REMEMBERING THE SHOAH IN BERLIN
Collective Memory
MEMORY IN BERLIN
The memorial landscape in Berlin makes it impossible for Berliners to escape their past as their daily life operates around navigating a city that is haunted by the memories of the Third Reich. Berlin can essentially be defined as a city with a memorial district; a large cultural space which acknowledges national guilt, commemorates the suffering of victims and represents the history of the perpetrators in a national capital.
There are binary poles of memory and forgetting in a city; total erasure and total memorialization, including the marking of every place with prior Nazi activity. Memory shapes the urban fabric of Berlin through everyday practices of memory construction; social activity reconstructs abandoned and forgotten spaces into a symbolic hub of memory. There are many parts of Berlin which have been erased following the Shoah as a result of wartime bombing, destruction and postwar urban renewal projects. Spaces previously left vacant from the war have now been replaced with contemporary forms such as shopping centres, office blocks or left with delipidated ruins where squatters and activists have resided, or emerged as part of the dynamic art and music scene. Additionally, there are many parts of Berlin which have been preserved capturing the significant memories associated; there are places in the city which have been transformed into a museum, with every part of the area holding a connection to Berlin’s Nazi past marked and cordoned off from the mundane practices of commerce, dwelling, governance or recreation.
Governments are often the key motivation behind memorials and museums , and are thus able to shape what, when, and how people remember, or forget, the past. State-sponsored memorials can conceal the past as much as they reveal it, the deliberate absences of memory powerfully disguise the city’s tales of violence. There are high-profile and high-controversy memorial sites installed by the state as a designator of official memory but often the ‘ordinary places’ are overlooked, these sites are missing from the representation of the past and often the participation of individuals from a grass-roots scale contribute to a deeper and more personal understanding of the past. This is illustrated in Berlin through the Stolpersteine installation which memorializes individuals onto the landscape and challenges the state-sponsored narratives of the Shoah, thus bringing new meaning to the past and present landscape of Berlin through the everyday encounters of the memorial. The stumbling blocks are situated outside buildings where Nazi victims lived before their death or eviction from the city; the installations are geographically placed in exact locations where the violence occurred and the commemorative plaques act as an alarming reminder of the omnipresence of violence and the need to remember the legacy of the Shoah throughout Berlin’s landscape.
The New Berlin’s architecture has assumed a highly significant role in recalling the past and marking a future of remembrance and recognition of the Shoah. Berliners, to a large extent, have embraced the memorial culture and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in particular. It certainly defines their city in new terms, as part of a memory district. The importance of the central location and size of the memorial in Berlin cannot be overestimated. Berlin’s new memorial district is a fundamental contributor to the healing of the nation; simultaneously creating a new identity for the city and overcoming the Nazi past through collective memory. The many monuments create an engaging public reminder of the tragic events, the art installations like Ullman’s Bebelplatz memorial and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe are examples of the ways the city can engage with the legacy of the Shoah through experiencing contrasting sites of memory and thus inflicting different emotions in regard to the history.
PLACES OF REMEMBRANCE SIGNPOST IN BAVARIAN QUARTER
