Memory and History in Germany

Abstract

If Canada is famously said to have more geography than history, Germany has more history than geography. What Canada really lacks, though, is not history but memory. Survey after survey shows how little Canadians know about the people and events that have shaped them. We do not teach our history and we do not celebrate our founders. It has made us a nation of amnesiacs, blissfully ignorant of our past, stumbling about in a poetic fog.The same cannot be said of Germany. Memory matters here. If Germany has too much history, which may well be true, it is trying to overcome it. This is particularly so in its public memory, a byword for presenting the past in monuments, memorials, and museums. Or, put differently, how society remembers, what it remembers, and who it remembers. Materially, we measure this in the exhibitions in museums, the signs on buildings, the statues in parks. All reflect a people's self-understanding.Germany is obsessive about its past. There may be no country that is more committed to writing its history in bricks and mortar. And there may be no city more committed than Berlin, its storied capital where so much of that history was made. It is a layered history, divided into periods going back generations. It begins with the monarch s of imperial Germany, represented in the royal palaces, gardens, and statutes of Potsdam and Charlottenburg, and the art and treasures of the five magnificent institutions of Museum Island, collections that are being restored and unified at great cost. Of interest here, though, is the last 90 years: the Weimar Republic (1918-33); national socialism (1933-45); the Cold War (1945-89); and reunification to the present. All are represented in Berlin in eclectic ways.This is especially true when it comes to marking the Holocaust. Nothing is more painful to Germans than the mechanized murder of the European Jews, and nothing is more fundamental to its public memory. While this genocide was a signal event for Germany and humanity, too, it does not necessarily ensure that it will be remembered that way - or even remembered at all - in the place it originated. Children do not always recognize the sins of their parents, let alone atone for them. Indeed, there are countries guilty of atrocities in the last century that have made little effort to address their past. They remain silent, ignoring or even denying it. Their museums do not address the big questions; if they do, they disparage or distort them. They have few memorials or monuments. This is generally true of Japan, Russia, and Austria, each of which sees itself as victim more than perpetrator.Not so Germany. If what the Germans did in the Second World War was unique in its size and horror, their commitment to remember it is unique in its depth and honesty. Where in the world has one ever seen a nation that erects memorials to immortalize its own shame? asks Avi Primor, the former Israeli ambassador to Germany. Only the Germans had the bravery and the humility. His incredulity is real. It has led essayist Wolf Jobst Siedler to suggest that if Germans were once world-class sinners, they are now worldclass penitents.How do the Germans remember? They make big statements, such as the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which opened in 2005. It fills some eight acres in the heart of Berlin, in the shadow of the Brandenburg Gate, close by Unter den Linden, the city's historic boulevard. Its 2 711 square, dark-grey pillars of differing heights evoke the dense tombstones of Prague's ancient Jewish cemetery. While there is nothing identifiably Jewish about where the memorial sits, it is at the centre of things, not on the periphery. Nor is it small or understated. The Holocaust memorial is a stark expression of a nation's shame.More than a monument, it chronicles the Holocaust. Photographs, letters, and stories here illuminate history's darkest moment. This is reinforced a few blocks away in the Jewish Museum of Berlin. …