium in which ancient cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging." 1 Memory is about excavating—about sorting and sifting through the elements of one's past. In the German case, it is not about the lack of memory but rather the enormity of it. Ambiguous Memory is partially an analysis of attempts to dig through the various Germanys in the 1980s and 1990s. It is less a history book than a series of cultural and sociological reflections from the outside. This study began with the question of how the event of German unification would change German national identity and the memory of National Socialism in unified Germany. Would 1989 overshadow 1945 or vice versa? What role would National Socialism play in the new Germany? I soon discovered, however, that one cannot begin to ask such questions without

2

Ambiguous Memory

first understanding the legacy of the Nazi past in East and West Germany. In the course of my research, it seemed that not only was the past a foreign country, but "Germany" itself had become a foreign country. Because an exhaustive account of the role of National Socialism in establishing East, West, and unified German national identity was clearly beyond the scope of this book, I narrowed my focus to a comparative study of the official memories of National Socialism and the public debates surrounding them in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), German Democratic Republic (GDR), and unified Germany during the 1980s and 1990s. The 1980s was a period of consolidation and marked the permanent division between the two Germanys. By then, a generation had come of age who did not have any personal experience of the Second World War, but of the ideological and geographical divide of the Berlin Wall. By then, Germany as a unified country was a country foreign to most East and West Germans. Unification dramatically ended what became known as the postwar period and heralded the problematic and deeply ambiguous restoration of the German nation. With unification in 1990, a new field of inquiry opened for comparative research into how the Third Reich and the Holocaust were remembered in East and West Germany. Such research raises questions of how such memories affected the cultural and political identity of East and West Germans. 2 From the unification debate, and debates over Berlin or Bonn as the national capital, the Neue Wache Memorial, the planned Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, and the commemorative marathon of 1995, questions of how to remember the Nazi past are linked to questions of German national identity. Any question of national identity admittedly runs the risk of generalizing a "national character" based on empty stereotypes and caricatures. Questions of collective identity and memory are difficult because the singular usage implies a single and unified memory or identity. Whereas biological and genetic definitions of national character imply a biological determinism; cultural constructions of identity and memory face the difficulty of cultural determinism. My point is certainly not to argue for some kind of essential "Germanness" or German national character; rather, it is to outline how different public interpretations and memories of history might have shaped competing identities of East, West, and unified Germans. Often the crimes of Auschwitz are rationalized as part of the German national character; however, such claims have a tendency to equate the particular form of atrocity (bureaucratic efficiency) with the causes (flaw in the German culture). 3 My study of German national identities is not meant to foster a notion of singular essence or character, but to analyze various memories and representations of the past that key German intellectuals linked to conceptions of German identity. "Identity" does not assume a singular, homogeneous identity but a multiplicity of often contradictory and competing identities.

Introduction

3

In outlining the contours of German memory of the Nazi past and the role which the changing memory played in constructing East and West German identities, special attention will be paid to the narrative structure of collective memory as a particular representation of the past in the construction of national identity. The traces and fragments of memory which are politicized in the name of certain national or postnational claims stem from a complex symbolic structure of German memory. Whether one speaks about working through or confronting the past versus overcoming or mastering the past, the referent of "the past" as the National Socialist past remains the same; what differs is how this past is constituted or displaced during the process of memory. Though official memory includes institutionalized governmental representations of the past, official memory has sharply different meanings in the GDR and the Federal Republic. Official memory in the GDR meant a restrictive ideological representation of the past with little public debate. Official memory in the Federal Republic, on the other hand, was a public and highly controversial topic in West German political culture. My discussion of German national identity (identities) examines debates about German national identity among intellectuals in the public sphere. These debates, from the late 1970s to the 1990s, are part of Germany's memory and memorial culture. From the late 1970s onward, German memory work was no longer a question of silence but of obsession with the past. For second and third postwar generations, the past is a memory learned not through direct experience but through indirect representations, historical documents, museums, and mass media images. Publicized intellectual debates about competing representations of the past themselves become lieux de memoire, Gedachtnisorte, or places of memory. By focusing on the structure of narration or "storytelling" aspect of postwar memories of the past, I intend to illustrate different ways in which memories of the Nazi past were politicized for national discourse. In agreement with Bernhard Giesen, Benedict Anderson, Ernst Gellner, and Liah Greenfield, I maintain that intellectuals are one of the important carriers of collective identity.4 Intellectuals such as novelists, public historians, filmmakers, and philosophers represent different—often competing—conceptions of identity and memory. Recent theories of collective memory and national identity reveal various ways in which the memory of the Nazi past functioned in the different Germanys and how it might affect German politics and culture in the future. Using a two-pronged approach of frames and places of memory, I highlight how different official representations of the Nazi past functioned in the various Germanys. Rather than let the places simply speak for themselves, I analyze the social frameworks in which national places of memory, such as monuments, museums, and commemorative occasions, occurred. This study seeks to answer the following questions: How did memories of

4

Ambiguous Memory

the Nazi past affect the national identity and legitimation of the Federal Republic, the GDR, and reunified Germany? How does public debate about the past affect what is remembered? What do memories and representations of the past tell us about the present, and how do they possibly affect the future? THE GERMAN QUESTION AND THE LEGACY OF NATIONAL SOCIALISM Ranging from questions of exceptionalism to normalization, the "German Question" after the Second World War shifted from ways to contain German aggression to the role of National Socialism in German national identity. The division of defeated Germany into ideological East and West, democratic and Communist, was accompanied by sharply differing narratives of nationhood and a divided memory of the Nazi past. With the division of Germany in 1949 into the new states of the Federal Republic and the GDR, two different German identities emerged: one rooted in the constitutional democratic state of the Federal Republic, the other in the socialist state of the GDR. Whereas West German identity was linked to postwar economic growth and West European cosmopolitianism, East German identity was heavily linked to socialism and antifascism. The occupation and division of Germany in the immediate postwar years meant a sharp periodization and demarcation between postwar divided Germany and the Reich. Yet, East and West German identities were based not solely on an ideological East-West divide between communism and capitalism, but also on different memories and representations of the Nazi past. In a sense, East and West German relations formed a kind of triangle where East and West German identities were negatively defined both in relation to one another and to the Nazi past. The division of the Reich resulted in a bifurcation of memory in which the narration of East and West German identities entailed a double negation of the past. As Claudia Koontz notes: Germans constructed a new identity based on a fresh start or a clean break with the past. Calling it "Zero Hour" (Stunde Null), they forged a new vision of their identity based on a rejection of Nazism. Further, each occupation zone assumed a second negation as a foundational identity. In the East, new leaders told citizens to be proud they were not West Germans. West Germans heard the opposite message: their civil society was anchored in its opposition to Communism in the East. As a result of this complex process of negative identification, remembering took different forms in the East and West.5 What makes postwar divided Germany so particularly intriguing is the complex process of double negation whereby East and West German societies remembered the Nazi past. 6 Although almost two-thirds of the contemporary population of the Federal Republic, the GDR, and Austria did

Introduction

5

not directly experience National Socialism, the legacy of the Nazi past nonetheless continues to play a central role in the self-understanding of the successor states to the Third Reich. Because National Socialism did not offer any positive orientation, the three successor states could define themselves only by simultaneously rejecting Nazi Germany and looking for other moments in German history which would serve as points of continuity and legitimation. As the German sociologist M. Rainer Lepsius persuasively argues, National Socialism served as a negative moral warning to the three successor states and was defined in different terms in each country. 7 In Austria, the preconditions, content, and consequences of National Socialism were externalized to the history of Germany. In the GDR, the preconditions of National Socialism were removed so that the contents and consequences of National Socialism belonged solely to the Federal Republic. National Socialism was universalized into an abstract fascism which was the necessary historical consequence of late monopoly capitalism. The Federal Republic, however, was unable to employ either Austria's strategy of externalization or the GDR's of universalization. West Germany understood itself as the successor state to the Third Reich and was forced to internalize National Socialism. Yet, the term "internalization" does not necessarily mean a successful internal and moral working through of the past. Instead, internalization denotes the recognition of the liability of the Federal Republic for the consequences of the Third Reich and the acceptance of National Socialism and its crimes. Such recognition and acceptance provided a distinctive orientation in the political culture of West Germany which differed sharply from those of the GDR and Austria. Only in the Federal Republic did Auschwitz became a central concept of moral reflection about National Socialism.8 Though Lepsius's critical distinction of how the legacy (Erbe) of National Socialism functioned in the three successor states to the Third Reich provides an excellent starting point for a discussion of East and West German official memories of the Nazi past, a more specific methodology is needed to address how, what, and why certain aspects of National Socialism were emphasized and others were downplayed. Recent theories of national identity and collective memory enable us to focus on the social mechanisms of how memories of the Nazi past functioned in the different Germanys. Such theories direct our attention to the instrumental use of the Nazi past in the name of the German nation. Chapter 2 addresses the sociological link between memory and identity. GERMAN SOCIAL FRAMEWORKS AND PLACES OF NATIONAL MEMORY The legitimation of postwar German national identities was based not simply on a system of negative mirror-imaging and comparison between

Ambiguous Memory

6

ideological East and West, but also on a complicated construction and identification with how Nazi Germany was remembered. Places of memory localize and symbolically ground what is remembered—former concentration camp sites, memorials, monuments, former Nazi headquarters, and military cemeteries. Commemorative calendrical occasions such as the end of the war on May 8, the attempted assassination of Hitler on June 20, and Kristallnacht on November 9 create a liturgical commemorative time outside everyday lived time. Western Internalization of the Past The framing of West German memory was based on complex and often highly ritualized confrontations with the Nazi past as a burden which shifted between a mastery and a critical appraisal of the past. At cultural and political levels, the question of what it meant to be German after National Socialism attained a relevance that was demonstrably lacking in the GDR. While the West German mastery and critical appraisal discourse did not necessarily mean the successful working through of the past, the West German internalization of the past focused on the fundamental question of how to interpret the past in light of the democratic present of the Federal Republic. Such an interpretation stemmed from learning processes and a normative orientation which were framed by the internalized legacy of the Nazi past. After highlighting different phases of the West German internalization of the past in chapter 3, via a "mastery of the past" discourse, three models of West German identity are distinguished: a guilty pariah identity during the occupation years and the 1950s, a therapeutic model during the student rebellions of the late 1960s and 1970s, and a normalization model during the 1980s. These three models demonstrate shifts in the West German conception of national identity. Thus, the history of West German memory is far from static and monolithic. On the contrary, the normalized model of German national identity coincided, ironically, with increasing public interest in the Holocaust and the Third Reich during the late 1980s. The places of memory during the 1980s which are discussed are limited to Ronald Reagan's visit to Bitburg, Chancellor Helmut Kohl's controversial decision to build two museums for German history—one to chronicle the history of the Federal Republic in Bonn, the other to narrate German history in West Berlin—and the discussion about the disputed singularity of the Holocaust and its meaning for German identity in the historians' debate. Places such as a military cemetery and a museum, and historical writings inspired intense controversy in the political culture of the Federal Republic and revealed the effect of the unresolved legacy of the Nazi past on contemporary West German identity. These debates did not occur within a vacuum but within the complex narrative framework of West

Introduction

7

German internalization of National Socialism as a burdened past and a bulwark for its staunch antitotalitarianism and commitment to the Western alliance. Eastern Universalization of the Past In the GDR, the question of the significance of the Holocaust was not a primary issue; nor did the Nazi past serve as a normative orientation or a burden; rather, the Nazi past was universalized into an abstraction from which the Jewish question was essentially dropped. The universalization of the Nazi past occurred through a complicated "myth of antifascism" in which East Germans identified themselves as both the victims and the heroic resistance fighters of Hitler fascism. Hitler fascism, though, was not part of German history, but of a larger historical process in which late monopoly capitalism necessarily culminated in fascism. Rather than examine the consequences of the specificity of National Socialism, the abstraction of fascism reduced the particular German variant to a necessary historical development. My discussion in chapter 4 focuses on how the myth of antifascism functioned in the East German universalization of the past. Whereas West German and unified German official memories of the past were hotly contested in the public sphere, the GDR, as a Communist-type society, blocked such open contestation and debate. Mindful of this difference, I focus on how the Socialist Unity Party (SED) attempted to shape and maintain the myth of antifascism as a kind of civic religion and raison d'etre. In analyzing the various phases of the East German universalization of the past from the occupation years to 1989, two models of East German identity are outlined: a socialist and a German socialist identity. While the Federal Republic during the 1980s witnessed a conservative shift and a search for a positive usable past, the 1980s in the GDR heralded a historical debate about the heritage and inheritance of the GDR. In a shift from the GDR as a purely socialist state to a German socialist nation, a dramatic change occurred in which historians no longer simply looked for progressive revolutionary moments in world history, but sought to appropriate certain national aspects of German history. In an attempt to analyze the depth of the East German myth of antifascism, three places of memory are examined: the former concentration camp of Buchenwald, which served as a site of national self-legitimation; the historians' dispute about the tradition and inheritance of German history; and the GDR's first official commemoration of Kristallnacht on November 9, 1988. Such places of East German memory reveal a slight loosening of the ideological hold of the myth of antifascism; however, the Communist representation of the past hindered a more open engagement with the Nazi past which was also characteristic of the Federal Republic.

8

Ambiguous Memory The Unified Double Past

With the opening of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, the same day as Kristallnacht in 1938, the question of German national identity was immediately raised from the perspective of a double past. The year 1989 casts new light onto the present way a society remembers the past—will 1989 overshadow 1938 or vice versa? Unification represents not only a radical break with Cold War ideologies, a divided Germany, and a divided Europe, but also an intensification of three competing trends of national discourse which crystallized during the late 1970s and 1980s in the FRG and the GDR, and either displace or constitute the Nazi past: 1. A moral Sonderweg (special path) focusing on Germany's exceptional burdened past in which the memory of the Holocaust prevents German national identity 2. Germany as a normal nation with a dark past like any other nation 3. The Kulturnation or common cultural heritage with pre-National Socialist German culture. Reunified Germany signifies both a new beginning through a restoration of the German nation and the end of divided Germany and the Cold War categories of East and West. Speculating in chapter 5 that unified Germany entails a double past framework which continues the West German internalization of the Nazi past as a burden and includes the postwar pasts of the GDR and the Federal Republic, I examine five places of memory in the "new" Germany: the renarration of the former concentration camp site of Buchenwald, Kohl's controversial decision to rebuild and reinscribe the Neue Wache Memorial in Berlin, the proposed Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, the Goldhagen controversy over the activities of normal Germans during the Third Reich, and the Walser-Bubis debate about the role of the Holocaust in German national identity. By the 1990s, a veritable memory boom emerged in unified Germany. Freed from the ideological constraints of the Cold War and faced with numerous commemorations of the 50th anniversary of World War II, the 1990s heralded diverse debates over Holocaust remembrance in Germany. These are illustrative examples of the unending debate which comprises German memory of the past. They focus on conceptions of German national identity as either exceptionally burdened or simply normal, and attempt to address the links between pre-Nazi German and postwar German (East/West/unified) political culture. The contentious debates surrounding memorials and monuments to the Nazi past testify to the dynamics of German memory and the continued link of the Nazi past with German national identity. German memory culture is neither static nor monolithic, but a deeply polarized terrain of conflicting memories about the Nazi past. Ambiguous Memory aims to provide

Introduction

9

a topography of East, West, and unified German memory during the 1980s and 1990s with the hope that such a topography contributes to an understanding of contemporary German society and culture, as well as to social constructions of memory. NOTES 1. Walter Benjamin, "Excavation and Memory," in his Selected Writings, vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 576. 2. On monuments, memorials, and national identity see: Mary Fulbrook, German National Identity after the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999); Peter Reichel, Politik mit der Erinnerung (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1995); James Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993); Claudia Koontz, "Between Memory and Oblivion: Concentration Camps in German Memory," in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, ed. John Gillis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 258-280; Jane Kramer, The Politics of Memory: Looking for Germany in the New Germany (New York: Random House, 1996); Aleida Assmann and Ute Frevert, Geschichtsvergessensheit, Geschichtsversessenheit: Vom Umgang mit deutschen Vergangenheiten nach 1945 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt Stuttgart, 1999). On schoolbooks, see Peter Dudek, Der Riickblick aufdie Vergangenheit wird sich nicht vermeiden lassen (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1995). For official speeches and commemorations at Bitburg, see Geoffrey Hartman, ed., Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). For an excellent social history of West and unified German government speeches, see Helmut Dubiel, Niemand is frei von der Geschichte: Die nationalsozialistische Herrschaft in den Debatten des Deutschen Bundestages (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1999); for West German parliamentary speeches, see Jeffrey K. Olick, "The Sins of the Fathers: The Third Reich and West German Legitimation" (dissertation, Yale University, 1993). For German collective memory and foreign policy, see Andrei Markovits and Simon Reich, The German Predicament: Memory and Power in the New Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997). 3. "To assume that Auschwitz was caused by some awful flaw in the German identity, just as a streak of collective German genius produced Goethe and Brahms, is to perpetuate a kind of neurotic narcissism: at best a constant worry that the Germans are a dangerous people, at worst a perverse pride in an almost tribal capacity for sublime music and unspeakable crimes." Ian Buruma, The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1994), 91. 4. See Bernhard Giesen, Kollektive Identitat Die Intellektuellen und die Nation (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983; 1991); Ernst Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983); Liah Greenfield, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 5. See Koontz, "Between Memory and Oblivion," 263. 6. For an excellent analysis of East and West Germany which links postwar divided Germany to prewar political attitudes and insightfully focuses on the Oc-

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Ambiguous Memory

cupation and early postwar years, see Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 7. M. Rainer Lepsius, "Das Erbe des Nationalsozialismus und die politische Kultur der Nachfolgestaaten des 'Grossdeutschen Reiches,' " in Demokratie in Deutschland: Soziologisch-historische Konstellationsanalysen. Ausgewdhlte Aufsdtze (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck 6c Ruprecht, 1993), 229-245. Though Lepsius includes Austria in his analysis, I concentrate on the GDR, the Federal Republic, and unified Germany. 8. Ibid., 241.

CHAPTER TWO

THE

AMBIGUITY OF MEMORY AND

IDENTITY

That which we remember is, more often than not, that which we would like to have been; or that which we hope to be. Thus our memory and our identity are ever at odds; our history ever a tall tale told by inattentive idealists. —Ralph Ellison1

Questions of memory and identity are raised in areas ranging from multiculturalism to nationalism to supranationalism. While multiculturalism and theories of cultural identity question whose memory and whose past are invoked to inscribe and maintain the political contours of inclusion and exclusion from a dominant political community, issues of memory and identity are gaining increasing importance as individuals attempt to come to terms with the rapid sociopolitical changes in Europe since 1989. With the fall of the Soviet Union and communism, the reinvention of national identities, and "national reawakening" of countries long under Communist rule, questions of memory and identity have moved to the forefront of political discussion. Memories of past national glory are invoked for the "natural" national unity of a collective group, and memories of past injustices have been politicized to legitimize violence of one neighbor against another. Moreover, the trend to supranational identities such as the European Union, which are postnational and abstract, are facing the reemergence of collective groups who maintain the objective facticity of their membership in a particular national or ethnic community. As John Gillis notes, "memory and identity are two of the most frequently used terms in contemporary public and private discourse." 2 The

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Ambiguous Memory

term "identity" was popularized by Erik Erikson in the 1950s and was connected to the notion of individual identity, life cycle, and crisis. Erikson noted that identity had become a ubiquitous concept that was losing its meaning. "The more one writes about this subject, the more the word becomes a term for something as unfathomable as it is all-pervasive."3 The same sense of ubiquity can be applied to the term "memory." The plethora of museums, national holidays, commemorative occasions, and commemorative documentaries bring the past into everyday parlance. Yet, as Gillis so aptly remarks, memory and identity have become free-floating phenomena which have lost their historical context and seem to signify the same thing in any given situation. Discussions of identity entail continuity of past, present, and future. When speaking of individual identity, we often conceive of memory as something to be retrieved and of identity as something to be found. However, unlike our vernacular speech, memory and identity are subjective categories which constitute and define one another. "The core meaning of any individual or group identity, namely, a sense of sameness over time and space, is sustained by remembering; and what is remembered is defined by the assumed identity." 4 Memory has been a long-standing preoccupation among novelists and poets: Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, Jorge Luis Borges's "Funes the Memorious," and Christa Wolf's Patterns of Childhood, for example. Individual reflections and memoirs about the Holocaust, such as Saul Friedlander's When Memory Comes and Lawrence Langer's Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory are not only memories of lived experience, but also reflections on the activity of memory itself.5 Philosophical investigations of memory are primarily interested in the past as a philosophy of history (Georg Hegel) and as a concept of time (Henri Bergson, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl). Contemporary examinations of the narrative quality of history and time involve questions of narration (Hayden White, Paul Ricoeur, David Carr, Alisdair MacIntyre), historical consciousness, and historicity (Martin Heidegger, HansGeorg Gadamer). Recent philosophical reflections on the relationship of identity to memory are situated within the modern/postmodern debate about the significance of the Holocaust for Western identity (Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Zgymunt Bauman, Francois Lyotard, Jurgen Habermas). Psychological discussions of memory are directly linked to the identity of the self (Sigmund Freud, Erik Erikson); whereas social pyschologists examine the role of society in identity formation (William James, George Herbert Mead). In an attempt to examine the role of memory in the creation, legitimation, and destruction of German national identities, I will first outline central sociological debates concerning memory and identity. Such a discussion is by no means exhaustive, but is intended to highlight central and relevant issues of modern memory and collective identity. 6 1 will (1) outline Maurice

The Ambiguity of Memory and Identity

13

Halbwachs's social framing of memory, (2) introduce Pierre Nora's historicization of national memory and the concept of lieux de memoire^ (3) discuss the role of memory in the construction of the modern nation and national identity, (4) discuss the ambiguous relationship between the democratization of memory and mass culture in the shift from the memorynation to the era of commemoration, and (5) argue for an understanding of collective memory as an analytic framework which enables one to uncover the political motivations and narrative structure of contemporary memory/memorial culture. Finally, I maintain that ongoing debate and contestation among individuals about their shared past is vital for the political culture of democracies—both old and new. MAURICE HALBWACHS: THE SOCIAL FRAMEWORKS OF MEMORY Whereas questions of memory and identity were previously studied only in the disciplines of philosophy, history, and psychology; Maurice Halbwachs's analysis of the social construction of memory sparked a growing interest within the burgeoning social sciences in both memory in general and the more pointed question of memory and national identity formation. Within the social sciences, the growing interest in collective memory can be situated within recent social and cultural theory influenced by hermeneutics and postmodern discourse which focuses on questions of narration, historicity, forgotten histories, oral history, the role of the interpretive subject, and everyday practices of the individual. The term "collective memory," popularized by Halbwachs, signifies the projection of individual memory onto a group, as well as ways in which a group frames and represents its past. Influenced by Henri Bergson's differentiation between inner and objective time and Emile Durkheim's conception of the conscious collective and the centrality of society as an object of sociological analysis, Halbwachs focuses on memory as a social mediation and construction of individual experience. Though Durkheim addresses collective representation within the realm of religion and ritual, he doesn't explicitly deal with the question of how individuals within a society remember their shared past. The main contribution that he makes in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life is the central importance of ritual commemoration for social cohesion. Religious rituals and symbols capture a shared experience and validate the collective identity of the group. Rituals provide society with a picture or representation of itself through time. 7 In contrast to Bergson's emphasis on memory as a personal and subjective experience, Halbwachs examines the social frameworks (cadres sociaux) in which individuals remember and in which memories of the past are incorporated into daily life. For him, individual memory depends on a social framework or milieu. "The individual memory could not function

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Ambiguous Memory

without words and ideas, instruments the individual has not himself invented but appropriated from his milieux." 8 Yet, the term "collective memory" (la memoire collective) does not refer to a single monolithic memory; rather, there are as many collective memories as collective groups. Halbwachs sharply disagrees with notions of a mythical collective consciousness and locates memory within particular groups: "there is no universal memory. Every collective memory requires the support of a group delimited in space and time." 9 Because memories are linked to a specific group, there can be as many memories as there are different groups of families, religious organizations, ethnic groups, or nations which identify themselves with a common shared past. To use Robert Bellah's terminology, each group develops its own "community of memory." A community of memory is the retelling of the community history by using stories of exemplary individuals from the community who signified and embodied the meaning of the community. Such a community of memory develops and maintains the linkage between past and present community members. Furthermore, the narrative community of memory entails a constant process of retelling and narration so that the community history is not forgotten. 10 Subsequent theorists have objected to the unitary connotation of collective memory, and argue for a term which implies contestation and difference rather than a fixed single memory. 11 Unlike autobiographical memory, which is rooted in other people who directly shared a past individual experience, collective memory is rooted in social institutions and evoked by indirect participation in or observation of commemorative events. Collective memories are remembrances of the past that link a given set of people for whom their shared identity remains significant at a later time. For Halbwachs, collective memory is not a given, but a socially constructed notion. Memory is not simply the retrieval of information or facts, but an imaginative, fluid activity which involves subjective impressions and meaning. Individual memory, which is completely separate from collective memory, is a meaningless abstraction. All memory contains traces of society and is framed by social institutions and habits. "While the collective memory endures and draws strength from its base in a coherent body of people, it is individuals as group members who remember." 12 Because individuals share language and culture, their memories of past events are shaped by their participation in certain groups: the family, school, religious affiliation, town, ethnic community, or nation. "It is language, and the whole system of social conventions attached to it, that allows us at every moment to reconstruct our past." 13 Collective memory, in effect, provides a group with a collective identity. For Halbwachs, the beliefs, interests, and aspirations of the present shape the views of the past as they are manifested in different historical epochs. The past itself is a social construction predominantly shaped by concerns of the present. In the German context, the memory of National Socialism was linked to so-

The Ambiguity of Memory and Identity

15

cietal and cultural changes as well as to the ideological divisions between East and West. Collective memory is a social bond among a group of people whose shared experiences and contemporary interpretations of the past form a crucial foundation for their community. Memory is neither neutral nor individual, but mediated and transmitted through social institutions such a schools, museums, and official national holidays. Forgetting occurs when individuals are removed from their group or social framework.14 Whereas history or historical memory attempts to record past events objectively for the purpose of preserving the past; collective memory is concerned with past traditions and memories which shape the present. I believe that the mind reconstructs its memories under the pressure of society. . . . Society from time to time obligates people not just to reproduce in thought previous events of their lives, but also to touch them up, to shorten them, or to complete them so that, however convinced we are that our memories are exact, we give them a prestige that reality did not possess.15 Halbwachs emphasizes the imaginative, reconstructive nature of memory; for him, the activity of remembering is an interpretive, meaning-making activity rather than an objective, neutral retrieval of information. He sharply disagrees with notions of a mythical collective consciousness and locates memory within particular groups. For him, there are many collective memories but only one dominating, single version of history. "History is unitary, and it can be said there is only one history . . . But there is no universal memory. Every collective memory requires the support of a group delimited in space and time." 16 Because memories are linked to a specific group, there can be as many memories as there are different groups of families, religious organizations, ethnic groups, or nations which identify themselves with a certain common past. "When it considers its own past, the group feels strongly that it has remained the same and becomes conscious of its identity through time." 17 Collective memory is distinctively generational, whereas history spans a long duration. 18 In distinguishing history from memory, Halbwachs draws a much criticized definition of history which is clearly demarcated from memory. "General history starts when tradition ends and the social memory is fading or breaking up." 1 9 History divides sequences of events into epochs, periods, wars, revolutions; memory forms a continuity between the living past and the present. History thus records changes; whereas collective memory provides the group—family, church, or nation—with a self-portrait. Collective memory for Halbwachs is generational, once something has passed from living memory, it becomes history. In the German context, the generational aspect of memory is especially important because members of the war generation who directly experienced National Socialism are dying, and memories of that period are indirectly mediated through secondhand accounts, museums, books, doc-

16

Ambiguous Memory

umentaries, and films. In other words the line between memory and history is becoming blurred. In response to Halbwachs's conception of collective memory, the German sociologist Jan Assman distinguishes between communicative and cultural memory. For him, Halbwachs's collective memory is better described as communicative memory because it is distinguished by the everyday memory of ordinary communication and oral history. Communicative memory is distinctively generational and spans at most one hundred years before the memory fades away. Cultural memory, on the other hand, is objectified and carried by social institutions. Cultural memory is indirect, whereas communicative memory is direct. While Halbwachs concentrates on the direct transmission of the past through the generations and examines objectified memory in the landscape of the Holy Land, Assman claims that Halbwachs's analysis of the Holy Land is closer to a Halbwachsian notion of history than to memory. Cultural memory is maintained by texts, rites, and monuments—places which Pierre Nora terms "lieux de memoire." 20 Although Halbwachs's conception of collective memory is rooted in the social framing of memory and directs attention to memories and representations of the past as a key mechanism of social differentiation among different groups; and although Assman differentiates communicative and cultural memory, both nonetheless fall short of giving memory a history. It is not until Pierre Nora that careful attention is paid not only to the social framing of memory but also to memory as a historically changing activity whose structure is affected by mass culture and the modern nation. 21 With Pierre Nora, the social manifestation of memory is given a history. PIERRE NORA: THE PLACES OF MEMORY Nora's edited project, which includes the work of forty-five French historians, addresses national memory as one specific, and perhaps the most important, type of collective memory. His seven-volume study, Les Lieux de memoires, is, however, not only an examination of French national memory it also represents a radical reconception of the theory of collective memory which complements and expands upon the work of recent theorists of national identity who consider the nation to be an imagined community, a fictive ethnicity, or a construction of invented traditions. Nora's study of the places of memory has become so popular that lieu de memoire (place of memory) appeared in the 1993 edition of Le grand Robert dictionary. The dictionary defines a lieu de memoire as a "meaningful entity of a real or imagined kind, which has become a symbolic element of a given community as a result of human will or the effect of time." 22 Unlike classical memory places or loci memoriae, which Frances Yates describes in the Art of Memory, lieux de memoire are rooted in the

The Ambiguity of Memory and Identity

17

specific role that memory plays in the construction of the nation. 23 Classical loci memoriae were devices by which orators were taught to memorize their speeches through associating some topic of the speech with a part of the building in which they were to give their speech. Classical memory places were a kind of rote memory whereas lieux de memoire are places in which memories of the nation crystallize. Lieux de memoire are cultural artifacts or remains fused with memory. Divided into three sections—La Republique, La Nation and Les France— Nora's study attempts to give national memory in general, and French national memory in particular, a history.24 He gives memory a history and offers a history of France from the perspective of memory as a key mechanism for social differentiation ranging from republican civic values to memories of the nation, and to the democratization and diversity of memories in France. La Republique (1984) focuses on lieux de memoire such as the tricolored flag, the Pantheon, pedagogical manuals (Le Tour de la France par deux enfants), and national holidays. Such lieux de memoire focus on the common memorial function of commemorating French civic ideals which represent France as the Republic. The second section, La Nation (1986), consists of three volumes and traces the role of memory in the construction of the memory-nation. Lieux de memoire of the memorynation are the main principles of social cohesion and unity. Such sites of memory consist of historiographic schools of thought such as the Annales school or national heritage sites, and are grouped under symbolic rubrics such as L'Etat, Heritage, Le Territoire, Le Patrimoine, Paysages, La Gloire, and Historiographie. Such places of memory do not identify with the civic republican values but with a cultural identity of the French nation. In the final section, Les France (1992), comprised also of three volumes, Nora concentrates on the collapse of the French memory-nation and the democratization of memory. The use of the plural, les France, represents competing representations of France and implies contestation rather than a unified conception of France. The memory-nation is being replaced, according to Nora, with the era of commemoration. Arguing that the nation has become a cultural artifact which is being gradually replaced by competing divergent memories and identities, Les France examines the decline of the memory-nation and the rise of contemporary memorial culture. 25 Pierre Nora agrees with Halbwachs's strong break between the traditional world of memory and familiar social relations of a Gemeinschaft versus the loss of community and memory in the modern social world of the Gesellschaft. For Nora, the shift from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft means a loss of memory which necessitates the creation of mnemonic sites to remind individuals of their shared social past. While mass culture and the media have democratized memory in the sense that everyone is his or her own historian, Nora observes the rapid emergence of museums, com-

Ambiguous Memory

18

memorative holidays, stamps, and so on as part of a larger cultural phenomenon accompanying the shift from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft. Technology and mass culture have brought about an "acceleration of history" and a different notion of time than in traditional societies. "We speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left."26 For Nora, the question of the "places" of memory is a thoroughly modern one—because we no longer live in a traditional society which is fused in memory, modern society defines what is memorable as lieux de memoire. These places exist because the milieux de memoire of traditional society have vanished. "There are lieux de memoire, sites of memory, because there are no longer milieux de memoire, real environments of memory." 27 The Media and a Memorial Consciousness Mass culture and the media offer a dilated and protracted sense of time. The past is chronicled, cataloged, filmed, mass-produced for audiences so that we seem to live simultaneously in the past and the present. The simultaneity of time sharply contrasts with notions of linear time. "Indeed we have seen the tremendous dilation of our very mode of historical perception, which, with the help of the media, has substituted for a memory entwined in the intimacy of a collective heritage the ephemeral film of current events." 28 While some may argue that Nora is merely nostalgic for traditional society, I would caution that he is more than simply nostalgic for a bygone era, and instead attempts to thematize how national memory has changed with mass culture's democratization of memory. Nora argues that the study of lieux de memoire takes place at the junction of two developments: the reflexive turning in of history upon itself and the end of the tradition of memory. Thus, our modern forgetfulness coincides with our obsession with chronicling the past. Mass culture and electronic media are new carriers of memory, but they deeply affect the structure of memory itself. Andreas Huyssen's reflections on modernity and memory in many ways complement those of Pierre Nora. Whereas Nora is concerned with the locality of memory, Huyssen is concerned with ways in which technological media affect our sense of temporality and memory. Like Nora, Huyssen argues that contemporary modern or postmodern culture is marked by a simultaneous cultural amnesia and obsession with the past. Huyssen asks whether Hermann Liibbe's diagnosis of modern historicism as a "musealized" or memorial culture is perhaps correct. "Both personal and social memory today are affected by an emerging new structure of temporality generated by the quickening pace of material life on the one hand and by the acceleration of media images and information on the other." 29 The speed and sheer volume of information have radically changed our conception of past, present, and future. Time and space seem to be simultaneously and equally present.

The Ambiguity of Memory and Identity

19

Questions of collective memory involve separate but often interlinked issues of nostalgia, myths and legends of past origins, folklore, tradition, and heritage. Although most critics would agree that the selective memory of past events is not a uniquely modern phenomenon, but part of the human condition, the media industry grants a greater potential for selection and manipulation of the past. Though selective memory in itself is not unique to modernity, the modes of memory transmission have significantly affected the very structure of memory and temporality. Electronic media and mass culture are deeply affecting the way in which individuals remember and identify with a remembered past. While selection and manipulation of the past are not new, the modes of information transmission are part of a larger cultural phenomenon in which, as Huyssen notes, "(w)hether it is a paradox or a dialectic, the spread of amnesia in our culture is matched by a relentless fascination with memory and the past." 30 In many respects, Nora's lieux de memoire as places where memory has crystallized are similar to Walter Benjamin's attention to cultural artifacts present for the casual gaze of the modern flaneur. Both Benjamin and Nora are interested in the traces and fragments of cultural meaning. For Benjamin, film and mass culture contain an emancipatory potential to break the aura of the artwork and shock the spectator into critical reflection. Film as a mechanical reproduction of art was not only a new medium which radically changed the way in which individuals interacted with an art object; the destruction of the aura meant the destruction of distance, magic, and passivity. A shock or rupture, for Benjamin, contained the messianic promise of redemption. Messianic time or Jetztzeit breaks into historical time. 31 As Hannah Arendt notes in her introduction to Benjamin's Illuminations, "Insofar as the past has been transmitted as tradition, it possesses authority; insofar as authority presents itself historically, it becomes tradition. Walter Benjamin knew that the break in tradition and the loss of authority which occurred in his lifetime were irreparable, and he concluded that he had to discover new ways of dealing with the past." 32 These new ways of dealing with the past were an examination of the traces and fragments of cultural artifacts ranging from quotations to collections and daily observations. For Benjamin, Baudelaire's theory of correspondences suggested a theory of collective experience. Modernity lacks a coherent narrative of collective experience and common meaning. "Where there is experience in the strict sense of the word, certain contents of the individual past combine with material of the collective past." 33 This relation between an individual and a collective past is crucial for the "secret agreement between past generations and the present one." 34 Nora argues that the democratization of memory coincides with the decline of the memory-nation as the primary mechanism for social differentiation. The waning of the memory-nation and the emergence of the era of commemoration mark an obsession with the places and sites of memory

20

Ambiguous Memory

fragments. For Nora, "these lieux de memoire are fundamental remains, the ultimate embodiments of a memorial consciousness that has barely survived in a historical age that calls out for memory because it has abandoned it." 35 Because modern memory is archival and serves as reminder of the vast amount of information we would otherwise forget, memory has lost its mystical "aura" or its capacity for meaning, and is instead reduced to a simple mnemonic device. "Modern memory is, above all, archival. It relies on the materiality of the trace, the immediacy of the recording, the visibility of the image." 36 For Nora, the replacement of memory as a meaningmaking activity which connects past and present generations has been reduced to the modern archive. The more forgetful we become, the greater our obsession with the past. Traditional communities were not obsessed with the past because such a dramatic separation between past and present did not exist. "The less memory is experienced from the inside the more it exists only through its exterior scaffolding and outward signs—hence the obsession with the archive that marks our age." 37 The disappearance of the modern nation heralds the beginning of a memorial consciousness in which each event is commemorated, archived, and collected for future reference. Whereas traditional communities organized the past by memory, modern society organizes the past by history. For Nora, "the memory-nation was thus the last incarnation of the unification of memory and history." 38 In traditional communities, the main producers of archives were noble families, the state, and the Church. With the democratization of memory, every person can chronicle his or her own past. "The passage from memory to history has required every social group to redefine its identity through the revitalization of its own history. The task of remembering makes everyone his own historian." 39 Such a democratization involves a process of redefinition in which groups formerly outside the dominant cultural group remember and identify with their newly revitalized past. Nora's conception of lieux de memoire and the shift from the memorynation to an era of commemoration provides an analytic framework which both complements and moves beyond conceptions of national identity formation and memory. 40 As the critic Nancy Wood argues, Nora's theory of memory contains a reevaluation of the relationship between memory and the narration of collective identities. To simplify: in the era of the modern nation-state, memory has primarily worked on behalf of narratives that have linked the national past and future in a causal relation. . . . With the decline of the nation-state as the main institution of social cohesion and its replacement by a social consciousness of the nation, past and future are no longer interdependent. The "dissolution of the national myth," according to Nora, has the effect of making past and future into virtually autonomous instances.41

The Ambiguity of Memory and Identity

21

In the second part, La Nation, Nora argues for a conception of memory as the dominant narrative which constructs national identity. Here, Nora is similar to Anderson and others who argue for the foregrounding of memory in an understanding of the narrative of national identity. Yet, as Wood cleverly points out, Nora's understanding of the democratization of memory marks a radical departure from thinkers such as Anderson and Hobsbawm. Although the democratization of memory due to electronic media and mass culture has destroyed the nation as a primary focus of social cohesion and unity, the memory of the nation remains a unifying force in social integration. "One of the analytical tasks of Les Lieux de memoire is to explain this apparent paradox and to identify the binding mechanisms of national memories in the face of historical eclipse of the erstwhile framework of cohesion, the nation-state itself."42 In the German case, the memory of the German nation serves as a particularly important force of social cohesion due to the divergent memories of the Third Reich and the division of postwar Germany. The most recent common past that both East and West Germans share is the Third Reich. In an attempt to see if Nora is indeed so radically different from theorists of national identity, I will map out the central debates of Renan, Anderson, Balibar, and Hobsbawm. However, rather than view national identity theorists as dramatically divergent from Nora, I will argue for their complementarity. NATIONAL IDENTITY AND REPRESENTATIONS OF A COMMON PAST Discussions of collective identity involve a distinction between "us" and "them" as well as a sense of continuity and sameness over time. Collective identity formation is either constructed through an external identification with another country or ideology or through an internal identification with one's own past history. Such internal identification can either displace or constitute the past—we either affirm our past cultural traditions or distance ourselves from certain aspects of our collective past. Questions of identity are distinctly modern questions which arose with the conception of the "nation" as a form of political and cultural community. As Gillis notes, "(m)odern memory was born not just from the sense of a break with the past, but from an intense awareness of the conflicting representations of the past and the effort of each group to make its version the basis of national identity." 43 Every narration of a community or collective identity involves a beginning and a moment of national awakening which is remembered in national legends or folklore. This beginning can then be remembered through repetitive commemoration, recovered from forgetfulness, or invented to suit present needs. Memories of a national past focus either on glorious moments of national awakening and heroic legends or on the victimization and martyrdom of the national community. 44 Di-

Ambiguous Memory

22

verse thinkers such as Ernst Renan, Benedict Anderson, Etienne Balibar, and Eric Hobsbawn focus on the nation as a symbolic field in which narrations of a particular group of "people" are linked together through the memory and forgetting of past collective experiences and future aspirations. Renan was one of the earliest thinkers to directly address the ambiguous relationship of memory and forgetting with respect to the nation. In his lecture delivered at the Sorbonne in March 1882, Renan reflected on the definition of a nation as a soul or spiritual principle. "Yet the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things." 45 The key narrative component for defining the unity of a people as a nation is the forgetfulness of certain historical events and valorization of other ones. "Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation, which is why progress in historical studies often constitutes a danger for [the principle of] nationality." 46 Anderson's conception of the nation as an imagined community, Balibar's fictive ethnicity, and Hobsbawm's invented traditions stem from the ambiguous tension between memory and forgetting in the construction of the nation. By concentrating on the tension between antique origins and contemporaneity, between claims to the past in the name of present and future generations and the evolving destiny of a people, Anderson, Balibar, and Hobsbawm elaborate Renan's original claim. A nation is therefore a large-scale solidarity, constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices that one has made in the past and of those that one is prepared to make in the future. It presupposes a past; it is summarized, however, in the present by a tangible fact, namely, consent, the clearly expressed desire to continue a common life.47 The Nation as Imagined Community While many studies of nationalism focus on political movements and ideology, Anderson focuses on the personal and cultural feeling of belonging to a particular nation. Anderson is interested in how national identities emerge and sustain themselves. He raises the question of how individuals conceive of their subjective identities as objective fact within the context of belonging to a particular nation. Nationality, nationness, and nationalism are artifacts of a particular kind which had their origin at the end of the eighteenth century. Influenced by cultural anthropology, Anderson examines the nation in relationship to kinship and belonging rather than as a political movement or ideology. He defines a nation as an imagined political community which is inherently limited and sovereign.48 A nation is imagined because all communications larger than face-to-face (and perhaps even those) are imaginary relationships.

The Ambiguity of Memory and Identity

23

For Anderson, memories of the past which link individuals as members of a group play a constitutive role in the formation of a national identity. Influenced by Renan's conception of the nation as an entity bound by common memory and forgetfulness, Anderson examines the nation as a symbolic system of kinship and belonging. This collective narrative of the nation which highlights certain stories and forgets others, forms the basis for Anderson's provocative analysis of the nation as an imagined community. The cohesive unity of a nation is based on a core group of common traditions, legends, and myths which achieve an objective facticity of nationhood. In the final chapter of the revised version of Imagined Communities, Anderson addresses the specific issue of memory and forgetting. "All profound changes in consciousness, by their very nature, bring with them characteristic amnesias. Out of such oblivions, in specific historical circumstances, spring narratives." 49 In other words, amnesia and narrative simultaneously accompany radical change. By focusing on the cultural roots of nationalism and nationness, Anderson argues that nationalism has to be understood in relation to the two cultural systems which preceded it—religious communities and the dynastic realm—as well as a new conception of time emerging from print capitalism. For Anderson, nationalism is the expression of a radically changed form of consciousness. The eighteenth century in Western Europe marks "not only the dawn of the age of nationalism but the dusk of religious modes of thought." 50 Anderson is not arguing that nationalism is the product of the end of religious thought, but that nationalism has to be considered within the context of the simultaneous decline of religious communities and dynastic rule coupled with the rise of a standardized print culture. The decline of religion and divine lineage occurred during a shift in the apprehension of time. Such a shift in the apprehension of time "made it possible to 'think' the nation." 51 Standardized Culture and the Nation The "origins" of national identity formation are based on the social and cultural institutions of a vernacular language, print capitalism, and a standardized educational system. The printing of newspapers and realist novels in vernacular language, in effect, standardized language. Such standardization resulted in feelings of belongingness which were not simply linked to religious continuity. The institution of state languages distinct from sacred languages resulted in standardized administrative bureaucracies; likewise, the spread of print capitalism created the seeds of a mass culture which linked individual readers to a common socioscape or community. Newspapers and novels provided the technical means to represent the modern nation as an imagined community by referring to events and places that readers recognized in such a way that an immediate community of readers

Ambiguous Memory

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developed who were linked together. "At the same time, the newspaper reader, observing exact replicas of his own paper being consumed by his subway, barbershop, or residential neighbors, is continually reassured that the imagined world is visibly rooted in everyday life."52 Anderson, Gellner, and Balibar argue that print capitalism laid the foundation for a national consciousness. "The essential thing is the interplay between fatality, technology, and capitalism." 53 Thus, a system of production and productive relations (capitalism), combined with technologies of communication (printing of newspaper and novels) and fatality of linguistic diversity, created a unified field of exchange and provided a standardization of language which was necessary to imagine the antiquity of the nation. The Narrative of a People as a Fictive Ethnicity Claims for the particularity of a people can appeal to a distinction between "us" and "them" via external differences; however, claims for the continuity of a people as nation also appeal to the past as a sustained link between past and present members of the community. Identity formation can be defined by both an external and an internal Other. Claims about the past are used to link and legitimize individuals as members of a particular "people." Appeals to a common past usually take the form of myths and legends of national origin, and claim a linear historical destiny and a unified identity. Balibar argues that nations require a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. The history of nations, beginning with our own, is always already presented to us in the form of a narrative which attributes to these entities the continuity of a subject. The formation of the nation thus appears as the fulfillment of a "project" stretching over centuries, in which there are different stages and moments of coming to self-awareness. . . . And it consists in believing that the process of development from which we select aspects retrospectively, so as to see ourselves as the culmination of that process, was the only one possible, that is, it represented a destiny.54 For Balibar, central to our notion of the modern state is a conception of narrative and the continuity of the subject. The unfolding narrative from the moment of national awakening to valiant defense of the motherland or fatherland entails the nation as an incomplete project which manifests itself differently in various historical epochs. The nation as narrative which links individuals into a chosen "people" contains a twofold illusion in which "(p)roject and destiny are the two symmetrical figures of the illusion of national identity." 55 Narratives of national history represent past people as ethnically distinct from others who form an ethnically distinct natural community.

The Ambiguity of Memory and Identity

25

No nation possesses an ethnic base naturally, but as social formations are nationalized, the populations included within them, divided up among them or dominated by them are ethnicized—that is, represented in the past or in the future as if they formed a natural community, possessing of itself an identity of origins, culture and interests which transcends individuals and social conditions.56 A fictive ethnicity is produced and reproduced in such a way that ethnicity does not appear as a fiction but as objective reality. For Balibar, " (e)very social community reproduced by the functioning of institutions is imaginary, that is to say, it is based on the projection of individual existence into the weft of a collective narrative, on the recognition of a common name and on traditions lived as the trace of an immemorial past (even when they have been fabricated and inculated in the recent past)." 57 In order for a people to become a national community, claims are made to past traditions in which the narrative of historical destiny of a given people is perpetuated. Faced with the question of individual versus collective identities, Balibar argues that all identities are individual and particular; however, individual identities are created within a symbolic field of values, norms, and behavior. "All identity is individual, but there is no individual identity that is not historical or, in other words, constructed within a field of social values, norms of behavior and collective symbols." 58 The symbolic differentiation between subjects as citizens versus foreigners creates an external identity formation, whereas the symbolic differentiation and continuity with the past create an internal identification process. Invented Traditions and the Modern Nation Invented traditions are based on a selective memory of past events that could link citizens into the national community. Myths of national origin and national awakening are in a sense perpetuated by invented traditions. "Inventing traditions, it is assumed here, is essentially a process of formalization and ritualization, characterized by reference to the past, if only by imposing repetition." 59 Flags, national anthems, national emblems, national holidays, and commemorative occasions marking a nation's glorious past are often invented traditions which invoke the unity of the nation. For Hobsbawm, invented traditions are a set of practices governed by tacitly accepted rules which seek to provide certain values and norms, and imply continuity with the past. Hobsbawn, like Anderson and Balibar, argues that the supposed naturalness of the nation is a constructed, imaginary set of practices which are repeated and reaffirmed in a ritual set of symbolic discourses. Studies of invented traditions are, Hobsbawm argues, highly relevant to studies of the nation, nationalism, and national symbols.60 In addition to the importance of a standard primary education for a conception of national identity, Hobsbawm includes the invention of public

26

Ambiguous Memory

ceremonies and the mass production of public monuments stemming from the nineteenth century. Such a standard education would turn peasants into Frenchmen, while public ceremonies and national holidays assert the singularity of a given nation. In addition, the widespread emergence of electoral mass politics dominates the invention of official traditions from 1870 to 1914. Finally, the mass production of public monuments, especially war memorials, promotes an image of the nation which suggests an imagined community which citizens belong to. 61 FROM THE MEMORY-NATION TO AN ERA OF COMMEMORATION: MEMORY AND COUNTERMEMORY, MONUMENTS AND COUNTERMONUMENTS The thinkers just discussed—Renan, Anderson, Balibar, and Hobsbawn— are, I would argue, acutely aware of the nation as a cultural artifact. With varying degrees of intensity, memories of the past are emphasized for the construction of national identities. Nora's argument for the waning of the memory-nation and rise of the era of commemoration in many ways complements analyses of the nation as an imagined community, fictive ethnicity, and a site for invented traditions. By focusing on the past as a constitutive element of national consciousness, lieux de memoire such as commemorations and monuments which affirm and legitimize the nation play an important role in the narration of national identity. Questions of national identity are linked to questions of how one represents the past through monuments and museums. The modern democratization of memory entails contestation and debate about whose memory is being represented in the identity of a collective group. With the democratization of memory, memories long repressed or excluded from public debate are posed as countermemories to the dominant, accepted memory. Yet, as others (among them Adorno, Nora, and Huyssen) have noted, the democratization of memory also fosters the spectaclization or ossification of the past, which reduces reflection to stereotypical cliches. In his essay on Paul Valery and Marcel Proust, Adorno writes about the similarity between a museum and a mausoleum. It is not simply a phonetic similarity, but a strikingly deathlike, functional similarity. Both museum and mausoleum are "museal" or museumlike in that they store objects for later observation. Once an object is taken out of context and stored or put on public display, the cultural object is neutralized. The German word, "museal" (museumlike), has unpleasant overtones. It describes objects to which the observer no longer has a vital relationship and which are in the process of dying. They owe their preservation more to historical respect than to the needs of the present.62

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For Adorno, objects lose their cultural and historical relevance during the process of musealization. Once an object is taken out of its historical context, a vital link between the pastness of that object and the present of the observer is altered and possibly lost. The musealization of an object is akin to a Nietzschean version of "monumental history" which attempts to freeze moments of greatness for subsequent veneration. 63 Acutely aware of the disjuncture between nineteenth-century monuments as objects which attempt to freeze and reify memory, and twentieth-century media culture which obsessively attempts to seize and represent the fleeting past, James Young's study of Holocaust memorials in Germany, Austria, Poland, and the United States critically examines places of memory and countermemory. Holocaust memorials in particular are a sign of the crisis of representation which accompanies the shift from the memory-nation to an era of commemoration. 64 Unlike monuments which celebrate the cohesion of a nation, countermonuments raise critical questions and engender controversy rather than evoke unified cohesion. Robert Musil wrote: "There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument. They are no doubt erected to be seen—indeed, to attract attention. But at the same time they are impregnated with something that repels attention . . ," 65 Monuments can all too easily become places in which memory is deposited, for the erection of certain monuments represents a ritualized remembrance in order to forget. In this age of mass memory production and consumption, in fact, there seems to be an inverse relation between the memorialization of the past and its contemplation and study. For Foucault, countermemory evokes otherness and divergent memories of the past. 66 Countermonuments such as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the disappearing countermonument in Harburg, Germany, attempt to foster interaction and critical engagement with the viewer. Countermonuments are meant to disturb and create controversy rather than to silence reflexivity into a ritualized structure of memory/forgetting. Countermonuments call attention to ambivalence rather than closure, and invite the viewer to critically reflect on historical events.67 However, just as the liturgical calendar can inspire memory and reflection on one's inner life, so monuments and memorials have the potential to ritualize reflection into an obligatory deference to the past. Thus, monuments paradoxically become places not of remembrance but of ritualized forgetfulness. The concept of the countermonument entails both a response to a dominant memory and a criticism of the monument as an art form. Countermonuments formalize the impermanence of time and attempt to break the aura of the monument. The countermonument does not intend to negate memory but to call attention to the impossibility of permanence. The simultaneous existence of monuments and countermonuments testifies to the vitality of the era of commemoration. Whether countermonuments are successful in their attempt to engage the viewers in critical reflection about

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their own link to history and future endeavors remains an open question, yet the response to such countermonuments as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the disappearing monument in Harburg, and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum testifies to the appeal of an alternative conception of memory which is open to subjective experience rather than closed to contestation. MONUMENTAL VS. CRITICAL MEMORY: MEMORY, IDENTITY, AND MODERNITY Our contemporary obsession with the past accompanies a democratization of memory which undermines the concept of a single, unifying national identity. Nora's critics characterize the lieux de memoire as an apologetic reduction of history to a positive national identity in which everything becomes a place of memory in the service of the nation. Yet, I would caution that his project of lieux de memoire is not so easily reduced to a revisionist history in the name of national identity similar to the work of the conservative German historians Hillgruber and Sturmer.68 They argue that the individual either identifies with history or forgoes identity altogether, as Sturmer maintains in his controversial claim: "in a land without history, whoever fills memory, shapes the concepts, and [whoever] interprets the past, wins the future." 69 Nora's project is more complex than an immediate reduction of history to identity. While he undoubtedly suffers from a sense of nostalgia for a past that might never have existed, the final section of Les Lieux de Memoire, arguing for a shift from the memory-nation to an era of commemoration, opens a space to discuss memories and representations of ambiguous national pasts. If one separates Nora's nostalgia for a traditional past fused with memory from the critical framework which the conception of the places of memory outlines, his project can, I believe, contribute to a larger understanding of memory as an ongoing and contested process in democratic culture. The era of commemoration means that society has replaced the nation, "even if [sic] 'the Nation' has remained the nostalgic and enduring figure of the larger social collectivity."70 The attention to places of memory, the democratization of memory in an era of commemoration, the affects of the mass media on the structure of temporality and memory, and finally Nora's understanding of the peculiar modern problem of the awareness of simultaneous cultural amnesia and obsession with the past provide critical complements to the constitutive role of memory in the narration of the modern nation. Nora, like Anderson, Balibar, and Hobsbawm, is highly aware of the socially constructed nature of both memory and identity as mediated activities. Furthermore, like Anderson and Hobsbawm, Nora seeks to uncover the commemorative practices and traditions made in the name of the nation. Just as Hobsbawm linked the rising interest in mass-produced

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traditions commemorating the nation to industrialization and rapid change, Nora attributes the modern fascination with commemoration to the acceleration of time. As an archaeologist of French national memory, Nora understands the constructive and reconstructive nature of memory as an activity that is shaped by emerging electronic media. In La Nation, Nora is interested "in the moment when the nation becomes conscious of itself as a 'Nation.' By "moment" Nora does not mean a temporally discrete apprehension of national self-consciousness, but an ongoing memorial process. It is when "the Nation" serves as the primary point of collective identification and, aware of its unrivaled unifying function, undertakes the work of self-consecration."71 Halbwachs's framing of memory and Nora's history of memory as an activity and series of "places" provide analytic frameworks to understand how nations remember not only their glorious but also their deeply burdened and ambivalent pasts. Collective memory, as an analytical framework, exposes the "moments" of a national self-consecration, and as thus engages in an archaeology of modern memory and memorial consciousness. The democratization of memory points to the ambiguity of the project—to the contestation and debate about whose memory and whose past are remembered or forgotten. The democratization of memory articulates the politicization of memory for national discourse. Rather than view studies of collective memory as a narrow, nostalgic affirmation of the homogeneous nation, studies of collective memory reveal fissures and tensions in national representations of the past. Collective memory, as Halbwachs argued, is not a universal collective unconscious nor a collective mythical world memory; rather, it is framed by social groups and carried by social institutions. Memory as an activity is deeply affected by its medium of transmission. The shift from a predominantly oral to a written to a visual culture has dramatically altered how we remember and represent the past. The question of memory and forgetting is, furthermore, a question that touches the core of Western identity. The Holocaust has been understood, among other things, as an aberration or culmination of Western rationality. Postmodern discussions of otherness, alterity, and difference focus on the Holocaust as the culmination of Western reason, whereas modern responses to postmodern critics of totality and the grand narrative view the Holocaust as an aberration of the Western Enlightenment tradition. In either case, as Huyssen notes, "The issue of remembrance and forgetting touches the core of Western identity, however multifaceted and diverse it may be." 72 Given that memory and forgetting are so tightly woven with modern Western identity, the question of memory is not simply one of a monumental memory against which Nietzsche so vehemently argued; it is more an issue of critical remembrance in a Benjaminian sense. "To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it 'the way it really was' (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger." 73

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In the end, memory is more of a process a b o u t h o w to represent and integrate a shared past in the present than a tangible product or memorial. As contributions to an archaeology of the past, studies of collective m e m ory are n o t replacements of, but complements t o , historical study. R a t h e r t h a n attempt to sharply separate history from m e m o r y , I w o u l d e m p h a size their m u t u a l interdependence. The activity of m e m o r y is a narrative involving simultaneous forgetfulness and r e m e m b r a n c e . As Gillis reflects, "(d)ependent on several collective memories, but masters of none, we are only too aware of the gap between the enormous obligation to remember and the individual's incapacity to do so without the assistance of mechanical reminders, souvenirs, and memory sites." 7 4 Unlike Funes the M e m o rious, we do not remember everything. Theories of memory and identity call our attention to the significance of h o w past memories are politically narrated to legitimate past, present, and future identities. NOTES 1. Ralph Ellison, quoted in Michael Kammen, The Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 3. 2. John Gillis, "Memory and Identity: The History of a Relationship," in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, ed. John Gillis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 3. 3. Erik Erikson, Identity, Youth and Crisis (New York: Norton, 1968), 9. 4. Gillis, "Memory and Identity," 3. 5. For a critique of recent examinations of memory, see Charles Maier, "A Surfeit of Memory? Reflections on History, Melancholy and Denial," History and Memory 5 (Fall/Winter 1993): 136-151. 6. For histories of memory, see Patrick Hutton, History as an Art of Memory (Hanover, NH: Press of New England, 1993); James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992); Philippe Aries, ed., A History of Private Life: Riddles of Identity in Modern Times (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). 7. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995), esp. chapter 7. 8. Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, trans. Francis J. Ditter, Jr., and Vida Yazdi Ditter (New York: Harper Colophon, 1980), 51. 9. Ibid., 83-84. 10. Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 153. 11. In an attempt to avoid the notion of a single hegemonic memory, James Young argues for collected aggregates of memory or "collected memory"—however, Young and other theorists, such John Gillis and Andreas Huyssen, simply use the term "memory," which emphasizes the multiplicity rather than the singularity of memory. For Henri Rousso, official memory is comprised of commemorations, government speeches, and official history. Vectors of memory incorporate various

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cultural products, such as film, novels, and artwork, whereas diffuse memory entails the reception of memory through surveys and opinion polls. Foucault distinguishes between a dominant memory and countermemories. Others, such as John Connerton, argue for social memory. 12. Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, 48. 13. Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, trans. Lewis Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941; 1992), 173. 14. Ibid., 72. 15. Ibid., 51. 16. Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, 83-84. 17. Ibid., 85. 18. For further discussions of generational memory, see Howard Schumann and Jacqueline Scott, "Generations and Collective Memories," American Sociological Review 54 (1989): 359-381. 19. Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, 78. 20. Jan Assman, "Collective Memory and Cultural Identity," trans. John Czaplicka, New German Critique 65 (Spring/Summer 1995): 125-133. Originally published as "Kollektives Gedachtnis und kulturelle Identitat" in his Kultur und Gedachtnis (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988). For Halbwachs's work on the Holy Land, see the translated conclusion, "The Legendary Topography of the Gospels in the Holy Land," in his On Collective Memory, 193-235. 21. Jacques Le Goff also contributes to history of memory by analyzing five different levels of social memory: (1) ethnic memory in primitive societies, (2) the rise in memory from prehistory to antiquity, (3) medieval memory, (4) the progress of written memory from the sixteenth century to the present, (5) the current overflowing of memory. See "Memory," in his History and Memory. Trans. Steven Randall and Elizabeth Claman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 51-99. 22. Le Grand Robert, quoted in Nancy Wood, "Memory's Remains: Les Lieux de Memoire" History and Memory 6 (Spring/Summer 1994): 123-124. 23. See Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966). 24. See Pierre Nora, ed., Les Lieux de Memoire: part 1, La Republique-, part 2, La Nation-, part 3, Les France (Paris: Gallimard, 1984-1992). 25. Wood, "Memory's Remains," 123-125. 26. Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire," Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 7. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., 7-8. 29. Andreas Huyssen, "Monuments and Holocaust Memory in a Media Age," in his Twilight Memories (New York: Routledge, 1995), 253. See also Huyssen's references to Hermann Liibbe, "Zeit-Verhaltnisse," in Wolfgang Zacharias, ed., Zeitphdnomen Musealisierung: Das Verschwinden der Gegenwart und die Konstruktion der Erinnerung (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 1990), 40-50. Also see Hermann Liibbe, Die Aufdringlichkeit der Geschichte (Graz, Vienna, and Cologne: Verlag Styria, 1989). 30. Huyssen, "Monuments and Holocaust Memory," 254. 31. See Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Repro-

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duction" and "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in his Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969). 32. Hannah Arendt, "Introduction," in Benjamin, Illuminations, 38. 33. Walter Benjamin, "On Some Theses in Baudelaire," in his Illuminations, 159. 34. Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," 254. 35. Nora, "Between Memory and History," 12. 36. Ibid., 13. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., 11. 39. Ibid., 15. 40. I am influenced by Nancy Wood's argument for Nora's lieux de memoire as an analytic framework. "Les lieux de memoire is not intended as a manifesto for such a memory-politics, but its tremendous value lies in providing the rich analytic framework by means of which such initiatives can begin to be imagined." Wood, "Memory's Remains," 147. 41. Ibid., 144-145. 42. Ibid., 129. 43. Gillis, "Memory and Identity," 8. 44. For a theoretical explanation and focus on the recovery of Masada and Cyprus, see Bernard Lewis, History Remembered, Recovered, Invented (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975). See also Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 45. Ernst Renan, "What is a Nation?," in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha (New York: Routledge, 1990), 11. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid., 19. 48. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983; 1991), 6-7. 49. Ibid., 204. 50. Ibid., 11. 51. Ibid., 22. 52. Ibid., 35-36. 53. Ibid., 49. 54. Etienne Balibar, "The Nation Form: History and Ideology," in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, ed. Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein (New York: Verso, 1988; 1991), 86. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid., 96. 57. Ibid., 93. 58. Ibid., 94. 59. Eric Hobsbawm, "Introduction: Inventing Traditions," in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 4. 60. Ibid., 13. 61. Eric Hobsbawm, "Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe 1870-1914," in The Invention of Tradition, 270-272.

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62. See Theodor Adorno, "Valery Proust Museum," in his Prisms (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967), 175. 63. See Friedrich Nietzsche, "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life," in his Untimely Mediations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 64. For a full explanation of the crisis in representation and the Holocaust, see Saul Friedlander, Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the "Final Solution" (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 65. Robert Musil, "Monuments," in his Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, trans. Peter Wortsman (New York: Penguin Books, 1987;1995), 61. 66. See Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977; 1980). 67. As Robin Wagner-Pacifici and Barry Schwartz argue, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial questions Durkheim's belief that moral unity is the object of commemoration. By focusing on commemoration as a "genre problem," a monument commemorating national unity is contrasted with the ambiguity of commemorating national disunity in Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial. See "The Vietnam Veterans Memorial: Commemorating a Difficult Past," American journal of Sociology 97 (September 1991): 376-420. 68. For such a critique of Nora's Lieux de memoire as revisionist in the style of Hillgruber and Sturmer, and as nostalgic for a bygone era, see Steven Englund, "The Ghost of a Nation Past," Journal of Modern History 64 (June 1992): 2 9 9 320. 69. Michael Stiirmer, "Geschichte in geschichtslosem Land," in Historikerstreit: Die Dokumentation der Kontroverse um die Einzigartigkeit der nationalsozialistischen Judenvernichtung, ed. Ernst Piper (Munich: Piper, 1987), 36. (My translation.) 70. Wood, "Memory's Remains," 130. 71. Ibid., 137. 72. Huyssen, "Monuments and Holocaust Memory," 251. 73. Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," 255. 74. Gillis, "Memory and Identity," 15.

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CHAPTER T H R E E

WEST GERMAN INTERNALIZATION OF THE PAST

Pierre Nora's oft-quoted phrase "we speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left" is indicative of the West German struggle with how to remember the Nazi past during the 1980s. 1 With the disappearance of the war generation and the dwindling number of concentration camp survivors, questions of how to remember National Socialism and the Holocaust coincided with the 40th anniversary of the end of the war and sparked controversial conceptions of German national identity. During the late 1970s and 1980s, West German conceptions of national identity were influenced not only by a negative mirror-imaging between a sharply demarcated East and West, but also by a complex and evolving internal relationship with the memory of Nazi Germany. Discussions surrounding Ronald Reagan's state visit to Bitburg (1985), Helmut Kohl's proposed history museums in Bonn and West Berlin (1982-1987), and the historians' debate (1986-1987) did not occur within a political vacuum, but were deeply part of the West German internalization of the Nazi past. Occurring in close proximity to each other, the debates demonstrated different, yet often overlapping, ways of internalizing the Nazi past. Coined "Bitburg history" by the American historian Charles Maier, the debates revealed tensions between official West German memory of National Socialism and a desire for a normalized, positive German national identity. These three interlinked debates are, I think, more than just random examples of West German memory; indeed they represent a shift in the West German internalization of the past, from the axis of guilt and avoidance to the axis of critical memory and normalization. Such a shift entailed different conceptions of German national identity, from the German as guilty pariah to the German as normal European. This change marks not

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only a new stage in the social construction of West German memories of the Nazi past, but also a change from the historical memory of living survivors to history. The issue was not about total forgetfulness, repression, or closure. Instead, the central question was how to remember and narrate the past in light of the democratic present of the Federal Republic. What is peculiar to the numerous West German postwar identity formations is the lengthy ritualized discussions about what it means to be German after Hitler. The West German internalization of the past was one of many interpretive matrices used to construct West German national identity. Whereas other models highlighted the relationship between the Federal Republic and the GDR, relations between the Federal Republic and Western nations through NATO and the European Community, the Federal Republic and geographic Mitteleuropa, the Federal Republic and its relationship to the United States, postnational identity vs. the ethnic construction of nationhood, the link between the Third Reich and the FRG entailed some kind of internalization and acknowledgment of German history as a burden. Unlike the GDR, where discussions of the Nazi past are characterized by an antifascist discourse that essentially un-linked the GDR from the Third Reich, the Federal Republic was forced to internalize the past as a burden through complex and at times ritualized confrontations. In order to prove itself as a reliable member of the Western alliance, NATO, and the European Union (EU), references to the Third Reich were necessary. Beginning with the Nuremberg trials and Allied occupation, political elites in the FRG accepted the continuity between the FRG and the Third Reich. After outlining different phases of West German memory, I argue for a shift in West German memory illustrated in the sites of Bitburg, the museums' controversy, and the historians' debate. These examples serve as symbolic "places of memory" in which a military cemetery, museums, and history books became sites of contestation about how to remember and represent the Nazi past during the 1980s. The places were indicative of attempts to disentangle the Nazi past from the desired image of the Federal Republic as a normal European nation. The heated public debates surrounding the three places revealed the dynamic unresolved tension of the West German internalization of the burdened past of National Socialism. They also revealed how memory and representations of the past are based on the needs of the present society. THE FRAMING OF WEST GERMAN MEMORY Whereas concepts such as Vergangenheitsbewdltigung (overcoming and mastering the past) and Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit (working through and reappraising the past) played a significant role, in both the scholarly work and the political culture of the Federal Republic, these concepts were

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relatively absent in the GDR. In the GDR, the official confrontation with the Nazi past was a function of the complex myth of antifascism in which East Germans were both victims and heroic members of the antifascist resistance. In the Federal Republic, the narrative structure of coming to terms with the past was a function of the West German internalization of the burdened Nazi past. Indeed, the very word "internalization" suggests a tension between acceptance and buried repression of the past. The West German internalization as mastery operates within the ambiguity of this dynamic tension and entails ongoing public debates about how to officially remember the past. Whereas the East German ideological representation of history as the universalization of the past was instilled from above, the West German internalization of the past demonstrated the dynamics of memory in a democratic culture. Such a dynamics shifted from the tense axis of memory versus forgetting in the immediate postwar years to historicization versus uniqueness of the Holocaust in the 1980s. In the Federal Republic, official attempts to publicly administer and institutionalize memory of the Nazi past from above resulted in heated debates among West German intellectuals, historians, writers, and artists. The social framework of West German memory was not antifascism, but a complicated tension between mastery and critical reappraisal of the past. In the shift between demonization and normalization of National Socialism, the Nazi past was always the subject of controversial debates in the Federal Republic and played a constitutive role in the various conceptions of West German national identity. The Burdened Past and the Federal Republic Vergangenheitsbewdltigung is a political and moral term which signifies the debate which a person, group, or nation has with its own history. In the German case, such an internal debate about the past refers to the crimes of National Socialism and their political, juridical, and moral consequences. "The past" (die Vergangenheit) explicitly refers to the Nazi past. Yet, independent of its contemporary usage in German political culture, Vergangenheitsbewdltigung addresses ways in which a society confronts the ruptures in its shared national history. It is a peculiar term that doesn't have a literal or simple English translation. Because questions of how to master or overcome (bewdltigen) the past concern the nation, Vergangenheitsbewdltigung is a modern concept that includes issues of historical consciousness and collective responsibility for one's inherited history. Questions of how to confront and integrate the Nazi past occur on numerous levels, from the criminal prosecution of individuals, to collective moral and cultural debates about the legacy of the past. Vergangenheitsbewdltigung as a narrative discourse serves as a self-reflexive warning that the crimes of National Socialism are an essential part of German historical consciousness.

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In its various usages, Vergangenheitsbewdltigung indicates that the presence of the Nazi past is a central element of West German social identity. The "German question," which formerly addressed how to contain German imperialism, changed radically after 1933. After National Socialism, the question of German national identity in the Federal Republic has been linked to questions of how to confront and internalize the Nazi past. Within the West German internalization of the past, sharp differences emerged as to whether the past could and should be overcome, thus denoting a sense of closure or Schlufistrich, or whether the past should be worked through, thereby emphasizing the ongoing influence of the past upon the present. Most theorists generally agree that the term Vergangenheitsbewdltigung suggests closure and a break between past and present, whereas Aufarbeitung, as critical reappraisal and working through, suggests a link between past and present.2 Whereas the early stages of West German discussions of the Nazi past focused on guilt versus avoidance, by the late 1980s these questions shifted to historicization versus the uniqueness of the Holocaust. However, in all the variations of West German internalization of the past—from overcoming to working through—the question of German national identity vis-a-vis the Nazi past remained a controversial subject of public debate. West German confrontations with the Nazi past had several stages in political culture and historiography that reflected changes in West German official memory and attitudes toward the past. Although I trace five phases in the West German internalization of the past, I also emphasize three models of West German memory, beginning with a guilty pariah model in the 1950s, progressing to a therapeutic model in the 1960s and 1970s, and culminating in a normalization model in the 1980s. Each of these models is part of the West German confrontation with the past as an internalized burden. Though some analysts, such as Ulrich Herbert, argue that West German memory of the Holocaust occurred during four phases roughly corresponding to four decades, others, such as Norbert Frei, list five periods or phases of memory in the Federal Republic, differentiating the period of Allied occupation from the four decades. Since I agree that a difference has to be made between the period of Allied occupation and the founding of the Federal Republic, I primarily follow Frei's distinctions. 3 Jeffrey Olick, on the other hand, outlines three models of the German nation: the reliable, the moral, and the normal nation. While his moral and normal nation roughly correspond to my therapeutic mourning and normalization models, we differ on the first model. For Olick, the Adenauer years attempt to represent Germany as a reliable nation in world politics. Though I find this model attractive, I nonetheless wish to emphasize the conflicted complexity of German memory and the development of the complex confrontation of the past as a burden within the Federal Republic. The official representation

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of the Federal Republic as a reliable nation is arguably an attempt to overcome images of Germany's catastrophic past and pariah status. 4 Phases of West German Memory and Internalization of the Past Questions of Guilt: Occupation and Shock During the Occupation from 1945 to 1949, West German confrontation and shock with National Socialism occurred "from the outside" as the Allies told the West Germans of their collective guilt, supervised the process of reconstruction and de-Nazification, and assisted in the rewriting of history textbooks. The Nuremberg war crimes trial in 1945-1946 publicized and established the magnitude of Nazi crimes against humanity, and the status of Germany as world pariah. Matters quickly shifted, though, as the Berlin Blockade and ensuing Cold War changed the geopolitical situation and necessitated the centrality of the FRG as a major world player against communism. During the immediate Occupation years before the foundation of the Federal Republic in 1949, West German memory of the Nazi past focused on questions of guilt and avoidance. Two books are culturally representative of the German as world pariah: Karl Jaspers' The Question of German Guilt and Friedrich Meinecke's The German Catastrophe.5 Jaspers's analysis of the postwar situation in The Question of German Guilt (die Schuldfrage) in many ways is representative of a certain strand of West German confrontations with the Nazi past through the prism of guilt and atonement. Jaspers vehemently argued for the necessity of radical moral renewal after the war and cautioned against the temptation to remain silent. Unlike the philosopher Hermann Liibbe, who in the 1980s argued for the necessity of silence in order to achieve democratic stability, Jaspers argued that intensive soul-searching and communication was the only way to confront the past and promote a democratic culture. For Jaspers, a community could develop only through dialogue, not through the mask of silence. "Lastly, I characterize ways of remaining silent to which we incline and which constitute our great danger." 6 Unless Germans learned to communicate freely with each other, they would remain in the pariah status of the immediate postwar years. Full frankness and honesty harbors not only our dignity—possible even in impotence—but our own chance. The question for every German is whether to go this way at the risk of all disappointments, at the risk of additional losses and of convenient abuse by the powerful. The answer is that this is the only way that can save our souls from a pariah existence. . . . We are going to be distrusted for a long time to come.7 For Jaspers, no German was free of a certain kind of guilt—each individual had to discern guilt for himself or herself. He differentiated between

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criminal, political, moral, and metaphysical guilt, and specified the consequences of recognizing each kind of guilt. Whereas criminal and political guilt may have affected a small sector of the population, Jaspers argued that metaphysical guilt included all of the German people. Moral guilt countered the claim that "orders are orders" and asserted that each individual was morally responsible for his or her actions. Jurisdiction for moral crimes lay within one's own conscience, and required inner penance and renewal. Metaphysical guilt encompassed the solidarity of human beings. "There exists a solidarity among men as human beings that makes each co-responsible for every wrong and every injustice in the world, especially for crimes committed in his presence or with his knowledge." 8 For Jaspers, metaphysical guilt required a transformation of self-consciousness before God. German historiography in the immediate postwar years was influenced by Friedrich Meinecke's The German Catastrophe (1946), which argued that National Socialism was an aberration in German history. For Meinecke, National Socialism was a result of demonic forces and represented a terrible deviation from the rational, progressive march of history. Reflecting shock and the sense of an immense burden, Meinecke sought a simple explanation for the rise and popularity of Hitler. In his preface, he writes, "Will one ever fully understand the monstrous experiences which fell to our lot in the twelve years of the Third Reich? We have lived through them, but up to now we—every one us without exception—have understood them only incompletely."9 The historical continuity of German history that was irrevocably broken by Hitler and his criminal followers was viewed as a burden and a demonic rupture resting on the souls of Germans and the German nation. For Meinecke, National Socialism was similar to a natural catastrophe or terrible fate which was inflicted on the German people. Arguing from the position of national character or a national soul, Meinecke's historical interpretation served to distance National Socialism as a kind of "mass Machiavellism" or an aberration from the continuity of German history. As Hagen Schulze notes, "Hitler was viewed as an emanation of satanic forces, the Third Reich as an exception to history, the catastrophe as destiny." 10 Meinecke examined the burdened Nazi past through the framework of guilt and avoidance. "The Third Reich was not only the greatest misfortune that the German people have suffered in their existence, it was also their greatest shame." 11 Repression and Reparations The second phase of West German memory has been interpreted as one of collective repressions in which energy was put into rebuilding war-torn Germany rather than examing the past. This phase began with the onset of the Cold War and the election of Konrad Adenauer as chancellor in 1949. In his acceptance speech of September 12, 1949, the first freely

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elected president of the Federal Republic, Theodor Heuss, warned against forgetting what the German people did and what happened to them during the years of National Socialism. Heuss's speech, and Adenauer's speech eight days later, proclaimed the necessity not to forget while emphasizing the rebuilding of Germany. In many ways their speeches captured the spirit of the times and were more future- than past-oriented. 12 Because of the growing tension between the Eastern and Western occupied zones and the emergence of the Cold War, questions of how to confront and deal with the past were pushed aside and the process of juridical de-Nazification slowed down. For Ulrich Herbert, the 1950s was not so much about the repression of the Holocaust as about a desire not to know what really happened (Nichtgenauwissensollen) accompanied by a sense of not being able to bear the truth of what happened. (Nichtertragenkonnen). During this time, the publication of The Diary of Anne Frank in 1947 opened up an individual side to the crimes committed in Germany's name. For Herbert, "Anne Frank's recording accomplished what neither the Nuremberg Trials nor the reports about the cruelty in the concentration camps were able to transmit. The victims had a face, a name, and a history." 13 The 1953 Reparations Treaty distinguished between war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes committed against the Jewish people. As Anson Rabinbach has persuasively argued, this treaty marked a shift in the West German confrontation with the past that officially linked the German question to the Jewish question. More important, the Reparations Treaty placed the Jewish question above the German question. 14 While the Nuremberg trials distinguished war crimes from crimes against humanity, the Reparations Treaty distinguished crimes against humanity from crimes against the Jewish people. This treaty has often been interpreted as the way in which Adenauer used the Jewish question as a tool for German acceptance into the Western alliance. As Rabinbach notes: "Adenauer's genius was to find the Jewish Question useful, where his political colleagues saw only a permanent source of embarrassment. Almost overnight, the crime against the Jews was transposed from a taboo to a politically overloaded symbol of the entire Nazi complex." 15 While the first and second phases of West German memory addressed questions of guilt and avoidance and represented German national identity as a guilty pariah within the international community, the third phase heralded a new paradigmatic model of how to confront the past based on a therapeutic model of working through and mourning. In the early postwar years, emphasis was on new beginnings and the rebuilding of Germany rather than on reflection about the past. West German memory during the late 1940s and 1950s concentrated on moral and narrow juridical questions of guilt, while West German historiography focused on National Socialism as a catastrophic aberration.

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The third phase of West German memory occurred during the 1960s and 1970s, and focused on individual perpetrators of the war generation. With the postwar generation, the 1950s period of repression was replaced by the student rebellions of the late 1960s and 1970s. During this time, the issue of Nazi crimes became an internal political theme in the Federal Republic. 16 Beginning with the criminal process against the Ulm Einsatzgruppen in 1958, then the capture of Adolf Eichmann in 1960 and his subsequent trial in Jerusalem in 1961, and culminating in the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials in 1964-1965 and the production of Peter Weiss's play The Investigation in fifteen theaters in the FRG and the GDR in October 1965, there was a shift from questions of burdened guilt and avoidance, to an examination of the German perpetrators. During this phase, cultural confrontations with the past were evidenced in the popular dramatization of The Diary of Anne Frank in the late 1950s, the publication of Giinter Grass's The Tin Drum in 1959, and Rolf Hochhuth's play The Deputy in 1963. A few years after the Reparations Treaty, Theodor Adorno published his influential essay "Was bedeutet Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit?" (What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?) in 1959. 17 Adorno warned that, " 'Coming to terms with the past' does not imply a serious working through of the past, the breaking of its spell through an act of clear consciousness. It suggests, rather, wishing to turn the page and, if possible, wiping it from memory." 18 Highly critical of previous attempts to confront and work through the Nazi past, Adorno warned that most West German attempts to come to terms with the past were actually evasions and repressions stemming from a desire to be free of the past. The false working through of the burdened past did not really entail memory, but was instead an "empty and cold forgetting." For him, "all this talk, by the way, of a guilt complex displays something untruthful." 19 Whereas many saw a break between National Socialism and the democratic culture of the Federal Republic in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Adorno was concerned with the continuity of National Socialism in the present. "I consider the continued existence of National Socialism within democracy potentially more threatening than the continued existence of fascist tendencies against democracy." 20 For Adorno, the past could be overcome only when its causes in the present were also overcome. As long as the causes of National Socialism still existed in the Federal Republic, "the spell of the past" would remain. For him, the popularity of the Nazi regime stemmed from the "collective narcissism" and authoritarian tendencies of many Germans that were still prevalent in the postwar Federal Republic. In 1967 Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlichs published their influ-

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ential book Die Unfdhigkeit zu trauern (The Inability to Mourn).11 Drawing on the Freudian therapeutic model of melancholia and repetition, they argued that "the repetition of inner conflicts and critical analysis are needed to overcome the instinctive and unconscious self-protective forces of forgetting, denying, projecting, and other similar defense mechanisms." 22 According to them, German society was incapable of mourning the loss of the Fiihrer as an object. Mourning involves an object of loss; yet in the German case, mourning was replaced by the economic miracle of the FRG and criminalization of the Nazi elite. The Mitscherlichs argued that the fall of Hitler constituted a traumatic devaluation of the ego ideal, which in turn created defense mechanisms to prevent an utter sense of worthlessness. Against claims for demonizing and solely blaming Hitler for the crimes of National Socialism, the Mitscherlichs called attention to the enthusiastic obedience of the German population. The inability to mourn the loss of the Fiihrer is the result of an intense defense against guilt, shame, and anxiety, a defense which was achieved by the withdrawal of previously powerful libidinal cathexes. The Nazi past was de-realized, i.e., emptied of reality. The occasion for mourning was not only the death of Adolf Hitler as a real person, but above all this disappearance as the representation of the collective ego-ideal.23 Such a collective derealization and distancing from the Nazi past led to a postwar tendency in which many Germans identified themselves as victims rather than as participants in the Third Reich. While many Germans were certainly victims of war, Allied bombing, and economic hardship, the Mitscherlichs stressed the popularity of Hitler among the majority of the German people, thus emphasizing Germans as bystanders and perpetrators, not victims. They argued that the identification as innocent victim forgets the context and consequences of National Socialism by paying attention only to the difficulties of many Germans after the war. 24 For them, mastery of the past (Vergangenheitsbewdltigung) is a psychological process of remembering, repeating, and working through which begins with the individual and culminates in society as a whole. The Mitscherlichs' therapeutic model of confronting the past accompanied the enormous generational differences between the war and postwar generations in the Federal Republic. The therapeutic model of confronting the past, along with the 1968 student rebellions and rise of the New Left in Western Europe, had a dramatic effect on how the Nazi past was remembered and internalized as a burden in the Federal Republic. As children angrily confronted their parents' involvement during the Third Reich, political debates about the role of Nazism and the Holocaust in German national identity exploded with unprecedented volatility.

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A Second Kind of Repression: Antifascism and Totalitarian Theories Cultural confrontations with the past in the 1960s paved the way for the antifascist discourse of the 1970s. The New Left, with its focus on pedagogy and psychoanalysis, combined with a generational alienation from their parents, radically changed the democratic culture of the Federal Republic. Ironically, while the German New Left vehemently argued against the repression of the immediate postwar years and the repression of their parents' involvement with National Socialism, they represented a second repression of the Nazi past. Although many emphasized the continuity of the authoritarian personality in the German present, the German New Left, similar to the East German official discourse, universalized National Socialism into fascism, thereby omitting the Holocaust as the defining moment of German fascism. This phase of West German memory represented a kind of second repression of Nazi crimes because the emphasis on a Marxist interpretation of fascism as an extension of monopoly capitalism obscured the specifically racist element of National Socialism. The 1970s marked a kind of second repression because the discussion of National Socialism did not deal directly with the Holocaust, but rather with the abstract discussion of theories of fascism and totalitarianism. Furthermore, debates about Nazi Germany were heavily framed in Cold War rhetoric. The exploration of the Nazi past during the 1970s also brought about the "marginalization" or "externalization" of the Holocaust under the all-encompassing rubric of antifascism. After the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, a reversal occurred, whereby the New Left sided with the Palestinians and the conservatives supported the Israelis. As the novelist Peter Schneider suggested, this antifascism of the 1968 generation was not worked through, but simply naive. 25 Although West German cultural confrontations with the past during the 1970s emphasized a second repression and universalization of the Nazi past, the political symbolism of Chancellor Willy Brandt's kneeling before the monument to victims of the Warsaw Ghetto cannot be understated. When Brandt spontaneously fell to his knees before the world in 1972, the image symbolized public remorse and an ability to mourn which was unprecedented in the postwar history of the Federal Republic. Brandt's biography cleansed him of a tainted past. Opposed to National Socialism, he fled to Norway and Sweden and remained there until after the war. His political stature, combined with his Ostpolitik, an attempt to bring together East and West Germans, made his singular act of sorrow one of the most powerful images of West German internalization. By speechlessly kneeling before the Warsaw Ghetto monument, as a member of the war generation and of the highest political elite in the FRG, he acknowledged the acceptance of West German guilt in way that members of the postwar generation could not.

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Normalization and German National Identity During the fifth phase in the 1980s, there was a shift toward normalization which foregrounded questions of German national identity while downplaying the Holocaust. Yet, this normalization tendency was accompanied by a growing interest in the Holocaust. The enormous reaction to the January 1979 broadcast of the American TV drama Holocaust indicated the conflicted terrain of the West German political culture. While the New Left sharply criticized Holocaust as an American soap opera version of the Holocaust, the TV drama provoked a heated debate within West German society and placed the representation of the Holocaust on the national agenda. Watched by 20 million viewers, about half of the adult population in the Federal Republic, the TV drama received an outpouring of interest from West German households. Holocaust seemed to break the taboo against portraying Auschwitz by breaking the Brechtian mode of alienation. The fact that Holocaust promoted identification with the victims and perpetrators gave it an emotional appeal instead of the abstract appeal common in traditional monuments and museums. Viewers were able to identify with the Weiss family in a way that that was previously impossible. Confirming the Mitscherlichs' thesis that the denial of the past left visible marks on West German society, the potential to identify with the victims unleashed unprecedented confrontations with the Nazi past. 26 Following Holocaust, the West German filmmaker Edgar Reitz produced a sixteen-hour film, Heimat, in 1984. Influenced by accounts of everyday life that focused on history from below and everyday practices rather than sweeping historical changes, Heimat narrated the story of a fictional German family in a fictional small town in Rheinland. For Reitz, "the most serious act of appropriation occurs when people are deprived of their history. With Holocaust, the Americans have taken away our history." 27 Whereas Holocaust narrated German history through the lens of a family deeply affected by National Socialism, Heimat told German history through the eyes of a small family virtually untouched by National Socialism. The word Heimat refers to the imaginary return to one's origins or roots, and carries predominantly rural connotations that are close to the land. Yet, as Gertrud Koch aptly noted, in order to tell the myth of Heimat as a place of imaginary idyllic return, the Holocaust necessarily had to be bracketed out of German history because the Holocaust destroys any notion of Heimat. 28 The Holocaust ruptures the myth of Heimat. Reitz's film illustrated a conservative cultural shift toward the normalized internalization of the Nazi past which attempted to disentangle West German national identity from the burden of the Nazi past. The normalization model of the 1980s roughly began with Helmut Schmidt's administration and gained swift momentum with Helmut Kohl's government in 1982. Schmidt's public statement on a return flight from

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Israel in April 1981—"German foreign policy can and will no longer be overshadowed by Auschwitz"—marked a dramatic shift from questions of guilt and catastrophe during the Adenauer years, and questions of mourning with Willy Brandt, to the normalization model symbolized by Bitburg in the 1980s. 29 This shift entailed an official disengagement of the German question from the Jewish question, and heralded the quest for a positive German national identity. Such a shift toward normalization also marked a sharp turn from the German as guilty pariah to the German as normal European. Schmidt's plea for normalization was reinforced a year later when Alfred Dregger, a right-wing Christian Democrat, called for Germans "to come out of Hitler's shadow—we must become normal." Dregger's sentiment was echoed by Kohl's infamous visit to Israel in 1984, when he spoke of "the grace of being born too late." Such shifts toward closure and Schlufistrich were most powerfully visible in the symbolic gestures of Bitburg. Coinciding with the controversies of how to represent and display German history in museums and historiography, the 1980s before unification signified an ambiguous closure rather than avoidance of the past. Moreover, they signified the pursuit of a normal and normalized West German identity unencumbered by the burdened memory of the Nazi past. Instead, this past was to be historicized into a past comparable to other national dark pasts. One cannot underestimate Helmut Kohl's role in the official role of West German memory. From his first parliamentary speech through his push for unification and European monetary union, Kohl's concern was the continuity of the German nation and the shared cultural heritage that defines Germans as "Germans." Throughout his tenure as chancellor, he consistently reshaped the memory of National Socialism to emphasize the suffering of German civilians and soldiers in conjunction with the suffering of those persecuted by the Nazis. Moreover, Kohl stressed the continuity between the positive aspects of German history and the democratic stability of the FRG. As the German sociologist Helmut Dubiel deftly puts it, Kohl's conservative agenda was a "politics of remembrance" (Geddchtnispolitik).30 The 1980s synthesized many changes: a generational change in both political elites and West German citizens, Gorbachev's perestroika, and the gradual loosening of the Soviet Union, and numerous anniversary occasions to publicly commemorate National Socialism. Perspectives of Vergangenheitsbewdltigung and the Burdened Past During the five phases of West German memory, roughly corresponding to the occupation years and four successive decades, various models of Vergangenheitsbewdltigung developed which represented the complex and often highly ritualized West German internalization of the past. The move-

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ment of West German phases of memory through guilt, mourning, antifascism, and normalization signaled a shift from an understanding of the Federal Republic as a pariah nation to a normal European nation. The ways in which the Nazi past has been internalized in the Federal Republic have not been static but have developed within the complex narrative discourse of Vergangenheitsbewdltigung. Vacillating between closure and engagement, three models of West German identity emerged: a guilty pariah model, a therapeutic mourning model, and a normalized model. Whereas Jaspers's guilt model addressed questions of existential and collective guilt, the therapeutic model of Adorno and the Mitscherlichs raised the question of the Nazi past on a political and psychological level. Accompanied by a generational shift, the therapeutic model marked a dramatic change in the way the Nazi past was internalized in the Federal Republic. In spite of criticism of the Mitscherlichs' thesis of collective guilt and German inability to mourn, much of the Left's Vergangenheitsbewdltigung literature was highly influenced by the Mitscherlichs and Adorno. This inability to mourn and the difficulty of being "German" created a kind of self-willed pariah status that was linked to the Sonderbewufitsein (German exceptionalism theory). However, whereas previous notions of German exceptionalism dealt with Germany's special path (Sonderweg) as a belated nation, the exceptionalism of the German New Left was concerned with the unspeakable Nazi past with which only Germans were burdened. While such literature addressed the difficulties of being German after Hitler, authors such as Hermann Liibbe, Eckhard Jesse, and Peter Steinbach examined the relative successes of the West German confrontation with the Nazi past. For some critics such as Hans Mommsen, the fact that Germans did not actively engage in de-Nazification immediately after the war was a loss to the democratic culture of the Federal Republic because they became spectators to rather than participants in their own de-Nazification. "This lack of participation helped foster the myth that somehow, National Socialism had been imposed externally, Germans began to see themselves as having been 'occupied' by National Socialists."31 Others, such as the conservative philosopher, Hermann Liibbe, viewed the silence and avoidance of the past as necessary for the stability of West German democracy. Liibbe, arguing that the Federal Republic was not able in the immediate postwar years to confront the past, and that a certain amount of distance was necessary, thought the postwar silence helped rather than hindered West German political culture. Liibbe sharply disagreed with Jaspers's argument for moral renewal after 1945. For Liibbe, "a certain silence was the socialpsychological and politically necessary medium for the transformation of our postwar population into the citizenry of the Federal Republic of Germany." 32 He argued that the restoration of normalcy demanded tolerance of individuals and mutual acceptance of each other's pasts. Eckhard Jesse criticized the pedagogic value of certain strands of West German Vergang-

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enheitsbewaltigung that emphasized the difficulty of being German. For him, Vergangenheitsbewdltigung had become a ubiquitous term that lost its actual meaning. 33 Others, such as Peter Steinbach, examined the various resistance attempts and movements in Germany during National Socialism and argued for the success of the West German debate about the Nazi past. The shift through models of guilt, therapeutic mourning, and normalization entailed a shift from questions of repression and memory to questions of historicization and uniqueness of the Holocaust. Framed within the internalization of the past as a burden, West German memory vacillated between attempts to master or critically engage with the past. Heated debates took place in the Federal Republic in the 1980s about how to remember and represent National Socialism within German national identity. Places of West German memory such as Bitburg, the museum controversy, and the historians' debate individually addressed various aspects of historicization versus uniqueness. The public debates which these sites aroused, raised the question of how to internalize and integrate the burden of National Socialism into West Germany's democratic present. PLACES OF WEST GERMAN MEMORY EN THE 1980s As Krzysztof Pomian writes, "When the time is right, an era of the past may serve as a screen on which new generations can project their contradictions, controversies, and conflicts in objectified form." 34 The Nazi era undoubtedly served as the screen for conflicts and crises within the Federal Republic. During the 1980s the desire for a positive German national identity, de-linked from the Nazi past, conflicted with a growing interest in the Holocaust and National Socialism. National Socialism served as a kind of screen onto which numerous contradictions and controversies of the Federal Republic were projected. The ensuing public debates marked a new model of internalizing the past that emphasized normalized identity over therapeutic mourning and questions of guilt. In the following pages, I will discuss key places of West German memory during the 1980s that exemplified such a shift in the West German internalization of the Nazi past. Bitburg: Reconciliation and Normalization In many ways, Bitburg is proof of Michael Kammen's claim that amnesia is induced by a desire for reconciliation, whereas memory is more likely activated by contestation. 35 Reconciliation means a compromise and the finding of a common ground oriented toward the future. Such future orientation and emphasis on commonality downplays differences and past grievances, whereas memories of the past incite contested and often irreconcilable differences about what is remembered. The very word "Bitburg" has come to symbolize the normalizing amnesiac tendency of the Kohl ad-

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ministration during the 1980s. Bitburg symbolized not only the leveling of differences between perpetrator and victim, but also the public acknowledgment that the Federal Republic was no longer overshadowed by a dark past and was firmly anchored in the Western alliance. Bitburg marked a shift in West German memory in which a positive national identity was separated and elevated from the Nazi past. Slighted by his exclusion from the Allies' commemorations of D-Day in June 1984 on Normandy beach, Kohl was invited by President Francois Mitterrand to visit the military cemetery at Verdun. As they stood hand in hand, a commemorative ceremony honored the dead soldiers of both Germany and France from the First World War. Kohl, however, sought a more powerful symbol of reconciliation and recognition than Verdun—a symbol that would emphasize the forty years of peace and partnership with the United States after the Second World War. 36 Such a symbolic act would occur on German soil and symbolize the normalcy of the Federal Republic and its firm participation in the Western fight against communism. Bitburg would more importantly symbolize the end of German guilt and a German national identity unencumbered and unburdened by the Nazi past. Eager to back Kohl's support for the installation of medium-range missiles in Germany, the Reagan administration accepted the invitation to visit Kolmeshohe military cemetery at Bitburg shortly before the anniversary of the end of the war on May 8, 1985. The White House's announcement of Reagan's visit to the military cemetery at Bitburg "in a spirit of reconciliation, in a spirit of 40 years of peace, in a spirit of economic and military compatibility" was met with heated criticism when it was discovered that forty-nine former SS members were buried at Bitburg. For Reagan, the future was clearly more important than the past. In a quote where he balked at the idea of visiting a former concentration camp site, Reagan noted, "None of them [the German people] who were adults and participating in any way" in World War II were still alive, and "very few . . . even remember the war." "They just have a guilt feeling that's been imposed upon them, and I just think it's unnecessary." 37 Yet, in an attempt to assuage heated public criticism in the United States and elsewhere, Reagan agreed to include a visit to the former concentration camp at BergenBelsen before Bitburg. In April of 1985, 257 members of the U.S. House of Representatives requested that Kohl release Reagan from his commitment. After the West German Bundestag voted 398 to 24 in favor of Reagan's visiting Bitburg, Kohl thanked Reagan for his "noble gesture" and noted that "reconciliation is when we are capable of grieving over people without caring what nationality they are." 38 The Bundestag's overwhelming support of Reagan's visit to Bitburg demonstrated that Bitburg affirmed a larger desire for the normalization of Germany on the part of the West German Parliament. The fact that Bergen-Belsen was an afterthought to Bitburg displayed a

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leveling of differences and a smoothing over of the past by both Reagan and Kohl. Yet, Bitburg was more than just a failed public relations exercise; it symbolized the need for a positive identification with German national identity. The reconciliation between Reagan and Kohl symbolized not only the political trade-off of medium-range missiles stationed on West German soil, but also a closure of politics via therapeutic mourning personified by Willy Brandt's spontaneous kneeling at the Warsaw Ghetto. Whereas Brandt was struck with guilt and exemplified the image of the mournful German, Kohl's bravado over his late birth marked an exoneration and a new way of dealing with the past in the name of a positive German identity. Bitburg marked a new stage in the official West German confrontation of the Nazi past in which the memories of the Holocaust were downplayed in the quest for a positive national identity in light of a democratic present. For Jurgen Habermas, three forces were at work in Bitburg: the aura of the military cemetery was supposed to awaken national sentiment and historical consciousness; the juxtaposition of Bergen-Belsen in the morning and Bitburg in the afternoon signified the leveling of differences between victim and perpetrator; and the shaking of hands by veteran generals in front of Ronald Reagan demonstrated that the Federal Republic was firmly part of the Western alliance and had always been on the right side of the fight against communism. 39 As a place of West German memory, the Bitburg cemetery symbolized the honorable death of soldiers who had died in the name of the German nation. The fact that SS officers were buried alongside other soldiers at Bitburg suggested their valorous death instead of the burdened past which they could have symbolized. The fortieth anniversary commemorations of the end of the Second World War starkly captured the polarized dimension of West German internalization of the past. In contrast to Chancellor Kohl's emphasis on reconciliation and normalization, President Richard von Weizsacker pleaded for an understanding of May 8 as a day of liberation and remembrance. In his speech commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the end of the war, Weizsacker argued for the central importance of remembering National Socialism. He reminded Germans that May 8 was a day not of celebration but of liberation—and, moreover, that May 8 was linked to the start of tyranny on January 30, 1933. For him, "May 8 is a day of remembrance. Remembering means recalling an occurrence honestly and undistortedly so that it becomes a part of our very beings." 40 There is no such thing as the collective guilt of an entire nation; rather, guilt is personal and individual. In speaking to the younger generations who were not directly responsible for National Socialism, von Weizsacker argued that The vast majority of today's population were either children then or had not been born. They cannot profess a guilt of their own for crimes they did not commit. No discerning person can expect them to wear a penitential robe simply because they

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are Germans. But their forefathers have left a grave legacy. All of us, whether guilty or not, whether old or young, must accept the past. We are all affected by its consequences and liable for it. . . . It is not a case of coming to terms with the past. That is not possible.41 Von Weizsacker's speech did not encourage the model of the German as pariah, but rather the acceptance of the past and of the consequences of the National Socialist legacy. Neither calling for normalization or closure, nor calling for a permanent outsider status, von Weizsacker pleaded for a complex internalization of the past as a "grave legacy." His emphasis on responsibility and memory sharply contrasted with Kohl's normalization of the past in favor of a positive national identity unburdened by National Socialism. In particular, Weizsacker emphasized the link between May 8, 1945, and January 30, 1933. The end of the war was not the immediate cause of anguish and deprivation; rather, German suffering had to be seen within the context of Hitler's rise to power. Because his father was a highranking diplomat in the Nazi government, Weizsacker's plea for acceptance of the past in German national identity gave additional symbolic weight. As Anson Rabinbach points out, Bitburg politics was a complete reversal of Adenauer's politics. "The Bitburg affair linked the Jewish question to the German question as intensely as only the Adenauer reparations treaty had done before in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany—with reversed symbolism." 42 Whereas Adenauer's reparations treaty placed the Jewish question above the German question by singling out the uniqueness of crimes against the Jews, Bitburg signified the nonuniqueness of the Jewish question. The Bitburg wreath—despite, and perhaps even more intensely, because of the last minute Belsen visit (interpreted as a mere concession to American Jews)—demonstrated that the Kohl government was the first to abandon the singularity postulate and to publicly relativize the Holocaust in relation to other suffering inflicted by "the war."43 As Rabinbach argues, Bitburg represented the end of the singularity of the Holocaust in German national identity. It symbolized the public narration of history in which German victimhood was to be commemorated in the absence of the Holocaust. Whereas the Jewish question was previously above the German question, Bitburg politics reversed the GermanJewish symbiotic relationship. The shift from the German as pariah to the German as normal European, combined with the normalizing tendency of historians and politicians during the 1980s, also reflected a new phase in West German national identity. The uniqueness of the Holocaust in German memory was downplayed in favor of a positive, meaningful identity emphasizing the continuity of German history and the democratic

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achievements of the Federal Republic rather than its catastrophic, burdened past. The subsequent historians' debate and museum controversy in many ways resonated the polarized tension between Kohl's closure and Weizsacker's emphasis on memory. The tension is part of the West German internalization of the past via a complex Vergangenheitsbewdltigung discourse and increasing tendency toward normalization. The Museum Controversy and the Search for a Positive National Identity The museum controversy focused on two proposed museums as places of German national memory, the House of History (Haus der Geschichte) in Bonn and the German Historical Museum (Deutsches Historisches Museum) in Berlin.44 The Bonn museum in the capital of the Federal Republic would narrate forty years of West Germany history, and the Berlin museum adjacent to the Reichstag in the former capital of Germany would narrate all of German history. One museum would tell the story of divided Germany, and the other would tell the story of the entire German nation. Whereas the Bonn museum would begin in 1949, thereby relegating National Socialism to prehistory, the Berlin museum would incorporate National Socialism as merely one epoch among others in German history. Both proposed museums stirred up questions of how National Socialism should be remembered and represented in German and West German history. The museum controversy occurred during a growing global interest in history and art museums. Yet, what distinguished the German debate from previous museum discussions in France and the United States was the question of how citizens of a divided nation would portray their history. Whereas art museums primarily raise theoretical questions about representation and aesthetic judgment, history museums represent not only national histories but also national identities. As Charles Maier notes, "The museum has come to represent not merely a pedagogic project, but a contested allegory of German national identity." 45 The German museum controversy was more than a pedagogic problem; it sharply intersected with the internalization of the past in the Federal Republic. As places of national memory, museums serve as carriers of the past and promote distinctive conceptions of national identity. National museums are far from neutral repositories of national memory, but are instead deeply politicized. Because the East German memory of the Nazi past was universalized into fascism, the problem of representing National Socialism in the GDR was greatly simplified. The West German social framework of internalization, however, hindered such a simplistic narration of history in the Federal Republic. The controversy surrounding the proposed museums in Bonn and Berlin fell into two categories: a smaller internal debate concerning the conception and planning of the museum buildings and exhibition halls, and a larger

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public debate which involved participants in the historians' debate. The controversy surrounding Kohl's proposed history museums in Bonn and Berlin in many ways mirrored the issues that were simultaneously and subsequently addressed in the historians' debate. Because curators of history museums traditionally attempt to present a broad, sweeping narration of national history emphasizing both the primordial history and the common destiny of a people, the issue of how to represent National Socialism in German history raised serious methodological and political problems. The museum controversy echoed many concerns of the later historians' debate: emergence from catastrophe, Germany's special path as a belated nation, the history of everyday life, historicization, and normalization. Moreover, the museum controversy raised the central question of how contemporary and future generations of Germans should remember and incorporate the burdened Nazi past into German history. Such a question was framed in the Vergangenheitsbewdltigung discourse, which increasingly tended toward the model of normalization and the quest for a positive national identity during the 1980s. Kohl's government in particular emphasized the importance of a positive identification with German history. The museum controversy, though, did not really begin with Helmut Kohl, but can be traced to President Theodor Heuss's speech on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the German National Museum in Nuremberg: "We Germans suffer incomparably more than any other people in the European-Atlantic cultural circle because of our unmastered [nichtbewaltigten] recent history. . . . Our history is not the history of the Federal Republic, it doesn't only begin in 1945." 46 As early as 1956 the question arose as to how to represent and exhibit German history. With the division of Germany, the question of German history became a problematic issue. After the Museum for German History opened in East Berlin in the Zeughaus (Arsenal) Unter den Linden, it became clear that a comprehensive German history museum was lacking in the Federal Republic. Although the East German version of history presented in the Museum for German History in the Zeughaus (the current site of the unified German History Museum) is coherent and linear, West German historians could not agree on a clear trajectory of German history. In the East German version, history unfolds from the peasant community, feudal society, absolutist state, and industrial revolution, developing from the material forces of production and class struggle to the rise of Hitler and fascism and the defeat of Hitler by the Soviet liberators and East German resistance, and culminating in the foundation of the GDR. In 1971, the "Questions for German History" exhibit in the Reichstag was warmly received in the Federal Republic. In 1979, President Walter Scheel visited the Munich Institute for Contemporary History. After visiting this research center on the Nazi and post-Nazi era, Scheel suggested the possibility of a permanent exhibit on German history which would em-

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phasize its positive as well as its negative aspects. Encouraged by the overwhelming success of the "Questions for German History" exhibit and the Prussian exhibition in the Martin Gropius Building in 1981, the question was raised about the possibility of constructing a comprehensive German history museum in the Federal Republic. By October 1982, the new government of Helmut Kohl officially proposed the Bonn House of History. The Bonn museum would represent the history of the Federal Republic in five phases: from the Third Reich to the Federal Republic (1945-1949), the early years of the Federal Republic (1949-1955), high points and crisis of the Adenauer era (1959-1963), continuity and change (1963-1969), and the social-liberal coalition (19721982). Situated in the capital of the Federal Republic, the House of History would inform visitors of the civic and democratic nature of the Federal Republic. The Bonn House of History, however, was not the museum which caused enormous controversy in the Federal Republic—it was the German History Museum to be built in Berlin which ignited much of the debate. Wolf Jobst Siedler, the publisher of Andreas Hillgruber's controversial book Two Kinds of Destruction: The Shattering of the German Reich and the End of European Jewry, suggested a separate museum for German history. This suggestion was supported by four prominent historians and Richard von Weizsacker, then the mayor of Berlin. In their draft proposal in January 1982, the four historians—Hartmut Boockman, Eberhard Jackel, Hagen Schulze, and Michael Sturmer—addressed five points: (1) reasons for the foundation of a history museum, (2) location of the museum building, (3) structure of the museum, (4) design of the exhibition halls, (5) administrative structure. The first proposal, to use part of the Martin Gropius Building as the site for the new German History Museum, was dismissed by a government proposal in 1983 calling for a completely separate museum. Finally, on the occasion of the thirty-fifth German Historical Congress held at Berlin in October 1984, Kohl announced that the government planned to give the city of Berlin a history museum for its 750th anniversary in 1987. This museum was to be a present from the Federal Republic to the city of Berlin. Kohl's decision changed the question from an internal museum debate to a matter of government involvement. In his first inaugural speech, on October 13, 1982, Kohl had stated that the subject of German history had his highest priority. "Our republic, the Federal Republic, exists in the shadow of catastrophe. Yet, meanwhile it had its own history." 47 The Social Democrats (SPD) opposed Kohl's history museum, and in May 1985 several SPD members formed their own "Working Group for a Museum of History and Culture." Fearful of exclusion from the museum planning, they argued that an entire museum devoted to German history would fuel a sense of nationalism. By late March 1986, a sixteen-member committee of experts submitted its conception for a German History Mu-

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seum to the minister of urban planning and construction. This conception primarily represented the working of a subcommittee of experts who included Boockmann, Sturmer, and the moderate Left historian Jurgen Kocka. The report attempted to offer a critical approach to history as well as the possibility for national identification. The museum . . . is to stimulate argumentation, but also to offer possibilities for identification. Above all, the museum should help the citizens of our land—as Germans and Europeans, as residents of a region, and as members of a worldwide civilization—to become clear who they are, where they are coming from, where they stand, and in what directions they can go. For them and for visitors from other countries the museum should provide a survey of German history in its European connections and its inner diversity—neither excusing nor accusatory, but sober, selfcritical, and self-aware.48 Thus, the German question was raised from a critical perspective that was simultaneously open to positive identification with the German nation. The committee tried to pose and resolve the central question of who the Germans were and how they should be nationally represented. While the Berlin Social Democrats argued for temporary exhibitions focusing on changing public issues, the central planners maintained the need for a permanent exhibit in the museum. The report represented two styles of exhibits: one thematic (appealing to the Social Democrats) and one chronological (appealing to the traditional Christian Democrats). According to the museum conception, visitors would enter the exhibits through an orientation atrium where a large map of Central Europe would highlight the early settlements of Germans. Visitors would then pass through chronologically arranged halls from the early peoples to the Third Reich. In-depth exhibits would address social, economic, and cultural history. An in-depth hall on 1933 would emphasize the world economic crisis, and an in-depth hall on 1945 would focus on World War II as a global situation and raise the question of whether 1945 meant the end of the German special path. Six thematic spaces would address general human issues: peace and war, work and leisure, gender relations, religion and society, sickness and health, and Jews in Germany. The museum would, in effect, greatly resemble the structure of the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. During the opening ceremonies, when Kohl unveiled the foundational plaque of the History Museum, he stated: "In the last few years our country has experienced a renaissance of historical consciousness. The German History Museum will keep alive the interest in our past. It will—and this is an important goal—also strengthen our consciousness that the history of Germans in East and West, on this side and the other side of the Wall, is our common history." 49 Kohl argued for the necessity of a separate history

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museum in Berlin rather than in Bonn due to the proximity to the Reichstag as an important symbol of German parliamentarism; the ruins of the former SS headquarters, which would serve as a warning against the past; the Brandenburg Gate, symbolizing the attempts of Germans at unity; and, finally, the Spree River, which is common to Germans on both sides of the Berlin Wall. After the Martin Gropius Building was deemed to small to accommodate such exhibitions, an architectural competition began. In August 1987, the Italian architect Aldo Rossi won the competition and Christoph Stolzl was appointed as curator of the museum. The history museum was to be built adjacent to the Reichstag and near the Spree River and Congress Hall. The historian Hans Mommsen sharply criticized the nationalistic tendency of the museum, and Jurgen Habermas attacked the conservative revisionism of the museum planners. The historian Christian Meier attacked the proposed design of the museum and suggested that instead of chronological exhibits centered on a map of Central Europe, the exhibit should be designed around a central hall devoted to National Socialism and the Holocaust. From this center visitors could move forward or backward in time into various exhibit halls. While Meier's view distorted and reduced German history to National Socialism, the proposal to present National Socialism as merely one epoch among others seemed to relativize and downplay its importance in recent German history. For the political scientist Peter Reichel, the Bonn and Berlin museums represented the ambiguous double-pronged relationship of the Federal Republic to the Nazi past. While the West German side understood itself as the heir of the Third Reich, the increasing distance of time and emphasis on the Federal Republic as a member of the Western alliance promoted the image of the Federal Republic as the "new creation of the postwar period." As such a new creation, the guilty pariah identity or handicapped burdened identity (to use Reichel's terminology, unabgeleitete und unvorbelastete Identitat) is lost. For Reichel, "both history museums are, whether intended or unintended, museal expressions of this double meaning." 50 The museums are museal because they attempted to present a sterilized version of history: the Nazi period was to be narrated as prehistory to the actual history portrayed in the Bonn Museum of the Federal Republic. The history museum in Berlin would represent National Socialism as a single epoch among others in the long course of German history. With unification in 1990, discussions about the German history museums came to an abrupt halt. Aldo Rossi's architectural design was dismissed in favor of using the former Arsenal and East German Museum for German History as the site of the German History Museum. Kohl's approved curator, Christoph Stolzl became the curator of the new history museum and was later influential in the decision to rebuild the Neue Wache as the central German memorial in Berlin in 1993. With the dismissal of Rossi's large

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modern design, the German History Museum was limited to 10,000 square meters instead of the suggested 35,000. Moreover, Kohl's original intention to Europeanize the German history museum by using a non-German architect was downplayed because the museum is currently housed in the Prussian Arsenal and former East German History Museum. The Bonn House of History, however, did open in June 1994. Due to its lack of historical context for the existence of the Federal Republic, journalists from the Rheinische Merkur named the museum "the greatest museal experiment on German soil." 51 Especially when viewed from the perspective of Berlin as the governmental capital of unified Germany, the Bonn House of History appears as a cultural artifact from a bygone era. Excluding East German history, the Bonn House of History represents the history of the old Federal Republic and unified Germany. The museum controversy and Bitburg displayed the dominant trend toward normalization and the delinking of the German question from the Jewish question. Both emphasized the positive aspects of the German past in light of the democratic present of the Federal Republic. Yet, both examples represented the conflicted terrain of West German memory of the past between internalization as acceptance and internalization as repression and avoidance. Moreover, both examples highlighted the attempt to unburden the past—making way for a conception of the German as a normal, cosmopolitan European delinked from National Socialism as the primary filter of national identity. This trend exploded as intellectuals in the West German public sphere debated the role of the Holocaust on German history and identity. The Historians' Debate: Political Use and Abuse of History The historians' debate was not simply a methodological dispute among academics and historians, but instead deeply touched a nerve within the political culture of West German society. As a debate conducted primarily in the conservative newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the liberal Die Zeit, with comments in leading newspapers and magazines, the historians' debate reached an audience beyond professional historians and academics.52 Although the methodological questions of the historians' debate did not represent anything new, the degree to which the issues reached a larger audience pointed to the significance of the discussion for the democratic culture of the Federal Republic during the 1980s. As an example of the importance of the historians' debate for West German political culture, the Foreign Office sent a detailed documentation of the Historikerstreit to all German embassies on November 6, 1986. The letter accompanying the documents stated: This controversy shows how our public sphere, against the backdrop of the Nazi period, is struggling for the meaning of history and an understanding of history in

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the Federal Republic. In part the debate links the fortieth anniversary of the end of the war and President Reagan's visit to the military cemetery at Bitburg in 1985. The discussion is also related to the preparation of a plan for two museum projects, the House of the History of the Federal Republic of Germany in Bonn and the German Historical Museum in Berlin. The letter further highlighted the significant points of the debate, including the following: • Should history provide meaning, be a bearer of national identity, and if so, how? • Is history being misused as an instrument of political debate? • What self-understanding and what image of history should the Federal Republic have? • Are we striving toward a patriotism oriented toward the constitution ("constitutional patriotism") or a patriotism oriented toward a sense of nationhood ("national patriotism")? • Are the crimes of the Nazi period unique, or are they comparable to other mass annihilations of history, such as those in the Soviet Union? • Should the discipline of history "historicize" or "moralize"? • Is there a "causal nexus" between the crimes of the National Socialist regime and those of the Russian Revolution and Stalinism? • What was the function of the German Army in the East in the winter of 19441945? • Is the destruction of the German Reich a response to the crimes of the Third Reich?53 The actual arguments of Ernst Nolte and Andreas Hillgruber are perhaps less interesting than the controversy and debate that they inspired. Such controversy arose not only from the awareness of the passing of time but also from the growing interest in West German (and American) popular culture in regard to museums and films in general. While the passing of time grants both distance and the awareness of the fading of historical memory, the fascination in popular culture with new ways of representing history provides new "places" and ways in which to critically commemorate the past. At varying levels of interpretation, the historians' debate was a public debate about the self-understanding and historical consciousness of the Federal Republic forty years after the end of World War II. After the war, the German question changed from how to curb German aggressiveness to how Auschwitz was possible in the land of Goethe and Schiller. As Charles Maier argues, the historians' debate raised questions about what kind of national existence could be possible after the Third Reich. It was a question not of territorial boundaries but of the quality of nationhood. It was not

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a question about which Germany—East or West—represented the German nation, but rather a fundamental question about the kind of national community possible after Auschwitz.54 In what follows, I will first outline the methodological and political context in which the debate appeared; next I will map out the central issues and positions of the debate; and finally I will discuss how the historians' debate contributed to a shift in the Vergangenheitsbewdltigung discourse of the Federal Republic. Methodological Context of the Historians' Debate: From Catastrophe to Normality The historians' debate has to be seen within the context of German historiography about National Socialism and the parallel developments of postwar political culture in the Federal Republic. Historians have long debated how to narrate the history of the Third Reich. While intentionalists such as Saul Friedlander and Klaus Hildebrand argue that a direct line of causation can be traced from the anti-Semitic speeches and writings of Hitler to the outcomes of the Final Solution, functionalist or structuralist historians such as Martin Broszat and Hans Mommsen, although acknowledging anti-Semitism, argue that the system of National Socialism lacked a center of control and was instead highly disorganized and diffuse. For the functionalists, the extermination of the Jews is an outcome of a haphazard set of circumstances rather than a carefully rationalized policy. By emphasizing the link between intention and outcome, the intentionalist school stresses the uniqueness of the Holocaust, whereas the functionalists' emphasis on bureaucratic efficiency lessens individual agency and stresses systemic bureaucracy. The second methodological dispute was concerned not only with the origin of the Holocaust and questions of agency, but also with the general tendency of German history. This dispute occurred between those historians who argued for a special path (Sonderweg) or peculiarity of German development versus those who denied the special evolution of German history. Members of the special path approach, such as Jurgen Kocka and Hans-Ulrich Wehler, explain the German development as a divergence from the path of normal European development. The Sonderweg approach maintained that it was the peculiar traditions which Germany inherited from the Wilhelmine empire that left Weimar Germany incapable of handling the interwar crises.55 In contrast to the Sonderweg approach, British historians such as Geoff Ely and David Blackbourn argue that Germany's development did not radically differ from that of France or Britain.56 The question of historicization examined the place of the National Socialist era in the continuity of German history. In the immediate postwar years, Friedrich Meinecke's book The German Catastrophe explained National Socialism as an irrational aberration in the stream of German history. 57 In response to Meinecke's catastrophic approach, three alternative

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historical and methodological approaches emerged for locating Nazism in German history: a Sonderweg thesis, an attempt at normalization, and the history of the everyday.58 The Sonderweg approach, as noted above, outlined the peculiar evolution of German history. The second approach, represented by Ernst Nolte and Andreas Hillgruber, was an attempt at the normalization of National Socialism through comparison. Less methodologically and more politically motivated, attempts at normalization sought to integrate National Socialism into the seamless stream of German history. Such attempts engaged in comparison for the sake of political and national normalization. The third reaction to Meinecke's position was historicization through an examination of everyday life under National Socialism, exemplified by Martin Broszat's study of everyday life in Nazi Bavaria. Attempts at historicization focused on the moral ambiguity of the "average" German during the period of National Socialism. Under this historical approach, National Socialism was viewed as part of a broader continuity of German history. Wolfgang Mommsen situates the importance of the historians' debate within both historiography in the Federal Republic and the shifting political culture of West Germany. 59 Whereas the war generation of the 1950s and early 1960s was typified by an ahistorical intellectual climate, history was at the forefront of the postwar 1968 generation until the 1980s. For Mommsen, the historians' debate was not purely coincidental, but deeply situated in the parallel changes in West German political culture and German historiography since 1945: "Germans wish to come to terms with their own past, and many of them would like to see their history rewritten in a way that would allow them to be no longer ashamed of their own past. The present Historikerstreit must be seen in this light; it is an indication of major changes in the mentality and the political culture of West Germany." 60 Arguing against the facile tendency to oversimplify the historians' debate into the Jewish desire to remember versus the German desire to forget, Anson Rabinbach situates the historians' debate within the narrative discourse of West German political culture. He skillfully argues that there were three major turning points in the postwar German confrontation with the legacy of the Nazi past. The first occurred during the Cold War in 1951, when Konrad Adenauer delivered his declaration of financial reparations to the Jews, resulting in the integration of the Federal Republic into the Western alliance. The second took place in 1958/1959, during the detente at the end of the Adenauer era, when the SPD turned toward NATO. The third took place at Bitburg, and reflected Kohl's attempt to counter a variant of Green nationalism by symbolically normalizing relations between the Federal Republic and the United States.61 The historians' debate "demonstrates that the Nazi crime against the Jews has always belonged to the political discursive topography [sic] of the postwar Federal Republic, and

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that a closer examination of this persistence of the Jewish Question reveals that every stage in the emergence of West German sovereignty has been linked to the question of responsibility for the German past." 62 Such a political discursive topography is, moreover, deeply linked to the complicated and ritualized West German internalization of the Nazi past. Each time West German sovereignty is proclaimed, it is carefully linked to the crimes of the Third Reich. Key Positions of the Historians' Debate The question of how to understand the historical significance of the Holocaust for German history and national identity was addressed from two general perspectives: uniqueness versus comparison and historicization versus normalization. In the debate, the issue of uniqueness had both methodological, and moral and political, consequences. During the central debate and subsequent responses to key positions, the issue of how to approach and understand the specificity and uniqueness of the Holocaust crossed traditional political lines. While Left historians such as Broszat and Mommsen supported the methodological argument for comparison and historicization as a means to better understand the Holocaust, they nonetheless rejected Nolte's political motivation toward normalization. The historians' debate began with the publication of Ernst Nolte's article "The Past That Will Not Pass: A Speech That Could Be Written but Not Delivered," in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeifung in June 1986. The thesis of the article was to contextualize National Socialism and assist Germans in dealing with their past in a more productive and less obsessive manner. Nolte laments that "the past," meaning the Nazi past, will not fade from living memory to history. For him, "more than anything else, however, memories of the Final Solution have contributed to the inability of the past to pass." 63 For Nolte, the memory of the Third Reich blocks continuity and an acceptable national history for Germans to identify with. Germans are, in effect, unnecessarily obsessed with the Nazi legacy and approach historical analysis of the Third Reich from a different perspective than other historical periods. He argues that the historian must be able to compare the Holocaust with other historical examples of genocide because comparison is part of historical methodology. Nolte's article was greeted with heated controversy when he claimed that the historian should be allowed to ask certain questions when studying the Nazi period. Nonetheless, the following question must seem permissible, even unavoidable: Did the National Socialists or Hitler perhaps commit an "Asiatic" deed merely because they and their ilk considered themselves to be potential victims of an "Asiatic" deed? Was the Gulag Archipelago not primary to Auschwitz? . . . Did Auschwitz in its root causes not originate in a past that would not pass?64

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While Nolte raised these questions from a hermeneutical point of view and tried to place himself within the context of National Socialism, critics interpreted his question as an endorsement and revisionist argument that the Holocaust was the defensive result of Asiatic aggression. As a historian, Nolte is extremely idiosyncratic—trained in metaphysics and a student of Heidegger, he gained notoreity with the publication of Three Faces of Fascism, a comparative analysis of German National Socialism, Italian Fascism, and the French Action Francaise.65 In an earlier essay, Nolte provided a more detailed account of how the memory of National Socialism was blocking historical analysis. In "Between Historical Legend and Revisionism? The Third Reich in the Perspective of 1980," published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in 1980, he argued that the image of the Third Reich had become a myth emanating a constant negative image of German history. Such a negative image of Germany, visible in popular culture and historiography, threatened the discipline of history. Auschwitz did not represent anything new in European history, but was merely a technical innovation of mass murder: "Auschwitz is not primarily a result of traditional anti-Semitism and was not just one more case of 'genocide.' It was the fear-borne reaction to the acts of annihilation that took place during the Russian Revolution." 66 Although Nolte conceded that the German copy was more irrational than the Bolshevik model, he nonetheless employed the analogy between the Russian model and the German copy to lessen the severity and uniqueness of the German crimes: "All this provides a foundation for the notion of singularity, but it fails to alter the fact that the so-called annihilation of the Jews by the Third Reich was a reaction or a distorted copy and not a first act or an original." 67 In an effort to justify comparison, Nolte argued that overzealous attention to the Holocaust hinders awareness of atrocities committed in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and the Soviet Union. For him, collectivist thought and the bracketing of the Holocaust hindered historical scholarship from understanding the Nazi past. As Charles Maier notes: [F]or Nolte, the bracketing of Auschwitz and the gulag means freeing historical consciousness from "the tyranny of collective thought." It means being able, as Hillgruber was able, to suggest that the historian might identify with the role of the Wehrmacht and not necessarily with that of the Resistance. It means lifting the burden of "absolute evil" from the German past and reconstructing a usable identity.68 Nolte's plea for the normalization of German history, the necessity of historical comparison, and the downplaying of the uniqueness of the Holocaust in German history paved the way for subsequent discussions of a normalized German national identity.

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Nolte's "The Past That Will Not Pass" coincided with the publication of Andreas Hillgruber's book Zweierlei Untergang: Die Zerschlagung des deutschen Reiches und das Ende des europdischen Judentums (Two Kinds of Destruction: The Shattering of the German Reich and the End of European Jewry). 69 The book aroused strong criticism because it compared the suffering and extermination of European Jewry with the experience of Germans expelled from the eastern borders of the Reich. The title alone aroused condemnation because it suggested the equation of the destruction of the German Reich with the Final Solution. As Micha Brumlik points out, Hillgruber devotes fifty-nine pages to the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front and a mere twenty-two pages to the destruction of the Jews. Furthermore, Brumlik notes that even Hillgruber's choice of the word "Jewry" (Judentum) rather than "Jews" (Juden) shows the destruction of Jewry as an abstraction, not of the Jews as a people.70 For Hillgruber, the historian is faced with the choice of having to identify with either Hitler, the Red Army, or the German army valiantly defending the civilian population of the German nation. Faced with these three choices, Hillgruber argues that the historian has no choice but to forge a positive identification with the German army. In his book he attempts to rationalize the Wehrmacht's soldiers' defense of the East Prussian front in the winter of 1944-1945. For him, as a historian recounting the history of the Wehrmacht defense, one has to identify with the hapless soldiers defending the East Prussian front. If the historian gazes on the winter catastrophe of 1944-45, only one position is possible . . . he must identify himself with the concrete fate of the German population in the East and the German Baltic navy, which sought to defend the population from the orgy of revenge of the Red Army, the mass rapine, the arbitrary killing, and the compulsory deportations.71 Hillgruber's assumption that the reader should identify with the subject falsely assumes the necessity for the reader to identify with one side of history. For him, as a German reading German history, one has no choice but to identify with Germans simply by virtue of being German. Rather than analyze historical consciousness from the perspective of trying to understand the cultural heritage and history that form the horizon of our understanding and our orientation to the world, Hillgruber quickly reduces historical narration to a politics of identity. However, by creating a situation of "us against them," he politicizes the memory of the Third Reich into one in which the Germans were the primary victims of the war, thereby avoiding questions of accountability, passivity, and acquiescence that affected the majority of the population. At roughly the same time as Nolte's article, Michael Sturmer published "History in a Land Without History" in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zei-

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tung in April 1986. For Sturmer, a historian then serving as Kohl's historical adviser, the task of the historian is to assist in the renewal of national self-confidence by providing positive images of the past. His position was important because Sturmer was instrumental in the discussions on the proposed history museums in Bonn and West Berlin. For him, the decline of religion and the disenchantment of the world point toward the nation and patriotism as the repository of meaning for the individual within the collective: "A loss of orientation and a search for identity are closely related. But anyone who believes that this trend will have no effect on politics and the future is ignoring the fact that in a land without history, the future is controlled by those who determine the content of memory, who coin concepts and interpret the past." 72 For Sturmer, the search for meaning is part of the human condition, and has shifted from religion to the nation. In his rather dramatic appeal for the plight of the German identity crisis, he attributes the renewed interest in history museums and exhibitions to a deep lack of orientation in West German political culture. Troubled by the low level of self-confidence in political culture polls and questionnaires, he reduces identity to an affirmative interpretation of history. By conflating various problems of modernity, ranging from the loss of tradition to apprehension in regard to the future, Sturmer concludes that the only way individuals can regain a positive identity is through an affirmation of the past: The search for a lost past is not an abstract striving for culture and education. It is morally legitimate and politically necessary. We are dealing with the inner continuity of the German republic and its predictability in foreign policy terms. In a country without memory anything is possible.73

Sturmer's argument for a German lack of memory insinuates that the memory and burden of the Third Reich have blocked access to a positive identification with other, more heroic memories of a common German past. In reaction to Nolte's 1986 article, Habermas published "A Kind of Settlement of Damages" in Die Zeit, in July 1986. 74 Habermas argued that Nolte and Hillgruber, as well as Klaus Hildebrand and Michael Sturmer, contained "apologetic tendencies in German historical writing." For Habermas, however, the issue was not methodology but the moral-political motivations and consequences of such argumentation. He took issue with Sturmer's claim that the discipline of history is propelled by a collective and unconscious drive toward an inner endowment of higher meaning. For him, Hillgruber is an example of the historian who attempts to find higher meaning while narrating the past. In response, Habermas argues that Hillgruber gives a false set of choices for the historian to identify with. The task of the historian is to narrate the past, not identify with its actors. Habermas argues that the emphasis by Sturmer and Hillgruber is deeply

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conservative and prone to nonreflective revisionism. Rather than rely on a mythical bond of a shared tradition and history that unites individuals into a community, Habermas argues for the continued Western orientation of the Federal Republic. The Western ideal of liberal democracy orients the individual to universal values of freedom, pluralism, and the rule of law, rather than a mythical Ur-Volk privileged to participate in a certain community. Habermas attacks Nolte's repetition of neo-Nazi propaganda that claimed Hitler was justified in treating Jews as prisoners of war on the basis of Chaim Weizmann's alleged September 1939 "declaration of war," calling for Jews to support Britain. He doesn't accuse Nolte of believing this claim, but instead attacks him for giving it serious scholarly consideration. Habermas is primarily concerned with the consequences of such historical revisionism for the democratic culture of the Federal Republic. For him, the Holocaust was certainly not a technical innovation nor copy of Bolshevik terror, but historically unique. However, given this uniqueness, Habermas does not argue against comparison, but against relativization and apology in the name of positive national identity. In short, he attacks all four authors for their attempt to disentangle contemporary German identity from the past. For Habermas, the only way to avoid German nationalism is by forging a postnational identity that will not foster any latent national identity. Postnational identity does not mean the denial of a particular German cultural identity through language and culture, but is an orientation to democratic civic identity. Whereas conservative historians such as Nolte, Sturmer, and Hillgruber promote a nonreflective historical consciousness affirming "German identity" while excluding perspectives critical of German nationhood, Habermas argues for a postconventional historical consciousness based on universal principles of the democratic constitutional state. For him, national identity is conventional because it propagates adherence to a group and does not allow for reflection based on universal principles. Postnational identity, on the other hand, invokes a constitutional patriotism or adherence to the constitution and rule of law: "The only patriotism that will not estrange us from the West is a constitutional patriotism." 75 The term "constitutional patriotism," first coined by Dolf Sternberger in 1982, was adopted by Habermas in 1986 to describe the way in which Germans should orient themselves toward Western, enlightened democratic ideals in order to overcome an aggressive national identity epitomized by the Third Reich.76 In August 1986, Joachim Fest, editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and author of a biography of Hitler, supported Nolte's claims and denounced those of Habermas in "Encumbered Remembrance: The Controversy About the Incomparability of National Socialist Mass Crimes," published in his newspaper. The title revealed Fest's desire to disentangle

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German history from the burdened memory and obsession with the Third Reich. In this article, Fest maintained that Nolte had never challenged the uniqueness of National Socialism, but merely argued for the necessity of comparison and probable causal connections between the gulag and Auschwitz. Furthermore, he argued that contemporary knowledge of the Third Reich is more mythical than historical. In response to Fest's and other historians' criticism of his first article, Habermas wrote "On the Public Use of History: The Official SelfUnderstanding of the Federal Republic Is Breaking Up," published in Die Zeit in November 1986. For him, the dispute was not about encumbered remembrance, as Fest termed it, "but about the rather more narcissistic question of how we should position ourselves—for our own sakes—towards our own traditions." 77 In this article, Habermas reformulates Jaspers's questions of guilt in reference to contemporary Germany. In the immediate postwar years, the question of guilt emphasized personal guilt and collective liability. For Habermas, however, the question has to be reformulated to take into account the generations who were born after National Socialism. In response to Jaspers's question of German guilt, Habermas argues that responsibility is carried over into the next generation because Germans have a specific obligation to maintain the memory of those who were murdered by Nazi Germans. 78 These dead justifiably have a claim on a weak amnesiac power of solidarity, which those born afterward can only practice in the medium of the constantly renewed, often confused, always worrying memory. If we brush aside this Benjaminian legacy, our Jewish fellow citizens, the sons, the daughters, the grandchildren of the murdered could no longer breathe in our country.79 Echoing Richard von Weizsacker's 1985 Bundestag speech commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the end of the war, Habermas spoke about the intergenerational link between past and present. He viewed the attempt by conservative historians to foster a national identity and relativize the uniqueness of the Holocaust as a denial of the ambivalent traditions in which Auschwitz was possible. By arguing for critical reflection and reflective memory, Habermas is wary of any interpretive or hermeneutic quest for identity, which in its most extreme case assumes totality and wholeness. One develops the necessary critical attitude toward tradition only through a common remembrance or solidaristic memory (solidarische Erinnerung) of the past. Can one continue the traditions of German culture without taking over the historical liability for the way of life in which Auschwitz was possible? Can one be liable for the context of the origins of such crimes, with which one's own existence is historically woven, in any other way than through common remembrance [sic] of

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that for which one cannot atone other than in a reflective, testing attitude toward one's own, identity-endowing traditions?80 Such a solidaristic memory acts as a filter through which traditions are judged. Rather than blindly accept all traditions as given, whereby we are damned to repeat the mistakes of the past, Habermas argues for a reflective criticism based on a common memory of the past. For him, a critical attitude and common remembrance are an integral part of individual and collective historical identity. Subsequent Debates: Historicization and the History of Everyday Life Questions of historicization were raised not only with the motivation of revisionism or apology (Nolte), but also by Left historians who emphasized history from below and everyday local practices rather than macro politics. Lengthy oral histories, most notably Martin Broszat's Bayern in der NSZeit, investigated the memories and experiences of different social groups under Nazism. In such a way, the history of everyday life (Alltagsgeschichte) sought to give a more nuanced and complex picture of everyday life under National Socialism. A major criticism of the histories of everyday life focused on the resistance of average Germans. Resistance implies an activity, but, in actuality Broszat describes a passive retreat into interior privacy. Resistance, furthermore, implies not a retreat but a maintaining of ground or a defense of a moral position. On the contrary, everyday life in Bavaria as examined by Broszat's study and Edgar Reitz's film Heimat reveals no defense of community, but a retreat and lack of action. Resistance thus falls into the category of internal withdrawal and omission, and is by no means an active defense but rather a passive acquiescence. Both Dan Diner and Saul Friedlander argue against the political consequences of employing the history of everyday life as a methodology for historicizing National Socialism. By questioning terms such as "normal," "everyday," "resistance," and "historical understanding," Friedlander and Diner raise serious questions for the political and moral motivations of a history of everyday life during National Socialism. In an exchange of letters appearing in the Vierteljahrshefte fur Zeitgeschichte in 1987, after the central articles of the historians' debate, the German historian Martin Broszat and Israeli historian Saul Friedlander discussed the issue of the historicization of National Socialism. Although their exchange of letters appeared after the main debate between Habermas and the historians, it may in the long run, as Andrei Markovits notes, prove more lasting and significant for future historiography. 81 While the historians' debate addressed questions of uniqueness of the Holocaust and the construction of a usable past and acceptable national identity, the debate between Broszat and Friedlander focused on the difference between public

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memory and historicization. Their series of letters followed articles on National Socialism by both men. In an earlier article, "A Plea for the Historicization of National Socialism" (1985), Broszat argued for the necessity of subjecting the Third Reich to historical examination rather than suspending it in a different mythical time, beyond rational comprehension. For him, the moral impact of National Socialism was exhausted, and had degenerated into empty "tired stereotypes." 82 What is peculiar to the German situation is the necessity and difficulty of fitting the Nazi period into the overall course of national history. Forty years' distance has not helped this enterprise very much. No matter which history book one opens, the tone becomes cold and distant as soon as the author broaches the Third Reich. The ability to feel one's way empathetically into the web of historical interconnections evaporates along with the pleasure of narration. The history of National Socialism is no longer repressed; it has instead degenerated into dreary required reading.83 Broszat argued for a historicization of National Socialism that would lift the blockade historians experience when confronting 1933-1945. Instead of a "moral quarantine" on National Socialism, he urged a focus on the long-term modernizing tendencies and social pathologies of the Third Reich. In his article "Some Reflections on the Historicization of National Socialism" (1987), Friedlander distinguished between Nolte's revisionism and Broszat's historicization. For Friedlander, Broszat's plea for a historicization of the Nazi period represented "an important transformation of the historical conception of the Nazi era." 84 Although agreeing with the necessity to eliminate taboos from history, Friedlander did not consider National Socialism to be a negative myth (Nolte) or a blockage to history (Broszat). Instead, he located arguments for the historicization of National Socialism within the political and ideological context of the Federal Republic during the 1970s and 1980s, and summarized the objectives of historicization in four points: 1. The study of National Socialism should be the same as any other historical period. 2. The black/white framework surrounding the history of National Socialism should be replaced by a more complex examination. 3. National Socialism should be reinstated into the wider trend of historical evolution. 4. The moral distancing of historians from National Socialism should be replaced by moral sensitivity.85

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Friedlander argued that Broszat's conception of historicization, emphasizing long-term modernization processes before National Socialism and the history of everyday life under National Socialism, too easily reduced historicization to historicism. 86 Furthermore, Friedlander feared that historicizing the Nazi period and concentrating on the relative normality of everyday life under Nazism would encourage apologetic tendencies toward normalization. For him, one needs to differentiate between the normality of everyday life and the perception of normality under a criminal system.87 The central issue in the Broszat-Friedlander debate addressed the difference between mythical memory and historical understanding. Broszat established a polarity between what he termed the "mythical memory" of the victims and "history" of German historians. Among the problems faced by a younger generation of German historians more focused on rational understanding is certainly also the fact that they must deal with just a contrary form of memory among those who were persecuted and harmed by the Nazi regime, and among their descendants—a form of memory which acts to coarsen historical recollection.88 Broszat's plea for historicization is an attempt to move beyond what he perceives to be a frozen narration of National Socialism. Friedlander, on the other hand, is concerned with the limits of such an open-ended historical understanding which Broszat advocates and utilizes in his social history of everyday life in Bavaria. Histories of everyday life are simply incapable of addressing the extraordinary events of the Third Reich. Whereas Broszat's historical method attempts to uncover the daily life of normal Germans living under National Socialism, Friedlander questions the construction of a "normal" life during the extraordinary years of Nazi Germany. "Indeed, normal life with the knowledge of ongoing massive crimes committed by one's own nation and one's own society is not so normal after all." 89 In a letter to Friedlander, Broszat clarifies his concept of historicization as grounded in the fact that the Nazi period can neither be excluded nor be bracketed from historical understanding. On the contrary, historicization is founded on a principle of critical historical understanding (Verstehen) that is shaped and informed by the National Socialist experience. Although Broszat's conception of understanding is different from the romantic-idealist notion of understanding and identification utilized by Hillgruber, Friedlander cannot accept the treatment of Nazism as merely another historical period. "Writing about Nazism is not like writing about sixteenth century France." 90 Friedlander was primarily concerned with the moral implications and political consequences of bracketing out the Holocaust for the sake of historical analysis, and thus paid particular attention to the narrative structure of historical discourse. For Dan Diner, the period of National Socialism defies historicization.

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Although history entails narration, fixity, and distance, the Nazi period looms over German history as "the past." Whereas Nolte interprets the Nazi period as a negative myth blocking access to history, Diner views National Socialism as a fundamental break in civilization. The key question of the historians' debate and the central question for German memory is whether or not National Socialism can become history. 91 For both Diner and Friedlander, the history of everyday life, with its emphasis on long periods of time, cannot grasp the exceptional situation of the victims. Whereas histories of everyday life can describe the local experience of individual Germans unaffected by National Socialism, it is incapable of approaching the extraordinary experiences of the victims: "The everyday-life perspective, guided as it is by local experiences and feelings, yields a close-up view divorced from great events." 92 Diner argues that the reality of everyday life, with its perceived normality, and the exceptional existentialism of the Holocaust cannot be narrated into one unifying historiography. Since the Holocaust was the antithesis to everyday life, it cannot be described as an ordinary event. Because National Socialism defies comprehension and historicization, historians are caught "between aporia and apology," between speechlessness and normalization. The intentionalist perspective cannot explain how ideology became a policy of extermination, the functional approach results in normalization, and the history of everyday life approach results in banal trivialities. Such a disjuncture of trying to describe National Socialism as history or a complex series of coherent events results in an epistemological black box. 93 For historians caught between the narrations of these two worlds, Diner argues for a third dimension of simultaneous nonsimultaneity. 94 Such an approach would foreground the Holocaust as the central feature of National Socialism while simultaneously attempting to understand the perceived normality of various individuals living during Nazi Germany. Although the history of everyday life all but ignored the Holocaust in focusing on local histories and micro practices of Germans living under National Socialism, the American critic Mary Nolan persuasively argues for a theoretical connection between the history of everyday life and the historians' debate. 95 The Right, she argues, rethought its analysis of Nazism by borrowing both the methods of social historians and their emphasis on the local over the general. The aim of an everyday history of the Nazi period was to counter the popular view that Nazism was an effective, totalitarian regime that penetrated all spheres of social life. The misappropriation of everyday history by conservative historians presents a serious challenge to Left social historians by exposing the discrepancy between structural history, which concentrates on large processes, and histories of everyday life, which focus on everyday life. Furthermore, the Right's misappropriation of everyday historians' concern for the identity of the average German is visible in Hillgruber's plea for German readers to identify with

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German soldiers defending the Eastern Front against Soviet invasion. Such an emphasis on identification is one-sided and reductive. Likewise, she argues that oral history is one-sided in its emphasis on the personal memories of average Germans who became representative of the larger society.96 Although German social historians, such as Alf Liidtke, Detlev Peukert, and Lutz Niethammer, did not have a strong vocal position in the historians' debate, Nolan maintains that conservative historians such as Hillgruber borrowed and heavily distorted social historians' emphasis on local identities and the importance of everyday activities in order to argue that contemporary Germans should identify with the "average German" and ultimately recognize the nonuniqueness of Nazi crimes. The removal of uniqueness includes the removal of questions of guilt and intergenerational responsibility. For conservative historians such as Hillgruber, the approach of everyday life removed the Holocaust from historical narration and enabled the German reader to place himself in the shoes of Wehrmacht soldiers on the Eastern Front and identify with their circumstances. CONCLUDING REMARKS ON BITBURG, HISTORY, AND THE WEST GERMAN INTERNALIZATION OF THE PAST Arguments about the uniqueness and comparability of the Holocaust are not merely scholarly debates about methodology of historical analysis, but questions about the public use of history and the public administration of national memory. The central theme in the various debates focuses on the question of whether the Holocaust and Third Reich can be studied in the same manner as other historical periods, or whether the crimes of the Holocaust were beyond the limits of human comprehension and, therefore, beyond the realm of historical analysis. The historians' debate revealed tensions in various political motivations for comparison and opened up distinctions between historicization, relativization, and normalization. Bitburg, the museum controversy, and the historians' debate were part of a larger change within the political culture of the Federal Republic. The tensions between conservative historians and politicians' desire to forge a positive national identity which was no longer mortgaged to the Nazi past, mark a dramatic departure from previous ways of confronting the past. Bitburg history represents a new stage in the narrative structure of dealing with the past—from the German as guilty pariah to the German as normal European. Furthermore, the public emphasis on German victimhood rather than German aggression signaled the downplaying of the Holocaust in German national identity. In agreement with Rabinbach, I would argue that the historians' debate is a "departure from the both the metaphysical guilt and the antifascist discourses." 97 It is both a departure from the German as guilty pariah and from the New Left's attempt to distance itself from National Socialism through a complex platform of West German antifas-

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cism. The social construction of West German memory during the 1980s signifies a shift from the axis of guilt and avoidance to the tension between obsession and normalization. The historians' debate and museum controversy were fundamentally debates about the identity of the Federal Republic forty years after the end of the Second World War. In the immediate postwar years, National Socialism was interpreted as a singular rupture in the continuity of German history. As Hans Mommsen notes, the fact that Nolte's views were publicly defended by professional historians such as Hildebrand and Fest, and the fact that the conservative Reagan administration encouraged Germany's search for a national identity, marked a shift in German historical consciousness. This convergence of a German search for a positive national identity and historical orientation combined with American support for a rehabilitated German national pride signified part of a larger change in German political culture. National museums, history books, and a military cemetery became controversial places of memory in West German political culture. While these places were attempts to publicly administer the national memory of National Socialism, the debate that they inspired revealed the conflicted terrain of West German memory. Such public debates were primarily about the political and cultural identity of the Federal Republic, the historical understanding of National Socialism in German history, and, above all, the contested role of the Holocaust in German historiography. Each public event occurred within the context of a highly structured Vergangenheitsbewdltigung literature in the Federal Republic, and was an attempt to disentangle German national identity from the heavily burdened memory of Nazi Germany. Unlike the GDR, which lacked a public sphere, the dynamic politics of memory in the Federal Republic represented the learning processes and democratic debate about the influence of the past in the present. While memory in the early postwar years vacillated between guilt and avoidance, by the 1980s the question of how to remember and represent the Nazi past was framed within the context of normalization and critical memory. Though there was a tendency to normalize and unburden the past for the sake of a positive national identity, the meaning and collective representation of this burdened past were strongly contested within a certain vocal segment of West German democratic culture. Above all, the debates demonstrated that intellectuals such as Broszat, Nolte, Mommsen, Habermas, Hillgruber, and Weizsacker were too young to have been soldiers during the war but old enough to have directly experienced National Socialism. The intensity of their viewpoints about how National Socialism should be remembered and narrated has a specific urgency because subsequent generations of Germans will know this period only through secondhand accounts. West German intellectuals played a particularly vocal role in the construction and shaping of West German

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memory. While some political elites and intellectuals pushed for a normal national self-image, others argued for the specificity of the Nazi past in German national identity. The debates, above all, highlighted the continued importance of h o w the past is instrumentally remembered in the present. The social framework of West German memory as the internalization of a burdened past was neither static nor monolithic, but deeply divided on h o w to publicly administer, represent, and integrate National Socialism into the Federal Republic. Moreover, West German memory was linked to the changing needs of different generations of Germans. NOTES 1. Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire," Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 7. 2. For an overview of Vergangenheitsbewdltigung literature, see Bert Pampel, "Was bedeutet 'Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit'? Kann man aus der 'Vergangenheitsbewaltigung' nach 1945 fur die 'Aufarbeitung' nach 1989 Lehren ziehen?" Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte January 6, 1995, 27-38. 3. See Norbert Frei, "Auschwitz und Holocaust: Begriff und Historiographie," in Holocaust: Die Grenze des Verstehens. Eine Debatte uber die Besetzung der Geschichte, ed. Hanno Loewy (Hamburg: Reinbek, bei Hamburg, 1992), 101-109; and Ulrich Herbert, "Der Holocaust in der Geschichtsschreibung der Bundesrepublik Deutschland," in Erinnerung: Zur Gegenwart des Holocaust in DeutschlandWest und Deutschland-Ost, ed. Bernhard Moltmann et al. (Frankfurt: Haag &; Herchen Verlag, 1993). 4. See Jeffrey K. Olick, "The Sins of the Fathers: The Third Reich and West German Legitimation" (dissertation, Yale University, 1993). 5. Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Capricorn Books, 1947;1961). Friedrich Meinecke, The German Catastrophe, trans. Sidney B. Fay (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946;1950). 6. Jaspers, 16. 7. Ibid. For a full interpretation of Jaspers and the German as pariah, see Anson Rabinbach, "Der Deutsche als Paria. Deutsche und Juden in Karl Jaspers' 'Die Schuldfrage,' " in Erinnerung, ed. Bernhard Moltmann et al. (Frankfurt: Haag & Herchen Verlag, 1993), 169-188. 8. Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt, 32. 9. Meinecke, The German Catastrophe, xi. 10. Hagen Schulze, "Explaining the 'German Catastrophe': The Use and Abuse of Historical Explanations," in Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust and the Historians' Debate, ed. Peter Baldwin (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), 187. 11. Meinecke, The German Catastrophe, 86. 12. See Wolfgang Benz, "Zum Umgang mit nationalsozialistischer Vergangenheit in der Bundesrepublik," in Die geteilte Vergangenheit, ed. Jurgen Danyel (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1995), 47-60. 13. Herbert, "Der Holocaust," 34. 14. Anson Rabinbach, "The Jewish Question in the German Question," in Reworking the Past, ed. Peter Baldwin (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), 45-76, esp. 49.

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15. Ibid., 51. 16. Herbert, "Der Holocaust," 36. 17. Theodor Adorno, "What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?" in Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective, ed. and trans. Geoffrey Hartman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 114-129. Originally published as "Was bedeutet Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit?," in his Erziehung zur Miindigkeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1959; 1971), 10-28. 18. Ibid., 115. 19. Ibid., 117. 20. Ibid., 115. 21. Alexander Mitscherlich and Margarete Mitscherlich, The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior (New York: Grove Press, 1975). Originally published as Die Unfahigkeit zu trauern: Grundlagen kollektiven Verhaltens (Munich: R. Piper, 1967). 22. Ibid., 15. For some of the Mitscherlichs' Freudian influence, see Sigmund Freud, "Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through," in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1937); Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," in A General Selection from the Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. John Rickman (New York: Doubleday, 1989), 121-140. 23. Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich, 23. 24. Ibid., 40. 25. See Peter Schneider, "Hitler's Shadow: On Being a Self-Conscious German," Harper's (September 1986): 49-54. 26. For extended discussions of Holocaust, see the special issue on Germans and Jews of New German Critique 19 (Winter 1980), esp. Andreas Huyssen, "The Politics of Identification"; Anson Rabinbach and Jack Zipes, "Lessons of the Holocaust"; and Jeffrey Herf, "The 'Holocaust' Reception in West Germany." 27. Edgar Reitz, quoted in Thomas Elsaesser, "From Memory, Home and Hollywood," Monthly Film Bulletin (February 1985), reprinted in Miriam Hansen, "Dossier on Heimat," New German Critique 36 (Fall 1985): 12. 28. Gertrud Koch, "How Much Naivete Can We Afford? The New Heimat Feeling," Frauen und Film 38 (May 1985) quoted in Hansen, "Dossier on Heimat" 13-16. 29. Helmut Schmidt, quoted in Rabinbach, "The Jewish Question in the German Question," 59. 30. See Helmut Dubiel, Niemand ist frei von der Geschichte (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1999), chapter on 1980s, esp. 190ff. 31. Hans Mommsen, quoted in Miller, One, by One, by One, 38. 32. Hermann Liibbe, "Der Nationalsozialismus im deutschen Nachkriegsbewufitsein," Historische Zeitschrift 236 (1983): 585. Quoted in Rabinbach, "The Jewish Question in the German Question," 46. 33. See Uwe Backes, Eckhard Jesse, and Rainer Zitelmann, "Was Heisst: 'Historisierung' des Nationalsozialism?," in Die Schatten der Vergangenheit: Impuls zur Historisierung des Nationalsozialismus, ed. Uwe Backes, Eckhand Jesse, and Rainer Zitelmann (Frankfurt: Propylaen, 1990), 25-57. 34. Krzysztof Pomian, quoted in Henri Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History

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and Memory in France Since 1944, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 5. 35. Michael Kammen, The Mystic Chords of Memory (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 13. 36. See "Address by Helmut Kohl to German and American Soldiers and Their Families at Bitburg, May 5, 1985," in Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective, ed. and trans. Geoffrey Hartman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 257. 37. Ronald Reagan, quoted in Hartman, Bitburg, xiii. 38. Helmut Kohl, quoted in ibid., xv. 39. Jurgen Habermas, "On the Public Use of History: The Official SelfUnderstanding of the Federal Republic Is Breaking Up," in Forever in the Shadow of Hitler?, trans. James Knowlton and Truett Cates (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993), 163. 40. Speech by Richard von Weizsacker to the Bundestag commemorating the 40th anniversary of the end of the war, May 8, 1985, in Hartman, Bitburg, 263. 41. Ibid., 265. 42. Rabinbach, "The Jewish Question in the German Question," 59. 43. Ibid. 44. Extensive documentation and information about the museum controversy can be found in Christoph Stolzl, ed., Deutsches Historisches Museum: Ideen— Kontroversen—Perspektiven (Frankfurt: Propylaen, 1988). English summaries can also be found in Charles Maier, "A Usable Past? Museums, Memory, and Identity," in his The Unmasterable Past (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 121-159. 45. Maier, The Unmasterable Past, 123. 46. Theodor Heuss, quoted in Das Parlament, January 18, 1956. (My translation.) 47. Helmut Kohl, quoted in Peter Reichel, Politik mit der Erinnerung: Gedachtnisorte im Streit um die nationalsozialistische Vergangenheit (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1995), 248. 48. Sachverstandigenkommission fiir die Konzeption des geplanten Deutschen Historischen Museum in Berlin, in Konzeption fiir ein "Deutsches Historisches Museum" uberreicht am 21. April 1986 (Bonn: Bundesminister fiir Raumordnung, Bauwesen und Stadtebau, 1986), 6. Quoted in Maier, The Unmasterable Past, 128129. Translation by Maier. 49. Helmut Kohl's speech quoted in the German Federal government's official document, Bulletin 113 (October 13, 1987): 973. (My translation.) 50. Reichel, Politik mit der Erinnerung, 246. 51. "Die Republik wird besichtigt," Rheinischer Merkur, June 10,1994. Quoted in Reichel, 250. 52. For articles on the historians' debate, see Ernst Piper, ed., Historikerstreit: Die Dokumentation der Kontroverse um die Einzigartigkeit der nationalsozialistischen Judenvernichtung (Munich: Piper, 1987); James Knowlton and Truett Cates, trans., Forever in the Shadow of Hitler? (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993); special issue on the Historiker streit, New German Critique 44 (Spring/Summer 1988); Jurgen Habermas, The New Conservatism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). See also Maier, The Unmasterable Past. A collection of translated articles

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from the historians' debate appears in Baldwin, ed., Reworking the Past. See also Richard J. Evans, In Hitler's Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape from the Nazi Past (New York: Pantheon, 1989); Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Entsorgung der deutschen Vergangenheit? Ein polemischer Essay zum Historikerstreit (Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 1988); and Christian Meier, Vierzig Jahre nach Auschwitz (Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 1987). 53. Quoted by Ernst Piper, editor of Historikerstreit, in Knowlton and Cates, Forever in the Shadow of Hitler?, 274. 54. Maier, The Unmasterable Past, 6. 55. See Jurgen Kocka, "German Identity and Historical Comparison: After the Historikerstreit" in Baldwin, Reworking the Past; and "Der 'deutsche Sonderweg' in der Diskussion," German Studies Review 5 (1982): 365-379. 56. See David Blackbourn and Geoff Ely, The Peculiarities of German History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). 57. See Meinecke, Friedrich, The German Catastrophe, trans. Sidney B. Fay (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946; 1950). 58. For an illuminating discussion, see Peter Baldwin, ed., "The Historikerstreit in Context," Reworking the Past, 3-37. 59. Wolfgang Mommsen, "The Germans and Their Past: History and Political Consciousness in the Federal Republic of Germany," in Coping with the Past: Germany and Austria After 1945, ed. Kathy Harms, Lutz R. Reuter, and Volker Diirr (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990). 60. Ibid., 253. 61. Rabinbach, "The Jewish Question in the German Question," 46. 62. Ibid., 45-46. 63. Ernst Nolte, "The Past That Will Not Pass," in Knowlton and Cates, Forever in the Shadow of Hitler}, 19. 64. Ibid., 22. 65. See Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism: Action Francaise, Italian Fascism, National Socialism, trans. Leila Vennewitz (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1966). 66. Ernst Nolte, "Between Historical Legend and Revisionism? The Third Reich in the Perspective of 1980," in Knowlton and Cates, Forever in the Shadow of Hitler}, 14. 67. Ibid. 68. Maier, The Unmasterable Past, 32. 69. Andreas Hillgruber, Zweierlei Untergang: Die Zerschlagung des deutschen Reiches und das Ende des europaischen Judentums (Berlin: Wolf Jobst Siedler Verlag, 1986). 70. Micha Brumlik, "New Myth of State," in Baldwin Reworking the Past, 48. 71. Hillgruber, quoted in Charles Maier, The Unmasterable Past, 2 1 . 72. Michael Sturmer, "History in a Land Without History," in Knowlton and Cates, Forever in the Shadow of Hitler}, 17. 73. Ibid. 74. Jurgen Habermas, "A Kind of Settlement of Damages: The Apologetic Tendencies in German History Writing," in Knowlton and Cates, Forever in the Shadow of Hitler?, 34-44. 75. Ibid., 34.

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76. Dolf Sternberger, Verfassungspatriotismus (Frankfurt: Insel, 1982). 77. Habermas, "On the Public Use of History," 165. 78. Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt. 79. Habermas, "On the Public Use of History," 165. 80. Ibid., 167. 81. Andrei Markovits, "Introduction to the Broszat-Friedlander Exchange," New German Critique 44 (Spring/Summer 1988): 81. 82. Martin Broszat, "A Plea for the Historicization of National Socialism," in Baldwin, Reworking the Past, 77. 83. Ibid., 78. 84. Saul Friedlander, "Some Reflections on the Historicization of National Socialism," in Baldwin, Reworking the Past, 88. 85. Ibid., 90-91. 86. Ibid., 95. 87. See Saul Friedlander's, letter to Martin Broszat in their "A Controversy About the Historicization of National Socialism," in Baldwin, Reworking the Past, 131. 88. Ibid., 106. 89. Ibid., 120. 90. Friedlander, "Some Reflections on the Historicization of National Socialism," 98. 91. Dan Diner, "Between Aporia and Apology: On the Limits of Historicizing National Socialism," in Baldwin, Reworking the Past, 135. 92. Ibid., 139. 93. Ibid., 144. 94. Ibid., 140. 95. Mary Nolan, "The Historikerstreit and Social History," New German Critique 44 (Spring/Summer 1988): 51-80. 96. See Detlev Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition and Racism in Everyday Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 1982); and Alf Liidtke, ed., The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). 97. Rabinbach, "The Jewish Question in the German Question," 65.

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CHAPTER FOUR

EAST GERMAN UNIVERSALIZATION OF THE

PAST

Whereas the West German framework of internalization was defined by a specific Vergangenheitsbewdltigung discourse, the East German variant of universalization produced a radically different representation of the past. Yet, it would be unfair to argue that the Federal Republic remembered while the GDR forgot. The issue is, rather, attentiveness to what aspects of the past were emphasized and what others were downplayed—and for what national reasons. The East German universalization of the past has to been seen within the context of a totalitarian system in which, unlike the Federal Republic or Austria, a public democratic culture in which different memories of the past could be contested was lacking. As a dictatorship lacking any real political legitimation, as demonstrated by the dramatic existence of the Berlin Wall, the state was maintained by a combination of force, compliance, and fear. Arguing against a simplistic black-and-white depiction of the GDR as a few criminal leaders against the people and the stereotype of East Germans as obedient Prussian pillars of the regime, Mary Fulbrook attempts to highlight the complexity and ambiguity of the social structures of domination inherent in the GDR. 1 For her, it was not merely the situation of society versus the state, but the intrusion of the state into all aspects of social life. Education, the media, sports, leisure, and the family were all manipulated and controlled by the state. The GDR was not only a "niche society," as popularized by the West German observer Giinter Gaus, nor was the GDR a society in perpetual conflict between dissidents and political elites; rather, the GDR was both a conflictual and a niche society.2 While intellectuals in the Federal Republic could publicly disagree with official memory, as the cases of Bitburg and the museum controversy in-

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dicate, such openness was lacking in the GDR. As in other Communist Soviet-type societies, propaganda, censorship, and atomization of individuals produced a different relationship of individuals both toward each other and toward the state. 3 With the radical breakdown of civil society and the atomization of individuals, structures of paternalism and paranoia developed, as the numerous East German secret police or Stasi files indicate. The intrusion of the state into the private sphere formed a niche society in which the private sphere became a quasi-public sphere. In such a niche society, many East Germans adapted to the pressures of the Communist Party or SED (Socialist Unity Party) by leading a double life of outward conformity and private authenticity. Since it was impossible to speak freely in public, in order to discuss the social consequences of National Socialism in the GDR, the framework of universalization imposed from above by the SED dramatically affected how the Nazi past was remembered in the GDR. The well-known opening to Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, in many ways, captures the tension between official forgetting and attempts by individuals, especially dissident writers, to remember the past in the face of Communist suppression: "[T]he struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." 4 Unlike other writers from Communist countries in Central Europe, who could refer to a more or less clear national narrative, the situation for East German intellectuals was more complex. Without the Vergangenheitsbewdltigung discourse of the Federal Republic, East German writers could only later begin to confront the past; however, this confrontation was still largely within the East German pattern of universalization. East German discussions of the German question and the past were characterized by an antifascist discourse. Unlike the lengthy and acrimonious West German discussions about German identity after Hitler, the legitimation of the GDR was linked to identification with the antifascist state. As in the Federal Republic, the national identity of the GDR was linked to a negative mirror imaging with both West Germany and Nazi Germany. However, whereas the dominant discourse in the Federal Republic was an internalization of the past via a complex confrontation and attempt to come to terms with the past, the dominant discourse of the GDR was a universalization and abstraction of the past. The antifascist discourse was one of many interpretive matrices used to construct East German identity. While other models concentrated on the relationship between the GDR and the Soviet Union, the Federal Republic, and the Warsaw Pact nations, the issue of antifascism focused on the direct link between the present socialist GDR and the Third Reich. Unlike the three models of national identity in the Federal Republic—a guilty pariah identity in the 1950s, a therapeutic model in the 1960s and 1970s, and a normalization one in the 1980s—the GDR had basically two models: an antifascist socialist identity and an antifascist German socialist identity. This shift occurred during the 1980s, at roughly the same time as

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the West German shift to normalization. Just as the Federal Republic was seeking a usable past for the construction of a positive national identity, the GDR reappropriated moments of "German history" to better define the contours of the GDR as a socialist antifascist state. However, while one could speak about public debates concerning official memory in the Federal Republic, the absence of a public sphere in the GDR meant a substantial lack of open debates about memory and representations of the Nazi past. Before tracing the development of East German memory, one has to first understand antifascism as a foundational mythology for the selflegitimation of the GDR. The myth of antifascism as part of the East German universalization of the past is symbolized in the example of the former concentration camp, Buchenwald, as a place of national selfconsecration. After outlining the various phases of East German memory of the Nazi past, I argue for a shift from socialist to German socialist national identity witnessed in the East German historians' discussion and the first official commemoration of Kristallnacht in 1988. Such places demonstrate the highly powerful myth of antifascism in the GDR and, furthermore, distinguish memory in the GDR from memory in the Federal Republic. THE FRAMING OF EAST GERMAN MEMORY Whereas West German memory operated within the tension between an internalization of the past as acceptance and as a buried repression of the past, East German memory functioned not within the framework of internalization, but of universalization. While concepts such as overcoming, mastering, and confronting the past played a significant role in the official memory as well as in scholarly and cultural interpretations of the past in the Federal Republic, official memory in the GDR was a function of the myth of antifascism. For West German memory, the Nazi past was a burden that provided a normative orientation for the internalization of the past into the democratic present of the Federal Republic. The concept of Vergangenheitsbewdltigung as a moral and political internal debate was glaringly absent in the social construction of East German memory of the Nazi past. Antifascism as a Foundational Mythology After World War II, antifascism in the West provided a political current for new political alliances. In the East, antifascism became the ideological justification for the postwar dictatorships of Eastern and Central Europe. Antonia Grunenberg examines the concept of antifascism is as the binary of binaries that has its intellectual roots in nineteenth-century thought. As a theoretical orientation, antifascism is a myth dividing the world into two

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camps: fascist and antifascist.5 For others, such as Herbert Ammon, antifascism is an ideology which began in Italy after the end of the World War I.6 Rather than discuss antifascism as a broad theoretical concept or attempt to trace the history of its origins as a concept, I wish to focus specifically on antifascism in the East German case while paying attention to its usage by the West German New Left. In this sense, I follow Dan Diner's argument that, with respect to Germany, antifascism makes sense after 1945 only because antifascism in the German case was a "foundational mythology" that served to legitimize the state. For Diner, antifascism provides the core of left-wing consciousness. Antifascism effected a fundamental change in the way that the Soviet Union was perceived after its victory over Nazi Germany. The Soviet Union seemed to have defeated not only Germany, but fascism itself. The understanding of antifascism in the GDR was based on the notion of certain material preconditions that were supposed to prevent fascism from returning. Thus, the SED defined the GDR not only as a socialist but also as an antifascist state that had triumphed over Hitler. Indeed, the very existence of the GDR prevented the return of fascism. As Diner persuasively argues, antifascism as a state doctrine placed mass extermination and the Holocaust outside the framework of heroic resistance and monopoly capitalism. The causal link between capitalism and fascism blocked the issue of individual guilt and responsibility as "a collective problem in Germany." 7 For the Federal Republic, however, it was more difficult to avoid the thorny issue of guilt and responsibility. In the GDR, the simplistic Manichaean framework of antifascism meant that the Holocaust was the responsibility only of certain exploitative classes which were linked to monopoly capitalism and, thus, to the West. Recent analyses of East German antifascism have argued for the interpretation of antifascism as a myth and a kind of civic religion.8 Roland Barthes's theoretical conception of myth provides a clear orientation for the way in which antifascism was used as a foundational mythology for the legitimation of the GDR. For him, a myth is a type of speech, a system of communication, and a form. "Myth hides nothing: its function is to distort [sic], not to make disappear." 9 A myth simplifies and reduces complexity. It is not an outright lie, but a distortion and inflection of reality. Historical events do not necessarily disappear, but are distorted into a flat simplicity. The principle of a myth is that it transforms history into nature by simplifying and destroying the complexity of human acts. Such a simplistic transformation extracts the ambiguity and complexity of historical actions and events. In passing from history to nature, myth acts economically: it abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them the simplicity of essences, it does away with all dialectics, with any going back beyond what is immediately visible, it organizes

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a world which is without contradictions because it is without depth, a world wide open and wallowing in the evident, it establishes a blissful clarity: things appear to mean something by themselves.10 Barthes's attentiveness to the simplifying and distortive aspects of myth is helpful in elucidating the East German universalization of the past. Antifascism as a foundational mythology simplified the complexity of the East German link with National Socialism. In its black-and-white conception of the world, socialists were by nature antifascist, and thus bore no responsibility for the Nazi past. Antifascism was a state doctrine of the GDR, and the SED viewed itself in the tradition of antifascist resistance fighters. Article 6, paragraph 1 of the GDR constitution states: "The German Democratic Republic has, true to the interests of the people and international commitments, wiped out [ausgerottet] German militarism and Nazism on its territory." 11 The East German official representation of the Nazi past universalized National Socialism into fascism and did not attempt to confront the social, political, and moral consequences of National Socialism in the GDR. Hans-Joachim Maaz forcefully argues that the Holocaust was not confronted or worked through in the GDR. Although both East and West Germans focused on the future and repressed the Nazi past immediately after the war, the GDR had a specific process enabling East Germans to officially forget the Holocaust. The Utopian ideology of socialism did not allow for an analysis of National Socialism in East Germany. "With the promise of new human happiness—socialism and communism—it was permanently suggested that the socialist person would of course be antifascist and thus had no relationship to the Holocaust." 12 Antifascism, in effect, provided a collective exculpation of East Germans. While Marxism and Leninism formed the ideological foundation for the political system of the GDR, the most important ideological integrative factor of the SED was antifascism. Antifascism formed a kind of social cohesion among East German intellectuals, political elites, and ordinary citizens. As the 1992 Entquete-Kommission (Commission of Inquiry) demonstrated, antifascism served as the legitimation of SED domination. Antifascism functioned partially as a myth and partially as a political concept because the SED claimed it was the successor of antifascist struggles. The political instrumentalization of the myth of antifascism was visible in the exterior images of the enemy (fascists and monopoly capitalists and, by extension, the Federal Republic) and internal images of the enemy (the workers' uprising on June 17, 1953). The central monuments and memorials to antifascists in the GDR represented the heroization of Communist victims of National Socialism.13 The moral and political existence of the GDR was founded on antifascism. Antifascism represented the zero hour (stunde null) for the GDR, whereby all guilt and wrongdoing was projected both into the past and

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onto the West. The GDR became a people of heroes, resistance fighters, and victims, and the theme of a fascist past became a taboo subject in the GDR. 14 In contrast to the Federal Republic, there was very little attempt to confront the fellow traveler status of East Germans. The obligatory visits to former concentration camps were part of the East German confirmation duty (Jugendweihe) and served to distance rather than link the past to the antifascist present. While the political-juridical process of de-Nazification occurred on a larger scale in the GDR, the social-psychological process of coming to terms with the past was significantly lacking. Indeed, the selection of the term "antifascist" denied the specifically racist component of National Socialism. Rather than forming a national identity as an "antiNational Socialist" state, the use of the term "antifascist" defined the enemy as a mixture of capitalism and fascism, and thus did not include the Holocaust in the construction of East German national identity. The myth of antifascism also distorted the ambiguity of the Soviet-German relationship. The "friendship" was remembered and highlighted, and Hitler Fascism was made the common enemy of East German antifascists and Soviets. Meanwhile, the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939, which divided Europe into ideological spheres of influence, was blithely glossed over. Instead of a critical confrontation with this ambiguous past, the myth of antifascism distorted the past into a one-dimensional "us" (East Germans and Soviets) versus "them" (fascists and monopoly capitalists). In presenting the three phases of East German memory, I argue for a shift from a socialist identity to a German socialist identity in the 1980s. 15 While both East and West German historiography immediately after the war interpreted German history as either catastrophe or misery, the GDR lacked the therapeutic model of internalization which characterized the Federal Republic in the late 1960s and 1970s. It is also interesting to note that while the Federal Republic tended toward normalization and the quest for a usable past in the 1980s, this period marked a shift in the GDR for a select appropriation of moments in German history that included aspects of German-Jewish history. Phases of East German Memory and Antifascism Occupation and Catharsis The immediate postwar years (1945-1949) were marked by Soviet occupation, a misery theory of history, and a brief-lived close linkage between the Communist and Jewish questions. In 1945, Walter Ulbricht spoke of the need for shame and guilt for Nazi crimes. Only through a cathartic shame and immediate embracing of socialist values, could Germany once again be a "nation." Not until our people [voik] feel deep shame about the crimes of Hitlerism, not until they feel deep shame about allowing these barbaric crimes to happen, will

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they discover the inner strength to take a new, a democratic, a progressive path which alone will secure the future of the nation.16 During the immediate postwar years, the nation served as the strongest connection between the Communist position and the Nazi past. Although Ulbricht's cathartic framework was short lived, it nonetheless attempted to overcome people's deep distrust of politics and fostered a sense of national rebirth among Communist and recent emigres to the GDR. Like Meinecke's catastrophe theory, the misery theory of history attempted to forge national continuity in the face of the National Socialist rupture. The misery theory of history was captured in Alexander Abusch's book Der Irrweg der Nation (The Wrong Path of a Nation), in which 400 years of German history was narrated as a chain reaction of errors tracing a line from Luther, Frederick the Great, and Bismarck, to Hitler. 17 However, unlike the Western guilty pariah mentality that strove for democratic renewal, the East German misery theory highlighted national rebirth for a new socialist state. The vocabulary of East German national shame and national rebirth dramatically changed with the advent of the Cold War, that giving way to an ideological competition for the better Germany. Rather than address the past, ties with the past were severed for the promise of socialism. Rather than speak of German guilt, the vocabulary shifted to the East Germans as the victors of history (Sieger der Geschichte). The East German position of fascism stemmed from the Communist International of 1935, which set the tone for antifascism in the GDR until 1989. According to the International, fascism is "the open dictatorship of terror of the most reactionary, chauvinistic and imperialistic elements of finance capital." 18 As Olaf Groehler points out, in the immediate postwar years the concept of victims of fascism (Opfer des Faschismus) was used to legitimize and distance the GDR from involvement with the Third Reich. On July 3, 1945, the Central Organ of the Communist Party of Germany published a report about the victims of fascism. Victims of fascism are millions of people and all those who lost their home, apartments, and place of residence. Victims of fascism are the men, who had to become soldiers and were placed into Hiker's battalions. Victims of fascism are the Jews who were persecuted and killed as victims of fascistic racial insanity [Rassenwahns]. They are also the Bible scholars and labor contractors. However, they do not fall under the term "victims of fascism." They have all suffered and incurred difficulties, but they have not fought [gekampft]\19 This distinction led to a hierarchization of victimhood in which passive victims (mainly Jews) were separated from active resistance fighters (predominantly Communists). As Jurgen Danyel maintains, the myth of anti-

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fascism in a sense provided a framework of social integration for citizens of the GDR. The transformation of antifascism from concrete memory, from the individualized (thematizing responsibility and the guilt of individuals) strategy of working through the past to a undifferentiated confessional ideology was a prerequisite or accompanying condition for a relatively tensionless social integration process in the early phase of the GDR.20 The Victors of History The second phase of East German memory, from 1949 through the 1970s, includes a radical delinking of the Jewish-Communist question and a replacement of the catharsis or misery theory of history with the victors of history framework. Such a vision of history emphasized the hierarchical status of victims of antifascism, and distinguished passive victims from active resistance fighters. Frank Stern emphasizes the uniqueness of the immediate postwar years for Communist hard-liners of Jewish origin. In the late 1940s, it was not a contradiction to be a member of the Communist Party and a member of the Jewish community. In the early years of the Soviet occupation, the Communist Party spoke out in favor of the founding of Israel. Until 1953, books by Jewish emigres appeared and numerous directors of Berlin theaters were of Jewish origin. Toward the end of the 1940s, the Cold War ideology changed the Jewish-East German relationship. Victims of fascism (mainly Jews) were distinguished from fighters against fascism (meaning the Communists). This shift signaled a delinking of the Jewish question from antifascism. As Stern points out, "Beginning in 1951 with the shift to anti-Zionist positions of foreign policy, a change of political climate became obvious in the GDR." 21 Because Stalin believed that Jews would seek to establish a separate state within the countries where they lived, Jews became a target for Communist aggression toward the end of his life. In the early 1950s, an anti-Semitic campaign began in Moscow; it led in November 1952 to the trial of Rudolf Slansky and culminated in a kind of anti-Jewish witch-hunt. Many Jewish Communists and representatives of Jewish congregations were imprisoned by the time of Stalin's death in 1953. Most Jewish Communists canceled their membership in Jewish communities, and more than half of the Jewish citizens left the GDR. High-ranking Jewish members of the Communist Party fled to the West following accusations of Zionism. As Stern wryly notes, by 1953 "the short antifascist German-Jewish spring after Hitler was over." 22 Historians such as Andreas Dorpalen and Frank Trommler argue for a shift in the early 1950s from a misery theory of history to an emphasis on

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the progressive heritage of the GDR. 23 From 1945 to 1949, East and West German historiography emphasized the catastrophic nature of National Socialism. The GDR, in particular, stressed the political and ideological misery (Misere) fostered by long-standing authoritarian and antidemocratic traditions in Germany. With the cold war, the misery conception was replaced by the quest for positive socialist traditions in East German history. At a party conference in 1950 and in a series of subsequent resolutions, the SED told the historical community to abandon the "misery concept" of German history and instead stress its progressive and liberating trends. SED documents proclaimed that "One cannot create power, courage and confidence in the history of their own people if one only portrays the wrong paths of a nation or an untimely fatalistic lament about German misery." 24 Rather than focus on German antidemocratic and authoritarian traditions, historians were to emphasize the revolutionary moments that had previously been represented for class purposes. Such moments in history included the Peasant War, the history of German and international labor movements, and the struggle for German unity and feudal small state parochialism. This historiographic shift was not simply a shift from a negative to a positive understanding of history, but a search for revolutionary progressive moments in history to legitimize the GDR. The victors of history thesis implied that the GDR was victorious not only over fascism, but over history itself.25 By tracing the democratic-revolutionary strand in East German history, historians could also demonstrate that the GDR embodied a historical heritage reaching back into the past and beyond the fascism of National Socialism. Historians seeking democratic-revolutionary traditions thus created a kind of self-legitimacy for the GDR. In particular, East German historians attempted to prove that the socialist transformation of the GDR was in accordance with established historical laws. In East German historiography, Hitler's appointment as chancellor on January 30, 1933, was viewed as a culmination of the historical process of monopoly capitalism and the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Fascism was interpreted as a phenomenon of the late phase of capitalism in which the obsolete and declining system attempted to preserve its weakened rule and prevent the inevitable transition to communism. 26 GDR historiography stressed revolutionary change and the oppression of the working class. Major events and figures in history could be understood only in terms of their progressive or revolutionary impact, and thus large chronological gaps in East German history resulted. Critical turning points in German history were subordinated to events in other nations, such as the Paris Commune, the Bolshevik Revolution, and Soviet socialism. One commentator wryly noted, "It was as if Russian history had become German history!" 27 During this second phase of East German memory, the workers' uprising in East Berlin on June 17, 1953, indicating a deep crisis of the state, was violently suppressed. War reparations were terminated in 1954, and the

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GDR achieved official sovereignty in 1955. In 1960, almost 200,000 people fled the GDR for the Federal Republic, and 100,000 more left before the Berlin Wall was built in August 1961. By the time of the Berlin Wall, almost 3 million people had left the GDR for the West.28 The building of the wall marked a dramatic demarcation and consolidation of East German political power. Officially defined in the East as "the antifascist protection wall" (antifaschistischer Schutzwall) to protect citizens of the GDR against future attacks by the capitalist West, the Berlin Wall became the symbol of the violent political and ideological division between East and West. Erich Honecker's appointment as first secretary of the SED in 1971 and Willy Brandt's election as chancellor of the Federal Republic changed the relations between East and West Germany. Under Brandt's policy of little steps, the basic treaty of mutual recognition between the two German states was signed in 1972. The Selective Appropriation

of German History

During the late 1970s and 1980s, there was a shift toward developing a specific GDR identity based on the policy of cultural demarcation (Abgrenzung) and a simultaneous revival of German cultural heritage. Perhaps with the realization that East German history could not begin with 1949, an internal debate developed between East German historians and the SED over the differences between the heritage (Erbe) and the tradition of history. This internal debate about the common German history of the GDR coincided with a growing interest in German-Jewish history. Eric Honecker's 1984 speech commemorating the 35th anniversary of the founding of the GDR and the first official commemoration of Kristallnacht in 1988 indicated a slight openness in the definition of the GDR. It appeared that the myth of antifascism was incapable of solely legitimizing the national identity of the GDR. In a turn to cultural conceptions of nationhood, Frederick the Great and Martin Luther were rehabilitated and scholarly research into the Holocaust and German-Jewish history reached their peak in the GDR. Forty years after the end of World War II, it seemed that the leaders of the GDR recognized what Bertolt Brecht said in 1953: "We have turned our backs much too soon on the immediate past in our eagerness to face the future. The future will depend, however, on our settlement with the past." 29 Although one can trace a change in the official representation of the past in the GDR during the 1980s, I agree with Trommler that one should be cautious in applying the West German discourse of memory to the GDR. While the West German internalization of the past confronted National Socialism as a burden, the East German universalization of the Nazi past framed the question of the past in a way that reduced the genocidal specificity of German fascism. Beyond the official SED discourse, there was an unspoken understanding that the GDR had paid a higher price for the crimes of National Socialism than the Federal Republic had. Moreover, the

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universalization of the past via antifascism also deeply influenced East German intellectuals and dissidents. While certain writers in the 1970s and 1980s, such as Christa Wolf, Heiner Muller, Christoph Hein, and Franz Fiihmann, raised the question of the relationship of the past to the socialist present and, especially in the case of Wolf, examined the process and faculty of memory, their literary work was nonetheless framed within East German antifascism. Even though Wolf's Kindheitsmuster (1976) was a biographical novel about her childhood under National Socialism and communism, she remained a dedicated socialist.30 East German intellectuals differed from East European intellectuals because the majority of them still believed in the viability of socialism as a Utopian project but were critical of the East German variant of it. Many willingly remained within the GDR because they wanted to work within the system in order to reform it. East German intellectuals were given privileged status in both Germanys—their writing mattered, and was read by the public. One cannot say that East German intellectuals were silent about National Socialism and the Holocaust; however, they operated within the framework of antifascism. Moreover, while the GDR lacked a vibrant public sphere and freedom of speech, East German intellectuals carved out a kind of alternative public sphere or space within the dominant sphere and were able to raise questions about the past through literature. As Frank Stern notes, antifascism may have failed as a political alternative to the Federal Republic; however, it did create a political and social alternative to the Nazi past as an intellectual and political bond among assimilated German Jews. 31 This bond also held true for many non-Jewish East German intellectuals, who, hoping for a better alternative Germany, understood antifascism as a path between the Nazi past and the socialist present. This antifascist discourse subsequently became highly relevant in the reaction of East and West German intellectuals to unification.32 Buchenwald as a Place of East German National Mythology Recent scholarship has exposed a mythology of resistance in the GDR and the Federal Republic as a way of breaking with the Nazi past. 33 Acts of resistance were commemorated in both Germanys in an attempt to forge a positive national identity that was unencumbered by National Socialism. Although remembrance of resistance against National Socialism was an important theme in the Federal Republic, ranging from Hans and Sophie Scholl's distribution of leaflets against the Nazis to the Wehrmacht officers' assassination attempt against Hitler on July 20, 1944, the use of commemorative sites of resistance was far more subdued in the Federal Republic than in the East. In the GDR, places of resistance and armed struggle became sites of national self-consecration and legitimation. Former concentration camps such as Buchenwald, Ravensbriick, and Sachsen-

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hausen became instrumental sites for the foundational mythology of the GDR as an antifascist state. Having officially defined the GDR as an antifascist state, the SED took great pains to commemorate it as both a victim and a heroic resister of fascism. In 1945, the second Sunday in September was declared a day of national remembrance for the victims of fascism.34 Resistance fighters and victims of antifascism were by law compensated with special housing, health benefits, education, and pensions. Antifascists were compensated by the SED, but non-antifascists, and especially Jewish victims of National Socialism, were not compensated or given any reparations until the shortlived Modrow government in 1990. Whereas the Federal Republic began reparations in 1952, the GDR did not consider Jewish victims as antifascist resistance fighters who could qualify for compensation from the state. Furthermore, the GDR, unlike the Federal Republic, did not see any link between the GDR and the Third Reich. James Young ironically notes that the emphasis on East German martyrdom and victimhood displaced the German aspects of National Socialism: "In this sense, the national identity of the GDR was rooted in the political memory of the Nazis as an occupying power." 35 The Nazis were viewed not as "Germans," but as abstract fascists—and, by extension, West Germans—who occupied the territory of the GDR. Concentration camps sites distanced the GDR from the Third Reich by equating fascism with monopoly capitalism, the Federal Republic, and the West. Such commemorative sites presented a deeply distorted and exaggerated image of Communist resistance and armed struggle. In the process of mythologizing self-liberation and the antifascist victory over history, the role of the Allies was downplayed and the question of a fellowtraveler status was silenced. The romanticization of East German heroes and resistance fighters is dramatically seen in the East German narration of Buchenwald. The place of Buchenwald actually has three usages: (1) Nazi concentration camp from 1937 to 1945; (2) Soviet internment camp from 1945 to 1950; and (3) memorial to legitimate the antifascist legend of the GDR from 1950 to 1990. However, here I will only discuss the first and third usages, leaving an examination of the Soviet past until chapter 5, where Buchenwald will be placed within the context of unified Germany's double past. 36 Although the SED placed Nazi concentration camps at the heart of East German political and memorial culture, the way in which these camps were framed within the myth of antifascism distorted historical events. Ironically, the centrality of the camp sites in East German memory failed to inspire critical reflection. Instead, it grossly simplified the complexity of National Socialism into an abstract and universal fascism that served as an instrumental tool for the legitimation of the SED and the GDR.

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Buchenwald as a Nazi Concentration Camp In July 1937, SS officers brought inmates from the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen to clear 370 acres of forest above Weimar, the town renowned for classical German culture. By 1943, Buchenwald held 17,000 prisoners, mostly German Communists, Social Democrats, criminals, and clergymen. The Communists and Social Democrats worked together to organize an International Camp Committee that gathered arms for a future revolt and organized acts of sabotage in nearby weapons factories. Jews did not comprise a large population of Buchenwald because by this time they were deported directly to the death camps in the East rather than to work camps in Germany. By late 1943, a load of French prisoners arrived along with 8,000 Soviet POWs, who were killed almost immediately. In 1944, with the abandonment of many death camps in the East, Jewish prisoners flooded into Buchenwald and were subsequently segregated from the rest of the camp into the "Little Camp," and were not protected by the International Camp Committee. 37 In early 1945, as the Allies advanced into Germany, the SS tried to clear Buchenwald of prisoners. Thousands of inmates were marched out of the camp and shot. Others, especially Jews, the sick, and the weak, were loaded into railway boxcars and deported to Dachau. On April 11, 1945, as General Patton's Fourth Armored Division approached Buchenwald, the SS fled. A highly organized camp underground led and controlled by Communist prisoners stormed the watchtowers and gates of the camp. After three hours of fighting, the remaining SS officers fled and the International Camp Committee hung a white flag from the entrance tower. With the arrival of the Americans, prisoners were taken to the hospital, and inhabitants of Weimar were taken by the Allies to view the concentration camp and help bury the dead. Buchenwald as Soviet Internment Camp While it was a Nazi concentration camp from 1937 to 1945, approximately 51,000 people died in Buchenwald. By the time General Patton's division arrived in April 1945, 21,000 people remained in the camp. By August 1945, months after Buchenwald had been emptied of survivors of National Socialism, the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs changed its name to Special Camp 2 (Speziallager 2). In the beginning, active Nazis, as well as low- and mid-level officials in the Nazi Party, the government, and industry, were arrested. Hitler Youth leaders and members of the Waffen-SS, and army officers were also arrested and sent to Special Camp 2. Later, Communists, Social Democrats, Christian Democrats, and Liberals who opposed the Soviets also were interned in the camp. 38 During its years of operation from 1945 to 1950, the Soviets imprisoned approximately

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32,000 Germans in Buchenwald. The population in the Special Camp 2 reached its peak in the spring of 1947, up to 16,000 people. According to official Soviet documents, an estimated 7,000 inmates died in the Soviet camp, mostly of hunger and disease.39 Buchenwald as the Communist Red Olympus After the war, Buchenwald became the East German "Red Olympus," the most revered place of national legends for the GDR. The historical context of the advancing American troops and of liberation was omitted in favor of mythologizing the prisoners' uprising as the self-liberation from fascism. The former concentration camp became a place of memory for the socialist state and was deeply revered as a historical site of legendary uprising and victory over fascism. Confirming Ernst Renan's definition of a nation as a body of individuals who agree to remember certain things but forget others, Buchenwald exemplified the distinctive power of the myth of antifascism in the East German universalization of National Socialism.40 The central narrative remembered at Buchenwald was the self-liberation of the antifascist Communist prisoners, whereas the reality of a world war and foreign soldiers in this "liberation" was heavily distorted. The remembrance of this common narrative was reinforced by the myth of antifascism and served to legitimize the "commonality" of the GDR as a socialist nation. Important Communists were imprisoned and murdered there, among them Ernst Thalmann, the chairman of the prewar German Communist Party. After Buchenwald was inaugurated as a place of national memory by Otto Grotewohl in 1958, hundreds of thousands of East German workers, schoolchildren, and farmers, as well as foreign comrades, visited every year to lay wreaths, listen to speeches, march in torchlight parades, and renew their resolve to continue the fight against fascism. The first memorial to Buchenwald was a wooden obelisk erected ten days after the prisoners' uprising and Allied liberation. By 1948, this wooden obelisk had begun to rot, and a prisoners' association campaigned for an official commemoration at Buchenwald. In 1949 the city of Weimar, the government of Thuringia, and former prisoners made a "Grave of Honor" in memory of the inmates who died there. The Organization of Victims of the National Socialist regime (Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes) started a plan to develop the camp into a museum. The first official funeral ceremony for the victims of Buchenwald was held on April 19, 1951. A delegation of survivors read the famous "Buchenwald Oath," which came to symbolize the antifascist resistance of Communist inmates and legitimated the GDR as an antifascist state distanced from the occupying force of National Socialism. By 1953, the SED dissolved the Organization of Victims of the Nazi Regime and formed the Committee of Antifascist Resistance Fighters to officially replace the remembrance of victims with the hegemonic memory of antifascist resistance.41

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In 1955, the board of curators for the Building of National Memorial Sites at Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and Ravensbriick was founded. And in 1961, a law was passed designating the former concentration camps as "National Places of Warning and Remembrance" (Nationale Mahn und Gedenkstatten).42 In German, a Denkmal is a place of remembrance, and a Mahnmal is a place of warning. The former concentration camp site of Buchenwald was to incorporate aspects both of warning and of remembrance by warning against the possibility of future fascism and remembering the Communist antifascist struggle. The Buchenwald National Warning and Memorial Place highlighted the socialist victory over fascism and history. It did not stress the mournful absence of victimhood, but emphasized triumphant victory and the prisoners' self-liberation. The official memorial guidebooks proclaimed: From the very beginning, the proclaimed aims of the German fascists were the elimination of Marxism, revenge for the lost war and a brutal terror campaign against everyone who stood in their way. Their aims were congruent to those of big-business which supported the Nazi movement generously. With their support the fascists came to power in 1933, and immediately began to crush the organized working class movement which was the main obstacle to their plans.43 Separated into two sections, the former concentration camp site and grandiose commemorative monuments to antifascist resistance, Buchenwald became perhaps the most important place for East German national memory. The large monuments erected by the Communists clearly overwhelm the former concentration camp. The Jews and Soviet POWs are remembered by small plaques randomly distributed over the former barracks sites and crematoria. The Communist resistance fighters are glorified in a separate area outside of the camp containing the Street of Nations, the Bell Tower, and an immense socialist realist sculpture titled The Revolt of the Prisoners. Outside the former camp, the SED designated an enormous area on Ettersberg Hill to commemorate the antifascist struggle. The Field of Honor, located on the southern slope of the hill, is the site of mass graves where commemorative events and assemblies of survivors were held during the GDR period. The Row of Tombs contains 1,286 urns for the ashes of Buchenwald victims, whereas the Stelae Road holds seven stelae and records episodes of suffering and resistance in Buchenwald through reliefs and poems. The Ring Tombs contains the 2,900 bodies that the SS buried in Ettersberg Hill. Perhaps the most monumental area of the entire Communist site is the Street of Nations, where eighteen large brick pillars represent the eighteen Warsaw Pact nations that had suffered in Buchenwald. A large bell tower contains soil from numerous Nazi concentration camps and sites of murder placed under a bronze plaque inside the tower. 44 Standing before

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the tower is the famous sculpture of antifascist resistance, "The Revolt of the Prisoners." Comprised of ten gaunt but defiant men and one boy, 45 the sculpture symbolizes the mythological essence of Buchenwald for the GDR. Arms and fists raised, the figures are not of passivity or victimhood, but of resistance and victory. Mass meetings, military swearings-in, and flagraising were often held in the square in front of the tower during the GDR period. Visitors entered the former concentration camp through the original entrance with the words "To Each His Own" (Jedem das Seine) and immediately viewed the ruins of former barracks. During the GDR days, the museum at the end of the former barracks grounds housed exhibitions on the glorious days of antifascist struggle. The exhibits displayed prisoners' bunks, uniforms, and eating utensils, as well as weapons of resistance such as radio transmitters and handmade grenades. The former hospital preserved disturbing equipment used in Nazi medical experiments, and another exhibit displayed a permanent collection of prisoners' artwork. The cell where Ernst Thalmann was killed was memorialized with an eternal flame and wreaths from trade unions and Communist organizations. A plaque outside the cell praised Thalmann the "great son of the German people and leader of the German working class, murdered by fascism."46 As visitors left the museum, a plaque quoting the prisoners proclaimed: "Remember that the German anti-Fascists were the first victims of the Nazi concentration camp, that they worked together with international anti-Fascists to liberate the camp and in so doing became the founders of a Nazi-free, democratic Germany." 47 What was striking in the East German narration of Buchenwald was the flat distortion and Manichaean interpretation of historical events. Antifascism became an instrumental tool for the legitimation of the GDR. Rather than raise critical questions about the past, questions were silenced in favor of heroic legend-building. The official memory of the GDR enshrined in Buchenwald was resistance and victory. While Jews were victims of antifascism, they were considered passive victims, and thus of lesser importance than those who engaged in the armed struggle for self-liberation. Remembrance of Jews and other non-Communists who were killed because of their ethnicity, religion, or political affiliation detracted from the singular memory of antifascism that the SED wished to cultivate. The authentic memory enshrined in Buchenwald was antifascist resistance, not the Holocaust. The state museum preserved the past by exhibiting objects and documents of Communist persecution and antifascist resistance. The GDR's memorialization of antifascist resistance fighters in Buchenwald demonstrates the second phase of East German memory, in which the misery theory of history was replaced by the victors of history. The purpose of Buchenwald is well captured in the dedication speech by the GDR minister president, Otto Grotewohl, in 1958: "We bow in love and admiration

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before the dead heroes of the Anti-Fascist Resistance Struggle, before the millions of victims of Fascist barbarism. Their idea is alive; it is resurrected out of war, misery, and ruins. Like a seed which has fallen into fertile soil, it has sunk its roots deep into the heart of the people." 48 Grotewohl continued by calling on East Germans to continue in the struggle against "the old Fascist system in West Germany which has been made acceptable again." 49 The state museums and memorial at Buchenwald were intended to exemplify the glory of resistance and the socialist victory over fascism; they were not meant to mourn the dead. The Rote Kapos: Ambivalence or Heroic Resistance? The legend of Buchenwald's uprising is questionable on two levels: first, the glaring omission of the role of the American liberation of the camp on April 11, 1945, and second, the abstraction or elevation of all Communists in the camp to heroic resisters. In the Communist narration of history, the Americans were not included in the story of Buchenwald's liberation. Instead, the armed resistance was highlighted and the hands of the clock above the camp entrance were forever frozen to exactly 3:15—the time when the camp was "self-liberated."50 In the Communist narration, the Hitler fascists were not defeated externally by the Allies and Soviets, but internally by antifascist resistance within the territory of the GDR, along with the assistance of the Soviets. Whereas the West European and American narration of the war emphasized the lack of internal resistance within Nazi Germany, East German historiography highlighted the central role of the East German internal resistance. Given the multiplicity of prisoners at Buchenwald, one is startled to find scant mention of prisoners other than Communist resisters. The East German version of history omitted multiple memories of prisoners in favor of valorizing and mythologizing the singular memory of the antifascist struggle. While the GDR mythologized the self-liberation of the prisoners, it glossed over the intermediary status of many Communists in the camp. Often functioning as liaisons between prisoners and the SS, the rote Kapos (red sergeants) were not purely legendary resisters. From the beginning of the Nazi concentration camp in 1937 until its end in 1945, individual prisoners and groups of prisoners had various statuses within the prison hierarchy. Essential camp services were primarily performed by the prisoners themselves. Due to the hierarchy, a bitter struggle developed between political prisioners and criminals.51 As recent research by Lutz Niethammer has elucidated, the Communist narration of Buchenwald resulted in a cleansed antifascism (gesauberte Antifaschismus), in which certain ambiguous aspects of historical events were cleansed from the official representation of the East German memory of the Nazi past. Niethammer's research reveals the conflicting role of the rote Kapos as fellow workers rather than bold resisters. Furthermore, he argues

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that the Communist prisoners maintained privileged positions that enabled them both to resist and to collaborate in the terror regime of National Socialism. As privileged prisoners, the rote Kapos did not necessarily foster solidarity with the other prisoners; rather, they turned in many nonCommunists to save themselves. Whereas the SED mythologized the community spirit of the Communist prisoners within the camp, Niethammer argues for a deeply stratified and complex system of collaboration and resistance within the prisoner hierarchy. The role of the rote Kapos in 1937-1945 and the use of Buchenwald as a Soviet internment camp from 1945 to 1950 became taboo subjects in the GDR. Niethammer argues: The GDR systematized these compensated memories into a censored collective remembrance and they handed over the concrete approach [Annaherung] of memory for specific reality to social forgetting and a cult of heroism. Due to the omission [Ausblendung] of this subjective experience, the antifascist legends that became the foundational mythologies of the GDR were hollow and broken from the very beginning.52 Buchenwald illustrates both Barthes's conception of myth and Diner's thesis that antifascism placed the Holocaust outside the framework of heroic resistance and antifascism. The official ideology of antifascism was a myth whose function was to distort and abolish complexity. Multiplicity and a critical relation to history were forsaken for the stark simplicity of antifascism. Because of its deceptive clarity, there was no room within antifascist discourse for the Holocaust. Furthermore, the universalization of the past via antifascism abstracted the particularity of National Socialism and distanced the GDR from its Nazi past. Memory of the past became musealized and monumental in the Communist presentation of Buchenwald. Perspectives of the Myth of Antifascism Whereas the West German models of guilt, therapeutic mourning, and normalization entailed a shift from questions of repression and memory to questions of historicization and the uniqueness of the Holocaust in German national identity, the East German universalization of the past resulted in a dramatically different interpretation of the past. The East German phases of memory from misery, the victors of history, and the selective appropriation of German history marked a shift from an understanding of the GDR as a socialist state to one of the GDR as a German socialist state. While one might argue that during the immediate postwar years individuals in both the GDR and the Federal Republic remembered the Nazi past through an interpretation of catastrophe and misery, only West German official memory internalized Nazism as a burden. Such a moral and self-reflective

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phase of mourning was distinctly absent in the GDR and had no place within the myth of antifascism. Furthermore, while one might argue that the 1980s was a period of normalization in both the GDR and the Federal Republic, the question of the GDR's normalization did not include the question of how to integrate the burden of National Socialism and the Holocaust into East German national identity. Whereas the 1980s entailed explosive public debates about the role of the Nazi past in the present democratic culture of the Federal Republic, in the GDR the 1980s heralded an unprecedented interest in German history and culture. The East German historians' discussion of the heritage and tradition of German history, along with the first official commemoration of Kristallnacht in 1988, signaled a redefinition of the identity of the GDR. However, while the West German places of memory in the 1980s focused on the question of how to internalize National Socialism into its democratic culture, the East German selective appropriation of moments in the past was continually framed within the universalization of the past via a complex myth of antifascism. Thus, this new openness to the past was not a critical openness, but a monumental understanding of history governed by the analytic framework of antifascism. PLACES OF EAST GERMAN MEMORY IN THE 1980s Whereas the Nazi past served as a screen for the projection of conflicts and crises within the Federal Republic, it served as a kind of patriotic legitimation of the GDR as the true place of resistance against the occupying forces of Hitler fascism. National Socialism served as both the legitimation of past resistance against Hitler fascism and the necessity for future resistance against Western fascism and monopoly capitalism. During the 1980s, the desire for a positive German national identity delinked from the Nazi past conflicted with the growing popular interest in the Holocaust and National Socialism in the Federal Republic. The 1980s entailed a redefinition of the GDR as more than a socialist state: as a socialist state with a specifically German culture and history. Whereas the Federal Republic's quest for a positive national identity continually ran into the thorny question of how to integrate National Socialism into German history, the GDR's search for national identity conveniently bracketed out aspects of the Nazi past that the Federal Republic was forced to confront. The omission of the Nazi past as a "place of memory" from the East German historians' discussion revealed its deep universalization. Rather than include National Socialism in a discussion of the differences between heritage and tradition, East German historians focused on German history before 1933. At the same time, however, the first official commemoration of Kristallnacht in 1988, two years after the West German historians' debate and four years after Honecker's speech on the guilt of Germans for World War

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II, signaled a slight crack in the universalizing aspect of the myth of antifascism. The East German historians' discussion and official commemoration of Kristallnacht marked a new universalization of the past that included an openness to select aspects of German history and a redefinition of the GDR as a German socialist nation. The East German Historians' Discussion Unlike the West German historians' debate in the 1980s, the East German historians' discussion was not a public debate among historians and intellectuals in large-circulation newspapers, but an academic debate among historians and the SED. Whereas West German historians debated the uniqueness of the Holocaust and the specific role of the Nazi past in German identity, the East German discussion concerned "German" history in general and did not debate the question of how to integrate the Nazi past into East German national identity. The East German debate focused on the difference between the legacy (Erbe) of German history and the tradition of German history. The discussion posed interesting questions in relation to the East German memory of the Nazi past. Was the East German interest in German history and German socialist identity the sign of a normalization tendency in the GDR? What was the significance of the East German discussion of the legacy and tradition of the past for East German memory? The East German historical reexamination of the German past in the 1980s marked a shift from a predominantly socialist identity to a particularly German socialist identity. This shift entailed a change in the SED's conception of the GDR from a socialist nation founded on the antifascist proletarian class to the inclusion of a modified cultural conception of the nation (Kulturnation). Whereas the conception of a socialist nation is based on the kinship of belonging to a certain class, the culture nation is based on a common language, history, and culture. 53 Whereas the class nation universalizes history, the cultural nation directly addresses the cultural links between past and present manifestations of the German nation. With the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the division between East and West Germany was no longer ideological but geographical. The wall solidified the fact that the issue of German unification had been pushed to the background, and accelerated the negative mirror imaging of the two Germanies. The SED sharply differentiated the history and future of the GDR from that of the Federal Republic. A party statement from the 1960s declared, "Before we unite, we have to differentiate ourselves." 54 Until the 1980s, the dominant East German interpretation of the German question focused on the GDR as a socialist antifascist state. The GDR distanced itself from German history and instead sought revolutionary, progressive

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moments of German and world history to legitimate itself as a socialist antifascist state. East Germany after Brandt's Ostpolitik developed a class theory of nation, arguing that though two German nations existed, the East German nation was historically more progressive. According to Mary Fulbrook, during the 1970s and 1980s, national identity in the GDR followed a twofold development: a specific GDR national identity stemming from the policy of demarcation after Ostpolitik and the almost simultaneous revival of interest in select aspects of the German past. 55 Since the beginning of the 1970s, and with the signing of the basic treaty in 1972, the question of the German nation as unified, divided, or double gained significance. During the 1970s, the SED maintained that two states did not coexist in Germany; rather, two German nations had developed.56 While this shift seems trivial, it involved a rethinking of nationhood that combined the socialist state of antifascist citizens with the cultural conception of a shared language, culture, and history. Such a conception of German nationhood differed sharply from the West German understanding of the German nation as culturally and historically unified, but currently and temporarily divided into two states. However, in order for the SED to legitimate the GDR as a nation, the cultural heritage and tradition of Germany before 1945 had to be recognized and incorporated into East German historiography. Thus, the victors of history approach, emphasizing the antifascist struggle and revolutionary-progressive moments of German and world history, was singularly insufficient to legitimize the national identity of the GDR. In Chancellor Willy Brandt's first address on the State of the Nation, he argued for the cultural unity of the German nation: In the conception of the nation, historical realities and political will are unified. Nation includes and means more than a common language and culture, more than a state and societal order. The nation grounds itself on a people's long-standing feelings of belongingness. No one can dispute that there is, and will be, a German nation in this sense, so long as we are able to think ahead [vorauszudenken].57 Sigrid Meuschel argues that the SED reacted in two ways to Brandt's plea for an intensification of East and West German relations: a political defense and a theoretical offense. The political defense entailed a containment and consolidation of the GDR as a sovereign state. The theoretical offense, on the other hand, resulted in a two-nation theory and paved the way for the selective cultural appropriation of German history in the 1980s. Shifting from the goal of a unified socialist Germany in the immediate postwar years to a competition between the two Germanys in the 1970s, Walter Ulbricht's reaction to Brandt's State of the Nation address was a two-nation theory in which he described the GDR as a socialist German nation-state and denied a comprehensive German commonality of economy,

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politics, language, and culture. 58 The GDR embodied the higher development into a socialist nation, and the Federal Republic was legitimated as a bourgeois-capitalist nation. Thus, the difference was not between two states in one nation, but between two separate nations. In many ways, the quest for a conception of German nationhood that would include the historicalmaterial conditions of the socialist identities of class and the antifascist struggle with German cultural identity provided the historical context for the methodological discussion about heritage and tradition in the 1980s. The 1974 revision of the 1968 constitution eliminated references to the united German nation, signifying a new conception of the GDR as a socialist German nation rather than as a part of a whole German nation. 59 Such a new conception of the GDR as a socialist German nation was confirmed in 1979 with the official Communist Party appeal for the preparation of the 30th anniversary of the foundation of the GDR. The GDR became a "genuine national community rooted in socialist German national consciousness [sic]."60 "German" and "socialist" were no longer completely contradictory terms, but complementary. The task was to write a German national history of the people of the GDR that was influenced by socialism and that would bring "the experiences and achievements of all classes and levels of the German people into its own long history." 61 Meuschel points out that "The differentiation between tradition and heritage allowed the historical sciences to examine their object in its totality." 62 Such a differentiation enabled historians to discuss the content and periodization of national history in the GDR. Marxist history writing was characterized primarily by a history of the modes of production, the progressive role of the exploited proletariat, and the importance of revolutions in the transition from one historical stage to the next. During the mid-1970s and early 1980s, East German historiography broadened to include figures of German history it had otherwise downplayed or ignored, such as Frederick the Great (Frederick II), and Martin Luther, and the legacy of Prussia. Yet, in spite of the interest in a shared German history, the National Socialist past was not examined; rather it remained universalized and pushed both into the past and onto the Federal Republic. The East German renewed interest in history during the 1980s, similar to that of the Federal Republic, was largely due to the passage of time and acceptance of Germany's permanent divided status. Yet, unlike history movements in the Federal Republic, which continually ran up against the problem of National Socialism in areas as diverse as the history of everyday life and oral history, New German cinema, and popular history exhibitions, the interest in German history in the GDR avoided the conundrum of this negative moment in the German past. The universalization of the past and the myth of antifascism, combined with the lack of a democratic public sphere, effectively blocked comprehensive East German debates about the Nazi past. While one might assume that the historians'

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discussion about heritage and tradition would engender a fresh approach to the shared cultural link between National Socialism and the GDR, the tenacity of antifascism as a legitimating ideology hindered a critical examination of the East German relation to the Nazi past. In the GDR, the memory of National Socialism was framed within the narrative of antifascism as a foundational mythology whereby National Socialism and the Federal Republic served as negative identification points for the legitimation of the GDR. As mentioned earlier, East German historiography entailed three major stages. The first was characterized by a confrontation with the reactionary heritage of German history through a misery theory of history and the errors of the German nation. The second was marked by the institutionalization of a Marxist-Leninist interpretation of history in the 1950s that emphasized the revolutionary epochs of German history and neglected historical periods that concerned the exploitative bourgeois class. Such a Marxist-Leninist interpretation of history coincided with the victors of history approach and the universalization of the past via a complex myth of antifascism. The third stage was typified by a new focus on the complexity of German history during the mid-1970s and 1980s. The shift from the self-identification of the GDR as a socialist state to a socialist German nation occurred at the same time as the historians' discussion on how to interpret German history in the GDR. 63 During the early years of the GDR, Frederick the Great symbolized the reactionary militarism and despotism of the German exploitative classes. The misery theory of history and the conception of the errors of a nation interpreted Frederick the Great as the beginning of an authoritarian lineage leading to Bismarck and culminating in Hitler. The new understanding of heritage and tradition during the 1980s, however, allowed for the rehabilitation of Frederick the Great and select aspects of Prussian history in the GDR. In 1981, the monument of Frederick the Great riding on his horse was reinstalled in its original place on Unter den Linden in East Berlin. This reinstallation of a place of national memory symbolized a rediscovery of German history in the GDR. Such a rediscovery did not mean a critical approach, however, but a selective interpretation and representation of German history. Before the East German heritage and tradition discussion, German history was viewed as a kind of prehistory to the GDR and the history of the GDR was explained as the highest point of German history.64 Whereas Martin Luther was previously viewed as part of the reactionary bourgeois class, the celebration of the 500th anniversary of his birth in 1983 interpreted the Wittenberg reformer as an integral part of the GDR's cultural heritage. The rediscovery of the entirety of German history as the foundation of a specific GDR historical consciousness was sanctioned by Erich Honecker's assumption of the chair of the Martin Luther Committee in 1980. The first "public" discussion about the terms "heritage" and "tra-

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dition" occurred at the conference of the Council for the Historical Sciences and the Central Institute of the Academy of Science in November 1980. This conference was followed in April 1982 by one based on the theme "Historical Heritage and Tradition: Problems and Consequences." 65 This conference focused on the definition of cultural heritage and various ways to explain socialism in relation to artistic works of the past. In 1981, Walter Schmidt wrote the theoretical foundation for a newly adapted Marxist-Leninist history in the East Berlin newspaper Sonntag. He outlined four aspects for a new understanding of history: a chronological, territorial, social-structural, and history told from the perspective of all classes. He argued that the history of the GDR could not simply begin with the foundation of the GDR as a state; it must begin with the emergence of the German people as an ethnic group. The history of the GDR could not be limited to the territory of the GDR, but should include the history of the German Empire. Finally, the history of the GDR could not be told only from the perspective of the proletarian class, but should also include the exploitative capitalist classes. For Schmidt, Socialist-historical thinking concerns itself finally not only with political, social and economic history but also with the examination of the everyday, ways of life, culture, spiritual life and mentalities. Socialist historical thinking wants to form a complex image of history . . . which means all of German history, the historical heritage in its entirety, to accept its good points and faults, to measure them in a critical engagement and progressive criteria.66 In another article published in 1981, Horst Bartel defined the difference between heritage and tradition: "Under heritage, we understand our relationship to all of German history in its connections [Einbindung] to the world historical process." 67 Bartel went on to argue that, with respect to a Marxist-Leninist historical understanding, all of German history entailed the complexity and multiplicity of class conflict, as well as the achievements and failures of all classes. Historical heritage would, then, seem to include a kind of acceptance of the negative aspects of history. For him, such negative aspects could not be made to not have happened; they could only be critically confronted. Coming from the GDR, such openness to the past seems deeply surprising; however, one should remain cautious about applying a West German framework and model of remembering the past to the East German understanding of a critical approach to history. The East German model was ideological and highly selective. In discussions and conferences, the debate among historians and artists continually raised the question of the relationship of the socialist state to the heritage of German history. The German word Erbe denotes both the positive heritage and the negative legacy of the past. In the context of the GDR, Erbe referred to the shared German heritage—or the entirety of history. Erbe as a negative,

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burdened legacy was not addressed by East German historians. Tradition, on the other hand, meant a particular aspect of heritage that was defined as the revolutionary-progressive moments of German history. While Erbe included all of German history as a heritage rather than a burdened legacy, tradition was limited to the positive aspects which directly influenced the formation and legitimation of the GDR as a socialist German nation. This openness to selective appropriations of shared German history coincided with a slight attempt to link the Jewish Question with the German Question in the GDR. The emphasis, however, is on the slight change, because although one might argue for an openness to shared German history in the GDR, this openness was nonetheless strongly governed by a universalization of the past highlighting and legitimizing the antifascist tradition of the GDR. Commemorating Kristallnacht Even before the opening of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, the date of November 9 had a complicated history in Germany. This date commemorates the November revolution of 1918, Hitler's failed putsch in 1923, and Kristallnacht in 1938. The first official commemoration of Kristallnacht in the GDR has to be seen within the context of both the structural formality of commemorative occasions and the political context of the Federal Republic and the GDR during the 1980s. Because both the Federal Republic and the GDR were searching for a positive link with their historical traditions and shared culture, commemorations for the Jewish victims of National Socialism were occasions fraught with political difficulty. The SED had not previously commemorated November 9 as Kristallnacht, but instead commemorated the November 1918 revolution as an official state occasion. The universalization of East German memory is clearly illustrated in a comparison between the commemoration of Kristallnacht in the Federal Republic and the GDR. During the 1960s and 1970s neither the Federal Republic nor the GDR highlighted Kristallnacht as an official state commemoration. However, newspapers on both sides commemorated the 1918 Revolution and Kristallnacht. The 50th anniversary commemoration in 1988 was the first official commemoration of Kristallnacht in both the Federal Republic and the GDR. However, while the West German 50th anniversary commemoration was viewed as a failure, underlining the normalizing tendency of the Federal Republic, the GDR's commemoration was recognized as a mild success signaling an unprecedented openness to the Nazi past. President Phillip Jenninger's commemorative speech to the Bundestag was widely received as a failure because it did not follow the structural formality of a moral gesture, but instead attempted to historicize or explain the past. Rather than mourn the victims, Jenninger attempted to explain history from the

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point of view of the heirs of the perpetrators. The GDR's mild success can be attributed to the fact that the ceremony operated on the symbolic level of mourning and sorrow. Although the presence of Israeli statesmen solidified the solemnity of the occasion, the commemoration was still framed within the East German universalization of the past that served to distance the Nazi past from the GDR present. West German Commemorations

of Kristallnacht

The first small commemorative services held in memory of Kristallnacht were in 1958 when Willy Brandt, as mayor of West Berlin, called on Germans not to forget. In a ceremony at the Jewish cemetery in Bielefeld, representatives of Protestant and Catholic churches declared that November 9 remained "a burden, a cross, and a fault of the German people." 68 Young members of a trade union held a ceremony in the former concentration camps of Dachau and Flossenbiirg. Fourteen hundred members of the Jewish community in Hamburg commemorated Kristallnacht in 1958 by laying the foundation stone for a new synagogue to replace the eight synagogues and three houses of prayer destroyed in 1938. President Theodor Heuss, in a speech to the Jewish Central Council, declared: The memory of the 9th of November awakens terrible actions that we all had to experience as brutality, lies, and deep lack of respect were manifested in the destructive anger against the Jewish places of worship. To remember this day is of exceptional duty in this time because the number of those grows who would like to flee into the convenience of wanting to forget or have already fled. The infamy of this time has created a burning memorial. The flames would like to sink slowly into themselves, but their dark embers react during these decades as a burning shame.69 During the late 1950s, numerous large-circulation newspapers wrote not only about Kristallnacht, but also about the abdication of the kaiser and the 1918 revolution on November 9. In the 1960s, the student rebellions and New Left's interest in antifascism emphasized the memory of 1918 over Kristallnacht. Rather than focus on Kristallnacht as the central event of West German collective memory, newspapers focused first on the 1918 revolution and then on Kristallnacht. During the late 1970s, the unprecedented West German reception of the American TV drama Holocaust placed the Holocaust in a more prominent public position. Furthermore, the fortieth anniversary of the end of war in 1985, symbolized by the Bitburg debacle and Richard von Weizsacker's May 8 speech, demonstrated the conflicted terrain of West German memory of the Holocaust and Kristallnacht in particular. Preparations for the commemoration were already fraught with controversy because Jenniger denied the head of the Jewish Central Council in

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Germany an invitation to deliver a commemorative speech. After long debate, the program included the singing of the Kracow Ghetto song by the cantor of the Bonn Jewish community and the Bach Chorus, the reading of Paul Celan's "Death Fugue" (Todesfugue), and a speech by Jenninger, and ended with Yiddish music. Jenninger wanted to be the only speaker because he thought that only the heirs of the aggressors should speak and remember this day, not the victims.70 When he began reading his speech, it was clear that he was not following the formal requirements of such commemorative occasions: moral gestures emphasizing mourning and sorrow. Instead, Jenninger wanted to give a history lesson from the perspective of the heirs of the perpetrators. We Germans must be clear about our understanding of our history and the lessons we can draw for the way we constitute our politics in the present and in the future. . . . Even seen from the distance of time and with the knowledge of what followed, the years between 1933 and 1938 are mesmerizing, insofar as the march of Hitler's political triumph in those first years are [sic] virtually without historical parallel.71 Jenninger's speech was more of a didactic history lesson than a gesture of sorrow or contrition. Following Ida Ehre's emotional reading of Celan's "Death Fugue" with the famous line, "Death is a Master from Germany," Jenninger's dry manner only solidified stereotypes of the German as the distant and rational bureaucrat. Jenninger's speech, unlike Weizsacker's in 1985, did not appear betroffen (stricken), but rather as an attempt to explain history. Yet, the narrative structure of commemorative occasions about the Holocaust in the Federal Republic was one of mourning rather than of historical explanation. The problem was not so much the content of Jenninger's speech per se, but the fact that his speech was given on the wrong occasion.72 He broke the ritualized mold of West German commemorations by trying to explain historical actions as normal and comprehensible. The political climate in the Federal Republic after Bitburg and the historians' debate meant that Jenninger's speech was quickly interpreted as an endorsement of the views of the perpetrators. On the contrary, Jenninger was trying to explain how and why Kristallnacht might have happened in Germany. As for the Jews, well, hadn't they been too big for their boots? So it was phrased at the time. Shouldn't they learn at last to be more humble? Hadn't they deserved to taken down a peg? Above all, didn't the propaganda—apart from wild exaggerations which couldn't be taken seriously—basically accord with one's own assumptions and convictions? . . . What we must all resist is the questioning of historical truth, the setting off of one category of victims against another, the denial of facts. Anyone who wishes to reduce our guilt, who says that it wasn't that bad— or not really as bad as all that—is trying to defend the indefensible.73

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Soon after the beginning of Jenninger's speech, delegates from the Green Party walked out of the Bundestag in protest. By the end of the speech, 40 percent of the Social Democrats had also left. Jenninger ended his speech by relentlessly quoting detailed eyewitness accounts of a mass execution of Jews in 1942. Members of the Bundestag declared the speech an utter catastrophe. Two days later, Jenninger resigned, apologizing for the misunderstanding that his speech had engendered. Although Jenninger was speaking as a politician and not as a religious representative, the occasion called for a memorial and not a history lesson. Given the political context of the Federal Republic during the late 1980s in which questions of the uniqueness and historicization of National Socialism were hotly contested, Jenninger's speech symbolized closure rather than mournful memory. As the journalist Ian Buruma noted, "Jenninger was shot down by both sides, for talking about too much guilt and not appearing guilty enough." 74 Remembering November 9 in the GDR The analytic framework for remembering the Holocaust in the GDR was distinctively different from that in the Federal Republic. Due to the universalization of the past via a complex myth of antifascism, the Jewish victims of National Socialism were viewed as passive victims, not as heroic active resisters against fascism. Jews, in other words, were not considered to be antifascists who legitimized the GDR. The selective appropriation of German history in the 1980s and the methodological discussion between historians about the heritage and tradition of German history marked a shift in the self-conception of the GDR. In searching for links to the past to legitimize the GDR as a socialist German nation, the issue of a GermanJewish heritage was cautiously and selectively raised. The discussions about the heritage and tradition of German history broadened the field of East German historiography from revolutionary moments to all of German history. In a sense, German-Jewish history began to be studied as not simply one aspect of Hitler Fascism, but as part of German history. In contrast to the Federal Republic, which placed the Jewish Question in the foreground of West German politics following Konrad Adenauer's 1953 agreement to pay war reparations to Jewish victims of the Holocaust, the Jewish Question remained firmly in the background of East German politics. While the Jewish Question was linked (however problematically and tenuously) to the German Question in the Federal Republic until the 1980s, when Bitburg symbolized the primacy of the German Question over the Jewish Question, the Jewish Question was severed from the German Question in the GDR. 75 Instead, the Jewish Question was largely ignored and formulated into an abstract antifascist question emphasizing the heroism of antifascist resistance. The Jewish Question and the Holocaust seemed to become serious themes only in the last years of the GDR. As Diner rightly argues, the Jewish Question and the Holocaust in particular

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were necessarily outside of the myth of antifascism. Because myths hide and distort reality into a deceptive simplicity, the Holocaust did not fit into the myth of antifascism. Whereas the myth of antifascism required a clear demarcation between "us" and "them," the Holocaust presented a deep challenge to the heroic tales of East German antifascism. Furthermore, the Holocaust signaled a direct link between the Third Reich and the GDR that the myth of antifascism negated. The commemoration of state anniversaries played a specific role in both the internal and external politics of the GDR. Until the 1980s, the date of November 9 traditionally commemorated the November Revolution of 1918, not Kristallnacht. November 9, 1918, was viewed by East German historians as the "first revolution of the German working class against imperialism and militarism and the most extensive movement since the Peasants' War, of the popular masses in Germany." 76 Although the 1918 Revolution failed and the bourgeois Social Democrats replaced the monarchy, East German historians interpreted the Revolution as an acceleration of historical processes and a significant revolutionary moment in the transition from capitalism to socialism. The workers and soldiers, led by the Spartacus group and revolutionary wings of the Communist Party, forced the removal of the emperor and Prince Max. However, East German historians blamed Friedrich Ebert's new Social Democratic government as a betrayal of the interests of the working class. In other words, although history called for an anti-imperialist government, a bourgeois-democratic republic was proclaimed in its place. Kristallnacht was a particularly difficult commemorative occasion because, according to official SED ideology, Jews were passive victims rather than active resistance fighters against fascism. Each commemorative occasion in the GDR had to remember the heroic martyrs of antifascism, and because Jews were not persecuted for Communist political beliefs that were considered to be "antifascist," but for racial and religious origin, they were considered to be of lesser value in the East German hierarchy of victimhood. Only those who had actively fought against Hitler were considered the proper victims necessary to distance the GDR from the Third Reich. Jewish victims were problematic because they highlighted the ambiguous link between the GDR and the Third Reich. In June 1945, a document on the victims of fascism declared: "Only those who had actively participated in the fight against the Hitler regime, only those who had remained true to their antifascist beliefs while in the penitentiary, in prison, in concentration camps can be known as a 'Victim of Fascism' [Opfer des Faschismus]."77 Such a declaration, which effectively ignored those persecuted for racial or religious reasons, was revised in October 1945 after debate over the status of victimhood. At a conference on the victims of fascism, Heinz Brandt maintained that "the Jews, the real victims of the Nuremberg laws, are self

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understood as victims of fascism. The victims of fascism have to be officially and socially cared for." 78 The first commemoration for the victims of Kristallnacht was sponsored by the Main Committee of the Victims of Fascism and Berlin Radio on November 12, 1945. In the following years until 1949, commemorative occasions (separate from ones organized by Jewish communities) were organized by the Main Committee for the Victims of Fascism and the Organization of Those Persecuted by the Nazi Regime. In 1948, Walter Bartel linked Kristallnacht to the 1918 Revolution. For him, historical reasons for Kristallnacht were found in the fact that the 1918 Revolution failed to break the power of monopoly capitalists such as Thyssen and Krupp. 79 During the 1950s, the main East German newspaper, Neues Deutschland, consistently failed to highlight Kristallnacht as the central occasion of East German national memory on November 9. Instead, numerous stories honoring the attempts of the 1918 Revolution were printed. Stalin's anti-Semitic purges in the Soviet Union forced many Jews in the GDR to emigrate to the West. The Eichmann trial in 1960-1961 brought renewed international attention to the Holocaust. In 1963, the first official state meetings were held on the occasion of Kristallnacht; during them the president, vice president, and leaders of the eight Jewish communities in the GDR proclaimed that fascism, anti-Semitism, and racism had all been successfully eradicated from the GDR. In 1968, Neues Deutschland printed fourteen pages about the November Revolution in 1918 and only two articles about Kristallnacht. Until 1988, the press continued to highlight the November Revolution of 1918 with scant mention of Kristallnacht. Honecker's 1984 speech commemorating the 35th anniversary of the founding of the GDR marked a radical change in the narration of East German history. Rather than begin by invoking the accomplishments of communism, he began with an acknowledgment of German historic guilt: In its long and diverse course, in the conflict between progress and reaction, German history has witnessed many events with long-range effects. . . . More often, they are those which not only overshadowed the German fate but also inflicted on other nations deep misery, inexpressible pain, and the devastations of war.80 Given the fact that Honecker was no Willy Brandt or Richard von Weizsacker, one asks why, and why in 1984 rather than earlier, Honecker chose to speak about German guilt for the past. Even more radically, Honecker addressed his countrymen as "Germans," not merely as citizens of the GDR. In his speech, Honecker called upon them to acknowledge their responsibility for the injustices of the past. 81 Honecker's speech seemed to reverse the victors of history framework of East German memory. By addressing Germans rather than socialist antifascists, Honecker challenged the identification of East Germans with the socialist victors and, instead, inti-

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mated identification with German aggressors. Given the fact that the victors of history framework reversed the misery theory of history, Honecker's sudden admission of German guilt seemed to mark a shift in East German memory. Such a shift suggested a change from a pure socialist identity to a German socialist identity. However, one should not overestimate this shift because the GDR remained a dictatorship until 1989. The interest in German-Jewish history and appropriation of select German historical figures, such as the revival of Martin Luther, Frederick the Great, and the 750th anniversary celebrations of Berlin ironically coincided with the collapse of the SED. The commemoration of Kristallnacht reflected the shift in the selfdefinition of the GDR from a pure socialist state to a German socialist nation. This shift was visible in the historians' discussion of the heritage and tradition of German history and reflected a normalization tendency in the GDR. With the safety of the passage of time, searching for positive links to the past allowed for a slight openness in the official policy of the SED. Yet, the interest in German-Jewish history operated within the analytic framework of universalization and always reflected the antifascist legitimation of the GDR. The East German official memory of the Holocaust was complicated by the SED's firm support for the Palestinians and sharp criticism of the Israeli government. Official East German policy was to tolerate Jews while opposing political Zionism. Furthermore, it was not a simple coincidence that the East German commemoration of Kristallnacht occurred after Bitburg and the West German historians' debate. Influenced by the international outcry and concerted Jewish protest against Ronald Reagan's state visit to Bitburg in 1985, the SED was determined to use November 9 as an occasion to clearly differentiate the GDR from the Federal Republic. As Angelika Timm persuasively argues, the SED used the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht as an occasion both to raise its foreign policy credibility and to underline the GDR's basic antifascist position. 82 In 1987, the state secretary for questions of the church sent the Central Committee of the SED a "Conception for the Carrying Out of a Commemoration on the Occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Pogrom Night of November 9, 1938." One month before the commemoration, East German media presented detailed programs and articles about Kristallnacht. For the first time, the state media concentrated on the primacy of Kristallnacht in East German collective memory rather than on the November Revolution. Numerous articles covered Jewish traditions and history, suggesting an unprecedented link between Jewish and German history. Such an interest in the German-Jewish Question indicated a selective openness to the German heritage or legacy of the Nazi past. The SED extended its first official invitation to representatives from the State of Israel to attend the East German commemoration of Kristallnacht. In many ways, the East German 50th anniversary commemoration was

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successful due to the sudden openness of the SED to the Nazi past and to its careful orchestration of the official commemoration. Unlike Jenninger's official speech, which was a didactic history lesson told from the perspective of the heirs of the perpetrators, the SED presented a moral gesture of sorrow and remembrance. Having learned from the international outcry over Bitburg, the SED was anxious to win international favor by using the occasion of Kristallnacht to gain political credibility and international acceptance. Whereas the West German commemoration of Kristallnacht was essentially conducted through the lens of Vergangenheitsbewdltigung, emphasizing the burdened link between the Nazi past and the democratic culture of the Federal Republic, the East German commemoration maintained its sharp contrast and delinking of the Nazi past from the Communist antifascist present of the GDR. The commemoration of Kristallnacht in the GDR was made more abstract and reverential by emphasizing the memory of the victims, instead of attempting to explain how and why the Holocaust happened in Germany. CONCLUDING REMARKS ON THE EAST GERMAN UNIVERSALIZATION OF THE PAST The commemorations in East and West Germany occurred during a period of normalization and of a quest for a positive national identity. However, whereas the West German phases of memory included a period of therapeutic mourning, the East German phases of memory leaped from the misery theory to the victors of history theory to a selective appropriation of German history. Kristallnacht was part of that selection; however, such attentiveness to history, appearing after Honecker's 1984 speech commemorating the end of the war, was not part of a process of official or cultural Vergangenheitsbewdltigung. Rather, the East German commemoration in 1988 still occurred within the dominant myth of antifascism. The historians' discussion about heritage and tradition, the rehabilitation of selected moments of German history, and the 1988 commemoration of Kristallnacht did not mean the complete exhaustion of this myth. Instead, the shift from a socialist to a German socialist identity indicated a slight crack in the myth of antifascism as the dominant mechanism of social cohesion in the GDR. The commemoration of Kristallnacht and the historians' discussion were signs of a shift in the national identity or "imagined community" of the GDR. Whereas the identity of the GDR in the early postwar years was a socialist state which was the historical and necessary consequence of revolutionary historical processes, the late 1970s and early 1980s marked an openness toward the particular German heritage of the GDR. The GDR was no longer simply a socialist state, but a German socialist nation. Although former concentration camp sites served as places of national mem-

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ory, they did not foster a critical relation to the past, but maintained a monumental, musealized legitimation of the GDR as an antifascist state. However, while Buchenwald demonstrated that East German places of memory were firmly anchored in the antifascist tradition of heroes and martyrs of the Communist struggle, the universalization of the past shifted to include a cultural conception of the nation. However, this expansion of East German national identity in the 1980s to include cultural conceptions of the nation, did not give up the dominant national narrative of antifascism. While the universalization of the past via the myth of antifascism served to separate the Nazi past from the GDR and legitimized the GDR as an antifascist state, the cultural nation legitimized historical and cultural links between German history and the GDR. The slight and brief openness to the Nazi past in the GDR did not entail a period of therapeutic mourning as visible in the Federal Republic. Rather, the GDR's examination of the past was still governed by the universalization and abstraction of the past for the purposes of state legitimation. In the GDR, the state was the undeniable custodian of national memory. While official attempts to publicly administer national memory in the Federal Republic were met with controversial discussions in the media, the lack of a public sphere and democratic culture successfully blocked East German debate about the Nazi past. During the 1980s, Bitburg, Kohl's proposed history museums, and the historians' debate were public debates about the relationship between the memory of National Socialism and German national identity. Official attempts to present the Federal Republic as a normal European nation were countered by a rather vocal segment of the West German population who argued for the centrality of National Socialism and the Holocaust in West German national identity. Such heated disputes were demonstrably lacking in the GDR. Instead, the 1980s in the GDR merely signaled a slight crack in the myth of antifascism and an openness to select aspects of German history. Places of East German national memory such as Buchenwald, the East German historians' dispute, and the 50th commemoration of Kristallnacht illustrated the ambiguity of East German memory. Involving a former concentration camp, history books, and a commemorative ceremony, these "places" highlighted the fact that even within the tight ideological framework of East German antifascism, the legacy of National Socialism still haunted conceptions of East German national identity. NOTES 1. Mary Fulbrook, Anatomy of a Dictatorship: Inside the GDR 1949-1989 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 2. For Giinter Gaus's description of the East German niche society, see Giinter Gaus, Wo Deutschland liegt: Eine Ortsbestimmung (Hamburg: Hoffmann und

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Campe, 1983), esp. "Nischengesellschaft," 156-233. For an emphasis on force and a conflictual interpretation of the GDR, see Armin Mitter and Stefan Wolle, Untergang auf Raten (Munich: C. Bertelsmann Verlag, 1993). 3. For an analysis of Soviet-type societies, see Ferenc Feher, Agnes Heller, and Gyorgy Markus, Dictatorship over Needs: An Analysis of Soviet Societies (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1983). For an analysis of the totalitarian and posttotalitarian mind, see Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, Beyond Glasnost: The Post-Totalitarian Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 4. Milan Kundera, "Most Letters," in his The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), 3. 5. Antonia Grunenberg, "Dichotomous Political Thought in Germany Before 1933," New German Critique 67 (Winter 1996): 111-122. For a fuller analysis of antifascism, see her book, Antifaschismus: Ein deutscher Mythos (Hamburg: Rowolt, 1993), esp. "Anti-Faschismus als Staatsdoktrin: Die DDR," 120-144. 6. Herbert Ammon, "Antifaschismus im Wandel? Historisch-kritische Anmerkungen zur Aktualitat eines Begriffs," in Die Schatten der Vergangenheit: Impulse zur Historisierung des Nationalsozialismus, ed. Uwe Backe (Frankfurt: Propylaen, 1990), 568-594. 7. Dan Diner, "On the Ideology of Antifascism," New German Critique 67 (Winter 1996): 131. For the German original, see "Zur Ideologic des Antifaschismus," in Erinnerung, ed. Bernhard Moltmann et al. (Frankfurt: Haag &C Herchen, 1993), 21-30. 8. For antifascism as myth in the GDR, see Michael Zimmerman, "Der antifaschistische Mythos der DDR," in Mythos Antifaschismus: Ein Traditionskabinett wird kommentiert (Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 1992), 135-153. For antifascism as a state doctrine, see Bernd Faulenbach, "Die doppelte 'Vergangenheitsbewaltigung': Nationalsozialismus und Stalinismus als Herausforderungen zeithistorischer Forschung und politischer Kultur," in Die geteilte Vergangenheit: Zum Umgang mit Nationalsozialismus und Widerstand in beiden deutschen Staaten, ed. Jurgen Danyel (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1995), 107-124. 9. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1957; 1972), 121. 10. Ibid., 143. 11. Verfassung der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (Berlin: Staatsverlag, 1974), 11. 12. Hans-Joachim Maaz, "Zur psychischen Verarbeitung des Holocaust in der DDR," in Moltmann et al., Erinnerung, 164. 13. See the findings of the Commission of Inquiry, Bericht der EntqueteKommission CiAufarbeitung von Geschichte und Folgen der SED-Diktatur in Deutschland,'" Drucksachen 12/7830 (Bonn: Deutscher Bundestag, 1992). 14. Maaz, "Zur psychischen Verarbeitung des Holocaust in der DDR." 15. My phases of East German memory draw from the following authors: Andreas Dorpalen, German History in Marxist Perspective (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1985); Olaf Groehler, "Der Holocaust in der Geschichtsschreibung der DDR," in Moltmann et al., Erinnerung, 47-66; C. Bradley Scharf, "Necessity and Vision in East German Identity," in Coping with the Past: Germany and Austria After 1945, ed. Kathy Harms (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990),

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94-104; Frank Trommler, "The Creation of History and the Refusal of the Past in the German Democratic Republic" in Harms et al., Coping, 79-93. 16. Walter Ulbricht, quoted in Werner Berthold, Marxistisches Geschichtsbild: Volksfront und antifaschisch-demokratische Revolution: Zur Vorgeschichte der Geschichtswissenschaft der DDR und zur Konzeption der Geschichte des deutschen Volkes (Berlin: 1972), 192. Also quoted in Trommler, "The Creation of History," 85, footnote 16. 17. Alexander Abusch, Der Irrweg der Nation: Ein Beitrag zum Verstandnis der deutschen Geschichte (Berlin: Aufbau, 1946). See also Friedrich Meinecke, The German Catastrophe, trans. Sidney B. Fay (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946; 1950). 18. Institut fiir Marxixmus-Leninismus beim ZK der SED, VII Kongrefe der Kommunistischen Internationale (Berlin: Reports and Resolutions, 1975), 75. Quoted in Groehler, "Der Holocaust in der Geschichtsschreibung der DDR," 55. 19. Deutsche Volkszeitung 18 (July 3, 1945). Quoted in Groehler, "Der Holocaust in der Geschichtsschreibung der DDR," 47-48. 20. Jurgen Danyel, "Die Opfer und Verfolgenperspektive als Gnindungskonsens? Zum Umgang mit der Widerstandstradition und der Schuldfrage in der DDR," in Danyel, ed., Die geteilte Vergangenheit, 42. 21. Frank Stern, "The Return to the Disowned Home: German Jews and the Other Germany," New German Critique 67 (Winter 1996): 65. 22. Ibid., 66. 23. See Dorpalen, German History; and Trommler, "The Creation of History." 24. Dokumente der SED, vol. 3 (Berlin Ost, 1952), 581ff. Quoted in Charlotte Schubert, "Phasen und Zasuren des Erbe-Verstandnisses der DDR," in Materialen der Entquete-Kommission "Aufarbeitung von Geschichte und Folgen der SEDDiktatur in Deutschland," ed. Deutscher Bundestag, vol. 3, pt. 3 (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlag; Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1995), 1779. 25. Trommler, "The Creation of History," 80. 26. Ibid., 48ff. 27. Scharf, "Necessity and Vision," 97. 28. For a history of the Berlin Wall, see Helga Behrendt, Die Mauer-Schneise: Ein Berliner Stadtfiihrer (Berlin: Elephanten Press, 1994). 29. Bertolt Brecht, Gesammelte Werke 20 vols., vol. 19 (Frankfurt: Frankfurt Verlag, 1967), 543. Quoted in Trommler, "The Creation of History," 79. 30. See Christa Wolf, Patterns of Childhood, trans. Ursula Molinaro (New York: Noonday Press, 1980). Originally published as Kindheitsmuster (Berlin: AufbauVerlag, 1976). 31. Stern, "Return to the Disowned Home," 66ff. 32. For the influence of antifascism on East German intellectuals, see John Torpey, Intellectuals, Socialism, and Dissent: The East German Opposition and Its Legacy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995); and David Bathrick, The Powers of Speech: The Politics of Culture in the GDR (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995). 33. See Michael Geyer and John W. Boyer, eds., Resistance Against the Third Reich 1933-1990 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 34. James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 73.

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35. Ibid. 36. The Historians Commission, chaired by Eberhard Jackel, in 1991-1992 recommended a threefold distinction of the usages of Buchenwald. For a discussion of the three usages of Buchenwald, including the Soviet phase, see Sarah Farmer, "Symbols That Face Two Ways: Commemorating the Victims of Nazism and Stalinism at Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen," Representations 49 (Winter 1995): 107. 37. Young, The Texture of Memory, 74. 38. Sabine Stein and Harry Stein, Buchenwald: A Tour of the Memorial Site (Weimar: Weimar-Buchenwald Memorial, 1993). See also Farmer, "Symbols That Face Two Ways," 104. 39. Sabine Stein and Harry Stein, Buchenwald, 74. 40. See Ernst Renan, "What Is a Nation?," in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha (New York: Routledge, 1990), 11. 41. Young, "The Texture of Memory," 75. 42. Farmer, "Symbols That Face Two Ways," 99. 43. Bodo Ritscher, Buchenwald: Guide to the National Memorial (Erfurt: Druckerei Fortschritt, 1986). Quoted in Young, "The Texture of Memory," 76, endnote 23. 44. Stein and Stein, 68-70. 45. The boy in the sculpture may be a depiction of Juschu, the Jewish boy who was hidden and saved by the Communists at Buchenwald, and was immortalized in Bruno Apitz's Naked Under Wolves. See Bruno Apitz, Nackt unter Wolf en (Leipzig: Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 1958). For a brief history of Juschu, see Heinz Albertus, Verbrechen an Kindern und Jugendlichen im KZ Buchenwald und der Kampf der illegalen antifaschistischen Widerstandsorganisation um ihre Rettung (WeimarBuchenwald: MNG Buchenwald Verlag 1989), 51-58. 46. Ian Buruma, The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994), 211. 47. National Mahn- und Gedenkstatte Buchenwald, Konzentrationslager Buchenwald, ed., 165, catalog for exhibition in the Gropius-Bau, Berlin, April-June 1990, translated and quoted by Claudia Koontz, "Germany's Buchenwald: Whose Shrine? Whose Memory," in The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History, ed. James E. Young (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1994), 114. 48. See Buchenwald mahnt: Rede des Ministerprasidenten Otto Grotewohl zur Weihe der Nationalen Mahn- und Gedenkstatte Buchenwald am 14. September 1958 (Weimar: Volksverlag, 1961), 7, 8, 13. Quoted in Koontz, "Germany's Buchenwald," 114, footnote 8. 49. Ibid. 50. Young, The Texture of Memory, 75. 51. Stein and Stein, Buchenwald: A Tour of the Memorial Site, 7. 52. Lutz Niethammer ed., Der "gesauberte" Antifaschismus: Die SED und die rote Kapos von Buchenwald (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1994), 16. 53. For different, often intersecting definitions of the German nation—the folk nation, cultural nation, and nation of citizens—see M. Rainer Lepsius, "The Nation and Nationalism in Germany," Social Research 52 (Spring 1985): 43-64. 54. Karl Polak, "Sozialismus, Imperialismus und die nationale Frage in Deutschland (Part II)," Einheit no. 1 (1962): 121. Quoted in Sigrid Meuschel, Legitimation und Parteiherrschaft in der DDR (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1992), 274, endnote 223.

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55. Mary Fulbrook, The Divided Nation: A History of Germany 1918-1990 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 300-301. 56. Meuschel, Legitimation und Parteiherrschaft, 276. 57. Willy Brandt, quoted ibid. 58. Ibid., 278. 59. See Alexander Fischer and Giinter Heydemann, "Weg und Wandel der Geschichtswissenschaft und des Geschichtsverstandnisses in der SBZ/DDR seit 1945," in Geschichtswissensch aft in der DDR, vol. 1, Historische Entwicklung, Theoriediskussion und Geschichtsdidatik, ed. Alexander Fischer and Giinther Heydemann (Berlin: Dunker & Humblot, 1988), 17. 60. See Alfred Kosing and Walter Schmidt, "Geburt und Gedeihen der sozialistischen deutschen Nation," Einheit no. 9/10 p. (1979): 1072ff. Quoted in Meuschel, Legitimation, 284, endnote 271. 61. See Horst Bartel and Walter Schmidt, "Historisches Erbe und Tradition— Bilanz, Probleme, Konsequenzen," Zeitschrift fiir Geschichtswissensch aft 9 (1982): 111. Quoted in Meuschel, Legitimation, 287, endnote 278. 62. Meuschel, Legitimation und Parteiherrschaft, 288. 63. I follow NeuhauEer-Wespy's analysis of East German historiography. Charlotte Schubert lists other central interpretations, however. For a full analysis of the three phases cited, see Ulrich NeuhauEer-Wespy, "Erbe und Tradition in DDR: Zum gewandelten Geschichtsbild der SED," in Fischer and Heydemann, Geschichtswissensch aft in der DDR, vol. 1, 129-154. For other interpretations, see Schubert: Albrecht Timm lists five phases, Ernst Engelberg and Rolf Rudolf list three, Fischer and Heydemann list three, Kuhrt and Lowis list eight. "Phasen und Zasuren des Erbe-Verstandnisses der DDR," 1774-1776. 64. Fischer and Heydemann, "Weg und Wandel," 4. 65. For a discussion of the heritage and tradition discussion, see Schubert, "Phasen und Zasuren des Erbe-Verstandnisses der DDR." 66. Walter Schmidt, "Wir stellen uns der ganzen deutschen Geschichte," in Erben deutscher Geschichte, DDR-BRD: Protokolle einer historischen Begegnung, ed. S. Miller and M. Ristau (Berlin: Reinbeck Verlag, 1988). Quoted in Schubert, "Phasen und Zasuren," 1791. 67. Horst Bartel, "Erbe und Tradition in Geschichtsbild und Geschichtsforschung der DDR," Zeitschrift fiir Geschichtswissensch aft 29 (1981): 389ff. Quoted in Schubert, "Phasen und Zasuren," 1796. 68. Quoted in Peter Reichel, Politik mit der Erinnerung: Gedachtnisorte im Streit um die nationalsozialistische Vergangenheit (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1995), 310. 69. Theodor Heuss, "Die 'Kristallnacht' als Mahnung," SZ, October 11, 1958. Quoted in Reichel, Politik mit der Erinnerung, 311, endnote 135. 70. See Buruma, The Wages of Guilt, 239. 71. Jenninger, quoted in ibid., 239-240. 72. For a full analysis of West German parliamentary speeches and the memory of the Nazi past, see Helmut Dubiel, Niemand ist frei von der Geschichte (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1999); and Jeffrey K. Olick, "The Sins of the Fathers: The Third Reich and West German Legitimation" (dissertation, Yale University, 1993). 73. Jenninger, quoted in Buruma, Wages of Guilt, 241. 74. Ibid., 245.

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75. For an excellent explanation of the Jewish-German Question, see Anson Rabinbach, "The Jewish Question in the German Question," in Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Historians' Debate, ed. Peter Baldwin (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), 45-73. 76. Wolfgang Ruge, Deutschland 1917-1933 (Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 1967), 118. Quoted in Dorpalen, German History in Marxist Perspective, 230. 77. Landesarchiv Berlin, Rep. 118, No. 615. Quoted in Angelika Timm, "Der Umgang mit der 'Reichskristallnacht' in der DDR," in Danyel, Die geteilte Vergangenheit, 215. 78. Heinz Brandt, quoted in Timm, "Der Umgang," 215. 79. Timm, "Der Umgang," 215-216. 80. Erich Honecker, Neues Deutschland, October 8,1984, 3. Quoted in Trommler, "The Creation of History," 84. 81. Trommler, "The Creation of History," 79-80. 82. Timm, "Der Umgang," 221.

C H A P T E R FIVE

UNIFIED GERMANY'S DOUBLE

PAST

The past is not dead; it is not even past. We cut ourselves off from it; we pretend to be strangers —Christa Wolf

The democratic revolution and collapse of the SED resulting in reunification in 1990 meant the end of the Berlin Wall as the largest symbol of the ideological divide between East and West, the end of the GDR as a country, the end of the familiar "postwar" period, and the end of the Bundesrepublik. The year 1990 also brought the restoration of Germany as a nation. In numerous discussions about the significance of 1989-1990, the question of the past has become as pressing as that of the future. From Bitburg and the West German historians' debate to the unification debate, debates over Berlin or Bonn as the national capital, questions of how to remember the Nazi past are linked to questions of German national identity. After 1989, the thorny question of German national identity is not simply raised in reference to 1933-1945, but also in light of 1989. How might an acknowledgement that the postwar period is over affect the historical and social understanding of National Socialism? Are 1933-1945 and 1945-1990 overshadowed by 1989-1990? And if so, does this mean that National Socialism barely affects the national identity of the "new" Germany? The growing scholarship after 1990 about the divided past of the Federal Republic and the GDR suggests the tenacity of the Nazi period as a problematic and influential legacy for German national identity.1 The controversy surrounding Buchenwald, the Neue Wache (The New Guardhouse Memorial), and the Holocaust Memorial, the Goldhagen con-

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troversy, and the Walser-Bubis debate are testimony to the complex politicization of memory and the continued link between German national identity and its Nazi past. Such heated discussions did not emerge from nowhere; but were part of the complex double past of newly reunified Germany. Occurring only a few years after Ronald Reagan's controversial visit to Bitburg, the lengthy history museum discussion, and the West German historians' debate, discussions about the Nazi past during the 1990s predominantly continued the West German model of internalization and normalization. Pulled between the search for a normal, positive national identity and the burdened legacy of the Nazi past, the question of how to narrate National Socialism and the Holocaust to German history revolved around the tense axis of normalization and critical memory. However, while the old Federal Republic was characterized by an internalization of the past as a burden via a complex discourse of Vergangenheitsbewdltigung, and the GDR by a universalization of the past through the myth of antifascism, newly reunified Germany has to confront not only the Nazi past but also the Communist past. Because the new Germany combines the different social experiences of East and West Germans, the reunified German memory of the Nazi past is framed within the complex double past of the Federal Republic and the GDR. While it is undoubtedly too early for a thorough study of the analytic framework for reunified German memory, one can nonetheless argue for a continuity of the West German internalization of the past and an intensification of the normalization model of German national identity during the 1980s. In what follows, I will highlight the "newness" of the reunified German analytic framework while arguing for the continuity of West German internalization of the Nazi past. Although reunification implies a return to the nation and a return to normalcy, one of the novelties of reunified Germany is the emergence of a double past. Whereas until 1989 East and West Germans had sharply divergent social constructions for remembering National Socialism, reunified Germany combines the divided memories into a double past that is simultaneously divergent and unified. The difficulty of the German double past is clearly visible in the controversy surrounding the discovery of the former concentration camp Buchenwald as a Soviet internment camp, Helmut Kohl's problematic reinscription of the Neue Wache as a national memorial to all victims of war and tyranny, Lea Rosh's proposed Holocaust Memorial for Berlin, the Goldhagen controversy about ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, and the Walser-Bubis debate over the Holocaust and national identity. THE FRAMING OF REUNIFIED GERMAN MEMORY The nation as narrative implies a beginning, a middle, and an end in which the nation is an unfulfilled project with various stages of historical

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development.2 National narratives typically tell the story of the birth of a nation through a national awakening from below and assume a certain naturalness of the nation. During the reunification of Germany, such metaphors for the naturalness of the German nation were confirmed early on by Willy Brandt's claim that "what belongs together, grows together." 3 Other commentators used the analogy of two brothers or of families united after a forty-year separation. Assuming an organic unity rather than a constructed wholeness, national narratives stress continuity rather than ruptures and tensions in the story of a nation. National Socialism and the "unnatural" postwar status of the Federal Republic and the GDR were viewed as aberrations, catastrophes, and temporary situations. Reunified Germany, on the other hand implied a restoration of the organic continuity of the German nation. The stress on restorative normalcy was clearly visible in the choice of the word "reunification" (Wiedervereinigung). Signifying a return to Germany as a normal European nation and the end of an unnatural separation, reunification also harkened back to Bismarck's initial unification of Germany in 1871. However, the "new" Germany of 1990 is territorially, politically, and socially different from Bismarck's unified Germany. For one thing, the new Germany has been forced to address and use its formidable power in foreign policy areas in which the old Bundesrepublik was unable to exercise its power. With the outbreak of the Gulf War and the Bosnian conflict, debates raged among German politicians and intellectuals as to the appropriate German response. For some, the memory of the Holocaust necessitated German pacificism and hindered German military involvement. For others, the memory of the Holocaust meant that Germans had a moral duty to intervene militarily in order to prevent future genocides. While the Bonn Republic could comfortably avoid military involvement, the Berlin Republic is faced with foreign policy concerns similar to those of other "normal" nations. No longer divided geographically or ideologically, the new Germany has emerged as Europe's most powerful country. The memory of National Socialism casts its shadow over how future German politicians will decide to exercise such power. 4 Reunified Germany is also different from its 1871 variant because both East and West Germans are affected by the same sociocultural changes as other first world countries: globalization, multiculturalism, and mass culture. So although national identity is still a prevalent form of collective identity, younger generations increasingly identify themselves with a broader shared culture that crosses national boundaries. With the shift in the demonstration slogans from "Wir sind das Volk" (we are the people) in October 1989 to "Wir sind ein Volk" (we are one people) in November 1989, the momentum of the demonstrations changed from reform within the socialist state of the GDR to unification with the Federal Republic. The replacement of das (the) by ein (one) seemed to

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symbolize the claim from below for the cultural and national unity of the German people. The shift from "the people" as demos to "one people" as ethnos highlighted the tension between the democratic and national moment of the German turn of events (Wende). The intellectual debate about the reunification of Germany centered on whether and how to reunify. The shift was more than semantic or territorial; it entailed a rethinking of the German nation after 1945. The original demonstration slogan "we are the people" not only challenged the SED as the sole representative of the people of the GDR, but also included a sense of citizenship whereby demonstrators sought to reform the GDR from within. The November slogan "we are one people," however, was not a claim of democratic citizenship within the GDR, but of the ethnic identity of East Germans as "Germans." Appealing to a conception of the nation as a people-nation or Volksnation, "we are one people" changed the situation from the reform of a German socialist state to the shared community and destiny of the German people. Throughout the debates, different reactions to reunification by East and West German intellectuals revealed the complex framework of memory, from an internalization of the Nazi past and a Vergangenheitsbewdltigung discourse in the West to a universalization of the past and antifascist narrative in the East. After the euphoria passed, differences between East and West were captured in a bitter joke: "An Ossi meets a Wessi and says: 'Greetings, we are one people.' The Wessi replies coolly, 'So are we.' " 5 The euphoria and the speed of unification were accompanied by discussions of how to imagine and interpret the shared community of reunified Germany. Whereas 1945 symbolized a zero hour and new beginning in German history, 1989 seems to denote both the radical break of a new beginning and a return to normalcy. While the fall of the Berlin Wall brought unprecedented euphoria for the democratic and national moment of overcoming a Communist dictatorship from below, the questions about whether and how to unify the nation entailed larger normative questions of nationhood and citizenship in the new Germany. The intellectual debate about unification initially raised the question of whether unification should occur at all, and later turned to specific mechanisms of unification. The debate in 1989-1990 focused on the quality of German nationhood—as a Volksnation, Kulturnation, or postnational nation of citizens—and revealed sharp differences in the intellectual reactions to reunification. While many East German Left intellectuals, such as Christa Wolf and Stefan Heym, opposed unification based on the hope for a reformed GDR as an alternative socialist society, West German Left intellectuals such as Giinter Grass opposed unification based on the memory of Auschwitz and the fear of losing the shared cultural tradition of the two Germanys. Others, such as Jurgen Habermas, argued against reunification via Article 23 of the Basic Law which would incorporate or annex the GDR into the Federal Republic

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and, instead, called for a nationwide referendum and a new constitution based on Article 146. However, once reunification officially occurred on October 3,1990, new questions emerged on the political scene.6 The issue shifted from whether to unify to the problematic consequences of reunification for German national identity. Indeed, the date for the official commemoration of reunification appeared problematic. Reunified Germany's double past is aptly captured in the calendar date of November 9, which signifies both the peaceful fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, and the violence of Kristallnacht on November 9, 1938. The date also marks the abdication of the kaiser in 1918 and Hitler's failed beer hall putsch in 1923. Because of November 9's dark and complex past, it was impossible to celebrate November 9 as reunified Germany's national holiday, and instead a neutral date of October 3 was found to commemorate the reunification of the two Germanys. 7 The search for a shared national narrative involves the problem of explaining the ruptures of Germany's double past. Furthermore, the contested quality of the German nation includes the larger ongoing debate about how to come to terms with the Nazi and Communist pasts of the new Germany. Central to the question of the double past is the question of which past is more primary for German national identity—1945 or 1989. Indeed, "the past," which previously implied only the Nazi past in West German discourse, now includes the Communist past. The analytic framework of unified German memory raises the question of whether German national identity should be viewed primarily through the democratic and national turn of events of 1989 or through the prism of National Socialism. The analytic framework of the double past is a continuation and intensification of many issues raised in the West German historians' debate. Yet, whereas the historians' debate examined the singular role of the Nazi past in West German national identity, reunified Germany encounters a new layer in the problematic notion of a past. Although East and West Germans have different historical experiences as a divided nation, they share the common past of the Third Reich. At the heart of the double past framework lie two related questions: Can one compare the GDR to National Socialism? Does the focus on the Communist past inadvertently lead to forgetting the Nazi past? These primary questions include related issues, such as How are the different pasts related to one another and to the present? How can a nation come to terms with two difficult pasts? Will 1989 overshadow 1945 or vice versa? Which past is more primary for reunified German national identity, National Socialism or the democratic/national moment of reunification? Like the historians' debate, the double past is both a methodological and a political debate about the consequences of comparison for the public administration of national memory. The double past explicitly raises the question of whether one can compare the two dictatorships

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without relativizing National Socialism and forgetting the uniqueness of the Holocaust for German national identity.8 Drawing on the West German internalization of the past, the double past framework compares the crimes of National Socialism with Communism while examining the similarities and differences in the two systems. The starting points for the double Vergangenheitsbewdltigung are the years 1945 and 1989, signifying both the end of dictatorships and new beginnings. Yet, comparisons of the Nazi and Communist pasts have to carefully foreground the differences between the two regimes. Germany's unconditional surrender in 1945 meant the end of the Second World War, liberation from concentration camps, the deaths of 50 million people, the destruction and division of Germany, and the beginning of the Cold War; 1989 meant the peaceful collapse of the SED, the end of the Cold War, reunification of divided Germany, the restoration of the German nation, and the end of a divided Europe. In early 1992, the Bundestag established the Commission of Enquiry on the Reappraisal of the History and Consequences of the SED Dictatorship in Germany (Entquete-Kommission "Aufarbeitung von Geschichte und Folgen der SED-Diktatur in Deutschland"). The term "reappraisal" (Aufarbeitung) is not merely a reconsideration of the past, but a confrontation with the consequences of the past on the present. Aufarbeitung stresses the past-present connection rather than a break between past and present. The aim of the commission was to learn everything possible about the forty years of separation and to prevent future dictatorships in Germany. Sponsored by former members of the East German civil rights movements and chaired by Rainer Eppelmann, the commission was an attempt to examine the complexity and ambiguity of life in the GDR. Its proceedings were published in a condensed report by the Bundestag and in a complete eighteen-volume set by Suhrkamp. 9 It did not have the power to prosecute or punish suspected criminals, but instead sought to illuminate the structures of SED power and aspects of daily life in the GDR. Markus Meckel, vice chairman of the commission described the task of the commission in the following way: When did we simply make mistakes? Where and when did we allow ourselves to get caught up in the system? When were we cowardly and opportunistic? Still, it is clear, cowardice and opportunism are not punishable. But when did they put us in a position in which we incurred guilt? How great was the pressure, really, in everyday life? Who really believed that what he or she was doing was right? And when must one speak, instead, of betrayal?10 Wary of the tendency to subsume National Socialism and Communism under the general rubric of dictatorship or totalitarianism, thus eliminating the specificity of each system, the commission consciously attempted to

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compare pasts without equating them. Indeed the phrase "comparison does not mean equating" (Vergleichen heiflt nicht Gleichsetzen) became a central motto of the commission. In May 1994, the commission held two plenary sessions, "The Debate About Two Dictatorships in Germany in the Present and the Past." Continuing the methodological and political discussion of the historians' debate—uniqueness versus comparison and historicization versus normalization—historians and intellectuals, among them Jurgen Kocka, Sigrid Meuschel, M. Rainer Lepsius, and Jurgen Habermas, discussed the significance of comparative studies of Germany's double past. THE PLACES OF REUNIFIED GERMAN MEMORY Because of postwar Germany's double past, the narration of history is far from neat and unambiguous. On the contrary, the memory landscape of reunified Germany is particularly difficult because it exposes the multiple and often overlapping memories that occur in one often highly symbolic place. Places of memory (lieux de memoire) are symbolic places which can either smooth over a nation's dark past or critically remind individuals of their link with their shared social past. The task of "correcting" the presentation of history in the former GDR entails the continuity of old questions raised in the Federal Republic and creates new problems for the interpretation of overlapping histories. By simply erasing the GDR's ideological presentation of National Socialism and replacing it with West German historiographical representations, one loses the specificity of East German memory and falls prey to forgetting the complexity of the GDR's forty-year history. One of the new difficulties facing reunified German memory is the acknowledgment of the instrumental use of the past for purposes of national self-legitimation. The East German myth of antifascism symbolized in the East German presentation of former concentration camp sites is a powerful reminder of an ideological and instrumental use and abuse of history. Recent debates about unified German memory highlight the difficulty of Germany's multiple pasts. Public representations of National Socialism are dominated by a West German interpretation because it is West Germans who are, after all, the political elite. Thus, it is not surprising that the West German model of internalization has hegemony over the East German model of universalization. The majority of intellectuals engaged in the public debates are overwhelmingly West Germans from the Left and Right who have continually clashed with one another since the 1980s. West Germans dominated the public discussions about National Socialism because of their long-standing internalization framework. East German intellectuals, on the other hand, are generally more concerned with the Communist past and address questions of Stasi involvement and complicity. This, of course, makes sense because East German intellectuals have firsthand direct knowl-

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edge of East German society and its alternative public spaces. Moreover, communism is part of East German collective memory and lived experience. Questions about the double past were complicated by the extent of complicity among East German intellectuals with the SED as the opened Stasi files and controversy over Christa Wolf emerged in the summer of 1990. n Exacerbating tensions between East and West German Left intellectuals, many East German intellectuals accused the West of acting like the victorious Allies without examining their own past or of comprehending the difficulties of living in a totalitarian society. Many West German intellectuals, on the other hand, used the example of widespread Stasi complicity to argue for the basic authoritarian character of East Germans. Buchenwald and the Difficulties of a Double Past: Whose Memory? Whose Past? With the incorporation of the former GDR into the enlarged Federal Republic, there exists the looming question of what to do with the remnants of the GDR. Such a question extends from the larger issue of governmental administration to the symbolic places of East German national memory dotted over the former GDR's landscape. While monuments to Communist heroes can be torn down and schoolbooks rewritten, the issue becomes especially problematic when it touches upon the East German narration of National Socialism. Nowhere are the difficulties of reinscribing the past more starkly evident than in the former concentration camp sites in East Germany. While former concentration camp sites were predominantly viewed as places of national shame in the Federal Republic, in the GDR such sites were official places of national honor and glorification. As sites of national mythmaking and legend-building, former concentration camp sites such as Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and Ravensbruck served as places of national legitimation for the antifascist GDR. Recalling Communist victimhood and antifascist resistance, the former concentration camp site of Buchenwald in particular became one of the most important places of East German national memory. After unification in 1990, East German curators and museum administrators were replaced by West German historians and curators who were appointed to correct and reconstruct the actual history of Buchenwald.12 While the task of rewriting history was difficult enough in itself, it was compounded by the discovery that Buchenwald was used as a Soviet internment camp after 1945. Thus, the place of Buchenwald no longer contained one history but multiple histories. While the Soviet internment camp was considered a taboo subject in the GDR, in reunified Germany it caused a controversy about how to rewrite and renarrate the authentic history of Buchenwald as part of the new Germany. The attempt by West German historians to correct and narrate the history of Buchenwald's past is a ques-

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tion not only of restoring history from falsification, but also of reclaiming the authenticity of a shared German past. Since National Socialism is the most recent past shared by East and West Germans, the divided narration and memory of that common past poses a significant challenge not only to German historiography but also to the broader implications of historical narration and collective memory. In Europe before 1945, a typical national memorial was characterized by a figurative monument at the site of a famous battle. After 1945, however, the place itself was left intact as a commemorative site of history. In such new commemorative sites, the mediation of a figurative monument was no longer needed because the place itself powerfully evoked the history of past events. As a lieu de memoire, the symbolic aura and authenticity of a historical place obviated the need for a figurative monument. Yet this new way of preserving the past tacitly assumed that the site had only one story to tell. The case of Buchenwald sparked a controversy about how to narrate multiple events that occurred at a single site and signified conflict about how to correctly remember concentration camps in contemporary Germany. The search for authenticity creates a hierarchy of histories in which only one narrative is "the narrative" and others are subsequent or merely tangential to the original story. Yet how can one reconcile authenticity with ambiguity? Authenticity assumes realness and originality, whereas ambiguity suggests uncertainty and lack of distinctiveness. While an authentic history implies a clear-cut narrative, East and West German collective memories of National Socialism are far from unambiguous. On the contrary, they are divided and deeply contested. For some, National Socialism represents a break in the continuum of German history, whereas for others the break begins in 1933 and ends only with unification in 1990. For most Germans in the immediate postwar years, National Socialism was associated not only with the Holocaust, but also with war, destruction, hunger, and defeat. The focus was on the future rather than on the past. Places of memory have different narrative functions: some preserve an authentic past, others glorify the nation's war dead, and still others attempt to engender critical introspection within the viewer. While the East German commemorative site of Buchenwald attempted to preserve the authenticity of Communist resistance and martyrdom, it also included the glorification of those antifascists who died in the name of the GDR. The task facing reunified Germany is how to preserve Buchenwald's "authentic" multiple pasts—Nazi, Soviet, and East German—while simultaneously fostering critical reflection among its visitors. Unlike figurative memorials or monuments that metaphorically remind viewers of the past, the preservation of former concentration camps as museums is site-specific and seems to take one back to the past "as it was." Individuals visit these historic sites to see the evidence for themselves and to get in touch with history.13 As visitors walk

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through the former concentration camp, they view the remains of barracks, crematoria, documents, utensils, clothing, uniforms, and photographs from Buchenwald's past as a Nazi concentration camp. However, it is not simply a matter of viewing isolated and displayed objects, but of placing these authentic objects within an interpretive framework. In the case of the GDR, objects from the former Nazi concentration camp were framed within a myth of antifascism that conveniently universalized the Nazi past into an abstract fascism. In the East German narrative of Buchenwald, the "preservationist spirit" was accompanied by the monumental memory of Buchenwald as a place of national self-legitimation that honored the valiant resistance and martyrdom of the Communist antifascists. With unification, curators faced the task of redisplaying some of the same objects within a West German interpretive framework that would represent the uniqueness of the Third Reich in German history. This project, though, was hampered by the problematic layering of pasts in one historic site. As the Buchenwald Historical Commission argued, Buchenwald actually had three usages: (1) Nazi concentration camp 1937-1945; (2) Soviet internment camp 1945-1950; (3) memorial to legitimate the antifascist legend of the GDR 1950-1990. The issue was not how to preserve one past, but how to preserve numerous, often overlapping pasts without losing the distinctiveness of each historical moment. When in 1983 East German builders accidentally discovered human bones that had been dumped into a common grave in the woods outside of the former Nazi concentration camp site, the SED immediately ordered the mass grave closed. The history of Special Camp No. 2 and the existence of the mass graves outside of the Buchenwald camp site were considered a taboo subject in the GDR because they were not part of the authentic past to be preserved and memorialized. However, after 1989, when more bones were discovered, a controversy arose over how to remember and integrate Buchenwald's usage as a Soviet internment camp with the site's usage as a Nazi concentration camp. 14 Until unification, there had never been a commemorative sign or monument to Germans killed in the Soviet internment camp. A provisional burial site was created at the site of a mass grave only after the collapse of the GDR. In the fall of 1990, the history of Buchenwald's multiple pasts began to be commemorated and a provisional exhibit about the Soviet internment camp was established in one room of the Buchenwald camp museum. Signs were placed on the path leading from the edge of the woods outside the camp site that told visitors of mass graves on either side of them. In June 1991, Chancellor Helmut Kohl dedicated six large wooden crosses to commemorate the victims "of the Communist terror dictatorship" and placed identical yellow and white wreaths on the graves of victims of Nazi and Soviet crimes.15 Since then, relatives of those who died in the Soviet internment camp have set up handmade wood crosses at the site of mass graves

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outside the main camp site of Buchenwald.16 The International Committee of Buchenwald Survivors protested the memorialization of perpetrators and the proximity of the Nazi and Communist displays. In portraying Buchenwald as a memorial site for the victims of both Nazi and Soviet aggression, the issue arose of how to avoid not only the levels of victims and perpetrators, but also the creation of new national mythologies. As the journalist Ian Buruma wryly noted, changes in the presentation of historical events at Buchenwald are not simply about renarrating a former concentration camp site, but also involve the rewriting of East German national mythology: "Old myths had to be challenged without replacing them with new ones." 17 While antitotalitarianism distinguished the old Federal Republic from Nazi Germany and the GDR, antifascism separated the GDR from the FRG and the Third Reich. In both cases, the specificity of National Socialism was subsumed under the broader rubric of totalitarianism or fascism. The Cold War perpetuated the mythologies of resistance and moral supremacy in the two Germanys. In the Federal Republic, the ideological struggle against communism easily slipped into a resistance again all totalitarian regimes. In the East, the struggle against the fascist West as an extension of monopoly capitalism and fascism obscured acts of collaboration and noninvolvement. The larger categories of totalitarianism and fascism served as convenient evasions and denials of the specificity of German history. In response to arguments that the new Buchenwald exhibits would equate Nazi and Soviet terror, and diminish the uniqueness of the Holocaust and the Third Reich, the Ministry for Science and Culture in the state of Thuringia established a commission of West German historians to recommend a "new orientation" for the Buchenwald site and appointed the West German historian Eberhard Jackel as head of the commission. The appointment of Jackel, who was a strong proponent for the uniqueness of the Holocaust and stressed the necessity for historical comparison during the West German historians' debate, was a sign of the openness and political orientation of the commission.18 Yet, the commission was strongly criticized for its lack of East German historians. This lack was due, in Jackel's opinion, to the party affiliation of most East German historians and museum workers at Buchenwald. For this reason, the commission was comprised solely of West German historians. 19 The commission not only focused on the immediate question of how to reconstruct the museum and memorial site, but also continued the broader political and historiographical questions that were raised during the historians' debate. Such questions included the following: Should the victims be commemorated together or separately? Would the focus on the Communist past inadvertently lead to forgetting of National Socialism? Which past is more primary for German national identity, 1945 or 1989? Can one compare the GDR to Nazi Germany?

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From September 1991 until February 1992, the commission met three times to discuss the new orientation of Buchenwald in unified Germany. In the end, it recommended a clear differentiation between the spheres of memory. The commission determined that the actual place of Buchenwald had three usages: as a Nazi concentration camp from 1937 to 1945, as a Soviet internment camp from 1945 to 1950, and as a memorial to legitimate the antifascist legend of the GDR from 1950 to 1990. 20 According to the commission, the memory of Special Camp No. 2 was subordinate to the primary memory of Buchenwald as a Nazi concentration camp. Furthermore, the actual memorial places and museum sites of the Nazi concentration camp and Soviet internment camp would have to be spatially distant from one another. While the Soviet Special Camp No. 2 would receive a separate exhibition space, it could not detract from the primacy and uniqueness of Nazi atrocities. The Commission finally recommended a correction to the one-sided antifascist representation of the concentration camp site that would involve a more nuanced understanding of the role of resisters and perpetrators while placing the monumental antifascist memorial site on Ettersberg Hill in critical perspective. The name of the memorial would change from the GDR's national inscription to a more neutral title—from Buchenwald National Warning and Memorial Place (Nationale Mahn- und Gedenkstatte Buchenwald) to Buchenwald Memorial (Gedenkstatte Buchenwald). Finally, the Commission recommended that the symbolic role of Buchenwald as a place of East German national legitimation that instrumentalized antifascism be incorporated into the full memory and representation of the contemporary site of Buchenwald.21 After 1989, the question arose whether Buchenwald should be a memorial to all victims of totalitarianism. For some, such a comprehensive memorial would reduce the distinction between not only victims and perpetrators, but also between the two authoritarian regimes. Although the debate over Buchenwald's double past in many ways represented a continuation of central issues raised during the historians' debate, in Jackel's opinion the Buchenwald debate differed in one important respect. Whereas the historians' debate raised the question of the uniqueness of the Holocaust in relation to German national identity, the Buchenwald debate did not attempt to find a positive national identity delinked from the Nazi past. 22 Instead, the emphasis of the committee and the appointment of a new director of Buchenwald was to preserve the authenticty of the site's multiple pasts while avoiding the blurring of distinctions between different historical moments. The overt task was how to preserve the different pasts without smoothing over their dark ambiguity. For Jackel, the issue of Buchenwald after 1989 was "to bring the two German pasts together without mixing them up." 2 3 The correction of historical narration is a question not only of restoring history from falsification, but also of reclaiming the authenticity of a certain

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past. The search for an authentic past assumes a true history that should be remembered over other versions. The preservation of former concentration camp sites from ruin and neglect is more than an attempt to maintain the memory of these camps; it is also an attempt to create a link between past and future generations. Through the physical link of actual objects and artifacts, the visiting public does not simply relive history "as it was," but instead comes into contact with the fragments and remains of that history. Although authenticity is easily conflated with notions of totality and closure, it does not necessarily mean a singular conception of history. Rather, one might at best achieve a kind of "fractured totality." 24 Just as everyday experience is fragmentary and incomplete, so one's memory of the past is comprised of fragments attained through the mediation of cultural artifacts. Buchenwald serves a painful example of the fractured totality of overlapping histories and of contemporary German struggles with the recent past. The heated debate surrounding the renarration of Buchenwald indicates both the tenacity of the recent past and the political implications of historical narration in the new Germany. Representing German Victimhood and Guilt: The Neue Wache and Unified German Memory Commemorating National Socialism and communism from the perspective of 1989 often results in an uneasy conflation of German guilt and victimhood. When the events of 1933-1989 are presented as one long authoritarian period, war and tyranny can easily be construed as external forces that simply befell the German nation. While memories of national guilt are divisive, memories of victimhood unify and simplify an otherwise ambiguous past. The 1995 restoration of Berlin's Neue Wache is emblematic of this conflation of guilt and victimhood. As the central German memorial to all victims of war and tyranny, the Neue Wache (The New Guardhouse Memorial) distinguishes neither between dictatorships nor between perpetrator and victim. Helmut Kohl's decision to restore the Neue Wache was not accidental; rather, it should be seen within (1) the history of the Neue Wache building; (2) the genre of West German war memorials; and (3) the normalization of German national identity during the 1980s. The Neue Wache renovation in the restored capital of Berlin marks a problematic continuation with the Bitburg policy of the late 1980s that stressed the formation of a German national identity unencumbered by the burden of the Nazi past. In short, the restoration of the Neue Wache symbolizes the ambiguous restoration of Germany as a normal nation in 1990. Questions of German guilt are replaced by symbolic reminders of Germany's normalcy in comparison with other European nations. Rather than focusing on rupture and difficulties

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in Germany's double past, the restored Neue Wache symbolizes unified national loss and victimhood. Since its construction in 1816, the Neue Wache has commemorated the invention and reinvention of German national identity. With each manifestation, it has linked the death of individual Germans with the birth of new German nations. 25 Various designs deliberately recall certain national moments while deemphasizing others. 26 Beginning with Heinrich Tessenow's interior renovation in 1931, the Neue Wache served as an official place of national mourning. Profoundly ritualistic and symbolic, the Neue Wache has represented in each of its historical permutations a focal point for social and national cohesion, and military honor. Similar to tombs for the unknown soldier built after World War I, its various designs attempted to offer meaning for the nameless individuals who died in the name of the German nation. Originally designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel to honor Friedrich Wilhelm III and Prussia's 1814 victory over Napoleon, the Neue Wache formed part of a larger project to emphasize the relationship between the Prussian military and the capital city of Berlin. Built next to the royal residence in the center of Berlin on Unter den Linden, the Neue Wache replaced the Alte Wache on the opposite side of the street. On its neoclassical facade, the goddess of victory is depicted leading ancient German warriors into battle. In 1822, statues of the Prussian military strategist Gerhard von Scharnhorst and Field Marshal Friedrich von Bulow were placed on either side of the building. After Germany's defeat in World War I and the monarchy's end in 1918, the Neue Wache lost its original function as a showplace for military guards and ceremonial guard parades. 27 Over the course of the next twelve years, from 1918-1930, the future of the Neue Wache became the focus of a controversial debate. The decision to convert the building into a war memorial was first made in 1924, in response to discussions on building a memorial for German soldiers killed in World War I. Renovated in 1931, around the same time as the construction of the French and American tombs to the unknown soldier, the Neue Wache became a place of national honor symbolizing the voluntary sacrifice of individuals for their nation. 28 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Heinrich Tessenow were the final contestants in the competition to redesign the Neue Wache. Mies proposed a dark interior with an engraving of the German eagle and the words "to the dead" (den Toten) on a central altar. While Mies's design signified both individual death and the death of the German empire, Tessenow's quasireligious design said less about German defeat than about voluntary sacrifice and mournful honor. After the jury voted in favor of Tessenow's design, the Neue Wache was renamed the Memorial Site for Those Killed in the World War (Geddchtnisstdtte fur die Gefallenen des Weltkrieges).29 Thus, German national iden-

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tity came to emphasize mourning instead of Prussian militarism, and a memorial to Germany's war dead replaced the workplaces of the Prussian guards. The renovation included the addition of a skylight, beneath which was placed a large block of black granite. A sculpted oak wreath was placed on the granite block accompanied by two slender candles and the simple inscription "1914-1918." Symbolizing both a sarcophagus and an altar, the interior invoked almost religious mourning and voluntary sacrifice for the nation. Hitler's 1933 rise to power brought another renovation to the Neue Wache. With the addition of a large iron cross behind the granite block, a silver wreath, and a new name (Place of Honor for Those Killed During the World War), the monument regained traces of its original military function. Moreover, with the cross as the primary symbol of German World War I cemeteries, the Nazi renovation explicitly linked military honor with Christian self-sacrifice.30 Despite severe damage sustained during World War II, the overall structure of the Neue Wache building remained intact. The silver wreath was stolen, and the granite block was deformed by fire. Tessenow's plea to leave the destroyed memorial as a reminder of war was rejected by the SED. In the immediate postwar years, the war-torn Neue Wache instead became the background for posters proclaiming German-Soviet friendship, peace, and prosperity, and decorated with the faces of Stalin, Wilhelm Pieck, and Otto Grotewahl. From the GDR's founding in 1949 until 1955, a contentious discussion ensued about whether the Neue Wache, as a symbol of Prussian militarism and fascist honor, should be restored. 31 In the end, the East German government decided to leave Tessenow's interior and added the words, "To the Victims of Fascism and Militarism" (den Op fern des Faschismus und Militarismus). In its deformation, the Neue Wache served as a jarring reminder of the destruction of war. In a May 1960 military ceremony, the Neue Wache was rededicated as a Place of Warning for the Victims of Fascism and Militarism (Mahnmal fiir die Opfer des Faschismus und Militarismus). By 1968, its redesign by the architect Lothar Kwasnitza reflected the birth of the GDR as an antifascist state. An eternal flame replaced Tessenow's black granite block; the symbol of the GDR was added with the inscription "To the Victims of Fascism and Militarism" (den Op fern des Faschismus und Militarismus). Copper plaques honoring the unknown resistance fighter and the unknown soldier were placed before an eternal flame. Buried beneath the plaques were two large urns containing the remains of an unknown resistance fighter and an unknown soldier; eighteen smaller urns surrounded them, nine of them filled with soil from various concentration camps, and nine with soil from different European battlefields.32 True to its Prussian origins and Nazi renovation, the East German government maintained the military function of the Neue Wache by using it

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as the focus for military parades. From 1962 until the GDR's end in 1990, the Neue Wache served as a place for the weekly changing of guards and as a site for the May 1 military ceremonies honoring East German antifascist heroes. In its Cold War incarnation, the East German Neue Wache symbolized both victimhood and resistance. The unknown soldier symbolized martyrdom for the nation and the unknown resistance fighter, antifascist struggle. In the end, both unknowns were remembered as sacrificial victims for the "antifascist" state of the GDR. Unification rendered the East German version of the Neue Wache obsolete. On January 27, 1993, Helmut Kohl's cabinet decided to redesign it as the Central Memorial of the Federal Republic of Germany for the Victims of War and Tyranny (Zentrale Gedenkstatte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland fiir die Opfer des Krieges und der Gewaltherrschaft). The newly restored monument would include Tessenow's original empty room and skylight. However, unlike Tessenow's temporal reference, "19141918," Kohl's choice, "To the Victims of War and Tyranny" (den Opfern von Krieg und Gewaltherrschaft) was open and inclusive, recalling inscriptions at the Bonn Cemetery (den Opfern der Kriege und der Gewaltherrschaft) and the GDR era Neue Wache, To the Victims of Fascism and Militarism. An enlarged version of Kathe Kollwitz's sculpture, Mother with Dead Son (Mutter mit totem Sohn), replaced Tessenow's black granite block and the GDR's eternal flame. This Pieta figure of maternal mourning abstracted German grief to a universal level. In a speech before the German Parliament in May 1993, Kohl argued for the necessity of a central national memorial to Germany's war dead: "There are political and moral considerations which make it necessary that we keep alive the memory and remembrance of the victims of war and tyranny in reunified Germany." 33 Kohl believed that Germany, like any other nation, deserved a traditional national memorial to its dead. Indeed, he characterized having such a memorial as part of "international protocol." The Neue Wache's prominent location—in Berlin's version of Washington D.C.'s Mall, close to the Reichstag, the Brandenburg Gate, and the German History Museum—makes it an ideal visiting place for foreign dignitaries and for wreath-laying ceremonies. Moreover, arguing that coping with military and civilian casualties formed part of the "normal" experience of German families of his generation, Kohl made a central memorial an integral part of the normalization of Germany. The Pieta would provide the correct sentiment of both mourning and honor by stressing female suffering rather than masculine military sacrifice.34 With the restored Neue Wache, German mourning for German victims would predicate German guilt for the Holocaust. Rather than completely restoring Tessenow's interior, Kohl and his appointed curator of the German History Museum, Christoph Stolzl argued for a renovation that would include aspects of Tessenow's interior design.

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Finally, after much heated debate, the Neue Wache was dedicated on November 14, 1995, the National Day of Mourning. Each incarnation of the Neue Wache evoked different aspects of German victimhood and national honor. Tessenow's design commemorated the death of German soldiers in World War I as a voluntary sacrifice for the German nation, while avoiding the historical context of German aggression. The Nazi version enshrined the death of German soldiers within a cult of military honor and quasi-religious veneration. In the GDR, the idea of the honorable dead widened to include unknown resistance fighters and unknown soldiers. German aggression and guilt for World War II were avoided in favor of emphasizing the voluntary sacrifice of the German resistance fighter and the victimhood of the German concentration camp inmates. In the GDR, the Neue Wache functioned as a living memorial to the East German resistance against fascism and as a place of national legitimation. 35 The latest restoration deliberately blurs distinctions between its original military function and its memorial status by commemorating all victims of war and tyranny. A unified German memorial implies a unified German past. By combining the victims of war with the victims of tyranny, all the victims of the Third Reich and the GDR are collectively commemorated. In many ways, the Neue Wache continues both the antifascist heritage of the GDR and the antitotalitarianism of the Federal Republic because National Socialism and communism are externalized into forces beyond individual control. The conflation of Nazi and Communist victims downplays Nazi crimes by focusing on German suffering and presupposes a shared past common to both the GDR and the Federal Republic. Because unified Germany has pasts, the rededicated Neue Wache attempts to bridge the gap between East and West through the trope of shared victimhood. The Neue Wache is a clear confirmation of Ernst Renan's claim that suffering unites more than joy does: "Where national memories are concerned, griefs are of more value than triumphs, for they impose duties, and require a common effort."36 Victimhood serves as a powerful force of national solidarity, whereas guilt divides an already deeply divided society. As Renan and Benedict Anderson have skillfully argued, national identity requires both the imagination of a shared community and the forgetfulness of divisive national events.37 In the Neue Wache, German guilt is displaced by creating an imagined community of victims and by blurring the building's original military function with national honor and sacrificial loss. It is not simply a renovation, but a reinvention and selective appropriation of previous designs highlighting German victimhood and national honor. In the case of reunified Germany, such a reinvention only works when German guilt is conflated with victimhood. The blow-up of Kollwitz's Pieta and inscription "To the Victims of War and Tyranny" explicitly links the birth of a new Germany to national victimhood from 1933-1989. Implicit

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within the updated restoration of the Neue Wache is the reinvention of Germany as a normal nation. The continuum between dictatorships becomes seamless and the distinction between victims and perpetrators is rendered meaningless. Genres of War Memorials The restoration of the Neue Wache has to be seen both within the general context of war memorials and within the particular context of German war memorials after World War II. War memorials are traditionally suffused with quasi-religious symbolism honoring individual death for the greater good of the nation. After the First World War, tombs of the unknown soldier became the symbol of the supreme sacrifice for the nation whereby death in anonymity signified a kind of political transcendence. War memorials symbolized national consensus and cohesion. Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., challenged this implicit assumption of national cohesion. Due to an overwhelming lack of national consensus about how to commemorate the war, American soldiers killed in Vietnam could not simply be honored with a traditional war memorial. And it is precisely because its design emphasizes the individual sacrifice of the soldiers without referring to the cause that the Vietnam Veterans Memorial functions so well. By inscribing the soldiers' names, the viewer focuses less on the reasons for death than on the fact of individual loss.38 The memorial thus breaks with tradition by acknowledging division rather than cohesion. The memorial's black marble further symbolizes mourning and a dark spot on American national history. The choice of a wall of names rather than figurative representations (which were subsequently added) emphasizes meaningless death, not meaningful sacrifice. The memorial thus transformed the traditional war memorial genre by challenging a singular conception of victimhood, adding a critical dimension by raising unsettling questions among the viewers. Unlike the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington Cemetery, which is white and guarded by soldiers, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial does not inter any anonymous remains. Instead it deliberately lists the inscribed names of soldiers who died amidst defeat and national division. Thus, the memorial portrays a negative national identity rather than a purely positive one, and commemorates fallen soldiers with a mixture of honor, defeat, and grief. Unified Germany's Neue Wache represents an expansion of the traditional war memorial to include not only fallen soldiers but also victims of dictatorships. While the Vietnam Veterans Memorial set the precedent for commemorating divisive military defeat, the Neue Wache also had to commemorate victims of National Socialism and communism. Combining the two groups of victims deemphasizes the historical context of suffering. Because war memorials are traditional places of military and national honor, the restoration of the Neue Wache in reunified Germany blurs the line

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between memorials built for the victims of German aggression and those commemorating Germans as victims of military suffering. With a legacy of military aggression and racial genocide, salvaging a sense of national honor becomes difficult. The function of war memorials is not to inspire criticism about a dark national past, but to remember and valorize those who died in the name of the nation. Within East and West Germany, memories of World War II cannot be separated from National Socialism and the Cold War. 39 The war is thus commemorated in two ways: either the victims of Nazi Germany or the Germans as victims are remembered. In the former, German aggression and the Nazi crimes against humanity provide the focus for commemoration. Victims of Nazi persecution include both Holocaust victims and German members of the resistance to Hitler. In such commemoration, relatively clear lines exist between victim and perpetrator. In the Federal Republic, memorials to Holocaust victims were placed in former concentration camps and in victims' former neighborhoods or places of deportation. Memorials to the members of the German resistance highlighted the bravery of those who opposed Nazi persecution. In East Germany, the genre of antifascist resistance served as a central legitimation of the GDR, while the persecution of Jews was downplayed in relation to Communist resistance. In the commemoration of Germans, war is remembered within the context of German military and moral defeat. In such commemoration, German victimhood includes civilian victims of Allied bombing, soldiers killed in battle, and Germans expelled from their homes east of the Oder and Neisse rivers. In the Federal Republic, German defeat was commemorated on the National Day of Mourning (Volkstrauertag), in war cemeteries honoring German soldiers killed during the war, and with the remains of bombed buildings left as reminders of war. In the GDR, civilian victimhood was linked to Soviet salvation and Communist resistance against fascist imperialism. Commemorated in Socialist Realist memorials and former concentration camp sites, East German defeat was remembered as a prelude to the birth of the GDR. The East German Gedenktag fiir die Opfer des faschistischen Terrors und Kampftag gegen Faschismus und imperialistischen Krieg (Commemoration Day for the Victims of Fascist Terror and Resistance Day against Fascism and Imperial War) commemorated the GDR's national heroes. In the Federal Republic, both the Volkstrauertag and war cemeteries linked German military losses with national honor. On the Volkstrauertag, considered since 1952 as the National Day of Mourning in the Federal Republic, ceremonies are held in Parliament and churches on the second Sunday in Advent, commemorating the victims of both world wars. All victims of war, including those of the Holocaust and the GDR are remembered together. The parliamentary event is organized by the Volksbund Deutscher Kriegsgraberfiirsorge (VDK), the Peoples' Committee for the

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Care of German War Graves, founded in 1919. As a private, statesponsored organization caring for the war graves of German soldiers, the VDK enshrines military death with national honor. Kohl was not the first chancellor who attempted to create a central national memorial to the German casualties of World War II. In 1964, a bronze plaque was laid in the Bonn Hofgarten with the inscription "To the Victims of War and Tyranny" (den Opfern der Kriege und der Gewaltherrschaft). In 1969, the plaque was moved to the Northern Cemetery in Bonn, where soldiers from both world wars were buried. On Volkstrauertag in 1969, commemorative wreaths were placed at the cemetery honoring Germany's war dead. By the mid-1970s, there were plans to construct a National Place of Warning and Honor in Bonn. In 1981, Chancellor Helmut Schmidt recommended the construction of a monument for those "who because of the errors and crimes of the Third Reich lost their lives, whether in prisons or concentration camps, whether bombed in their homeland or on the front of World War II." 40 Schmidt's statement seemed to anticipate the postunification conflation of victims, bystanders, and perpetrators. In May 1983, VDK representatives met to discuss the construction of a memorial for all of Germany's war dead; their recommended design was to have featured an enlarged crown of thorns symbolically commemorating the 2 million German casualties of World War I and the seven million of World War II. Amid protest from Jewish and Christian organizations, the suggestion was rejected in an extraparliamentary forum in the fall of 1984. 41 Relatives of German resistance members, among them Heinrich Albertz, Emmi and Walter Bonhoeffer, and Inge Aicher-Scholl, considered the monument "unrealizable" in the absence of a fundamental distinction between the victims of war, of the resistance, and of the Holocaust.42 Aside from its monumental appearance, the crown of thorns was too closely associated with Christian self-sacrifice, and grossly distorted German guilt and military aggression. The proliferation of West German countermonuments since 1990 challenges the standard war memorials that affirm national unity. Similar to Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial, countermonuments represent national division and uncertainty. Furthermore, these new conceptual forms of commemoration reflect the structure of public memory and forgetting.43 The postunification Neue Wache fits into the West German genre of war memorials by stressing victimhood and national cohesion. Yet, the use of the Pieta instead of a soldier enlarges the memorial function to include all victims—civilian and military, East and West, Nazi and Communist. It neatly avoids the issue of national division and defeat by emphasizing national cohesion through national victimhood. The Conflicted Normalization and Victimhood

of German Guilt

Kohl's restoration of the Neue Wache has to be seen within the context of his personal projects of presenting the German people with a positive

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image of their own history, and restoring Berlin as unified Germany's capital. Continuing the powerful gesture made at Bitburg, in which Kohl attempted to publicly disentangle German national identity from the singularity of the Holocaust, the restored Neue Wache symbolizes a normalization of representing German victimhood and national identity. In many ways, the Neue Wache continues the reversal of the German-Jewish question that Bitburg facilitated. Just as Reagan's Bitburg visit symbolically whitewashed the distinction between SS officers and German soldiers, the restored Neue Wache makes no distinction between victims of Nazi Germany and German victims of war. Instead, everyone becomes a victim of unfortunate historical circumstances. Both are places of national death and honor. In the military cemetery of Bitburg, death represents the supreme sacrifice for the nation. The Neue Wache, with its interred remains and soil from battlefields and concentration camps, also serves as a highly symbolic place of honorable death. Presented as a quasi cemetery for the German people, the sacrifice of the casualties is equated with national honor. While Bitburg contains the physical remains of former SS officers, the Neue Wache, in its open inscription "To the Victims of War and Tyranny" honors all of the dead, irrespective of historical context. By commemorating the victims of National Socialism and communism together, the restored Neue Wache goes one step beyond Bitburg. As the differences between the two regimes are flattened, German victimhood is emphasized over German guilt. Especially given the extent of unofficial cooperation with the Stasi in the GDR, the line between Communist perpetrator and victim of communism is deeply ambiguous at best. While the combination of civilian and military victims implies national self-sacrifice, the combination of regimes downplays questions of individual guilt in favor of collective victimhood. Public criticism of the Neue Wache's proposed restoration fell into three broad categories. The first focused on the question of whether unified Germany really needed a central national memorial. The second asked whether an enlarged Pieta provided an adequate memorial for all victims of National Socialism, the GDR, and the world wars. The third addressed the highly controversial inscription "To the Victims of War and Tyranny." With Berlin as the restored capital, Kohl argued for the necessity of a central national memorial. The decision to move the capital provided the perfect occasion to erect a national memorial that both Germans and foreigners could visit. For Christoph Stolzl, as Kohl's appointed director of the German History Museum, the Kollwitz sculpture represented the correct sentiment of the Federal Republic. Arguing that Tessenow's original granite altar and wreath were reminders of Prussian militarism, Stolzl disagreed with criticism of the Kollwitz sculpture. 44 Citing Kohl's intention to highlight the suffering of women in time of war, he argued for the immediacy of the Neue Wache as a historical link for younger generations. Re-

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sponding to criticism about the lack of official discussion (either in public hearings or in architectural competitions) before Kohl's announcement of renovation of the Neue Wache, Stolzl defended the decision as an appeal to tradition. Instead of entirely restoring Tessenow's interior, the updated restoration signified for Stolzl "a sign of Germany's new position on the catastrophe of this century." 45 Universal mourning replaces guilt while the normalization of German national identity replaces notions of the German Sonderweg and exceptionalism. Reunification marks the end of unnatural division and the return to normal nationhood. For Kollwitz's grandchildren, the restoration and rededication of the Neue Wache was an attempt to erase its previous military function; moreover, they argued that the restoration of the statues of Friedrich von Billow and Gerhard von Scharnhorst conflicted with Kollwitz's outspoken pacifism.46 From Schinkel's 1816 design until their removal in 1948 by the SED, the statues stood on either side of the Neue Wache; thus, their return after unification restored the subtext of Prussian victory. The sculptures also displaced the sentiment of mourning with military honor. 47 Kohl and Stolzl felt, however, that the restoration of the statues was necessary, given that the Neue Wache, as a central German memorial, had to reflect its original Prussian heritage. The Neue Wache exterior would remain faithful to Schinkel, but the interior would largely reflect Tessenow's design. Thus, the military implications of the statues would be offset by the mournful sentiment of the interior. The enlarged Pieta proved problematic on both aesthetic and political grounds. Enlarged and taken out of its original private context, the work became a national symbol of self-sacrifice. Aesthetically, the enlargement distorted Kollwitz's original intention. As a powerful antiwar statement, Kollwitz's original 1937 sculpture—only thirty-eight centimeters high— symbolized her personal grief after the death of her son, who had served as a volunteer in World War I.48 The fact that another artist, Rolf Szymanski, enlarged Kollwitz's work to 152 centimeters without the artist's consent inevitably alters the original meaning. As the sculpture moves from the private to the national context in unified Germany, Kollwitz's message of senseless loss is absorbed within the larger framework of German victimhood. While the image of the Pieta clearly symbolizes grief, to those familiar with Kollwitz's work her ardent pacificism undercuts the traditional national symbol of meaningful self-sacrifice. Her popularity in both Germanys made her ironically well-suited to represent unified German victimhood and guilt. The personal context of Kollwitz's original sculpture shows the senselessness of war; within the context of the restored Neue Wache, however, it abstracts political death to a universal level. In many ways, the sculpture facilitates universalization because it is both an image of private grief and an expression of Kollwitz's deep pacifism. The image of the mother and dead son effectively transcends conventional

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references to Christian and military self-sacrifice by evoking maternal loss. While the Christian connotations of the Pieta symbolize innocent sacrifice, victimhood, and higher redemption, the form also serves as a common tombstone in West German war cemeteries. Since 1945, depictions of the Pieta and the crucifix have been the predominant forms of memorial used in war cemeteries cared for by the VDK. With this scene of maternal loss, German military aggression and racial extermination were subsumed under the notion of civilian victimhood. One of the most outspoken critics of Kohl's proposed restoration of the Neue Wache, Reinhart Koselleck, strongly objected to the use of Kollwitz's sculpture. For him, the sculpture's original portrayal of a relationship between mother and son dramatically changes when enlarged and transformed into the central symbol of national mourning. Within the context of Tessenow's restored interior (originally commemorating soldiers killed during World War I), Kollwitz's enlarged sculpture conflates national grief and military honor, 49 and downplays the particular historical context of German victimhood. Instead, both the dead soldier and his mother are remembered as victims. The reference to the dead as "victims" involves not only a leveling of perpetrator and victim, but also a double use of victimhood. While "Victims of War and Tyranny" transforms all of the dead into victims of history, the definition of "victim" can be read as a victim for something or a victim of something. As Koselleck notes, the term "victim" had a positive meaning before 1945 by implying that one was a "victim for their country" (Opfer fur das Vaterland) and had chosen to sacrifice himself for the higher cause of religion or the nation. After 1945, the term "victim" implied that one was a "victim of something" (Opfer von etwas). The meaning of Opfer slipped from active to passive.50 Thus, one became a victim of totalitarianism and war. Because of this semantic shift, everyone appears to have been a passive victim of something beyond his control. One no longer actively chooses to be a sacrificial victim for a higher cause, but is instead subject to victimhood. One becomes a victim of unfortunate historical circumstances. Koselleck further argued against the use of the term "victim," not only because of its immediate reference to the GDR's inscription "To the Victims of Fascism and Militarism," but also and more importantly, because Victimhood in a national monument implies a lack of agency and that all Germans were in some way victims of a hegemonic amorphous regime. Victims in a national monument does not introduce the question of perpetrators but rather induce an institutionalized forgetfulness [sic].51 The Neue Wache's emphasis on victimhood levels the differences between concentration camp victim and soldier, victim of Stalin's terror and Germans expelled from their homes in Soviet occupied zones.

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By casting German victimhood in such universal terms as war, tyranny, and maternal mourning, German aggression and complicity are downplayed and forgotten. Koselleck proposed changing Kohl's inscription to a more nuanced and detailed differentiation of victimhood. In an attempt to avoid the equalization of the experiences of casualties, he suggested "The dead: killed in war, murdered, gassed, killed, missing" (den Toten: gefalien, ermordet, vergast, umgekommen, vermisst).52 Such differentiation would avoid both a hierarchy of victimhood and an erasure of German aggression. After repeated criticism from individuals including Koselleck, Ignatz Bubis (the head of the Central Jewish Council in Germany), and Jerzy Kanal (the head of the Jewish Council in Berlin), the Kohl administration decided to place two plaques outside the interior room of the Neue Wache. 53 One plaque differentiates the victims commemorated at the newly renovated Neue Wache, and the other gives a chronological history of the Neue Wache building from Schinkel to the GDR. The text for the differentiation of victims was suggested by the SPD in its opposition to Kohl's initial inscription. Adapted from Richard von Weizsacker's famous anniversary speech on May 8, 1985, the plaque lists the various categories of victims remembered at the Neue Wache. 54 It differentiates the civilian victims, soldiers, and civilians expelled from their homelands from the murdered Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals. Although the plaques (a political afterthought) were designed to distinguish between perpetrator and victim, they unwittingly create a hierarchy of victimhood. Passive German victims of war and tyranny are emphasized over the victims of German aggression. By commemorating German civilian deaths in a memorial originally devoted to military honor, the Neue Wache conflates German victimhood, guilt, and national honor. Unlike the proposed Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, the restored monument deemphasizes German guilt and complicity, honoring instead German victimhood in two world wars and in the eras of National Socialism and communism. Combining the events of 19331989 into a seamless continuum of history normalizes the uniqueness of the Holocaust within German national identity. In an attempt to forge a common past for a formerly divided nation, the Neue Wache symbolizes Germany's reinvention as much as its reunification and restoration. In a nation with two pasts, the most recent shared past is that of Nazi Germany. However, given the different ideological interpretations of the Third Reich in the GDR and the Federal Republic, victimhood provides the most common commemorative theme. As in earlier designs, the current representation links individual death to the birth of a new Germany. The restoration of Germany as a normal nation is a partial reinvention of Germany wherein National Socialism and communism are presented as pasts comparable to those of "other" normal nations. Continuing the legacy of Bitburg, the restored Neue Wache emphasizes reconciliation and the uneasy conflation of guilt and victimhood.

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While the inscription "To the Victims of War and Tyranny" evades the question of guilt, Kollwitz's Pieta universalizes German victimhood, focusing on human suffering and frailty. Yet, the question of how one defines normalcy remains unanswered. As Saul Friedlander poignantly wrote in response to Martin Broszat's plea for the historicization of National Socialism, "[I]ndeed, normal life with the knowledge of ongoing massive crimes committed by one's own nation and one's own society is not so normal after all." 55 The fact remains that neither National Socialism nor communism was normal, but deeply pathological. The attempt to combine all the victims into one larger referent of "victim" distorts the terrible complexity and ambiguity of German history in the twentieth century. The Holocaust Memorial: Monumental or Critical Memory? Although plans for a Holocaust Memorial began in the Federal Republic before unification, the memorial became increasingly important with the restoration and reinvention of the German nation after 1989/1990. With its proposed location in the restored capital of Berlin, the Holocaust Memorial was immediately framed within the double past of the new Germany. As the seat of the former Nazi headquarters and as a divided city during the Cold War, the city of Berlin is imbued with a symbolic meaning different from other German cities. In many ways, the city of Berlin is itself a lieu de memoire for Nazi and Communist pasts. The Neue Wache and proposed Holocaust Memorial were disturbing and controversial because they seemed to be more concerned with the reinvention of Germany than with remembrance of the victims of National Socialism. While the Neue Wache was explicitly dedicated to all victims of war and tyranny, the proposed Holocaust Memorial was specifically intended to honor the singular memory of the murdered Jews of Europe. However, from the moment of its inception, the Holocaust Memorial provoked controversy. Aside from the central question of the exclusion of nonJewish groups from the memorial, the most pressing question raised during the debate was whether such a memorial would foster or block memory. While some Germans agreed on the necessity to commemorate the Holocaust in Berlin, the grandiose scale and form of the proposed Holocaust Memorial offended many individuals and groups, and provoked a heated debate in German newspapers among artists, historians, politicians, and intellectuals about the most appropriate German memory of the Holocaust. The idea of the large Holocaust Memorial was first publicly raised in 1988 by the citizens' initiative group Perspective Berlin. Spearheaded by the charismatic and controversial journalist/TV talk show hostess Lea Rosh and supported by the historian Eberhard Jackel, the group collected more than 10,000 signatures, including those of Willy Brandt, Giinter Grass,

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Heiner Miiller, and Christa Wolf, as well as 120,000 marks in support of the project. Since other countries had central Holocaust Memorials, the group argued for the necessity of a central Holocaust Memorial in Germany. When the gypsies (Sinti and Roma) complained of their exclusion from the Memorial, the Berlin Senate clarified that a separate memorial to them would be built later, at a respectful distance from the Holocaust Memorial. For Lea Rosh, the memorial was important "to publicly document that we accept the burden of our history, that we, however, remember to write a new chapter in our history." 56 The group originally proposed to erect a memorial on the former headquarters of the Gestapo, SS, and Reichs State Security Police. However, the place was already claimed by another citizens' initiative group who intended to uncover the history of the former Nazi headquarters. The heated differences that soon emerged centered on how best to remember this lieu de memoire—as a place of the perpetrators or as a monument to the victims. Memory quickly became politicized into whose memory was the more appropriate for contemporary Germany. The two groups disagreed over whether to remember the place as the "Topography of Terror" or as a "Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe." The West German historian Reinhard Riirup's quest for the history of the perpetrators led him to the central place of the perpetrators: an abandoned square city block divided between East and West Berlin.57 In looking for the infamous Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8, Riirup uncovered not only the history of National Socialism but also the repression and forgetfulness of that history in the Federal Republic. Immediately after the war, the area was abandoned, and the remains of the buildings were dynamited and left in ruins. With the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 through part of the former Nazi headquarters, the area was left in further ruin. As Thomas Lutz, a consultant to the Topography of Terror ironically noted, the abandoned area represented "a mirror image of the societal repression of history." 58 In 1980, various organizations pleaded for the erection of a memorial on the site. By 1982, the SPD recommended the construction of a museum and documentation center, but with the architectural competition new problems emerged. The competing artists were encouraged by the German Parliament to coordinate "the historical depth of the location with a useful park, playground, and walking grounds." 59 Although two artists won the architectural competition in 1984 for their proposal to cover the area with steel plates and steel trees, their project was pushed aside as Kohl's proposed German History Museum, to be built near the Reichstag, took center stage in West German politics. The citizens' initiative group Aktives Museum, led by Riirup, argued for the centrality of the location as a place of memory. It strongly disagreed with attempts to harmonize the history of the location with peaceful parks and playgrounds. By the end of 1985, the Initiative for the Study of the

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Gestapo Area was founded. After numerous exhibits and discussions, part of the rubble in the area was cleared, and the foundation of cellars and kitchens was exposed. In the following year, under the direction of Riirup, the provisional exhibition "Topography of Terror" opened, coinciding with the 750th anniversary of the city of Berlin. With the growing popularity of the Topography of Terror, partially due to its central tourist location, the exhibit became permanent. In 1990, members of the Senate recommended the construction of a central exhibition, document center, and meeting house rather than a formal memorial. The exhibit would chronicle not only the Nazi past of the area, but also the Federal Republic's repression of the area's history. Curators of the Topography of Terror demonstrated the postwar repression of National Socialism by deliberately leaving the remains and overgrown rubble for visitors to physically climb on and around. Rather than erect a monument to the perpetrators or the victims, it was decided to let the place of the perpetrators speak for itself through images and texts dispersed throughout the site. Atop the ruins of the Reich's headquarters, long overgrown during the postwar years, the viewer sees a photo and reads a brief chronicle of the actual building, and imagines how it was during National Socialism. Using traces and ruins rather than figurative symbols, the Topography of Terror attempts to link the viewer to the past through imagination and emptiness. Its emphasis on fragmentation and the layering of history is a critique of both National Socialism and the repression of the past. While Riirup was not against the idea of a Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, he vehemently objected to its construction on the site of the Reich's former headquarters. Rather than simply remembering one group of victims, he wanted to emphasize that all the Nazi persecutions originated in the location of the Topography of Terror. 60 For him, the location of the proposed memorial conflicted with the history of the site that was a place more of the perpetrators than of the victims. For members of the Topography of Terror initiative, The discussions about the form of the site are so lengthy because a large monument is the easiest but also the false solution . . . the Gestapo site must be a place where the perpetrators, as well as the structures in which they worked and the contemporary consequences of these structures, can be reflected on . . . one cannot speak about perpetrators if one doesn't know their actions. The Gestapo site, however, must also be a place of memory for the victims.61 Rather than promote a hierarchy of victimhood by commemorating only the Jewish victims, the Topography of Terror would provide an active pedagogical site for viewers to interact with. It was intentionally nonfigurative and nonmonumental. Rather than simply erect a large monument, the To-

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pography of Terror would raise questions and inform viewers about the history of National Socialism. By 1989, Perspective Berlin and the newly formed Committee for the Erection of a Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe were granted city property between the Brandenburg Gate and Potsdamer Platz as the new site for the Holocaust Memorial. A no-man's-land during divided Germany, the area contains the buried ruins of the Third Reich, the former Ministergarden, and is close to Hitler's bunker. From this place, Hitler declared one month before his death on April 2, 1945, that one "would be eternally grateful to National Socialism for having eliminated the Jews from Germany and Europe." 62 Its prominent location in the center of Berlin, across from the Goethe Monument in Tiergarten, and its enormous size (20,000 square meters) meant that the memorial would not be missed. Lea Rosh originally proposed the construction of a monument by a Swiss architect: a huge subterranean Star of David with simulated concentration camp gates through which visitors would enter into rooms of mourning and exhibition space. But once the government of Berlin became involved by granting the memorial such prime land in the center of Germany's future restored capital, along with its initial donation of 4 million marks toward the cost of the memorial, Rosh's idea was dismissed and an international architectural competition was announced. The Architectural Design

Competition

In February 1994, an architectural design competition began, open to German artists and foreigners who had lived in Germany for at least six months. A total of 528 individual artists and artists' groups participated. Twelve international artists, among them Rebecca Horn and Richard Serra, were invited to participate in the competition. 63 In the beginning it wasn't clear whether a memorial or a museum would be the more appropriate representation of German national memory of the Holocaust. For Ignatz Bubis, a memorial was singularly insufficient. Instead, he argued for a museum and document center as a place of learning. 64 Others, especially Lea Rosh, argued for the symbolic necessity of a large memorial. Presented around the same time as the debates about the Holocaust Memorial, David Libeskind's proposed design for a Holocaust Museum in Berlin was deemed monstrous, unorthodox, and expressionist.65 The Berlin Senate, the Bonn government, and Lea Rosh each chose five people for the jury. The fifteen members predictably were individuals with strong, differing opinions about the proposed memorial. They included Lea Rosh, the initiator of the Holocaust Memorial project; Eberhard Jackel, a historian critical in the redesigning of Buchenwald; and Ignatz Bubis, the head of the central Jewish Council in Germany. The public announcement of the competition stated: "It is the Germany of today that has the entire responsibility . . . to accept the burden of German history . . . to make a

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sign for a new chapter in the human community in which no injustice may be possible against minorities." 66 The results of the competition were announced in March 1995, and the models were displayed throughout the spring and early summer, coinciding with the unprecedented and extensive 50th anniversary commemorations of the end of the Second World War. Among the proposals were an eighteen-meter steel oven that would burn day and night; a Ferris wheel with deportation boxcars instead of seats, called "People's Festival and People's Murder" (Volksfest und Volksvernichtung); and an enormous 120-meter Star of David floating in water, with broken yellow stars and hearts in the center. Within the large star, individuals could walk into "Work of Mourning Places" (Trauerarbeitspldtze) for reflection and exhibits. This large Star of David was to be encircled by smaller stars. One group proposed to make a monument out of donated combs. Another artist proposed to float a 4,000-ton iron block in salt water, representing tears, that would slowly corrode over 40,000 years. Ninth place in the competition went to a proposed empty grave site which would cost over 100 million marks to build.67 Ranging from the kitsch to the monstrous, the entries received heated attention both in the new Germany and abroad. One of the few reflective proposals, by the artists Frieder Schnock and Renata Stih, received eleventh place. Their proposal, "Bus Stop" was simply a garage where people could board special red buses that would take them to places where the Holocaust was planned and carried out. For the artists, "a giant monument has no effect and ultimately becomes invisible . . . giving people a way to visit the authentic crime scenes would be far more effective."68 The artists' previous work in Berlin, Place of Memory, is comprised of eighty signs hung in a former Jewish area of Berlin (Bayerischer Viertel). The signs list and illustrate the laws and rules against Jews that were visible in public places after the Nuremberg Racial Laws went into effect in 1935. 69 Because the jury couldn't decide who should receive the first prize, they picked Simon Ungers and an artists' collective led by Christine JackobMarks, and left the final decision to representatives from the federal government, the city of Berlin, and the citizens' initiative. Ungers proposed an enormous empty space bounded by a huge, rectangular steel frame. The names of the death camps were to be engraved inside the steel structure so that when the sun shone through the perforated steel, the names of thirty concentration and death camps would appear on the ground and on the visitors themselves. In this way, the visitors would physically stand in "the shadows of history." For Ungers, the four steel beams symbolized nothing less than "a gigantic burden." 70 The other first prize winner proposed a large tombstone the size of a football field with the names of the 4. 2 million Jews murdered during the Holocaust gradually inscribed on it. Eighteen stones from Masada in Israel,

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representing the eighteen countries from which individuals killed in the Holocaust had come, were to be transported and placed on top of the tombstone, symbolizing both Jewish resistance against the Romans and the Jewish tradition of honoring the dead. While artists were making their proposals more economically feasible, Lea Rosh unilaterally decided in June 1995 that she would initiate the tombstone memorial, regardless of the jury's decision of a stalemate. Three days after the decision in favor of the tombstone memorial was reached, Helmut Kohl objected to the form and size of the memorial. While the federal government considered the memorial important, both of the jury's choices were deemed too monumental. According to a government spokesman, "The discussion about the form of the memorial has to be continued with the goal to achieve a wide consensus among all the participants." 71 In response to Kohl's objections to the memorial's enormous size, Lea Rosh quipped, "The past is gigantic and not the memorial." 72 Critics of the memorial disagreed for different reasons. While Kohl was concerned that the size of the memorial would conflict with other, more positive images of German national identity, the Green Party/ Biindis 90 was afraid that the memorial would bury the past. For them, "both proposed monumental suggestions stand in danger of burying memory." 73 The Jewish historian Arno Lustiger agreed with Kohl's decision and pleaded for the funding of former concentration camp sites and a monument that was "not monumentally but humanly shaped." 74 In the end, a decision was reached to postpone the construction until a later date and to limit the competition for a revised memorial to the seven finalists. In 1997 three public forums were held to discuss the competition. A new committee was formed, comprised of museum directors Christoph Stolzl and Dieter Ronte, Berlin architect Josef Paul Kleinhues, German art historian Werner Hofmann, and the American professor James Young. Architects were invited to submit designs to the committee. In June 1999 the German parliament (314-209 with 14 abstentions) approved a plan to build the Holocaust Memorial designed by Peter Eisenmann. 75 Scheduled to be built between the Potsdamer Platz and newly reopened Reichstag, the memorial would combine a field of more than 2,000 stone pillars with a documentation/museum center. The sheer size of the memorial, coupled with its prominent location in the center of Berlin, emphasizes the ambiguous link between the new and old Berlin Republics. Furthermore, the recent discovery of parts of Joseph Goebbels's bunker beneath the site of the proposed memorial underscores the difficulty of constructing a simple memorial to the Holocaust in Germany's capital. Perhaps the location of the memorial over the ruined bunker is an ironically appropriate place of memory that calls attention not only to the murder of 6 million Jews, but also to the rubble of German history buried beneath the new Berlin.

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The Controversy The controversy surrounding the Holocaust Memorial was not only specifically directed at the artistic design of the memorial itself; as in the earlier debates over Buchenwald and the Neue Wache, the controversy addressed the appropriate memory of National Socialism. While criticism focused on the grandiose size of the proposed memorial and the problematic inscription of names, larger questions emerged about the necessity of such a memorial in Berlin. The Holocaust Memorial raised the difficult question of whether memorials and monuments in general are merely constructed as alibis that make it convenient to deposit memory into stone and then forget about the past, or whether monuments can foster any sort of critical memory. Echoing Robert Musil's famous quote—"There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument"—the proposed Holocaust Memorial in its grandiose and gigantic size threatened to silence memory rather than foster it.76 For many critics, there were already so many memorials and plaques in Germany, and especially in Berlin, that one ran the risk of no longer noticing them because both abstract and figurative monuments too easily become part of the city landscape. The establishment of yet another monument could invariably become a perfunctory gesture of ritualized memory where one remembers in order to forget. For many critics, the Holocaust Memorial in particular symbolized a "politics of closure" rather than of memory. Ignatz Bubis favored Ungers's model with the names of concentration and death camps rather than the tombstone model with 4.2 million names. For him, the specific names excluded anonymous deaths and, furthermore, the figure of 4.2 million names was misleading because no one really knows how many Jews were killed in the Holocaust. Although Ungers's model was more inclusive and allowed more reflection, the problem remained of how to include the Soviet Jews who were shot in mass executions rather than killed in concentration camps. 77 Lea Rosh found Ungers's model problematic because it included the names of concentration camps where Jews were not murdered. For her, the centrality of the memorial had to be the murdered Jews of Europe. 78 For the Jewish political commentator Henryk M. Broder, the artistic proposals were gigantic and sorely missed the point. Rather than build a huge monument to the Holocaust, Broder, like Lustiger, advocated the funding of former concentration camps sites that are gradually deteriorating. He also argued that the German government could better spend its money assisting remaining survivors of the Holocaust rather than appeasing the consciences of Germans. For Broder, the memorial was more about Germans and Germany than about the memory of the victims. It was not so much the memory of the victims that motivated the memorial but the need for certain Germans to publicly display their acceptance of history. The

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memorial seemed to be less about Jews than about Germans and German national identity.79 Some commentators compared the issue of names and naming with the U.S. Vietnam Veterans Memorial on Washington's Mall. Maya Lin's controversial design was one of the first countermonuments that deliberately went against the grain of national monuments erected for the purpose of national glory and social cohesion. Instead, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, in its nonfigurative stark simplicity, acknowledges the shame and rupture of a national past along with national mourning. Such countermonuments attempt to foster interaction and critical engagement with the viewer by calling attention to ambivalence rather than closure. 80 However, just as the liturgical calendar can both inspire reflection on one's inner life and become a time of perfunctory memory, monuments and memorials also have the potential to simply ritualize reflection into an obligatory deference to the past. Thus, monuments paradoxically become places not of remembrance but of ritualized forgetfulness. Unlike traditional monuments such as the Neue Wache, which highlight honorable death in the name of the nation, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial foregrounds the ambiguous combination of loss and national shame. As visitors descend into the open V-shape of the wall and approach the engraved names of Americans killed in Vietnam, the memorial loses its monumentality and becomes a private space for visitors to reflect and remember the past. For many critics in the United States, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was problematic because its open, somber space for reflection did not explicitly honor or glorify the soldiers' deaths. Such openness was attractive to German critics of Rosh's Holocaust Memorial because rather than ascribe a singular memory, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial encouraged ambiguity and multiple memories. The grandiose size of the Holocaust Memorial threatened to bury the past rather than create a link between past and future generations. Moreover, unlike the engraved names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial that were presented in an open space, the Holocaust Memorial offered a totalizing, singular memory of victimhood. For many, the engraved names were more exclusive than inclusive, and closed any possible space for reflection into an official, perfunctory place for national wreath-laying ceremonies: "The danger of a theatrically staged, ritualized unburdening ceremony is great. The place will be treated more for diplomatic functions and less as place of memory." 81 Ironically, while the artists intended to personalize the memorial by engraving the names of victims, the effect was one of closure and totalization rather than of openness and reflection. For the artists Frieder Schnock and Renata Stih, it was unclear for whom the Holocaust Memorial was constructed—for the survivors, future generations, or contemporary Germans. For Schnock, the proposed Holocaust Memorial was more of a "Lea Rosh Memorial" than a memorial to the

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victims. It was a glorification of those who initiated the memorial rather than an active engagement with history. It was more about "good Germans" than about an active engagement with the past. For the artists, both first prizes were attempts to bury the past, to draw a final line between past and present, rather than to critically engage with the past. 8 2 As a large tombstone, the memorial represented German inability to confront history and symbolized a tombstone for burying the past. The art historian and critic Silke Wenk framed the issue of the Holocaust Memorial within its location in central Berlin. With unification, the restoration and reinvention of Germany is visible in the decision to restore Berlin as the national capital of Germany by moving the federal government from Bonn to Berlin; restoring Berlin's central railroad stations, destroyed during the war and closed during the division of Berlin; and renewing Potsdamer Platz as the center of Berlin. For her, the construction of the Holocaust Memorial has to be seen within such a reconstruction of Berlin as the nation's capital. 83 The fact that the Holocaust Memorial would be a national memorial in the center of Berlin on the site of perpetrators, close to the former Gestapo headquarters and Hitler's bunker, carries a special weight. With the return of Berlin as the national capital, one witnesses the radical return of the German nation. And yet, the location of the Holocaust Memorial in the place of the perpetrators conflicts with the function of a memorial dedicated to the murdered Jews of Europe. Rather than critical reflection on the perpetrators, as at the Topography of Terror, the Holocaust Memorial offers a model of simplistic identification. For Wenk, the construction of the Neue Wache and the Holocaust Memorial conveniently transforms all Germans into victims of National Socialism. The visitor identifies not only with the individual Jewish names engraved on the memorial but also with the Jews as larger "victims" of a criminal regime. A "central" and "national" memorial wants to be a sign of national identity.84 Yet, national monuments assume a linear continuity between the past and present manifestations of the nation. The Holocaust Memorial fosters the deeply problematic identification of "Germans as victims" rather than a critical engagement with the difficult legacy of the perpetrators. Commenting on the perversity of the proposals from the deportation-railroad car Ferris wheel to the broken Star of David, Wenk finds a general trend of "a fascination with catastrophe": "The fascination with decline which is clear in many proposals in their written and visual metaphors (deep water, holes, craters) speaks about an impossible wish for a place in history where an unbroken national identity can be thought about." 85 Such an unbroken identity, for Wenk, is possible only when contemporary Germans also consider themselves as victims. Because the Holocaust Memorial is part of the national renewal and reinvention of the German nation, it becomes yet another manifestation of the normalization tendency within the political culture of the Federal Republic since the 1980s.

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For the artist Horst Hoheisel, the proposed Holocaust Memorial could only bury the past. His memorial proposed to destroy the Brandenburg Gate and scatter the crushed pieces over the memorial area, which would then be covered by granite plates. The destruction of the Brandenburg Gate would mean the destruction of the symbol of unbroken German national identity. Realizing that his proposal would never win, Hoheisel intended to inspire controversy and reflection about the monumentality of such a central and national memorial in Germany. The memorial in the country of the perpetrators has to be completely different, it has to reflect on the perpetrators. Otherwise, Germany shifts unnoticed into the countries of the victims of Nazi terror and suddenly the perpetrators disappear under this memorial and everyone is a victim of "tyranny" which has broken around us like a natural catastrophe.86 Hoheisel feared that with such gigantic monuments in the place of the perpetrators, Hitler would be transformed into a kind of natural catastrophe or a band of criminal thugs without popular support. Criticizing both the Neue Wache and the Holocaust Memorial for encouraging identification with the victims of tyranny; Hoheisel argued for a more reflective memorial that would confront rather than bury the past. Some German critics, including Hoheisel, agreed with the American commentator James Young that the actual debate about the Holocaust Memorial was more important than the memorial itself.87 In response to the question of which proposed memorial was the best, Young argued that the best memorial or place of German memory about the Holocaust is the incomplete debate and confrontation with the past. For him, monuments and memorials, in their attempt to represent memory, are structurally incapable of seizing the past. Whereas dialogue keeps the memory of the Holocaust alive, a fixed central memorial is an act of closure and means the end of active memory. Fearing that the gigantic tombstone memorial would bury not only the Nazi past but also the memory of that past, Young argues for the necessary incompleteness of the Holocaust Memorial project and the openness of continual debate about how to remember the Holocaust in Germany. 88 Ironically, while the idea of Lea Rosh's initiative to remember the murdered Jews of Europe was an attempt not to blur distinctions between victims and perpetrators, as well as an attempt to memorialize the uniqueness of the Holocaust in German memory, the monstrous form of the memorial threatened to musealize rather than remember the past. Since taking office in 1998, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has pushed hard for a resolution to the Holocaust Memorial dispute. At the urging of Michael Naumann, his minister of culture, a compromise between a monument and a museum was found. Eisenmann compromised with Naumann

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by agreeing to reduce the number of pillars from 3,000 to 2,000 and to add a building to house an archive, information center and exhibition space.89 With such an addition, the site is no longer solely about memory and warning, but also about education and historical knowledge. The Goldhagen Controversy: A Second Historians' Debate? That Daniel Goldhagen's book, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust sparked controversial criticism among American and German historians was not surprising; however, the warm reception it received from the German public despite such vehement criticism suggests a broader change in the self-understanding of many Germans. Even though many respected historians and intellectuals who were active in the historians' debate sharply criticized Goldhagen's monocausal thesis of anti-Semitism, the German public by and large sided with him as a kind of pop hero. Published in the United States in 1995, Hitler's Willing Executioners analyzed the police battalions (Ordnungspolizei) of Eastern Europe who moved in after the Wehrmacht. 90 They were not members of the political elite or bureaucrats, but "ordinary" men with families and modest education. These lower-class men were officers of the death marches who kept on killing even though Heinrich Himmler had ordered them to stop by the end of the war. Goldhagen chose the police battalions for his case study because through them, he could address the larger question of how the Holocaust could have happened and why it happened in Germany. He wanted to understand the mentality of the killers, and thus chose the most mundane of examples rather than the most extraordinary. He intentionally didn't focus on the death camps or the victims, but on ordinary Germans who massacred Jews. While Christopher Browning's book, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, covered much the same material; he didn't argue that the police battalions were representative of ordinary Germans. 91 They were, as his title indicates, ordinary men, but were not indicative of a wider trend among Germans. Goldhagen flatly rejected Browning's claim and argued strongly that German anti-Semitism was the sole motivation for killing. While Browning acknowledges that other factors—such as fear of not following orders, desire for career advancement, and simple human weakness—may have affected those who served in the police battalions, Goldhagen maintained the singularity of anti-Semitism as the overriding cause of genocide. The conclusion of this book is that anti-Semitism moved many thousands of "ordinary" Germans—and would have moved millions more, had they been appropriately positioned—to slaughter Jews. Not economic hardship, not the coercive means of a totalitarian state, not social psychological pressure, not invariable psy-

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chological propensities, but ideas about Jews that were pervasive in Germany, and had been for decades, induced ordinary Germans to kill unarmed, defenseless Jewish men, women, and children by the thousands, systematically and without pity.92 For Goldhagen, the police battalions were not simply ordinary men, but represented ordinary Germans at large. They killed because German culture was permeated with a particular kind of "eliminationist anti-Semitism" that justified mass murder. Browning didn't argue from the standpoint of German culture but presented the police battalions as more of an isolated case study. Browning's book didn't provoke controversy among historians or the general public, but Goldhagen's clearly did. In the spring of 1996, German and American critics either lauded or criticized Hitler's Willing Executioners.93 By the fall, through the German translation and Goldhagen's promotional tour and televised debates, he had become the darling of the German public. In less than four months, the book sold more than 160,000 copies and was at the top of the German best-seller list for months. While ordinary Germans seemed to agree with Goldhagen's thesis of widespread anti-Semitism, German historians attacked his lack of scholarship, reductive thesis of collective guilt, and repetitive style. German Critics German historians of the older generation, who had spent most of their professional lives examining the Third Reich, were especially critical of Goldhagen. For Eberhard Jackel, it was simply "a bad book" that harkened back to the simplistic mentality of the 1950s. Goldhagen didn't attempt to differentiate various levels of anti-Semitism, but reduced them into the singular eliminationist version rampant in Nazi Germany. 94 Frank Schirrmacher accused Goldhagen of dragging out the thesis of collective guilt and of mythologizing German national character. 95 Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Norbert Frei both doubted that Goldhagen's book would produce another historians' debate. Instead, they regretted how the debate marked the return of monocausal arguments suggesting that German anti-Semitism stemmed "from Luther to Hitler." 96 After the dust settled, most historians agreed that Goldhagen had at the very least asked the right question. 97 He had shifted the emphasis from the functionalist perspective of institutions and bureaucracies to the intentions and motivations driving and maintaining National Socialism. Even if the question wasn't novel, he was nonetheless right to ask how the Holocaust was possible and why it arose in Germany. He was also right to break the taboo between "criminal Nazi" and "normal German." Throughout the book, Goldhagen always referred to "Germans" and not to "Nazis" thereby bringing the agents closer to home. Finally, there was a consensus

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among the German public that most Germans were anti-Semitic during the Third Reich. The German Public In many ways, the German reception of Goldhagen was similar to the West German response to the American TV series Holocaust. He somehow hit a nerve among the German people. The Israeli critic Amos Elon noted, "Goldhagen's book seems to have touched that nerve as no other in the recent past. He evoked nearness by reducing his argument to the moral kernel of individual behavior." 98 Like Holocaust, Goldhagen put a human face on the otherwise inexplicable. Unlike Shoah in which Claude Lanzmann interviewed ordinary individuals involved in the Holocaust—victims, perpetrators, and bystanders—Goldhagen gives a systematic rendering of the activities of one group: the police battalions. Shoah reached a far smaller audience of avant-garde filmgoers and those already interested in the Holocaust. Goldhagen's reception was far broader and closer to the emotional mass appeal of Holocaust than Shoah. As Josef Joffe rightly noted, lengthy academic treatises focusing on the Nazi bureaucratic machine are not emotionally compelling, whereas Goldhagen's narrative makes the killing by ordinary Germans all the more chilling and gripping. Whereas Browning left the moral question of how and why Germans would want to kill Jews, Goldhagen made it the focus of his book. 99 Perhaps the biggest reason why Goldhagen was so popular among the German public is that he consistently argued for the stability of contemporary German democracy and a change among Germans after the war. Although Hitler's Willing Executioners was about Germans during Nazi Germany, it was a different country than postwar Germany. In an odd way, Goldhagen argued for closure between the past and the present that resonated well with his strong German following. After the commemorative marathon of 1995 marking the 50th anniversary of the end of the war, the German public seemed even hungrier for discussions about National Socialism than before. Rather than fading from German collective memory, the Nazi past seemed to be more alive than ever. Goldhagen and the Public Use of History In partial response to the German public's warm reception of Goldhagen and the debate that his book instigated, Goldhagen was awarded the prestigous Democracy Prize in March 1997. Given by the Blatter fiir deutsche und international Politik (Journal for German and International Politics), the prize is awarded to someone who fosters democratic debate in the Federal Republic. Earlier, the Democracy Prize was given in 1990 to Barbel Bohley and Wolfgang Ullmann for their leadership in East German citizens' initiative groups. After a speech on behalf of the publisher praising Goldhagen for reminding Germans of the roots of German democracy and of

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the singularity of the Holocaust, Jurgen Habermas and Jan Philipp Reemtsma gave speeches in honor of Goldhagen. 100 The fact that two such public and prominent intellectuals were chosen to honor Goldhagen revealed the high level of debate that his book had fostered. Both Habermas and Reemtsma are strong proponents of democratic debate and have long been thorns in the side of any kind of German nationalism. In reflecting on the Democracy Prize, Habermas deliberately invoked his earlier essay from the historians' debate on the public use of history. The title, "On the Public Use of History: Why a Democracy Prize for Daniel Goldhagen?" emphasized his concern with the moral-political consequences of history. 101 In an earlier essay, "On the Public Use of History: The Official Self-Understanding of the Federal Republic Is Breaking Up," Habermas reformulated Jaspers's question of guilt to take into account the responsibility that successive German generations have to remember those murdered during the Third Reich.102 A critical attitude toward tradition is possible only when the memory of the past takes into account the particular conditions that made Nazi Germany possible. The public use of history is the self-conscious reflection of citizens upon their link to a common shared past. Historians who seek to relativize the Holocaust in the name of a positive national identity are forgetting the conditions that made the Holocaust possible. Habermas raised the pointed question of why Goldhagen was given the Democracy Prize rather than other historians. Given the plethora of serious German historians who have devoted their professional lives to analyzing the Third Reich, why choose a young American professor rather than a German? Why not Martin Broszat, Hans Mommsen, or Eberhard Jackel? For Habermas the answer was not one of widest readership but of public resonance (offentliche Resonanz) and level of debate that the historian provoked. 103 Goldhagen had clearly hit a nerve among the German public. Given his provocative thesis and the controversy that it inspired in the United States, it wasn't surprising that Hitler's Willing Executioners would also inspire controversy in Germany. Instead, it was surprising that Goldhagen provoked critical reflection about the correct public use of history. Democracy is strengthened by public debate and critical self-reflection. Patriotism is not simply the praise of glorious aspects of a national history or tradition, but the critical questioning and acceptance of a negative national past. For Habermas, Goldhagen's greatest contribution was to provoke Germans to think critically and responsibly about National Socialism. By shifting attention away from bureaucratic institutions and Nazi elites and to ordinary police battalions and their extreme anti-Semitism, ordinary contemporary Germans were given the chance to critically reflect on their individual norms and values. For Jens Reemtsma, director of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research and curator of the controversial Wehrmacht exhibit exposing atroc-

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ities committed by Wehrmacht officers during World War II, Goldhagen's book had a particular relevance.104 In his speech honoring Goldhagen, Reemtsma argued that the task of the historian is not solely one of historical explanation, but also is an attempt to understand the motivations and moral capacity of individual actors in particular historical circumstances.105 As a political scientist, Goldhagen didn't give only a historical account of the police battalions, but also sought to understand the moral values and norms that they shared. He tried to understand the mentality of the perpetrators in particular and of ordinary Germans in general. The publication of Goldhagen's book coincided with a growing interest in the everyday lives of Germans during the Third Reich. The public fascination with the actions of ordinary Germans can be witnessed in the popularity of the Klemperer diaries documenting the anti-Semitism he experienced in Dresden during Nazi Germany. 106 It can also be seen in the controversy and interest generated by the Wehrmacht exhibit, because most German families were in some way touched by men who served in the Wehrmacht. Thus, by the time, Hitler's Willing Executioners was translated and published in Germany in 1996; the public was already focused on questions of how ordinary Germans acted during the years of National Socialism. For Reemtsma, there was a peculiar "collective readiness" to reflect on the moral choices that ordinary individuals faced during the war. This readiness included acceptance of German anti-Semitism and the singularity of the Holocaust in German national history. 107 The Goldhagen controversy was a kind of second historians' debate because it focused on the instrumental role of the Holocaust in German collective memory. Some of the same historians from the 1980s debate participated in the discussion over Goldhagen's thesis of German eliminationist anti-Semitism and the singularity of the Holocaust. Both debates were carried out in the pages of prominent newspapers and academic journals. Yet what differentiated the two debates was the sharp division between the general public and German historians. While the historians' debate was largely between German intellectuals and historians, the Goldhagen controversy reached a wider sphere of the German public. With his promotional tour and sold-out debates, Goldhagen seemed to resonate well with many Germans. Like the Holocaust TV series in the late 1970s, Goldhagen was able to inspire both moral reflection and a powerful emotional response from his audience. The Walser-Bubis Debate and the Normalization of German Memory Shortly after the Goldhagen controversy (1996) and the Wehrmacht exhibit (1997), the debate between Martin Walser and Ignatz Bubis erupted in Germany. Unlike the historians' debate and the Goldhagen controversy,

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in which various historians from across the political spectrum debated the meaning of the Holocaust for German national identity, the debate between Walser and Bubis occurred between two men of the same generation. Both in their seventies, they came to represent the different contours of the generation with firsthand experience of National Socialism. Bubis was a Holocaust survivor and became head of the Central Jewish Council in Germany. Walser was in his early teens when the war ended and became a prominent West German novelist and writer. Both men represented the shift from collective memory to history. As members of the war generation die out, memories of Nazi Germany will not be directly communicated but indirectly learned through film, history books, museums, and literature. The Walser-Bubis debate marked a turning point in German collective memory from the generation of witnesses to generations for whom National Socialism is not a lived experience. In many ways, their debate also marked a turning point in the conception of Germany as a normal nation. After 1989, normalization gained a different meaning. No longer divided into ideological East and West, unified Germany is a normal country. As the largest economic and political power in Europe, Germany has to accept normal economic, military, and political responsibility. However, even though Germany is normal, the shadow of its double past makes its national history unique. On October 10, 1998, Walser received the Peace Prize from the German Book Association. After his acceptance speech in the St. Paul's Church in Frankfurt, President Roman Herzog stood to lead the applause. Only Ignatz Bubis and his wife remained seated during the ovation. After Walser's fiery speech, Bubis accused Walser of spiritual arson (geistige Brandstiftung), and German intellectuals responded with critical articles and open letters in prominent German newspapers (predominantly in Die Zeit and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung). Bubis didn't formally respond to Walser until his speech commemorating the 60th anniversary of Kristallnacht on November 9, 1998. In his speech, Walser emphasized his resentment at having to feel guilt and shame for German history. His acceptance speech was a kind of "critical sermon" to the German people in which he voiced his discomfort at the overwhelming routine and ritualization of Holocaust remembrance. 108 Faced with daily reminders of the Holocaust, he described how he had to learn how to look away (wegzuschauen) in order to keep some kind of individual integrity. The use of the term wegzuschauen was deliberately provocative because it referred to the attitudes of bystanders during National Socialism. He sharply criticized German intellectuals who, in his mind, imposed an eternal burden of German history and who labored in a cruel work of memory (grausamen Erinnerungsdienst). Although they were left unnamed, he was most likely thinking of intellectuals such as Habermas and Grass: "Everyone knows our historical burden, the everlasting disgrace;

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no day goes by in which it is not brought up." 1 0 9 Most of all, Walser raged against the mass media for their continuous representation of the Holocaust and the Third Reich. The media turned National Socialism into a "routine of accusations" (Routine des Beschuldigens): "Instead of being thankful for the incessant representation of our disgrace [Schande], I begin to look away. I want to understand why in this decade the past is more present than before." 110 For Walser, the memory of Auschwitz had become "a menacing routine," "a moral cudgel," and "a dutiful exercise." He reserved his strongest critique of the ritualization of German memory for the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin because it represented a "the concreting of the center of the capital with a football field-sized nightmare. The monumentalization of disgrace." 111 Germans cannot and should not feel collective guilt or even disgrace. Instead, one should only answer to his or her individual conscience. At issue was the question of when Germans could finally identify themselves with a normal nation. Walser voiced something that other Germans felt but could not publicly articulate—resentment at having to be contrite and a feeling that they have paid their debt to the past. On November 9, Bubis gave his long-awaited response to Walser. In his commemorative speech, he argued for the importance of remembering all aspects of German history and warned against turning away from the disgrace of National Socialism: "This disgrace was there and will not disappear through the desire to forget [Vergessenwollen] and it is spiritual arson when someone sees in it a instrumentalization of Auschwitz for contemporary reasons." 112 In particular, Bubis took issue with Walser's culture of looking away, because looking away and being a bystander were a central component of ordinary life during Nazi Germany. To look away from films and books that remind one of the Holocaust isn't an act of individual conscience, but a conscious decision to repress the past: "The term 'Auschwitz' is not a menacing routine or means of intimidation or even a dutiful exercise." 113 Moreover, for Bubis, the Nazi crimes, not the Holocaust Memorial, were monumental. As a monument, the Holocaust Memorial isn't a concrete nightmare or permanent reminder of German guilt, but a form of memory for future generations of Germans. The Public Response to the Debate During President Roman Herzog's speech commemorating the 60th anniversary of Kristallnacht, he addressed the conflict between Walser and Bubis. Like Bubis, he emphasized the necessity of confronting both the positive and the negative aspects of national history. "No community, no society, and no state can live without remembrance and memory. To live without memory means to live without identity and orientation." 114 The purpose of memory is to educate future generations of German citizens about their national history.

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Those who supported Walser argued that Bubis had misunderstood his speech. Walser tried to distinguish between memories of the Holocaust and the way that the media instrumentally use and trivialize those memories for political purposes. Judging from the numerous letters and articles in support of Walser, his opinions resonated with a large portion of the German public. He was able to articulate publicly what many felt privately. For the SPD politician Klaus von Dohnanyi and the East German writer Monika Maron, Bubis seriously misunderstood Walser's speech. There is no single correct memory of the Holocaust. Germans should not be made to constantly feel guilty for Nazi crimes committed in their name. In a series of open letters to Bubis, Dohnanyi raised the controversial question of how Jews would have acted if they were not subject to Nazi racism and genocide: "Also the Jewish citizens of Germany have to ask themselves whether he (or she) would have been so much braver at that time than the many non-Jewish German spectators, when in the Third Reich 'only' the handicapped, homosexuals or the gypsies would have been deported to the concentration camps." 115 By suggesting that "we are all vulnerable," Dohnanyi provoked even more controversy and seemed to polarize Jewish and non-Jewish Germans. Moreover, Dohnanyi tried to distinguish between Bubis as a Jewish German and Walser as a non-Jewish German. For him, Bubis was incapable of understanding the resentment that non-Jewish Germans experience because they are expected to publicly exhibit guilt for Nazi Germany and to identify with the perpetrators. Bubis, although German, identified more with Jews than with Germans, and thus couldn't feel the shame of Germans as perpetrators. Because Bubis identified with the victims, he was incapable of understanding Walser's perspective. Bubis was "a German without a guilty history." 116 In his public response, Bubis argued that by advocating a culture of looking away (Wegschauen), one also promoted forgetfulness and repression. 117 For Maron and numerous others, Walser's speech was an act of bravery because he criticized the ritualization of Holocaust memory in Germany. 118 As the open letters and articles escalated in German newspapers, Richard von Weizsacker intervened with an open letter in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and asked for an end to the debate dividing the German public in general and dividing Jewish and non-Jewish Germans in particular. The debate threatened to spin out of control as the letters between Walser, Bubis, Dohnanyi, and their supporters polarized further. For von Weizsacker, Bubis spoke from an authentic and lived memory that nonJewish Germans who didn't survive the concentration camps or lose most of their family in the Holocaust could hardly comprehend. Echoing his famous speech in 1985 commemorating the end of the war, Weizsacker pleaded for the centrality of memory in one's inner life: "Memory means to think of an experience so honestly that it becomes a part of one's inner

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life. It is evil when memory is misused." 119 While he respected Walser's plea for personal memory, Weizsacker nonetheless recognized that National Socialism is, and should be, part of German collective memory. Henryk Broder, among others, sharply criticized Dohnanyi for his intimation that Jews would have looked the other way just as many Germans did in Nazi Germany. Dohnanyi and his supporters underscored the Israeli psychoanalyist Zvi Rex's dark comment that "the Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz." 120 For Broder, the debate was yet another example of the German obsession with their identity and burdened past. The protagonists in the debate skated on thin ice because the subtext pitted Germans against Jews and threatened to do more harm than good. The Israeli historian Saul Friedlander also intervened by raising the question "Is it not strange that the public who two years before cheered Daniel Goldhagen, now applauds Walser? There are two diametrically opposed positions. Is that a sign of generational distance or of constant confusion?" 121 For Friedlander, Germany is a normal country—but even citizens of a normal country need memory for their collective identity. Memory does not mean abnormality. In response to his critics, Walser responded in a public debate and an article that he in no way advocated closure and forgetfulness, but that he took issue with the media's instrumental use of Holocaust memory in Germany. By the spring of 1999 the debate slowed down, and it ended when Bubis died in August 1999. Regardless of the harsh words and misunderstandings, most people agreed that the debate was important because it allowed divergent opinions to be aired publicly. In a speech to the German Bundestag on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Roman Herzog addressed the openness and diversity of the debate in German culture. The debate demonstrated that Germans still have not found "a form of remembrance that is sincere and appropriate and even whether fifty years after the end of that reign of terror—there is in fact any need to constantly make ourselves confront this part of our history." 122 For Herzog, the debate was important because of the divergent viewpoints that were expressed in the public sphere. Like Goldhagen, Walser touched a nerve within the German public. The Walser-Bubis debate not only was between two men of the same generation, but also affected the general public and German politicians. If anything, it was a self-reflective debate about how the Holocaust should be remembered and represented in contemporary Germany. Of particular interest was the question of whether memory is merely private or also collective. The intensity of the debate suggests that memory is both private and collective, and that how Nazi Germany is represented in German history matters to the public at large. It is not only a question for academics or politicians. The strong support for Walser was an indication that a large majority of Germans were uncomfortable with the mass media's reductive

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representation of the Holocaust. However, judging from Goldhagen's popularity with the public, dissatisfaction with the media does not mean lack of interest in Nazi Germany. Just the opposite—the Goldhagen controversy, Wehrmacht exhibit, and Klemperer diaries indicate a strong desire to learn about ordinary Germans during the Third Reich; they certainly don't demonstrate a culture of looking away. However, this interest in National Socialism as history does not translate into the welcoming of constant Holocaust imagery produced by the mass media. Finally, the debate raised the question of German normalcy from a different perspective. Memory and normalcy are not mutually exclusive, but collective memory is necessary for a normal democratic society because the past will always influence the present in some way. CONCLUDING REMARKS ON REUNIFIED GERMANY'S DOUBLE PAST The controversy surrounding memories of National Socialism and the Holocaust in reunified Germany represents an intensification of the normalization trend in the Federal Republic during the 1980s. The restoration of the German nation intensifies the trend to integrate National Socialism into the seamless narration of Germany as a normal nation. However, reunified German memory of the past is not simply characterized by continuity with the Federal Republic; it also has to integrate the Communist past of the GDR into its national narrative. Germany's double past includes the unanswered question of how to compare the dictatorships of National Socialism and communism without leveling them into the abstract category of totalitarianism. While the curators of Buchenwald attempted to preserve an authentic past through the narration of Buchenwald's three separate pasts without leveling the Nazi and Communist pasts, the Neue Wache, dedicated to all victims of war and tyranny, eschewed historical distinction for symbolic reverence. Although the proposed Holocaust Memorial dramatically highlighted the singularity of Jewish victimhood, its monstrous form and controversial location threaten to bury the past. The Goldhagen controversy signified a peaked interest among the majority of young Germans in examining the actions of ordinary Germans during Nazi Germany. The Waler-Bubis debate, on the other hand, demonstrated that while the majority of Germans accept that ordinary Germans were anti-Semitic during the Third Reich, they are also tired of the cliched stereotypes of the Holocaust that are broadcast through the mass media. The fact that each example raised controversial debates in the political culture of Germany demonstrates the vitality of the recent past in German memory. The past that is remembered is neither neutral nor static, but dynamic and deeply politicized. Attempts to seamlessly integrate the burdened past into the

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present through institutionalized places of national memory reveal the deeply unsettled nature of German national identity. For Maurice Halbwachs, "depending on its circumstances and point in time, society represents the past to itself in different ways: it modifies its conventions." 1 2 3 Echoing Halbwachs's claim that society remembers the past based on the needs of the present, recent attempts to codify Germany's memory landscape emphasize t w o trends—one seeking a normal, usable past which manifests itself through monumental reverence and reconciliation, the other seeking a critical engagement with the past which attempts to avoid traditional forms of memory by calling attention to the impermanence and ambiguity of memory itself. NOTES 1. Some of the most helpful discussions include Uwe Backes et al., eds., Die Schatten der Vergangenheit: Impuls zur Historisierung des Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt: Propylaen, 1990); Jurgen Danyel, ed., Die geteilte Vergangenheit: Zum Umgang mit Nationalsozialismus und Widerstand in beiden deutschen Staaten (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1995); Bernhard Moltmann et al., eds., Erinnerung: Zur Gegenwart des Holocausts in Deutschland-West und Deutschland-Ost (Frankfurt: Haag &c Herchen Verlag, 1993); Werner Weidenfeld, ed., Deutschland: Eine nationdoppelte Geschichte (Cologne: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1993). 2. For discussions of nationhood and national identity, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983; 1991); Homi Bhabha, ed., Nations and Narration (New York: Routledge, 1990); Etienne Balibar, "The Nation Form: History and Ideology," in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, eds. Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein (New York: Verso, 1988; 1991); Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 3. Willy Brandt, "Berlin City Hall Speech," in When the Wall Came Down, ed. Harold James and Maria Stone (New York: Routledge, 1992), 43. 4. For an excellent analysis of the role of collective memory in unified German foreign policy, see Andrei Markovits and Simon Reich, The German Predicament: Memory and Power in the New Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997). 5. Adam Michnik relates this anecdote in an interview with Jurgen Habermas in "Overcoming the Past," New Left Review (January/February 1994): 5. 6. For collections of key commentaries and articles by East and West German intellectuals in English, see Harold James and Maria Stone, eds., When the Wall Came Down (New York: Routledge, 1992); special issue on German unification, New German Critique 52 (Winter 1991). For articles about East and West German intellectuals, see Andreas Huyssen, "After the Wall: The Failure of German Intellectuals," in his Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1995), 37-66. Jan-Werner Miiller, Another Country: German Intellectuals, Unification and National Identity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000). For an emphasis on East German intellectuals, see David Bathrick,

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The Powers of Speech: The Politics of Culture in the GDR (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995); and John C. Torpey, Intellectuals, Socialism, and Dissent: The East German Opposition and Its Legacy (Minneapolis: M N University of Minnesota Press, 1995). 7. For an excellent discussion of the difficulties of November 9, see Peter Reichel, "Der 9. November: Eine verpafite Chance," in his Politik mit der Erinnerung: Gedachtnisorte im Streit um die nationalsozialistische Vergangenheit (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1995), 310-312. See also Frank Stern, "The 'Jewish Question' in the 'German Question' 1945-1990," New German Critique 52 (Winter 1991): 155-172. 8. For important discussions about Germany's double past, see "Zur Auseinandersetzung mit den beiden Diktaturen in Deutschland in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart," in Entquete-Kommission "Aufarbeitung von Geschichte und Folgen der SED-Diktatur in Deutschland," vol. 9 (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlag; Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1995), 575-777; Klaus Siihl, ed., Vergangenheitsbewdltigung 1945 und 1989: Ein unmoglischer Vergleich? (Berlin: Verlag Volk and Welt, 1994). For key books and articles, see Christa Hoffmann, Stunden Null? Vergangenheitsbewdltigung in Deutschland 1945 und 1989 (Bonn and Berlin: Bouvier Verlag, 1992); Jurgen Habermas, "Was bedeutet 'Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit' heute?," in his Die Normalitdt einer Berliner Republik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1995), 21-45; Helmut Dubiel, "Deutsche Vergangenheiten," in Politik ohne Project? Nachdenken uber Deutschland, ed. Siegfried Unseld (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1993), 236-249. 9. For the condensed report, see Bericht der Entquete-Kommission "Aufarbeitung von Geschichte und Folgen der SED Diktatur in Deutschland" (Bonn: Bundesanzeiger Verlagsgesellschaft, 1994); Entquete-Kommission "Aufarbeitung von Geschichte und Folgen der SEDS Diktatur in Deutschland," 18 vols. (Baden-Baden/ Frankfurt: Nomos Verlag/Suhrkamp, 1995). 10. Markus Meckel, quoted in John Torpey, "The Post-Unification Left and the Appropriation of History," German Politics and Society 30 (Fall 1993): 14-15. 11. For the controversy surrounding Christa Wolf, see Thomas Anz, ed., Es geht nicht um Christa Wolf (Munich: Edition Spangenberg, 1991); and Christa Wolf, Auf dem Weg nach Tabou: Texte 1990-1994 (Cologne: Keipenheuer & Witsch, 1994). See also Andreas Huyssen's "After the Wall" and David Bathrick's The Powers of Speech, esp. "Epilogue: The Stasi and the Poets." 12. In 1991, the East German director of Buchenwald was removed because of her role in the glaring omission of Jewish victimhood and the foregrounding of the role of the Soviets over Allied liberation. Her replacement by a West German historian was short-lived when an anticommunist group learned that he had formerly belonged to the Communist Party in the 1970s. The third director in a single year, Thomas Hofmann, thus faced the difficulty of presenting Buchenwald's double past in a way that would not create new mythologies or distortions. A fourth director, Volkardt Knigge, replaced Hofmann in 1994. 13. See Diane Barthel's interesting analysis of historic preservation in the United States and Great Britain: "For preservations, the historic structure must be interpreted accurately and in a context free of contaminating purposes or self-serving interpretations. Further, all decisions regarding the structure must be documented and must be reversible. Additions to structures must be distinguished from and not

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fundamentally change the original physical structure. Future generations of experts must be able to 'read' what this generation has done and to undo it if necessary—all in the service of authenticity." Historic Preservation: Collective Memory and Historical Identity (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 7. 14. Ian Buruma, The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994), 214. 15. See Claudia Koontz, "Germany's Buchenwald: Whose Shrine? Whose Memory," in The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History, ed. James Young (Munich and New York: Prestel Verlag, 1994), 118. 16. Sarah Farmer, "Symbols That Face Two Ways: Commemorating the Victims of Nazism and Stalinism at Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen," Representations 49 (Winter 1995): 105. 17. Buruma, Wages of Guilt, 213. 18. See Eberhard Jackel, "The Impoverished Practice of Insinuation: The Singular Aspect of National-Socialist Crimes Cannot Be Denied," in Forever in the Shadow of Hitler?, trans. James Knowlton and Truett Cates (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993), 74-78. See also Jacket's Umgang mit Vergangenheit: Beitrdge zur Geschichte (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1989). 19. See an interview with Eberhard Jackel in "Wider das Vergessen," Thuringer Allgemeine, October 4, 1991. 20. In chapter 4, I describe Buchenwald's use as a Nazi concentration camp and its East German mythologization from 1945 to 1990. I am following the commission's three usages of Buchenwald that Sarah Farmer outlines in "Symbols That Face Two Ways," 107. 21. Jahresinformation der Gedenkstatte Buchenwald 1991 (Weimar and Buchenwald: Repro und Verlag, 1992), 9-15. 22. Jackel, "Wider das Vergessen." 23. Eberhind Jackel, quoted in "Das deutsche Dilemma mit der doppelten Vergangenheit," Frankfurter Rundschau, December 14, 1991, 3 24. The term "fractured totality" stems from Martin Jay's essay on Adorno's nonidentitarian thinking and aversion to totality. See Jay's "The Fractured Totality: Society and the Psyche," in Adorno (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 82-110. 25. I owe this insight to Wallis Miller, "Schinkel and the Politics of German Memory: The Life of the Neue Wache in Berlin" in A User's Guide to German Cultural Studies, ed. Scott Denham, Irene Kacandes, and Jonathan Petropoulos (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 227-256. 26. Such a dialectic of national memory and forgetting is clearly seen in Ernst Renan: "Yet the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things." See "What Is a Nation," in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha (New York: Routledge, 1990), 9. 27. Stefanie Endlich and Thomas Lutz, "Die Neue Wache: Zentrale Gedenkstatte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland fiir die Opfer von Krieg und Gewaltherrschaft," in their Gedenken und Lernen an historischen Orten: Ein Wegweiser zu Gedenkstdtten fur die Opfer des Nationalsozialismus in Berlin (Berlin: Landeszentrale fiir Politische Bildungsarbeit, 1995), 114-115. 28. For discussions of war memorials and tombs to the unknown soldier, see Ken S. Inglis, "Grabmaler fiir Unbekannte Soldaten," in Die Neue Wache Unter

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den Linden: Ein deutsches Denkmal im Wandel der Geschichte, ed. Christoph Stolzl (Berlin: Koehler & Amelang, 1993), 150-171. See also Reinhart Koselleck and Michael Jeismann eds., Der politische Totenkult: Kriegerdenkmdler in der Moderne (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1994). 29. Of the nine jury members, five supported Tessenow, three supported Mies, and one supported Hans Poelzig. See Miller, "Schinkel and the Politics of German Memory." 30. Ibid., 62. 31. Ibid., 77. 32. Anita Kugler, "Neue Wache: Dem alten Treu," Die Tageszeitung, November 3, 1993. Also Jurgen Tietz, "Schinkels Neue Wache Unter den Linden," in Stolzl, Die Neue Wache Unter den Linden, 87. 33. Helmut Kohl, quoted in "Mahnmal zum Gedenken an die To ten von Krieg und Gewaltherrschaft," Bulletin 42 May 2 1 , 1993, 397. 34. Helmut Kohl's speech to the Bundestag, in "Die Debatte des Deutschen Bundestages," May 14, 1993, in Stolzl, Die Neue Wache Unter den Linden, 2 1 2 214. 35. Gabi Dolff-Bonekamper, "Schinkels Neue Wache Unter den Linden: Ein Denkmal in Deutschland," in Streit um die Neue Wache: Zur Gestaltung einer zentralen Gedenkstatte. Walter Jens, ed. (Berlin: Akademie der Kiinste, 1993), 35-44. 36. Renan, "What Is a Nation," 19. 37. See Renan, "What Is a Nation?" See also Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 204: "All profound changes in consciousness, by their very nature, bring with them characteristic amnesias. Out of such oblivions, in specific historical circumstances, spring narratives." 38. See Robin Wagner-Pacifici and Barry Schwartz, "The Vietnam Veterans Memorial: Commemorating a Difficult Past," American journal of Sociology 97 (September 1991): 376-420, esp. 392. 39. For the different genres in the Federal Republic, see Gerd Knischewski and Ulla Spittler, "Memories of the Second World War and National Identity in Germany," in War and Memory in the Twentieth Century, ed. Martin Evans and Ken Lunn (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1997), 239-254. 40. Helmut Schmidt, quoted in Bernhard Schulz, "Wo die Bundesrepublik der Toten gedenkt," Der Tagesspiegel, March 28, 1993. Reprinted in Streit um die Neue Wache, ed. Walter Jens, 93. 41. See Bernhard Schulz, "Kein Konsens im Land der Menschenketten," in Stolzl, Die Neue Wache Unter den Linden, 177. 42. Reichel, Politik mit der Erinnerung, 241. 43. See James Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), esp. "The Countermonument: Memory Against Itself in Germany," 27-48. 44. Christoph Stolzl, "Schwierigkeit zu trauern: Gesprach zur Zukunft der Neuen Wache," in Streit um die Neue Wache, 59 ed. Walter Jens. 45. Christoph Stolzl, "Die Trauer der Mutter: Playdoyer im Denkmalsstreit um die Neue Wache. Sprechendes Mitleid statt sprachlosem Stein," Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 13, 1993. Reprinted in Streit um die Neue Wache, 87.

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46. See Arne A. Kollwitz, "Symbole, die unvereinbar sind," Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 28, 1995. 47. Dolff-Bonekamper, "Schinkels Neue Wache," 38. 48. See Kathrin Hoffmann-Curtius, "Ein Mutterbild fiir die Neue Wache in Berlin," in Streit um die Neue Wache, ed. Walter Jens, 51; and Josephine Gabler, "Kathe Kollwitz—Krieg und Tod," Gudrun Fritsch, "Kathe Kollwitz—Bild eines Lebens," and Gudrun Fritsch and Annette Seeler, "Der Blick auf Kathe Kollwitz im Wandel der Zeiten," in Stolzl, Die Neue Wache Unter den Linden. 49. Reinhart Koselleck, "Stellen uns die Toten einen Termin?," Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, August 23, 1993. Reprinted in Streit um die Neue Wache, ed. Walter Jens, 31. 50. See Koselleck's explanation in "Stellen uns," 33-34: "Der Begriff verschleiert, was geschehen ist, er senkt die brutale und absurde Wirklichkeit unserer Geschichte ins Vergessen." 51. Ibid., 33. 52. Ibid., 34. 53. Interview with Christoph Stolzl and Jerzy Kanal, "Die Tafeln bleiben," Berliner Zeitung, November 18, 1993. 54. For Weizsacker's speech, see "Speech by Richard von Weizsacker in the Bundestag During the Ceremony Commemorating the 40th Anniversary of the End of the War," in Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective, ed. Geoffrey Hartman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 262-271. 55. Saul Friedlander, "Some Reflections on the Historicization of National Socialism," in Reworking the Past, ed. Peter Baldwin ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), 85. 56. Lea Rosh, quoted in Ute Frings, "Bescheiden im Erinnern, gewaltig im Spriicheklopfen," Frankfurter Rundschau, April 30, 1994. 57. See Reinhard Riirup, ed., Topographie des Terrors: Gestapo, SS und Reichssicherheitshauptamt auf dem "Prinz-Albrecht-Geldnde." Eine Dokumentation (Berlin: Verlag Willmuth Arenhovel, 1987). 58. Stefanie Endlich and Thomas Lutz, "Internationales Dokumentations und Begegnungszentrum 'Topographie des Terrors' " in their Gedenken und Lemen an historischen Orten, 52. 59. See Reichel, Politik mit der Erinnerung, 200. 60. Riirup, interviewed by Jane Kramer, in her The Politics of Memory: Looking for Germany in the New Germany (New York: Random House, 1996), 265. 61. Der Wettbewerb fiir das "Denkmal fur die Ermordeten juden Europas," eds. Die Arbeitsgruppe der Neuen Gesellschaft fiir Bildende Kunst (Berlin: Verlag der Kunst, 1995), 21-23. 62. Anita Kugler, "Ein Yad Vashem in Berlin Mitte," Die Tageszeitung, April 25, 1994. 63. See the official artistic competition invitation, "Ausziige aus der Kurzdokumentation 'Kiinstlerischer Wettbewerb, Denkmal fiir die ermordeten Juden Europas' " in Der Wettbewerb, 179-189. 64. Kugler, "Ein Yad Vashem." 65. See Reichel, Polilik mit der Erinnerung, 258-260. 66. Der Wettbewerb, fiir das "Denkmal fiir die Ermordeten juden Europas," eds. Die Arbeitsgruppe der Neuen Gesellschaft fiir Bildende Kunst, 180.

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67. Henryk M. Broder, "Deutschmeister des Trauerns," Der Spiegel (April 17, 1995): 222-224. 68. Stephen Kinzer, "Berlin Given Unusual Idea for a Holocaust Memorial," New York Times, January 29, 1996. 69. See Orte des Erinnerns, vol. 1, Das Denkmal im Bayerischen Viertel (Berlin: Druckhaus Hentrich, 1994). 70. "Eine gigantische Last: Interview mit Architect Simon Urgers uber sein Holocaust-Monument fiir Berlin," Der Spiegel no. 13 (March 26, 1995): 230. 71. Peter Hausmann, quoted in Rolf Lautenschlager, "Kohl schwerer als 'gigantische Platte,' " Die Tageszeitung, July 1, 1995. 72. Lea Rosh, quoted in "Die Debatte ist fatal," Berliner Zeitung, July 5, 1995. 73. "Grime teilen Einwande gegen Mahnmal," Berliner Zeitung, July 5, 1995. 74. Anita Kugler, "Holocaust-Mahnmal ein 'Unsinnsprojekt,' " Die Tageszeitung,]^ 11, 1995. 75. Roger Cohen, "Berlin Holocaust Memorial Approved," New York Times, June 26, 1999. 76. Robert Musil, "Monuments," in his Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, trans. Peter Wortsman (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), 61. 77. Interview with Ignatz Bubis, "Ein neuer Wettbewerb bringt nichts," Die Tageszeitung, January 20 and 21, 1996. 78. See "Die Debatte ist fatal." 79. Broder, "Deutschmeister des Trauerns." 80. As Robin Wagner-Pacifici and Barry Schwartz argue, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial questions Durkheim's belief that moral unity is the object of commemoration. By focusing on commemoration as a "genre problem," a monument commemorating national unity is contrasted with the ambiguity of commemorating national disunity in Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial. See their "The Vietnam Veterans Memorial." 81. Rocco Thiede, "Wo Erinnerung erstarrt zum Ritual," Die Welt, March 13, 1995. 82. Interview with Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock, "Ein Objekt, nichts weiter," Die Tageszeitung, March 28, 1995. 83. Silke Wenk, "Der Wettbewerb um das zentrale 'Denkmal fiir die ermordeten Juden Europas' als soziologisches Experiment," in Der Wettbewerb, eds. Die Arbeitsgruppe der Neuen Gesellschaft fiir Bildende Kunst 165. 84. Ibid., 167. 85. Ibid. 86. Ute Scheub Interview with Horst Hoheisel, in "Das Denkmal muss auf die Tater verweisen," Die Tageszeitung, February 6, 1996. 87. For an opinion similar to Young's, see the German art historian Jochen Spielmann, "Der ProzeE ist genau so wichtig wie das Ergebnis," in Der Wettbewerb, ed. Die Arbeitsgruppe, 128-145. 88. James E. Young, "Gegen das Denkmal, fiir Erinnerung," in Der Wettbewerb, ed. Die Arbeitsgruppe, 174-178. See also his The Texture of Memory, 1-90. 89. Cohen, "Berlin Holocaust Memorial Approved." 90. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Knopf, 1995).

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91. Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). 92. Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners, 9. 93. For the most comprehensive collection of articles about the Goldhagen controversy, see Julius H. Schoeps, ed., Ein Volk von Mordern? Die Dokumentation zur Goldhagen-Kontroverse um die Rolle der Deutschen im Holocaust (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1996). 94. Eberhard Jackel, "Einfach ein schlechtes Buch," in ibid., 187-192. 95. Frank Schirrmacher, "Hitlers Code," in Schoeps, Ein Volk, 99-105. 96. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, "Wie ein Stachel im Fleish," in Schoeps, Ein Volk, 193209; Norbert Frei, "Ein Volk von 'Endlosern'?" in Schoeps, Ein Volk, 93-98. 97. See especially Ulrich Herbert, "Die richtige Frage," in Schoeps, Ein Volk, 214-224. 98. Amos Elon, "The Antagonist as Liberator," New York Times Magazine, January 26, 1997, 43. 99. Josef Joffe, "Goldhagen in Germany," New York Review of Books, November 28, 1996, 21. 100. Karl D. Bredthauer, "Grenzen einer deutschen Normalisierung: Die konstitutive Bedeutung des Bruchs von 1945/49," Blatter fiir deutsche und internationale Politik (April 1997): 406-407. 101. Jurgen Habermas, "Uber den offentlichen Gebrauch der Historie: Warum ein 'Demokratiepreis' fiir Daniel Goldhagen?," Blatter fiir deutsche und internationale Politik (April 1997): 408-416. 102. Jurgen Habermas, "On the Public Use of History: The Official SelfUnderstanding of the Federal Republic Is Breaking Up," in Forever in the Shadow of Hitler?, trans. James Knowlton and Truett Cates (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993). 103. Habermas, "Uber den offentlichen Gebrauch der Historie," 409. 104. For an excellent book documenting some of the main speeches surrounding the opening of the Wehrmacht exhibition in various German cities, see Hannes Heer and Birgit Otte, eds., Krieg ist ein Gesellschaftszustand: Reden zur Eroffnung der Ausstellung "Vernichtungskrieg" Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941 bis 1944 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1998). 105. Jan Philipp Reemtsma, "Abkehr vom Wunsch nach Verleugnung iiber 'Hitlers Willige Vollstrecker' als Gegenstiick zur xhistorischen Erklarung,' " Blatter fiir deutsche und internationale Politik (April 1997): 417-423. 106. Victor Klemperer, Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten: Tagebucher 1933-1945 (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1996). Translated as / Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years 1933-1945 (New York: Random House, 1998). 107. Reemtsma, "Abkehr vom Wunsch," 419. 108. See Martin Walser, "Erfahrungen beim Verfassen einer Sonntagsrede," in Die Walser-Bubis Debatte: Eine Dokumentation, ed. Frank Schirrmacher (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999), 7-17. 109. Ibid., 11. 110. Ibid., 12. 111. Ibid., 13. 112. Ignatz Bubis, "Rede des Prasidenten des Zentralrates der Juden in Deutsch-

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land am 9. November 1998 in der Synagoge Rykerstrasse in Berlin," in Schirrmacher, Die Walser-Bubis Debatte, 106-113. 113. Ibid., 112. 114. Ibid., 113. 115. "Klaus von Dohnanyi antwortet Ignatz Bubis: Wir sind alle verleztbar," in Schirrmacher, Die Walser-Bubis Debatte, 164. 116. Klaus von Dohnanyi, "Eine Friedenrede: Martin Walsers notwendige Klage," in Schirrmacher, Die Walser-Bubis Debatte, 147. 117. Ignatz Bubis, "Ignatz Bubis antwortet Klaus von Dohnanyi: Ich bleibe dabei," in Schirrmacher, Die Walser-Bubis Debatte, 158. 118. Monika Maron, "Hat Walser zwei Reden gehalten?," in Schirrmacher, Die Walser-Bubis Debatte, 181. 119. Richard von Weizsacker, "Der Streit wird gefahrlich: Musste Walser provozieren?," in Schirrmacher, Die Walser-Bubis Debatte, 188. 120. Henryk R. Broder, "Halbzeit im Irrenhaus: Sie reiten und redden uber das diinne Eis der Aussohnung: die Pirouetten der Protagonisten," in Schirrmacher, Die Walser-Bubis Debatte, 213. 121. Saul Friedlander, "Die Metapher des Bosen: Uber Martin Walsers Friedenspreis-Rede und die Aufgabe der Erinnerung," in Schirrmacher, Die WalserBubis Debatte, 237. 122. Roman Herzog, "The Future of Remembrance," speech in the Plenary Chamber of the Bundestag, Bonn, January 27, 1999 (http:www. germany - info.org/ newcontent/gp/herzog_01_27_99. html). 123. Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, trans. Lewis Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941: 1992), 172-173.

C H A P T E R SIX

CONCLUSION: MEMORY AND F O R G E T T I N G IN A D E M O C R A T I C CULTURE Given the vitality of German debate, the question of how best to remember and integrate the Nazi past into the present remains deeply ambiguous at best. Discussions about German memory of the Nazi past are usually embedded within admonitions against forgetfulness—from "never again" to the inscription at Yad Vashem: "the secret of redemption is remembrance." Yet, as we have seen from the German experience, exactly what is remembered, and by whom, opens a Pandora's box of different pasts. Although memory is the opposite of forgetting, it is also deeply interwoven with forgetfulness. We can remember certain events only if others are downplayed or erased from public memory. Nietzsche's mediations on history illuminate the tenuous relationship between memory and forgetting. For him, "forgetting is essential to action of any kind, just as not only light but darkness too is essential for the life of everything organic." 1 Forgetting provides not only the contrast to memory but also, more importantly, is a necessary component for the life of the individual. While it may be possible to live without memory, it is utterly impossible to live without forgetting. Nietzsche was not advocating complete forgetfulness, but drawing attention to our fragile relationship to the past. Animals are ahistorical because they live fully in the present and have no memory, whereas human beings are historical due to memory and our temporal connection to the past. For him, the issue boils down to the "plastic power" of individuals, cultures, and nations: "I mean by plastic power the capacity to develop out of oneself in one's own way, to transform and incorporate into oneself what is past and foreign, to heal wounds, to replace what has been lost, to recreate broken molds." 2 Plasticity is the ability to learn from the past and to integrate the past into the present and future.

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Plasticity is a kind of bounded historicity that is perhaps an acknowledgment that the dynamics of memory involves a certain degree of forgetfulness. Given Nietzsche's emphasis on the relation between memory and forgetting, we are still faced with the difficulty of how to understand the intense debates surrounding German memory. In comparing East and West German official memories of the past, the role of democratic debate emerges as a central point of differentiation. While official memory meant an uncontested singular memory in the GDR, official memory in the Federal Republic and unified Germany was comprised of government-sponsored commemorations, museums, and national monuments. In the closed Communist society of the GDR, open and public debate about memory and representation was understandably lacking. Instead, one witnessed an ideological universalization of the past that legitimized the national identity of the GDR as an antifascist state permanently resisting the fascist past and fascist/imperialist Federal Republic. The Nazi past was neatly represented in stark contrasts between past and present, on the one hand, and between bad fascists and good Communists on the other. The GDR lacked a public sphere and democratic culture where debate about the meaning of the Nazi past could flourish. The emerging democratic culture of the Federal Republic, however, produced a dramatically different relationship to the past. While one might argue about the success of West German memory, the vitality of debate surrounding official attempts to smooth over the past demonstrate a more open understanding of the Nazi past. The West German internalization of the past and complex discussions about the role of the Holocaust in German national identity were an integral part of West German democratic culture. In contrast to Hermann Lubbe's thesis on the virtue of communicative silence (kommunikatives Beschweigen) as a necessary precondition for democracy, recent debates in Germany testify to the vibrant link between memory and public debate in a democratic society.3 For Liibbe, silence provided the context within which individuals could become democratic citizens in the Federal Republic. Thinkers such as Helmut Dubiel and Gesine Schwan, however, argue convincingly that an individual cannot fully change without a minimum acknowledgment of guilt and responsibility. Such an acknowledgement necessitates some sort of publicity and openness within the political culture. Schwan carefully criticizes Lubbe's split between public and private by arguing that institutions are empty without individual values of solidarity, trust, and responsibility.4 For Liibbe, however, West Germans could become democratic citizens only within a certain period of silence (gewisse Stille). If questions of the Nazi past were immediately raised, the already fragmented and broken individual sense of self would shatter, thus further hindering the fledging roots of West German democracy. In a sense, Liibbe makes a pragmatic plea for clo-

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sure (Schlufischrichi). Only after democratic institutions are well in place, can individuals afford to ask soul-searching questions of moral responsibility and guilt. In Schwan's eyes, the privileging of public institutions over individual morality results in lost opportunities for the necessary learning processes and for establishment of democratic values which bind civil society together and, in turn, nurture democratic and legal institutions. Silence and silenced guilt in particular damage the ties of solidarity and trust that are the necessary foundation of civil society. The acrimonious debates in unified Germany about the role of the Holocaust in German national identity are testimony to the strong civil society that binds German democratic institutions. For Dubiel, the democratic debates about how to remember National Socialism in the West and the unified German Parliament are occasions to examine democracy at work. Debates about the past entail moral norms about how one should or should not act. The debates also serve as examples of collective reflexivity in a democratic society.5 Public debates about memory represent different trends and conceptions of how the past is or is not integrated into contemporary identity. Memories of the past perhaps tell us more about the present society than about the past. Because memory is a dynamic, fluid activity framed by social groups and located in symbolic places, the activity of remembering is guided by needs of the present. Memory is neither a retrieval nor a reliving of the past, but an interpretive process of selection that often results in conflicting versions of the past. Yet, debate and contestation about how to remember the past are part of the dynamics of memory in a democratic culture. As James Young poignantly notes, "the best German memorial to the Fascist era and its victims may not be a single memorial at all—but simply the never-to-be-resolved debate over which kind of memory to preserve, how to do it, in whose name, and to what end." 6 It is precisely Young's focus on contestation, difference, and the openness of public debate, rather than closure and a single representation of the past, that I am drawn to when examining the memory of the Nazi past in the Federal Republic, GDR, and unified Germany. Because Young focuses on "the never-to-be-resolved debate," the quest for a monolithic, all-encompassing identity linked to a single memory is avoided. Instead, the contradictions and fissures of memory are highlighted, and the fragility of the ambiguous relationship between memory and identity is made all the more tenuous. Democratic debate about how to remember the past and in whose name the past should be represented opens rather than closes future generations' link to the past. Because memory is a process framed by specific social groups and located in symbolic places, it changes with the changing social context. What is remembered at one time may be forgotten at another, depending on the needs of the group. In many ways, the public debates about memory in the Federal Republic and contemporary unified Germany

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are debates not simply about the past, but also about the present democratic orientation of Germany. Intellectual debates about how the Nazi past should be remembered and integrated into German national identity became places of memory in Germany's memory culture. Because many of the same intellectuals engaged in major debates such as the historians' debate, Goldhagen controversy, and Walser-Bubis debate, they are important carriers of German collective identity. As members of the war generation die out and National Socialism becomes learned predominantly through secondhand accounts, the role of democratic debate becomes even more important than before. The fierce debates conducted in newspapers and on TV talk shows are evidence of the vitality and openness of German democratic culture. Democratic debate keeps memory alive because it is through controversial discussion that the past remains a public concern. It is only when the past ceases to be an object of national debate in the public sphere that the past loses its vital link to the present. NOTES 1. Friedrich Nietzsche, "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life," in his Untimely Mediations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 62. 2. Ibid. 3. Hermann Liibbe, "Der Nationalsozialismus im politischen Bewufistsein der Gegenwart," in Deutschlands Weg in die Diktatur: Internationale Konferenz zur nationalsozialistischen Machtiibernahme in Reich stagsgebaiide zu Berlin. Referate und Diskussion. Ein Protokoll (Berlin: 1983), 329-349. 4. Gesine Schwan, Politik und Schuld: Die zerstorische Macht des Schweigens (Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag, 1997). 5. Helmut Dubiel, Niemand ist frei von der Geschichte: Die nationalsozialistische Herrschaft in den Debatten des Deutschen Bundestages (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1999). 6. James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 21.

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INDEX Abusch, Alexander, 85 Adenauer, Konrad, 40-41 Adorno, Theodor, 26-27, 22 Anderson, Benedict, 22-24 Antifascism, myth of in the GDR, 8 1 84; phases of in the GDR, 84-86; of the West German New Left, 82 Assman, Jan, 16 Balibar, Etienne, 24-25 Bartel, Horst, 102-103 Barthes, Roland, on myth, 82-83 Bergson, Henri, on memory, 13-14 Berlin, Holocaust Memorial in, 141; Berlin Wall, 98-99; fall of, 120-121 Bitburg controversy, 48-52 Bonn House of History. See Museum controversy in the Federal Republic Brandt, Willy, 104; kneeling before Warsaw Ghetto Memorial, 44; and Ostpolitik, 99 Broder, Henryk M., on the Holocaust Memorial debate, 147-148; on the Walser-Bubis debate, 159 Broszat, Martin, on studies of everyday life, 67; debate with Saul Friedlander, 67-69 Browning, Christopher, 151-152

Bubis, Ignatz, and Holocaust Memorial Debate, 147; debate with Martin Walser, 155-160 Buchenwald Concentration Camp, as Nazi concentration camp, 90-91; as place of East German mythology, 8 9 90; 92-96; in reunified Germany, 124-129; as Soviet internment camp, 91-92 Collective memory. See Memory Coming to terms with the past. See Vergangenheitsbewdltigung Countermonument, 26-28 Danyel, Jurgen, 85-86 Democracy, and public debate, 1 7 1 172; and Democracy Prize for Goldhagen, 153-155; and memory, 169172 Diner, Dan, on studies of everyday life, 67-71; on antifascism as foundational mythology of the Left, 82 Dohnanyi, Klaus von, 158 Dregger, Alfred, 46 Dubiel, Helmut, 171 Durkheim, Emile, on commemoration and moral unity, 13

194 East Germany. See GDR Eisenmann, Peter, 146, 150-151 Entquete-Kommission, 83, 122-123 Fascism, victims of in the GDR, 85-86 Federal Republic, frames of memory in, 36-48; places of memory in, 48-71 Foucault, Michel, and countermemory, 27-28 Fredrick the Great, celebration of in GDR, 85-86, 101-102 Friedlander, Saul, and debate with Martin Broszat, 67-71; on WalserBubis debate, 159 Fulbrook, Mary, on East German society, 79-80, 99 GDR, frames of memory in, 81-97; collapse of, and reunification, 118123; national identity as socialist state, 100-103; places of memory in, 97-110 The German Catastrophe. See Meinecke, Friedrich Goldhagen, Daniel, controversy over Hitler's Willing Executioners, 1 5 1 155; and Christopher Browning, 1 5 1 152 Groehler, Olaf, 85 Grotewohl, Otto, 92, 94-95 Habermas, Jurgen, on Bitburg, 50; on Daniel Goldhagen, 153-154; on the Historians' debate, 64-67; on reunification, 120-121 Halbwachs, Maurice, and social frameworks of memory, 13-16; generations and memory, 15-16; on language and memory, 14-15 Heimat. See Reitz, Edgar Herzog, Roman, on Walser-Bubis debate, 157-158, 159 Heuss, Theodor, 53, 104 Hillgruber, Andreas, on Historians' debate, 63 Historians' debate, in the Federal Republic, 57-71 Historians' dispute, in the GDR, 9 8 103

Index Historiography, Intentionalist vs. Functionalist, 59-60; in the GDR, 86-89 Historikerstreit. See Historians' debate Hobsbawm, Eric, 25-26 Holocaust, and modern memory, 2 9 30. See Bubis, Ignatz; Hitorians' debate; Walser, Martin Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, 1 4 1 151; architectural competition, 144146; Lea Rosh, 144-151 Holocaust TV drama, 45-46, 153 Honecker, Erich, 101-102, 108-109 Huyssen, Andreas, on memory and modernity, 29 Intellectuals, in the public sphere, 120121, 123-124 Jackel, Eberhard, and Goldhagen, 152153; and Historians' Commission for Buchenwald, 127-129; and Holocaust Memorial, 141-142 Jaspers, Karl, and question of German guilt, 39-40 Jenninger, Philippe, speech in Bundestag, 102-106 Kohl, Helmut, and Buchenwald, 126127; on Bitburg, 48-52; and grace of late birth, 46; on the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, 146; on Museum controversy, 52-57; on the Neue Wache, 129-130, 132-133, 136-138 Kollwitz, Kathe, and sculpture for Neue Wache, 137-139 Koselleck, Reinhart, on the Neue Wache, 139-140 Kristallnacht, commemorations of, in the Federal Republic, 104-106; in the GDR, 106-110 Lepsius, M. Rainer, on the legacy of National Socialism, 4-5; role of Nazi past in FRG, 6-7; role of the Nazi past on the GDR 7 Lieux de memoire. See Nora, Pierre Liibbe, Hermann, 47-48, 170-171

Index Luther, Martin, celebrations of the in GDR, 88, 101-102 Maaz, Hans-Joachim, 83 Maier, Charles, on the museum controversy, 52; on the historians' debate, 58-59 Meinecke, Friedrich, and The German Catastrophe, 39-40 Memory, individual vs. collective, 1416; and democratic culture, 28-30; and generations, 15-16; vs. history, 15-16; and mass media, 18-21; and museums, 26-28; and countermemory, 26-28 Memory nation. See Nora, Pierre Meuschel, Sigrid, on East German national identity, 99-100 Mommsen, Hans, on museum controversy, 56; on West German identity, 72 Mommsen, Wolfgang, 60 Museum controversy in the Federal Republic, 52-57 Musil, Robert, 27, 147 Myth of antifascism. See Antifascism Nation, and national character, 2-3; as imagined community 22-24; as invented tradition, 25-26; and national identity, 21-22 Neue Wache, design of, by Schinkel, 130; debate over in reunified Germany, 132-134, 136-141; and genres of war memorials, 134-136; in the GDR, 131-132; and Helmut Kohl, 129-130, 132-133, 136-138; by Tessenow, 130-131 Niethammer, Lutz, and Buchenwald, 95-96 Nolte, Ernst, and the historians' debate, 61-63 Nora, Pierre, and places of memory: and democratization of memory, 2 8 30; lieux de memoire, 16-21, 26-30; and the memory nation, 26-28 Normalization of West Germany and German national identity, 45-46;

195 and Helmut Kohl, 46. See also Bitburg; Brandt, Willy; Neue Wache; Ostpolitik Rabinbach, Anson, on Bitburg, 51-52; on the German/Jewish question, 4 1 ; on the historians's debate, 60-61 Reagan, Ronald, and Bitburg, 48-52 Reemtsma, Jan Philipp, and the Goldhagen controversy, 154-155 Reichel, Peter, 56 Reitz, Edgar, 45-46 Renan, Ernst, 22 Reunification, and German national identity, 118-123; and German intellectuals, 120-121, 123-124 Rosh, Lea, and the Holocaust Memorial, 141, 144, 146, 147-148 150 Riirup, Reinhard, 142-144 Schinkel, Karl Friedrich, and the Neue Wache, 130 Schmidt, Helmut, 45-46 Schmidt, Walter, 102 Schroeder, Gerhard, and the Holocaust Memorial, 150-151 Schwan, Gesine, 170-171 Stern, Frank, 86-87 Stolzl, Christoph, and the museum controversy, 56; and the Neue Wache, 137-138 Sturmer, Michael, and the historians' debate, 63-64 Tessenow, Heinrich, and Neue Wache design, 130-131 Thalmann, Ernst, 94 Timm, Angelika, 109 Trommler, Frank, on historiography in the GDR, 88-89 Ulbricht, Walter, 84-85 Ungers, Simon, 145, 147 Unified Germany, frames of memory in, 118-123; places of memory in, 123-160 U.S. Vietnam Veterans' Memorial, and

196 countermonuments, 27-28, 136; and Holocaust memorial, 148 Vergangenheitsbewdltigung, definition of, 37-39; and the double past in unified Germany, 122-123; in the Federal Republic, 39-48; in the GDR, 79-81 Walser, Martin, debate with Ignatz Bubis, 155-160

Index War memorials, genres of, 134-136. See also Neue Wache; U.S. Vietnam Veterans' Memorial Weizsacker, Richard von, 1985 speech in Bundestag, 50-51; on Neue Wache, 140; on Walser-Bubis debate, 158-159 West Germany. See Federal Republic Young, James, 27, 150, 171-172

About the Author SIOBHAN KATTAGO is Adjunct Associate Professor at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study of New York University. She has published articles on German collective memory and national identity.