History & Memory

Some fifty years after the end of World War II, many Germans, including leading politicians, public intellectuals, architects, journalists, writers and historians discussed the most effective way to memorialize the Holocaust, mourn Jewish victims of the Nazi state and signify to themselves and the rest of the world that the Nazi attempt to kill all European Jews was central to any complete account of modern German history. After broad public debate, a majority in the parliament determined that in the center of Berlin—a city that with the end of the East–West division of the Cold War had resumed its former prominence as a major capital in the center of Europe—a monument would be constructed to honor the memory of the "murdered Jews of Europe." Within walking distance of the Brandenburg Gate and the remodeled Reichstag building, since 1998 home of the German parliament, and close to the huge new buildings that have sprung up in the past decade to house the national government, the Holocaust Memorial should serve as a powerful reminder that what joined Germans in the present was a past in which millions of other Germans had enthusiastically supported a regime that had sought to eliminate European Jewry. The Holocaust Memorial will be located on ground that was part of the "no man's land" running along the wall that for nearly forty years divided East from West Berlin. One part of modern German history will cover another.¹ [End Page 147]

Against the background of debates over what shape the Holocaust Memorial should take, many Germans were also discussing how to commemorate other legacies of World War II. Consider a few examples. In 1992, Helke Sander's film BeFreier und Befreite (Liberators take liberties) presented the past of the thousands of German rape victims of Red Army soldiers at the war's end. A year later, Josef Vilsmaier's Stalingrad evoked the suffering of men rather than women by revisiting the "death of the Sixth Army" in the winter of 1942/43. This well-known director's film drew more than a million and a half viewers by the end of 1993. Two years later, as the fiftieth anniversary of the war's end approached, papers were filled with pictures of victims of the war—in particular expellees driven out of eastern Europe at the war's end and the victims of Allied bombing raids—and images of Germans mourning their dead and struggling to survive in the rubble.²

Writing in 1997, the novelist W. G. Sebald, a German expatriate at home in England since 1966 but intellectually and emotionally never far from the country of his origin, turned his attention to the strategic bombing war of British and American flyers against German cities. Sebald commented that "the destruction, on a scale without historical precedent, entered the annals of the nation, as it set about rebuilding itself, only in the form of vague generalizations. It seems to have left scarcely a trace of pain behind in the collective consciousness." He described "a kind of taboo like a shameful family secret, a secret that perhaps could not even be privately acknowledged," surrounding the "darkest aspects of the final act of destruction, as experienced by the great majority of the German population."³

Günter Grass, arguably Germany's best-known writer, agreed. Speaking as part of a forum on the "future of memory" in Vilnius in October 2000, he declared that the writer "remembers as a profession," and his list of those to be remembered included European Jews, Sinti and Roma and slave laborers persecuted by the Nazis. But he also commented on how "curiously disturbing" it was that "we remember only belatedly and with hesitation the suffering that came to Germans during the war." Grass claimed that only in the margins was it possible to read stories of the...