Nottingham Trent University historian Jenny Wüstenberg, author of Civil Society and Memory in Postwar Germany, argues that Berlin’s Topography of Terror Museum is emblematic of the dramatic transformation of Germany’s memoryscape beginning in the 1980s.  It was in the course of the 1980s that Germany pivoted from commemorating the German victims of World War II to the victims of Nazi crimes and terror during the years from 1933 to 1945.  Built over the once abandoned and forgotten ruins of the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin, the Topography of Terror is one the most prominent examples of Germany’s new negative memory culture.  By focusing on the role of Germans as perpetrators and the suffering experienced by the victims of the Nazi regime, this negative memory culture deepens democracy by reinforcing the importance of tolerance, respect for difference and equal rights in the present.  

It was here that unknown thousands of perceived enemies of the Nazi regime were detained and tortured.  It was here that participants in the 20 July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler were brought before their execution.  It was here that parts of the Holocaust were planned.  Yet as late as the 1980s the site of the future Topography of Terror Museum in Berlin remained a forgotten landscape of wartime rubble, an abandoned ground where locals practiced driving without a license.  On May 5, 1985, a few days before the fortieth anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe, a small group of activists from a collective known as Active Museum—Fascism and Resistance in Berlin gathered with their shovels to symbolically excavate the site.  Their goal was to publicly shame the authorities of West Berlin for their failure to preserve the site.  They called for the transformation of the site into a museum where visitors would be confronted with the crimes of the Nazi past.  It would be an active museum with an archive, library, and rooms for meetings and debate where visitors would have the resources to critically engage with the past.  Every effort would be made to avoid monumental architecture and to preserve the original remains of the site.  

It is a misconception that after the Second World War Germans wanted to forget the past, that the German economic miracle or wirtschaftswunder was the result of forgetting through work.  It is true, however, that those groups who were most eager to remember were not inspired to look critically at the period of National Socialism or the suffering caused by Nazi Germany.  The most vocal advocates of memory were Germans who wanted to recall their own experiences of suffering and victimization caused by the war.  Most prominent among these groups were expellees forced from their ancestral homes in Eastern and Central Europe, former German soldiers who languished as prisoners in Soviet camps, and the residents of Germany’s cities leveled by Allied bombing aids.  In West Germany, these were the groups that sent representatives to the Bundestag and had the ear of the influential postwar Chancellor Konrad Adenauer.  Most of the monuments, plaques, and memorials devoted to the recent past recalled the suffering experienced by these groups of Germans.  Survivors of concentration and extermination camps struggled to preserve the sites of Nazi crimes, but usually with little or limited support from government authorities.  Their voices were largely drowned out by the larger and more influential German victims groups who reflected the common sentiment that Germans were the greatest victims of the war.

The Democratic Republic of East Germany (GDR) was in many respects far out in front of the Federal Republic of West Germany (FRG) in preserving Nazi sites of memory.  Years before West Germany, East German authorities devoted considerable human and material resources to converting large concentration camps such as Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and Ravensbrück into memorials.  But East German authorities had no interest in accommodating or working with victims groups who might constitute a rival pole of political authority—even if they shared similar views of the past.  While stifling independent civic initiatives, the East German regime instrumentalized Nazi sites of memory to bolster the official narrative of the past.  According to this narrative, East Germany was the inheritor of the communist history of resistance to fascism and Nazi Germany in particular.  While memorializing former concentration camps, the memory of these camps was edited and narrowed to feature the sacrifices and struggles of the communist resistance while excluding a wide range of victims of both Nazi and Soviet authorities who used the camps after the war.  Only in its twilight years, and for the most part after the collapse of the GDR, were Nazi sites of memory in East Germany broadened and made more representative of the diverse groups targeted during the National Socialist period. 

It is precisely the extent to which memories of minorities as well as of historical failures of the majority (the perpetration of crimes, racism, anti-Semitism, collaboration, profiteering, etc.) are represented publicly that characterizes a “deeply” democratic society.  Jenny Wüstenberg, Civil Society and Memory in Postwar Germany

The conditions that led to the willingness of West Germans to confront the Nazi past were multifaceted and unfolded over a period of decades.  Immediately after the war victims groups did the invaluable work of documenting and preserving Nazi sites of terror from destruction.  In the late 1950s, two former participants in the Church-based resistance to Nazi Germany formed the ASF (Action Reconciliation/Service for Peace).  In the spirit of promoting greater understanding, cooperation, and reconciliation, ASF youth met Holocaust survivors in Israel and helped build nursing homes, churches, and synagogues.  A significant percentage of memory activists in the 1980s were influenced by their involvement with the ASF.  Jenny Wüstenberg argues that the 1968 student movement produced little in the way of concrete changes to the dominant memory narrative but it did encourage greater openness and criticism of the Nazi past.  During the 1960s most West German states expanded the school curriculum to cover the period of Nazi rule.  In the late 1970s television miniseries, entitled “Holocaust,” was viewed by millions of West Germans stimulating a greater interest in the Nazi past.  A general climate of greater openness to and interest in the Nazi past was only strengthened when bureaucrats and political leaders from the Nazi era retired from active professional life.

It was beginning in the late 1970s, and especially during the 1980s, that West Germany underwent a dramatic transformation of its memory culture.  Jenny Wüstenberg comments that  “during the 1980s, more memorials and plaques commemorating those murdered between 1933 and 1945 were established in West Berlin than in the period of 1945 to 1980 combined.” In the course of a larger memory boom in West Germany marked by a dramatic increase in museum attendance, visitors demonstrated a particular interest in sites of memory associated with the Nazi past.  The 1980s was the decade when West Germans went from seeing themselves as victims to perpetrators and embraced a new negative memory culture.  This transformation occurred at the time when the long-ruling conservative government of Chancellor Helmut Kohl was looking for ways for Germans to have a more “normal” relationship with their past in which they could celebrate their heros and take pride in their larger history.  Kohl’s decision to invite President Ronald Reagan to visit the German military cemetery in Bitburg to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the end of the war sparked international outrage when it was discovered that 49 former soldiers of the Waffen SS were buried at the site.  

Jenny Wüstenberg identifies two separate but often interconnected movements that were most influential in reshaping Germany’s memory culture beginning in the 1980s—the Memorial Site Movement and the History Movement.  The Memorial Site Movement was more exclusively focused on the Nazi past and targeted both large and infamous as well as small and forgotten sites with the goal of creating memorials or museums where visitors would be required to engage critically with the past.   For the larger sites Wüstenberg includes Neuengamme, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, the Memorial to German Resistance, and the Plötzensee Memorial in Berlin.  For the forgotten ones she lists “Judengasse in Frankfurt am Main, the EL-DE House in Cologne, the Gestapo headquarters at the former Hotel Silber in Stuttgart, the many sites of death marches and satellite camps, Nazi military tribunals, locations where Nazi euthanasia was practiced, and more come to mind.” The aim of these memorials and museums is to commemorate the victims and identify the perpetrators.  Offering examples such as the Mirror Wall in Berlin Steglitz or the Aschrott Fountain in Kassel, these memorials were placed in central locations intended to provoke critical reflection.  From the Sinti and Roma to the disabled, chronically ill, slave laborers, and deserters from the Wehrmacht, these memorials focused on a wide array of victims.  Rather than simply intending to inspire empathy with the victims they were meant to raise questions about responsibility while encouraging citizens to reflect on contemporary prejudices and exclusionary thinking.  By building a negative memory culture connecting the past and present the hope was to deepen the commitment to democratic values.  

The history movement consisted of grassroots activists interested in local history.  Although not limited to the period of National Socialism, they came to take a particular interest in this past.  Their work was often triggered by construction projects that threatened to level significant sites of memory or local anniversaries and commemorations that made no mention of the Nazi past.  Their motto was “dig where you stand” and they did the real work of confronting the past—carrying out oral history interviews, compiling archives and libraries, leading tours on foot or by boat, and organizing exhibits, festivals and debates.  From changing bridge or street names from the Nazi era or establishing the historical record of crimes committed by a local military regiment, they focused on small, incremental changes.  They put the history of Nazi forced labor on the map and they helped identify German companies that benefited from this practice.  To challenge and unsettle unquestioned norms and values they used a variety of confrontational tactics.  They disrupted military ceremonies by recalling the memory of the thousands of soldiers executed for desertion from the Wehrmacht.  They sprayed graffiti on military memorials criticizing the glorification of war.  They used public spaces and the media to draw attention to their causes—converting a bus into a mobile museum to bring the history of the Nazi euthanasia program to Berlin residents.  It is when memory becomes protest, Jenny Wüstenberg argues, that it has the potential to change the existing norms.  

The history movement also helped shape what Jenny Wüstenberg describes as a new memorial aesthetic in Germany.  This new aesthetic grew out of a disenchantment with traditional, often large-scale monuments and memorials intended to convey the official narrative of the state and orchestrate an understanding of the past for participants or visitors.  Discredited by the massive bloodletting of two world wars and the proclivity of Nazi leaders for monumental architecture, the history movement was influenced by a broader societal desire for alternative approaches to remembering the past.  Jenny Wüstenberg identifies four characteristic features of the new memorial aesthetic, “a decentralized structure for the memory landscape; an emphasis on authenticity; the rejection of monumentality; and specificity and diversity in the content of commemoration.”  Decentralized memorials reject the time honored practice of concentrating memorials in specially designated sites of public reverence.  Artist Gunter Demnig’s Stolperstein or stumbling blocks, for instance, are pavers that recall the memory of the Holocaust but are placed on ordinary streets where residents will literally have to walk over them.  The Stolperstein also demonstrate the desire for authenticity because they include the names and deportation dates of Holocaust victims and are located outside the places where these victims once lived and worked.  As part of the rejection of monumentality and the desire for authenticity, the Topography of Terror Museum was designed to preserve and reveal the remaining ruins of the former Gestapo headquarters in Berlin.  Memorials to the Sinti, Roma, gays, slave laborers, and chronically ill victims of euthenasia represent the search for ways of remembering the diverse victims of the Nazi regime.  Lastly, it is important to stress that this new memorial aesthetic often requires active participation and reflection on the meanings of the past and their connections to the present.  The Stolperstein, for instance, are sponsored by specific groups who must research the history of those they seek to memorialize.  This research is then published and presented at the inauguration ceremony for the pavers.  It is this active, critical engagement with the past that has the potential to deepen democratic values.  

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism, memory activists from the former East Germany benefited from a much more favorable context.  West Germany had already been transformed by decades of memory work and now fully embraced a new negative memory culture that was much more in sync with democratic values of respect for difference and equal rights.  Borrowing many of the same strategies used by History and Memorial Site Movements, memory activists from East Germany, and former dissidents in particular, played a crucial role in preserving sites of memory such as former Stasi offices, detention centers, remnants of the Berlin Wall, security and border checkpoints.  But Jenny Wüstenberg points out that there were pronounced tensions between this new group of memory activists and their West German counterparts.  West German memory activists have successfully integrated themselves into the decision making circles of the German memory establishment.  They were determined that their years of hard work in establishing the primacy of the memory of the Holocaust and the crimes of the Nazi past would not be relevatized or diminished by memory work on repression in the East.  Moreover, they took pride in their professionalism and were suspicious of the emotionally charged East German memory activists driven by personal, lived experiences of dictatorship and oppression.  Links to conservatives and sometimes right-wing German elements, long supportive of the memory of the victims of communism, only added to these suspicions.  While the Holocaust and Nazi past deserve to have a central place in the German memoryscape, Jenny Wüstenberg warns that other important memories, such as those from East Germany or the imperial past, deserve recognition as well.  Only by continuing to confront and unsettle complacent understandings of the past with democratically inspired memory work can Germany continue to deepen its democracy.