A Travelers Account of Berlin, Its People and Monuments as well as General Musings on Any Number of Diverse Subjects

 

 

 

    

MLG

 

 

 

March 9^th, 2008:

 

 

 

 

 

 

I took this picture on the first day while we were looking at the signs which show the progression of Nazi racial laws. The signs comment on the way in which the laws subtly removed the Jewish population from everyday life—no shopping between four and five, no going to the movies, no joining clubs—culminating in their actual removal. By slowly removing the Jews from the German consciousness, the Nazis assures their “final solution” was carried out without any interruption of business as usual in the German population. Thus, the sings forcibly inject them into everyday life in postwar Germany, where people have to notice them because of their awareness of Nazi crimes. Also, the signs form a commentary on the way in which monuments remove Nazi crimes into a single space reserved for morning and introspection.

            Because of the meaning of the signs and their emphasis on participating everyday life, it was really interesting to be situated in a group of tourists gathering around them. In some ways, it makes the monument more effective in interjecting the Nazi crimes into the day to day consciousness of Berliners. Not only do they encounter the signs on their walks home, but they also have to walk around a big groups of American students taking pictures and pointing, forcing the crimes into their physical reality of living in Berlin. But I also worry that this might contribute to a certain attitude within the population of being fed up with all of the focus on German guilt and national past. Yes, we did terrible things in the past, but does that mean we have to put up with all of this?

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Meeting the people of Berlin has been great. This afternoon, Kegan and I had a really interesting conversation with a bartender who grew up in East Berlin. She spoke English, German, French and Russian and acted like it wasn’t anything special, essentially calling us incredibly lazy for only speaking English and a little Spanish. Also she said that a lot of Americans who learn German in America speak it with almost a Spanish accent—because we all learn some Spanish and think of it as the primary foreign language. Similarly, the Germans seems to speak much more British English than American English. It makes me think more generally of geography, how much it influences culture and the general mindset of a population. I think that the sheer size of the United States is one of the reasons we have trouble memorializing, with so many groups harmed in so many different places its easy for everyone to just throw in the towel.

The bartender was sixteen when the wall came down. I asked her about the transition between the two cultures and she said that it really wasn’t a big deal to her because her economic situation didn’t really change: her family was middle class the entire time. Because of studying the different ideologies of the two systems, and maybe due to an influence of the “Cold War” ideology of polarization, I always assumed that the transition into capitalism represented a major rupture in people’s lives. I also asked her about the impression I have that of life under communist regimes as incredibly gray and uniform. She said in some ways it was, but there were still interesting buildings and different signs. Our world would be much grayer without advertising. I wonder though if part of the reason this woman felt so little change was her age. She was only in the middle of high school at the time of unification, the shift must have been greater for people who were older, more involved in the system. (Writing this later I think of Irene Diekmann, who had to retrain herself to a new style of scholarship after the fall of the wall).

 

The city is beautiful. I love the combination of modern architecture and big open / green spaces.

 

 

March 10^th, 2009:

I am struck by how big and centrally located the Soviet war memorial is. The huge statue on the central pillar and tanks give it a definite gravity, you can’t miss it as you move along the Tiergarten towards the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag. The monument’s physical centrality seems to be mirrored by its history too: it was built before the Reichstag was reconstructed while the Tiergarten was being used as a vegetable garden in response to the critical food shortages. Even now, the German people pay taxes to maintain the monument to their defeat, part of the price of unification. It is amazing how much this monument, which aside from being about their defeat was built while they were starving and is still maintained by them, really shoves national introspection and humility down the German people’s throats. Even the simple physical difference of having Cyrillic text and a hammer and sickle (the symbol of anther world system) so close to the buildings of government is striking.

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I really like the Reichstag (which wasn’t used until unification when the capital moved from Bonn to Berlin) and its surrounding buildings. The modern architecture uses glass and big spaces to suggest openness and transparency, also forming a contrast to the regimented lines and purposely imposing facades of fascist architecture. However, I think the concept of the big glass copula on the top of the building funneling democracy from the parliament out into the city pushes it all a little too far. The buildings make me think of Boston City Hall, which is a huge Brutalist building made of dark stone that also manages to have big open spaces where you can see right through. In some ways, it combines the might of the state inherent in fascist architecture and the transparency of the modern buildings.

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It was surprising to see the word Volk on the Reichstag because it is a word so clearly associated with the National Socialist past (especially as I write this later, after hearing from Christoph that it truly is a loaded word in Germany, one that he studiously avoids using. It is a little funny to me that he can be so sensitive to that language and then used “the n word” in the library, calling Catherine and I “wackos”, one of his favorite buzz words, when we freaked out a little). Apparently, there was debate about whether to put the sign up again, but then it turned out the words were made by a famous Jewish artist, so up they went. Thus, in the unification moment wanting to honor German Jewish contributions to Germany trumped a discomfort with the words of the National Socialist past. It is also deeply ironic, and illustrative of German Jewish assimilation, that a German Jew fashioned the “Volk” sign for the Reichstag, the exact words later used to exclude his people and justify their genocide. 

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I love the inside of the Reichstag, specifically the attention to featuring works of modern art by international artists (a feature throughout Berlin). It speaks to a desire to make Germany an international and responsible modern nation with a firm tradition of supporting the arts, perhaps suggesting it is through arts that the nation will be reborn. We are all being incredibly loud at this moment in the trip, giggling and carrying on as usual, and need to be reminded that we are in the most important building of German government and to behave ourselves properly. While part of this is that as Americans we are just louder, especially a bunch of excited American twenty year olds. However, our inappropriate loudness reflects the lack of traditional gravity exuded by the new Reichstag. In the Capital Building in Washington D.C. the space itself, its coldness and vastness, inspires a sort of hushed awe (suggesting respect and deference for the government). However, that gravity did not come across in the modern art decorated, purple seated and comic eagled interior of the Reichstag.

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The view of the city from the copula is outstanding, especially being able to see all of the new buildings and construction, which reminds you of how recently the city was destroyed and that it’s rebuilding process if far from complete. In the rebuilding process they left the anti-German graffiti written by the Soviet soldiers after the fall of Berlin, speaking to intense introspection and awareness of the crimes of the past. There is a really good looking buffet a few floors down, I gasp when I see it through the windows.

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The great difference in feeling between the Reichstag (and surrounding buildings) and the buildings of Washington D.C. really makes me wonder about what would have to happen in America to affect such a profound introspection within our own government and society. What would make us the leave graffiti of our occupiers on the wall, the art of the conquerors decorating the senate? I think part of it is simply being forced to. As the Soviet war memorial down the street suggests, Germans just had to accept these new monuments against them, the begging of an introspective process of national reckoning. It is interesting to think of this process as connected to the amazing city visible from the rooftop, with so many green spaces and ecologically friendly buildings (where people bring their own bags to the supermarkets and ride bikes everywhere). Is excessive consumption somehow connected to national pride? We are Americans and all of the resources are for us, we’ll keep making wasteful buildings and transportation systems because our way has always worked and made us the best. Perhaps the (graudual) questioning of tradition in Germany after National Socialism produced more than open government and transparent buildings, but affected the national consciousness in ways that can be seen in a certain self-awareness of Berlin culture.

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I love all the bullet holes still left in many of the buildings we encounter. It really gives such a vivid picture of urban warfare, even to the point where you can guess where troops and snipers were by the concentration of bullet holes. Between the bullet holes and wondering what it would take for America to echo Germany’s introspection I can’t stop imagining a huge battle being fought in Manhattan and wondering how it will all come about.   

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The history of the Neue Wache (which I found out from a sign outside) seems to perfectly encapsulate German history as a whole. It was first built in 1816 by the Prussian king Frederic William III (designed by Schinkel) as a guardhouse, and then transformed into a memorial for the victims of the first world war in the Weimar Republic—capturing the imperial past and the transition into democracy. Almost completely destroyed in WWII, it was rebuilt as a memorial to victims of “fascism and extremism” by the GDR (later adding the bodies of a concentration camp survivor and a soldier and dirt from a camp and a battle field in 1969) and then became the central memorial of the Federal German Republic in 1993. Thus, the history shows how reluctant the GDR was to mention any sort of specific victims in their official language and ceremonies, despite a slowly growing awareness demonstrated by the addition of the bodies.

 The space itself is great. The big open hole in the ceiling casts a bright circle across the dark stone, which is really cool. (Maria said it is especially beautiful in the snow. After that, whenever it started hailing I always had the urge to just get there as quick as I could to see it filtering down through the hole. I was even in Mitte once when it was hailing, but we didn’t make it back in time). In the center of the building there is a statue of a mother holding her dying son, which seems to be a reoccurring image used in memorials. This seems somewhat problematic because the image of a woman over her suffering son evokes Christian images of suffering, or at least Christian principles, so it seems like a misdirected way to mourn the loss of Jewish lives.

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I enjoyed the empty shelves monument to the book burnings, commenting on the loss of culture in National Socialism. However, I thought that the Moses Mendelssohn Center’s idea of distributing the burned books to every high school in Germany really served as a better memorial by essentially saying “you didn’t want these books to be read? Fuck you, we’re putting them in every classroom in Germany”—it really addresses and rejects the intent of the Nazi’s in its commemoration of their crime.

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It is sad to see the Palace of the Republic being deconstructed. I understand that it has asbestos problems, but it is a shame to take such a vital link to the Soviet past out of the city. I think the idea of having a bowling ally and other public social space right in the house of government. It really speaks to openness and transparency in same way as the modern architecture of the new government buildings. It seems like the Berliners who lived under the GDR deserve some ways to remember their society, a need that is ignored by the “Cold-War” assumption that their lives must have been terrible and that they must be overjoyed to be included in capitalism. This tendency is completely apparent in my guide book, which cheers the deconstruction of the soviet eye sore gumming up the middle of Mitte and asserts that the TV tower at Alexanderplotz will never loose its Soviet stigma. In an interesting way, both of these pasts (National Socialist and Soviet) seem to be completely rejected in the Berlin of 2008, but whereas one is continually memorialized the other is compulsively ignored.

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I’m not crazy about Libeskind’s super intentional architecture in the Jewish Museum of Berlin (although I admit it might have something to do with our tour guide, who wondered if she perhaps had “too many academic degrees”, as if such a thing was possible!). I think that making a big web of all the famous Jews in Berlin, while it might show that the city and Jewish life are connected, is gimmicky. It is, after all, just a projected web of lines then selectively chosen to make the zig zags of the building, which includes other obvious symbolism like subjecting people to confusion and having to go through the basement to represent hiding and the Jewish experience. This feeling of the museum being a bit gimmicky stayed with me throughout the exhibit. I mean, two metal trees where people can write and hang card with their hopes and dreams and answer  the question “what equal rights means to me” on the others. Moreover, in the middle of the exhibits there is a signs extolling the historic generosity of the Jewish community in Berlin as a means to illicit donations, as well as a Moses Mendelssohn stamp a penny (see picture below).

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I do like the idea of the voids running through the building as the voids left in German culture without the Jewish contribution, especially because they make extremely striking spaces within the museum. I enjoyed the uneven grating in the garden of exile, as well as being able to see out a little bit into the city, which makes it at once open but also confining and groundless.

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It is immediately clear how incredibly well endowed the museum is—the free audio tours come on ipods, there is absolutely pointless multi-media everywhere, the building is impressive and was impossible to build (especially the voids). I really enjoyed a couple parts of the exhibit, especially a display case of Superman and Batman yarmulkes because it so speaks to assimilation of Judaism into mainstream society. However, over all the information is clustered and doesn’t feel that accessible, but (honestly) perhaps it’s just my lack of interest in Jewish history. Not that it’s not interesting, but the names and descriptions of past famous Jews and the changes in religious laws don’t exactly captivate me. This is why I am so aware of the stunningly pointless multi-media, which apparently is made for children visiting the museum with their parents. These games, which asked you to pack a woman’s trunk for her journey and attempt to win the favor of the sovereign and the Jewish community while amassing a fortune, were designed to elucidate the lives of medieval Jews. Catherine, who was scolded for trying to pack a rabbit on her trip, and I thoroughly enjoyed them with the sarcastic vigor of youth.

                                                                                     

March 11^th, 2008:

After reading so much about it and seeing so many pictures it was nice to actually go to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Even though I see five our six tour busses lined up when we get there, the memorial itself seems totally empty; people really do just disappear into it. This sense of disappearing, yet still being able to see the city move around you comes across in the slight lean of the columns, which feel as though they’re closing in on you. I also enjoyed seeing little signs of everyday life within the memorial, such as a rake leaning against one of the pillars. It reminded you, despite being inside this capsule where it almost feels like life stops to morn, that life for many went on while the Shoah was being committed, that time does not stop for atrocity. Having the loud boisterous people in the memorial also added to this feeling of life going on, as well as the uncertainty and fear of living a hidden existence where at any moment someone could pop out from around a corner and take you away. One especially troubling group of American school children were all lining up at different levels along the rows of columns to take cute group pictures, using the memorial as a prop for their fun optical illusion. This somehow feels worse than kids running around or being loud because it takes important aspects of the experience, the uneven ground and loss of visibility, and turns them into something adorable to show their parents with the pictures of the Berlin Bears and the Soviet soldier loitering around the segments of the wall in Postdamer Platz. 

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The exhibit space underneath the memorial is excellent, providing a sense of the history of the Holocaust as well as a proper respect for its huge emotional import. We have to go through a metal detector (the first of many to enter Jewish related sites in Berlin) which reminds me of the divisiveness and anger that the legacy of the Holocaust still evokes. The first aspect of the exhibit is a brief history of the Nazi race laws and Krystalnacht, pairing text which speaks in active terms of “the Germans did this” with pictures explaining each period. While I thought this context completely necessary and very well done, I did not like the fact that especially gruesome words or deeds were highlighted in different colors in the text. For example, one part reads “Together with German Units, Romanian soldiers carried out mass shooting of Romanian and Ukrainian Jews.” I don’t like this emphasis, a trick also employed by the gentlemen’s magazine GQ, because it implies that the suffering and mass execution is somehow the most important part of the text (almost allowing time-pressed memorial goers to skim all the boring context stuff and get right to the mass murder). To me, the most interesting part of that sentence is that the German units employed recently subdued Romanians to assist with the genocide (which stands in the way of Goldhagen’s thesis).

Beyond this slight criticism, the rest of the exhibition space was extremely effective. One room exhibited letters and postcards written by victims in light up boxes on the floor, forcing you to blow your head as you read them. Also keeping the original documents aside typed versions was a great decision, something about seeing the handwriting made their statements and authors all the more real. I was struck by one that essentially said, even if I live what is the point? Everyone else I love is dead; even if I live my life has been destroyed.

            Another section of the exhibit featured unspeakably gruesome testimonies from survivors about their experiences in the camps. It really drove home to me how much Jews were involved in the murder of their own people—they were forced to organize the deportations, assist in moving people and bodies in the camps, etc. I think the worst testimony was from a woman who was lined up to be shot in a ditch but then jumped in at the last second. She managed to stay alive as hundreds of corpses fell on top of her, eventually digging her way out of the pit. As she came up, she could still see the soil rising and falling with human breath. Another one talked about piles of corpses, their flesh melting together, which really knocked the wind out of me. I liked that you listened to these on phones, so you had to choice to listen and to stop at any time. I also like this aspect because it acknowledges that not only were terrible things done on institutional or mass levels (like mass murder) but also individual people had unimaginably horrific experiences. This linkage of the individual to the idea of “mass murder” also came through in the dark room where you heard the life stories of individual victims, as well in the room about families and describing the experience of living in the ghetto (focusing on the Shoah’s impact on the Jewish community). The exhibition downstairs—which provides historical context and connects individual people to the concept of mass murder—forms an essential important component of the extremely abstract memorial up above.

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“One of the two SS Camp photographers”!... it just boggles the mind that the Nazis wanted a visual record of the “Final Solution”. That someone would take one of these pictures and send it hope to their sweetheart or put it in a photo album.

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            When the Jewish Community wanted to build their fist synagogue in Berlin it was not allowed to go above the Christian homes surrounding it. So, they built the main space for the congregation blow the level of the ground to leave space for an upstairs balcony, allowing them to maintain the gender divide enforced in their services. I think that is so clever, and shows the ways in which the Jewish community abided by the laws and assimilation demanded of them by Germany yet still maintained their own cultural traditions.

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     I can’t believe that the GDR tuned the Jewish cemetery, which was destroyed by the Gestapo in the summer of 1945, into a park for the 650^th anniversary of Berlin. Further, immediately after the war, the GDR buried bodies of other, non-Jewish, Berliners in the cemetery, desecrating the space by violating the custom of exclusively Jewish cemeteries. Both of these insensitive actions illustrate how much the GDR downplayed the racial nature of the Nazi crimes and their victims to focus on heroic resistance to Fascism. (In fact, before Americans were willing to talk to the Soviets they had to acknowledge the Jewish aspect of the Holocaust—which is why the GDR allowed the New Synagogue to be built). Thus, they felt no need to be respectful of Jewish customs and spaces. However, I also wonder if the burial of non-Jews after the war demonstrates a decreased appreciation (reverence) towards death. After all, the deaths in the Holocaust were only a small part of the destruction of life occasioned by World War Two. Almost an entire generation of young men was lost, not to mention the deaths from the allied bombing campaigns that destroyed German cities. Therefore, following the war people may not have felt such a reverence for sacred burials, and there were so many bodies to be buried. So, they just found somewhere to burry them, without really caring that it was a sacred space for a recently persecuted people. 

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         Jessie was saying today at lunch that she considers Israel, as well as the United States, her country. I think this identification is really interesting because, until the founding of Israel in 1948, the idea of being a wondering, nationless people was a central aspect of Jewish identity. After the trip, I asked my Jewish friend if she too considered Israel her nation. She said she feels like she owes Israel something because its citizens raised the money that got her family out of France (originally from Germany, they emigrated to France and then the United States). So, while she doesn’t necessarily consider herself part of the nation of Israel or think of it as her homeland, she definitely feels an allegiance to it, pays more attention to news about Israel etc. This connection of modern Jewish identity with the state of Israel seems to be a significant rupture from “pre-Shoah” identity, I wonder if this shift comes out at all in the rituals or religious discourse of current Jewish communities.

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The New Synagogue really makes me think about the assimilation of the Jewish community prior to Shoah. The layout of the space for worship reminds me much more of a church than the other synagogues I’ve been to. Moreover, we saw a Torah cover with German words written in Hebrew lettering, showing how this assimilation even operated on the level of sacred religious items.

 

 

March 12^th, 2008:

Today we went to Track 17 of the Grunewald train station, used by the Nazis to deport the Berlin Jews. I found this site to be by far the most powerful one we’ve seen thus far. The edges of the platform are lined with plaques that have a date and how many Jews were deported on that day. It gives me chills to walk along and read the numbers, knowing I’m in the space where that number of Jews stood, not knowing where they were going. Especially later, as the numbers start to dwindle, they probably had terrible rumors floating in their heads, gathered exactly where I stood. Being on the track also really drove home the theme of life going on for the rest of the city as the Jews had this horrific experience. I could see people going into businesses on the street below and hear the birds chirping in the trees.

Later, on our bike trip across Berlin, Marco and I found a memorial about the deportations that made this point about everyday life. It had a tall steal plaque with the numbers, dates and destinations of deportations cut out. Through these cutouts you can see a playground and apartment buildings, a scene of everyday Berlin. Further, there is a sculpture resembling a cattle car, with granite blocks that have people cut into them suggesting the terrible confinement in the cars. Also the tracks for the cattle cars ran along the block and then fade into the city streets, which evokes the Holocaust’s presence in Berlin’s history and the need for it to be part of present day Berlin as well. After seeing the tracks themselves, I think that this memorial did a really good job of capturing an essential part about the deportations. 

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It was really exciting to meet the German students today. On a whole, they seem much older and more put together than us. We had a really great lunch in a café in Potsdam, where I finally got turned onto German breakfast. We left the restaurant and walked into an idyllic Disney version of Germany thanks to the music of a German brass band and the cobblestone streets. Then, continuing in this fantasy world, we visited the palaces in Potsdam. I really thought they were stunning, I loved the symmetry of the grounds and buildings. The way in which the streams were dug to fit into the design of the palace suggested the Hegelian effort to conform (act upon) nature to suit man’s needs as an essential aspect of civilization.  

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I’m starting to wonder if this the idea that Germans have so effectively addressed their national past, hammered home in our visit to the Reichstag, all of the daily monuments, etc. participates in a discourse of German/European cultural superiority. (This is coming from the Germany 1740-1918 class I took my sophomore year and African Diaspora in Germany). German national identity was built on the idea of its superior culture. (And Jews felt they could become more German than the Germans by participating and mastering it, one reason they were so assimilated and made such a huge impact on German culture.) Ideas that the German language was so expressive, German philosophy and literature so superior seemed to dominate the cultural mindset. Another aspect to this cultural mindset were the racial philosophies of Kant about the superiority of whiteness, which existed above and outside the “race” applied to degenerates. The stress on belonging through culture (partially due to late political unification), and these aspects of the culture, formed the idea that Germanness is whiteness, an issue that influences German discourse on race to this day. So, all of this stress on the superior ability of the German culture to address, mourn, and learn from its national past rings slightly sinister in my ears.

March 13^th, 2008:

Today we visited the Moses Mendelssohn Center in Halberstadt. I really think this organization is great. They’re memorial to the book burning by putting copies of the burned books in high schools is ingenious. Also, I really like their emphasis on teaching about German and Jewish history in authentic spaces. Halberstadt’s layout, architecture, graveyards, and even empty spaces (like where the synagogue once stood) all speak to the religious and cultural history of Germany. The town’s impressive cathedral, which also had town-owned guard towers for civic defense, literally stands between the rest of the town and the Jewish quarter. So, walking around the town and seeing the spatial relationships made it especially clear how the Bishops and the Church literally protected the Jewish residents, receiving taxes in return. It was also interesting to hear that Jews could only buy houses and not land, which reinforces the idea of Jews as impermanent residence in the town (and Germany), regardless of the reality, shown by the two cemeteries and the community’s synagogue, that they truly established a permanent community. (This emphasis on their impermanence reminds me of the ways in which Afro-Germans were conceived of in the German cultural discourse and strongly echoes the treatment of “guest workers” in present day Germany). I also really enjoyed seeing the building in the square with all of the guild symbols on it. I’ve written two German history research papers that have involved the social values of the guild system, their pride in honor and fraternity, so it was cool to see the symbols they rooted so much of their identity in and the places where they must have congregated. 

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The Jewish cemeteries are really interesting spaces, with very uneven terrain and surrounded by high walls and a gate we had to specially unlock (like the security in Berlin, these little aspects of our tour reminds me how contested Jewish identity still is in Germany). Having two cemeteries in such a small town is an indicator of the high status of Halberstadt’s medieval Jewish community. Despite having the two, our guide said the reason the cemeteries were so hilly is because they had to add dirt on top of old graves to burry new bodies. Maria also said that in Christian cemeteries in Europe, where there is no explicit belief in permanently burry bodies, they just dug people up after thirty years or so to reuse the room. Growing up in America, where we have so much more land and so much less history (at least of the European values that required cemeteries), I’ve never thought about having to find more space for the dead. It is also interesting that an anthropologist, centuries later, could figure so much out about our world just from these cemeteries: the layering of bodies would show that Jews believed in permanent burial and were pressed for space, etc. More

The history of these cemeteries, much like the one in Berlin, shows a disrespect towards the Jewish community and customs, especially in the post war years. Many of the headstones are missing, taken to stabilize bomb shelters during WWII and by residents of the GDR during the 1960’s. They also show the assimilation of Jews into mainstream Germany, as well as a certain awareness and resistance to it. Under an order from the Prussian government, all stones had to have the name and date of the deceased in German. While the Jewish community did this, they used Hebrew dates and only wrote in German on one side. Thus, while they were officially complying with the regulations of the government towards assimilation they also maintained a cultural divide and resisted the government’s control. This type of resistance comes up again in the Juden star with a fishhook on the back, allowing its owner to wear it when he absolutely needed to and hide it whenever else.  

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The Kosher lunch was great. It is nice to eat such fresh, healthy food after all the Wurst, salads covered in cream, and derner I’ve been eating.

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Seeing the spot where Halberstadt’s synagogue once stood, and hearing the story about how the Jews themselves had to destroy it, reminded me again that the Nazis forced the Jews to help eliminate their own people. I thought the planned memorial, a heavily landscaped garden marking its boundaries, will put the synagogue (or, more correctly, the lack of a synagogue) into the public consciousness in a very effective way. Similarly, I like how the museum displays everyday pictures of Halberstadt’s Jews, putting them back into the community they were forcibly removed from.

March 14^th, 2008:

It is so strange to be at this concentration camp that sits across from an adorable little German town on a beautiful lake. Also on the walk there we went straight through the town and a handful of residential neighborhoods, a route planned by the National Socialists to intimidate the rest of the population into conformity. As we got closer, I was surprised at how many homes and buildings lay directly outside of the camps (I had always just imaged barbed write and barracks in the middle of a filed some where). These were homes for the huge group of guards and workers required to run a camp. While the homes for the female guards lay outside of the camp, the homes of the SS and their families sat inside on top of a hill, towering over the rest of the space. Seeing how many people must have worked there makes me realize how much the crimes of National Socialism involved the entire population, and thus why the postwar years were so difficult. Even the people who weren’t soldiers or mass murderers may have cooked or guarded for Ravensbrück, or even just made deliveries there, not because of ideology but because of economic necessity.

Now these guardhouses function as youth hostels. While at first I was taken aback by this casual use of these tainted buildings, ultimately I realized that so much space in Germany is tainted and its just not an option to not use these places. Also, everywhere cannot stand as a monument or means for education, some things just have to grow into new functional uses.

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The tour is introduced with the camp’s five layers of history:

1—the time before the camp opened in 1939, with stereotypical German houses on this pretty lake. 

2—when it actually was a concentration camp for women (1939-1945) 

3—after WWII when it served as a military camp for the occupying Red Army

4—1959 until unification when small parts were used as memorial spaces, but (as this was in the east) ones that stressed ideological concerns over mourning victims (and the ethnic nature of the crime)

5—The current post-unification camp, after the Russian army leaves and it is set up as a space for education as well as mourning.

 

I like how this framework sets its function as a concentration camp in the National Socialist period as only one part of its very interesting and complicated history, all of which seems significant. In it you can see the history of occupation and the establishment of the GDR, the differences between the GDR and West Germany’s public memory and consciousness around the Holocaust, and the shifts that came along with unification as well as the current trend that advocates education as a key component to memorialization. This also came through in the first exhibit space we visited, which was pout together in the 1960’s under the GDR. While there were really interesting artifacts, like a rosary made entirely of bread, especially significant considering the meager rations in the camps (also because it suggests resistance to camp policies, a key aspect of Soviet discourse on the Holocaust), there was no accompanying narrative or overview to situate the artifacts in the larger experience of the camp and persecution. Also while there were many more letters in this exhibit than in the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the way in which those were displayed and highlighted made them so much more effective than the ones here, just pinned to a wall.

One more thing on the Soviets, and their disregard for the racial motivation of the National Socialist crimes and victims: I can’t believe that they sent a lot of concentration camp survivors immediately into the Gulag system following the war because they saw survivors as somehow suspect for not resisting or being killed. There are just so many crushingly depressing “almost” moments like that in the history of National Socialism: oh good you got out of the concentration camp, oh no the Soviets are sending you to a Gulag. Oh good you got out of Germany into France, oh no the Nazi’s are occupying France… ) 

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The next memorial we saw was in the former guard house, converted into a memorial space in 2005. When we first walked in, I thought the wall with pictures of women’s faces was really moving. I kept staring at their defiant looks, all of them so different from one and other, and thinking about how these women existed and were in this space under such unfathomable circumstances. However, the tour guide pointed out that these pictures (taken by Nazi offers after all) depicts the women through the gaze of the perpetrator, uses their images without any permission, and objectifies the featured women (ironically, the vast majority of whom were survivors) as nameless victims instead of individuals. He even told a story of a survivor who purposely kept a picture of herself from the camp’s memorial foundation because she had a black eye and was ashamed of her appearance, only to have it be found somewhere else and displayed on the wall. Moreover, all of the pictures are of women from Vienna, despite the fact that many of Ravensbrück’s prisoners came from Eastern Europe. Also the room has a log book to identify victim’s nationalities and religions, which exists totally separate from the pictures and despite the fact that some inmates who were ethnically Jewish did not identify as so. Thus, identifying them as Jewish in a memorial is essentially doing the same thing as the Nazis by taking even a little Jewish blood and making transforming it into the central piece of their identity. So, while this memorial aspect was emotionally effective, it failed to consider the complex politics of the image (the gaze, its ownership) and identity, ultimately coming off as a trite space superficially arranged to illicit a hollow emotional reaction.

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In the same way that the Soviet memorial spaces and post war uses showed the ideological flaws of its time by ignoring important aspects of Nazi crimes in their memorials  and distrusting survivors. Further, the failure of the guard house and its disjuncture with our guide’s hyper awareness to post-colonial questions of identity politics and the ways in which racism and other prejudices are subtly reproduced, transmitted, and reinforced in the experience of visiting a concentration camp seem to capture the ideological challenges of our moment. One part of society is enthusiastically doing well intentioned but intellectually problematic things (the guard house) while the others are so aware of these issues that they seem trapped. For example, our guide talked about how he doesn’t like to talk about the rape of German women by Soviet soldiers after the war because it validates the Nazi discourse of animalistic, subhuman Slavs. And how he doesn’t ask who was brought to the camps anymore because one teacher phrased it “who was sent to the camps” which implies reason. And kids always list Jews, then gay people, which he thinks shows the homophobia of adolescent boys.

I thought what he said about giving tours to sixteen and seventeen year old boys especially interesting. Essentially, he saw Ravensbrück, as an all female camp with female guards as well, as a place where (especially) teenage boys locate their sexual fantasies. I think partially as a gay man, as someone who is not sexually into domination, and as someone who is so academically aware of the Holocaust, I don’t understand this claim of identification at all. How could anybody locate sexuality in such a stark place? However, after talking about it for a while, I came to see that the sexuality is not projected onto the actual camp but onto a sexualized ideal of the camp as a place where only women lived and exercised power over each other.  Thus, given the fantasy of the camp, the centrality of power relations in sexuality and the sheer power of the teenage mind, I can see how this projection could happen. Beyond locating sexual fantasies in the camp experience, our guide also saw homophobia in the teenage boys’ answers to his question of who came to the camps. He thinks that this age group is especially homophobic because of their nascent sexuality; they too have to declare themselves as sexual beings and communicate that sexuality to the world. However, unlike gay people, who have a ready made platform to announce themselves sexually, these boys must struggle to articulate their own unique sexual identities. Thus, the boys envy gay people and always list them after Jews as people who came to the camps because they somehow deserved it for being publicly gay. When I was in the camp I believed this second point, thinking about how gay people do have articulated sexual identities perhaps unavailable to teenagers not yet comfortable or fully aware of their sexual feelings. However, writing about it now, I also think this is ridiculous. Almost all popular media does is provide examples of heterosexual relationships and acceptable expressions of heterosexual sexuality. Unlike their gay peers, These teenagers, so bothered by their struggles to articulate their identities, have role models of that identity surrounding them, both in the media and in their day to day lives.

Instead of this strange envy, I wonder if the answer Jews and then gays reflects the relative minority status (or minority visibility) of the groups sent to Ravensbrück in German culture. First highs school kids are aware of Jews, then Gay people, who have an increasingly vocal and powerful role as a minority group in Germany, then the Sinti and Roma people who perhaps are not as vocal or unified as Jewish people or homosexuals, reflecting in less awareness of them as a persecuted group. Perhaps the guide was being slightly over sensitive to these identity struggles in heterosexual youth. What with the awareness of reinforcing Nazi ideology around Slavs, the perpetrator’s gaze in the pictures, and the thoughts about teenage boys sexual identity its pretty clear that the tour guide had a very nuanced academic understanding of memorial space, historical memory, identity and prejudice. However, I can’t really see how to resolve his questions. How do you talk about Russian atrocities after the war without playing into a discourse of a violent Slav? How do you talk about big groups of women living together without arousing teenage boys? It seems like there needs to be a connection or at least a dialogue between the enthusiastic but poorly executed memorial spaces and his academic approach. Perhaps education itself is that bridge, however I wonder if every visitor gets such an interesting tour.

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        Israeli students left a flag in the crematorium. I’m ambivalent about this gesture. I just feel like its claims the space in a way that denies the large number of Slavs, political prisoners, and asocials that also suffered and perished in the camp. I wonder what would happen if we left an American flag there. What about a Russian one?

March 15^th, 2008:

At the topography of terror I am wording about the pink triangles Nazis used to identify gay prisoners. I feel like now the same symbol exists now as a positive identifier, or at least is a popular symbol to denote gayness (like the Weezer song “Pink Trinagle” about being in love with a lesbian). Was it a pre-existing symbol of homosexuality that was just used by the Nazi’s? Or is the “Final Solution” the origin of the gay triangle.

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The talk this afternoon about modern Jewish life was enjoyable, although also a little irritating. I think also by this point in the trip I just felt done with being talked at. Also the Turkish coffee really hyped me up. Mostly, I wrote down things he said that bothered me, including: “the average Turk is anti-Semitic”, “they won’t leave because they protest their eviction”, Americans are “used to difference”, etc. I don’t like this idea that Americans are used to difference. Most Americans are isolated from difference, both through distance and pressure to assimilate. African-Americans identity is either pushed out of the American consciousness in the ghetto and prison-industrial complex or assimilated to show no difference. Gay people are asked not to identify their difference if they wish to fight in the Army. It just seems superior to suggest that Americans are somehow more tolerant of different than Germans, just as it does to suggest that German memorial culture is vastly superior to America’s. However, I loved the anecdote that most Germans do not realize Woody Allen is Jewish.

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I just saw a commercial for some show on MTV Germany that had a little cartoon figure of Hitler yelling and ridiculously gesturing from a podium. Then, a hand came down and unrolled a pink condom on him. Its interesting that this American company (Viacom) is comfortable satirizing Hitler on German television. I’m not sure how I feel about the ultra comical depictions of Hitler, like in The Producers as well, because it seems strange to suggest that some bumbling, stupid looking moron perverted enlightenment thinking, and lead a nation into world war and genocide. If only they’d thought to silence him with a condom!   

March 17^th, 2008:

Today Marco and I biked all over Berlin, starting at the Charlottenburg Palace and ending at Treptower Park. It was such a great way to see this vast, flat city. And it was great to finally be the irritated biker in the lane, ringing their bell at big groups of kids blocking the bike path. Also the bike paths have their own stoplights and turn only lanes; I couldn’t believe how easy it was and how safe I felt the entire time. I especially enjoyed seeing the AEG Turbine factory, which was designed by Peter Behrens in 1910 and one of the first example of modern architecture. It’s the first time I’ve ever looked at a building and understood why it was better than other buildings. More generally, I am much more aware of the architectural importance of this city this time around, mostly because of Marco’s influence. We visited the Altes Museum, designed by Schinkel and the first museum building self-consciously designed for that purpose.  

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On our bike trip we visited the Germania exhibit across from the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. I really loved this exhibit, especially the model. The newly planned Reichstag, meant to house the parliament of Europe, as well as the planned triumph arch, dwarf the current Reichstag, which is a big building for present day Berlin. This point is really well made in a cartoon (which is left completely out of context in the exhibit) which reads “construction error!” and shows a crane picking up the Reichstag, the size of stones being used for the new hall.  It all really makes me think about how grandiose (delusional) the National Socialist leadership was, to really think they could build such ambitious projects during wartime (or ever). Moreover, so many scientists and workers worked on these buildings, mostly doing preliminary tests, despite knowing how ridiculous the plans were just because it kept them out of the front. I wonder if many camp guards and workers made a similar decision to avoid the front, and if that is part of how the mass murder happened with the assistance of the German population.

The Germania exhibit also makes me think about the way in which Hitler constructed his persona. He made it so that anybody who wanted to meet with him had to walk a huge distance through impressive, daunting halls, emphasizing his power and the might of the state around them. More broadly as well, these builds were intended to inspire awe in the power of the Fascist state, and rhetorically to glorify the German volk. However, ultimately these building just glorified Hitler and reinforced his image as a Godly leader.

Volk = more important than individuals. Volk = Hitler?

*

The language of Check Point Charlie is infuriating. The GDR is styled as a brutal, repressive regime, and the Soviets as fighting in Afghanistan despite every single citizen begging them to leave. In contrast, the United State’s role in the Vietnam War is offered in the most positive terms possible, actually not even called a war:

 

So the United States simply accepted an invitation, watched a war break out, declared the end of that war and left. Even the formatting strikes me as problematic. I can’t help but notice that when I just skim over it (as I’m sure many people do as they slowly walk the display wall) the longer lines jump out while the shorter ones fade away. It is interesting to see what this does to the narrative. For example: “the USSR and China providing military” sticks out while “but were not directly involved in the fighting” fades into the interior of the text.  I wonder who wrote these blurbs about the Cold War, and when this exhibit went up. I wish somebody had addressed it in their presentation, although it must be one of the few memorial or exhibit spaces in Berlin unconnected to the Holocaust.

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We also saw the oldest bridge in Berlin, the only thing I saw that really visually captured how I imagine pre-modern Berlin. Treptower Park was also awesome. The pictures I had seen did not capture its might and size. Imagine being the team of German landscapers maintaining this humungous celebration of the Red Army.

March 18^th, 2008:

Today Marco and I aced the public transportation system by riding on the S-Ban, the U-Ban, a bus, and a tram in a single afternoon! We also took a taxi, which I suppose counts against us, although we rode bikes earlier, which should count for us. I figured out the key is to go as far as you can on the S-Ban and then switch to the U-Ban to get as close as possible. I love this feeling of slowly coming into a reliable knowledge of how to use the transportation system here. Partially this is because I strive to look like a local as much as possible, which is hard because I’m so loud. Regardless, Marco and I pass our guidebook under the table to each other, hide in corners when we use our map, and usually just stand there for three minutes of being talked at in German until we say that we only speak English. 

 *

We met Lottie at an Absinthe bar in Prinzlauerberg. She just pulled up a stool and told us the bartender, who had been ignoring us all night, was an arrogant bastard and that she had just cursed him out. Once we finished our drinks she took us to a much more alternative bar in Mitte with comfortable beat up furniture and a bizarre French film projected against one of the walls. Lottie was very much a young Berliner, deeply into and proud of the techno culture of the city. Her: I wouldn’t move anywhere else if you paid me a million Euros. Me: You love Germany that much? Her: Germany? No I hate Germany, I’m a BERLINER… everyone on the tram turns and stares at us. I love how the Berliners (especially as opposed to New Yorkers) openly stare. I always just meet there eyes, we both stare at each other for enough time to acknowledge we’re both looking and then break off. It’s so much more comfortable than the stolen glances on the Subway. This more alternative scene was a welcome change for Marco and I. We had been frustrated at how much our experience of German culture was being dictated by the guidebook, where everything was a little too mainstream for us. This challenge really reflects the ephemeral and oppositional nature of coolness in international youth culture these days. Anything published in a guidebook, that discovered by such a broad section of mainstream society, is officially lame. Moreover, I think that Berlin youth culture especially resists mainstream clubs. Lottie and her friends talked a lot about going to big open invitation parties in huge warehouse spaces and high rise apartments that are completely open if you have the connections to know about them. Later, Christoph took Laura, Marco, and I to exactly this kind of party. There was a constantly changing group of kids working the incredibly cheap bar, which really made it seem like a communal effort to provide drinks for people to enjoy the party not to make money off them. However, even in this alternative scene we danced to poppy mainstream American rap and hip-hop. Experiences like that, dancing to “Drop it like its Hot” in the basement of a secret party, or to classic rock hits in a gay dance pit really speak to America as the global producer of popular culture. (As does watching the ridiculous MTV dating shows on German T.V., which is confusing because the shows are based solely on cheap culturally informed double entendres that seem almost impossible to translate). I feel ambivalent about this global position, on the one hand I am kind of proud of America for perfecting this ridiculous genre, for really knowing how to make universally appealing music that’s so awesomely fun to dance to. However, I am also aware of how much American popular culture cultivates a sense of complacency and how white consumption of hip-hop and predominant images of blackness exploits and trivializes African-American identity and traditional means of resistance. But really, its great dance music.

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According to Lottie “the Turks are only good for making derner”. The next day Nica, a friend studying in Berlin, told Marco and I about a series of articles in a Berlin newspapers about problem of “youth crime” which explicitly connects crime and Berlin’s Turkish population, ignoring that many of them were born in Germany by blaming their foreign upbringing. She told us this over drinks in a Mexican themed bar that employed only Turks in Sombreros, after which we headed to a Hookah bar packed full of German youth watching an exotic film of deserts and beautiful, mystical, dark women. Even if there were any Turkish children in that bar, and even if they were born in Germany, they would not, and will not ever, be citizens, regardless of how many generations their family has lived in Germany. Even now, German citizenship is based on blood (whiteness).

How do you reconcile the racism expressed against the Turks (and Afro-Germans) in everyday Berlin life’s and the governments policy with our course’s theme of national introspection and awareness after the Shoah? Has Germany really broken with its past?

*

Especially as opposed to the extremely assimilated Jewish population, the Turkish population seems quite unassimilated into the mainstream Berliner population. The original wave of Turkish guest workers who came into West Germany were housed separately from the rest of the populations and not allowed to participate in politics. However, they could form their own organizations. Thus, as workers became permanent due to economic need, their families came (originally not planned on), and reinforced this separate community with its only organizations and rituals. Moreover, in German national rhetoric and policy, these guest workers still are impermanent, negating the need for assimilation (a lot of this comes from a paper I wrote after our trip for the course on African Diaspora in Germany). You can see this distance even in cultural interactions, the Turks are loud and self-assured among the quiet, obedient Berliners. It almost seems like there is a wall between the two groups, creating two separate societies in the same space.

 

Check out my project page on the Goldhagen debates.