Diverging Memories? Durs Grunbein's Mnemonic Topographies and the Future of the German Past

Abstract

While walking the streets of Berlin these days, one can clearly observe the last visible remains of WWII and the Cold War years gradually vanishing from sight: bullet holes, smoke-blackened buildings, and rubble give way to restored classicist palaces, while new buildings ornamented with steel and glass emerge on every corner. While the war and the years that followed remain, in Reinhart Koselleck's term, an always-- present Zeitschicht of Berlin's visual palimpsest, they nevertheless seem to drift into oblivion.1 Only rarely does the lurking past shimmer through the facades of the old-new German capital, calling to mind the interdependency linking its past, present, and possible future. Berlin's topography is currently being rewritten according to the city's central role in Germany's new self-image and its unique position in Europe's reawakening middle. Yet, Berlin's new topography-the visual result of fierce artistic and political debates-represents only one result of the much larger process of what Andreas Huyssen has called rethinking German nation, or, as I would phrase it, discussing alternative future German narratives, that is historical, political, and cultural conceptions and representations of the German past (74). Indeed, the disputes over the future of the German history haven't ceased for a moment since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. With the changing political map, the growing distance from the era of National Socialism, and the increasing integration of those born after 1945 into the cultural and public arena, the chain of public disputes over alternative narratives of the past seems unbreakable: The quarrel over the Gulf War and Germany's responsibility for helping to create Sadam Hussein's war machine was followed by the debate over Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners. The argument surrounding the publication of the Black Book of Communist atrocities paved the way for the continuous dispute over the so-called Wehrmacht crimes exhibition. The seemingly endless commemorating events on the fiftieth anniversary of the end of WWII in and around 1995 were followed by the thorny question of whether Germans in uniform should return to the Balkans, this time as protectors of human rights. After the ferocious conflict over Martin Walser's attack on the instrumentalisation of Holocaust memory in his 1998 Peace Prize speech, came the dispute over Peter Sloterdijk's Menschenpark-did he really plead, in a post-Nietzschean manner, for the breeding of nonviolent human beings? That was soon to be succeeded by the recent controversies over German Leitkultur and the caesura 1968.2 Indeed, all these debates-and I certainly didn't mention all of them-can be explained within their immediate contexts. Yet they simultaneously pose variations on one overarching question: namely, how to tell about the past in the future, and what discursive consequences each and every story, each and every history, would have.3 One debate in particular, though-over the planned Holocaust Memorial in Berlin-- seems to have posed this question more than others and thus has attracted the most public attention in Germany and abroad.4 The reason for this lies at hand: Once built, the German national Holocaust Memorial in Berlin will visually embody the symbolic space of the past, of the Holocaust, in the nation's self-image. To be sure, what shaped the course of this intense conflict was not solely the issue of which of the mostly pretentious proposals should be realized. Rather, the debate was fueled by the kind of discursive suggestions that different artistic choices would have. The proposed location of the memorial was of crucial importance in this respect. It was clear that the erection of the memorial at the corner of Ebert and Behrens Streets-in the heart of German political and cultural activity--denotes, as James Young pointed out, the relationship between the postreunification German nation to the memory of the Nazi crimes (Young 7, 184-223). …