Illustration by Hanna Barczyk
In one corner of Berlin’s beautiful Tiergarten park sits the Denkmal fur die im Nationalsozialismus verfolgten Homosexuellen, the Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted Under Nazism. A bare concrete cube with a small window through which you can watch a film of same-sex couples kissing, it was unveiled in 2008 after “years of controversy,” as Der Spiegel put it.
In the 12 years since it was unveiled by Berlin’s first openly gay mayor, Klaus Wowereit, the monument has been repeatedly vandalized. When I went to visit it this week, a pair of yellow roses sat underneath the little glass window, which had been smashed – again. The police are investigating.
As the world grapples with the fate of all the white supremacists cast in metal overlooking their streets, people often turn to Germany as an example of the way to do it right. They cite Germany’s national project of atoning for the country’s genocidal past, through public education and memorials (yes, the Germans have a word for it: Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung).
And it’s true, you cannot live here without being confronted daily by the sins of the grandfathers and grandmothers. What is less well known, and what might be helpful to the rest of the world as it struggles with similar issues, is knowing that this process in Germany didn’t spring up organically overnight. It was fraught, contentious, hard-won and it continues to this day.
The memorial to the Nazis’ gay victims, for example, was criticized for not including lesbians (at first) and also for being somehow distasteful in its proximity to the much larger Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe across the street. That monument, commonly called the Holocaust Memorial, was more than 20 years in the planning, and those 20 years were filled with debate and controversy. The five-acre site composed of 2,711 staggered concrete blocks in the heart of Berlin has been criticized from every possible angle: It’s too abstract, it’s too visible, it’s maudlin, it’s a playground for selfie-takers and footsore tourists.
The soul-baring process of reckoning has been hijacked by Germany’s far-right as a wedge issue to win sympathizers to its side. In 2017, the Alternative for Germany party politician Bjorn Hocke called the memorial “a monument of shame in the heart of [Germany’s] capital.” Twenty years earlier, before it was even built, one of Germany’s most celebrated writers, Martin Walser, denigrated it as “a memorial of shame.”
Loud outcries followed both of those statements – and that’s the point. Germans, particularly those in the capital, are used to having difficult and painful debates about the past. They happen in schools and online, in newspapers and on TV. And the memorials were built despite controversy.
The rest of the world is recognizing that these profound shifts don’t end with a statue in a harbour, or a road renamed. Every day requires historical reckoning. Theresa Varga, writing in The Washington Post about the fight over Confederate statuary in the United States, summed it up this way: “It’s about whether we care more about statues standing than people falling.”
Those debates are nowhere near settled in Germany. It may have outlawed Nazi symbolism and iconography, but the aesthetics of the Third Reich live on as ghastly echoes. What to do with them? Just last month, controversy erupted when Berlin’s former head of urban development called for the Nazi-era statuary and art to be removed from Berlin’s Olympic stadium redevelopment. That argument is still going on: Should the sculptures, commissioned by Nazis and redolent of the Fascist physical ideal, be removed, or is it enough to explain them away with a wall panel or two?
It is fascinating to watch the world wrestling over statues and memorials from my neighbourhood in Berlin, where each one that’s been erected in the past 30 years is the product of historical reckoning (and probably several committees). As Alexa Karolinski, co-writer of the Netflix series Unorthodox, put it, “Berlin really wears its trauma on its sleeve. It’s what makes the city so raw, so interesting.”
Every day on the streets near my apartment, I look down at the Stolpersteine, or stumbling stones, that mark the last known residences of victims of the Nazis. I stop and read their names and their fates, which often end with “ermordet.” Murdered. The stones, a project of German artist Gunter Demnig, were also controversial: Would pedestrians be trampling on the memories of the dead?
Not far from where I live, there’s a gargantuan, graffiti-covered statue of the communist politician Ernst Thalmann, which locals have been fighting over for decades. It, like other remnants of the East German dictatorship, is subject to a different range of ideological tussling. Anyone who wants to see the giant figure of Lenin that was torn down in 1991 can visit him in the museum of discredited statues in Berlin’s Spandau Citadel. Well, his head, anyway.
I like the idea of a museum of discredited statues. It drives home the idea that history isn’t a relic, but a living thing that is shaped every day in the choices we make. Maybe statues should come with a statute of limitations.
The process of debate – and even better, protest – is key to this reimagining, as the Germans well know. Earlier this year, when we could still travel, I visited a memorial in Hamburg. Now it’s a park, but 80 years ago it was a train station where thousands of Jews, Roma and Sinti were shipped away to be murdered. The plaque lists these facts blandly, and then says: “There are no reports of any protest by the people of Hamburg.”
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