REMEMBERING THE SHOAH IN BERLIN
THE LANDSCAPES OF REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING
The Memorialization of Berlin
The German capital, Berlin, was not an active killing site during the Shoah, but played a fundamental role in deciding and orchestrating the deportations and mass killings throughout Europe. It was in Berlin that the official order to exterminate the entire Jewish population originated - the Final Solution. This was planned and administered at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942 and became the catalyst for the final stages and intensification of the murderous regime.
As generations become further removed from the Holocaust, the process of memorialization becomes increasingly important for understanding the significance of the event, as memory is an effective tool through which the past can become immortalized.
Contemporary Berlin uses its landscape to mark persecution by and resistance to the Nazi Regime and solidify the current remembrance of the Holocaust for the future. Berlin is an apt paradigm of the social origins of memorial landscapes; many places in the city have been rendered as off limits to use as apartments, shops or offices due to Nazi past and involvement. Due to the mass demolition of most of Berlin after the Shoah by Nazis, only a small proportion of authentic sites still remain. The places with direct connotations to acts of resistance or persecution during the Nazi era have become infused with official collective memory and are important to preserve or plaque to acknowledge the events that occurred at these locations; this remembering inflicts marks on the city. Berlin is a palimpsest with layers of history and architecture piled on top of each other. There has been plenty of contention regarding how to treat real estate, “hallowed ground”, with a difficult past in the bustling metropolis. Memory in Berlin largely shapes the urban landscape; this is seen through remembering: memorials, monuments, museums, plagues; and forgetting: the reconstructing of past buildings, structures, embassies in place of those destroyed.
BERLIN'S LANDSCAPE IS SCARRED WITH NAZI HISTORY
Berlin has come to be identified as a city of cultural space as it attempts to simultaneously memorialize the Shoah and develop as a modern nation-state. This is a novel feature as never before has a modern city endeavoured to negotiate between accepting culpability for such a large scale genocide as well as strive to become an equal and contending member of Western democratic culture.
Although Berlin is rebuilding itself as an upcoming metropolis, there are still evident structures which remain from the legacy of the Shoah. There are
imposing and sterile Nazi ministerial buildings present in Berlin and bullet scarred architecture, demonstrating the reality that Berlin is inherently interlinked with the Nazi period. The architecture of the city narrates representation and the previous politics of the city. There are the sites of Nazi aggression and defiance which have been commemorated, such as Bebelplatz, where thousands of books were burnt during Kristallnacht 1933, and currently the memorial marks the location of the incineration attack. This memorial is an example of the New Berlin acting in place of the older Berlin through deliberate references to past activity and crime in key locations. The historical fabric of the city still shapes the current landscape of the Berlin today. Moreover, it is important to note the locations where the past elements have been sanitised, erasing the Nazi connection and socialist period. This is intertwined with the geography of forgetting and the active decisions as to what is commemorated and remembered and what is overlooked of the Nazi past. The older historical fabric of the city creates a paradox to the current memorials and the geographies of memory. The memorials stimulate a reaction between the geography of modern Berlin and the memory of the city during the Shoah.
"There is perhaps no other major Western city that bears the marks of twentieth-century history as intensely and self-consciously as Berlin”.
(Huyssen 2003: 51).
