The Wages of Guilt

by Ian Buruma

  Warning monuments come in many different forms. Former concentration camps have become Gedenkstätte which combine the functions of museum, tourist attraction, and memorial. Some, such as Ravensbrück in the East, are more or less intact, and some, such as Bergen-Belsen in the West, are no more than sites.

  The Wannsee Villa, outside Berlin, where Reinhard Heydrich discussed the logistics of the Final Solution with fellow bureaucrats over an after-breakfast cognac on January 20, 1942, was opened as a Gedenkstätte on the fiftieth anniversary of the occasion. The opening was celebrated in the afternoon with a conference about memory and the Holocaust, followed by a champagne reception.

  The museum in the Gedenkstätte Haus der Wannsee-Konferenz does not show much that is new. The pictures on the wall are less about the Nazi bureaucrats who planned the Final Solution than about the victims, photographed with eager thoroughness by their tormentors. There they all are again, frozen in their misery: the boy in the Warsaw ghetto holding up his hands, the terrified eyes peeping through the door of a sealed cattle car, the selection on the ramp, the rabbis playing piggyback, etc., etc. I leafed through the visitors’ book and read the professions of national shame: “It is embarrassing, sad, and humbling to have to call oneself a German.” “How could this happen among a largely Christian people?” “After this visit I am ashamed to be a German.”

  There is a warning monument in the center of West Berlin, facing some of the busiest department stores. Hundreds of thousands walk past every day, with shopping bags full, seeing it, but not seeing it. It is a sign listing the main concentration camps and telling us never to forget. There are other such signs scattered around the city.

  One artist, Jochen Gerz, born in 1940, came up with the idea of making an invisible warning monument. He was critical of conventional memorials and monuments, which beautify the past by casting history in bronze, as it were, thus turning personal, meaningful remembrance into a communal ceremony. This, he argued, was just another way of suppressing the past. The representation of history replaces memory itself, especially after the witnesses are gone; it hinders personal reflection. The question is: How do you visualize memory? Gerz’s answer is: You don’t.

  What he did instead was to trace the continuity of Jewish life and culture by finding out the names of Jewish cemeteries in Germany. Then, as a variation of the Jewish custom of leaving stones on visited graves, Gerz and his pupils dug up paving stones in a street in Saarbrücken, outside the castle which used to contain a Gestapo prison. Every stone was inscribed with the name of a Jewish cemetery and the date of its discovery by Gerz, and restored to its place in the street, making sure the inscription was underneath. Gerz’s team dug up 1,926 stones, and inscribed and replaced them in this manner. A sign indicates the place of the “Invisible Warning Monument.”

  In an essay entitled “The Past Must Not Be Normalized,” Jürgen Habermas, as is his wont, criticized the desire among German conservatives to unburden Germany from its recent past by making it seem less singular, more normal, more in the mainstream of history than is warranted. He quoted the following description (by Helmut Dubiel) of this attitude: “People relate to the national past as they do to a nuclear power station for whose radioactive waste no final destination has been found.” Reading this, I was reminded of Walter Benjamin’s description of history as an accumulation of rubble. But even as some (perhaps many, perhaps even most) Germans wish to have the radioactive rubble buried, others try their hardest to retrieve every stone, every cinder, to be preserved in monuments and museums.

  The site of the former Gestapo headquarters in Berlin, for example, consists of nothing but stones. Himmler chose some of the grandest addresses in Berlin for his operations. The Gestapo was in the former School of Industrial Arts and Crafts on the Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, and the Security Service, under Heydrich, was in the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais on the Wilhelmstrasse. The latter was a fine baroque palace, renovated by Friedrich Schinkel in the early nineteenth century. These two buildings formed the hub of the entire network of concentration camps and secret police organizations; here the procedures of mass murder were worked out. The Gestapo also built a “house prison” in the cellars of the art school.

  Like the rest of Berlin, both buildings were damaged in the bombings. They were not beyond repair, however, but as was the fate of many reminders of the old days, the palace was demolished in 1949, and the old arts and crafts academy was blown up in stages between 1953 and 1964. There was not even a Mahnmal to commemorate the place. Nothing remained but a mountain of rubble which was never properly cleared away.

  In 1983 the Berlin government decided to do something about it. A competition was held to see if some suitable artistic concept for this historical site might emerge. Concepts emerged, but nothing happened. Six years later, the government appointed a commission to look into the possibility of a museum, or perhaps a documentation center, or maybe a Mahnmal. Again nothing happened officially, but meanwhile a group called Active Museum of Fascism and Resistance in Berlin had built a makeshift museum on top of the ruins of what was assumed to have been the Gestapo prison. In fact, they were the broken walls of a washroom. But ghoulish legends grew easily from these sites. A hotel across the street, once the billet for middle-ranking SS officers, was torn down. I was told by a local resident, speaking in a low confiding voice, that some of the hotel’s furniture had come from the Gestapo’s torture rooms.

  The foundations of the house prison had indeed been dug up some years before, but they had been sealed by the state Ministry of Archaeology. The ministry was engaged in a bureaucratic wrangle with the authorities in charge of historical buildings. The heritage authorities wanted to turn the entire site into a “Pompeii of the SS”—to borrow the phrase from Alfred Kernd’l, Berlin’s chief archaeologist since 1968. Kernd’l had plans to build a memorial around the jail, with some modest plantings to indicate the outlines of the cells.

  By the middle of 1992, still nothing had happened. The makeshift museum, called Topography of Terror, was still there. Kernd’l worried about the state of the cell foundations, and outside the museum children climbed the rubble on mountain bikes. New ideas for the site were offered. A politician suggested that a slab of the old Berlin Wall might be positioned behind the ruins, with some appropriate text, like “End of two dictatorships.” But finally, by the end of the year, the senator for cultural affairs made a decision. The Topography of Terror would be expanded and an “international center” built, for seminars, meetings, and conferences on the Nazi past.

  In the meantime another archaeological dispute had erupted. In June 1990, Berliners were about to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall by staging a rock concert by Pink Floyd on the site of Hitler’s old chancellery. This spot, near the Brandenburg Gate, had been wasteland, lying like a sandy mine-filled moat along the eastern side of the Berlin Wall. Escapees had been shot there and rabbits ran wild. Not long before the Wall came down, gray housing blocks were built on top of Hitler’s bunker. Before the concert, workmen dug into the rubble, looking for unexploded mines, and struck the roof of a bunker—part of the concrete labyrinth built to house Hitler and his retainers at the end of the war. Alfred Kernd’l—asserting that “everything under the ground is my territory”—rushed to the scene on his bicycle and found something remarkable. For inside the bunker nothing had changed since 1945. Somehow, the Red Army had forgotten to blow it up, even though the odd black smudge left by flame throwers showed they had been there.

  There were bunk beds for the SS guards, and on the wooden table, empty bottles, knives and forks, and porcelain bowls had gathered decades of dust. An amateur painter had left frescoes on the walls of tall SS men in tight trousers and shiny black boots, shielding blond German children playing under German oak trees, and blond bosomy women holding hands on checkered tablecloths with blond soldiers drinking beer. With the customary taste of rock impresarios, the promoter of the Pink Floyd concert contrived to have himself photographed in fron
t of the painting before Kernd’l sealed the door. The concert was duly held. Pink Floyd sang about sitting in a bunker behind a wall waiting for the worms to come. And the quarrel about the bunker began.

  Conservatives were embarrassed by yet another unwelcome reminder of the past and wanted to destroy it. Some liberals and members of the Jewish community worried that it would become a neo-Nazi shrine and wanted to be rid of it as well. But Kernd’l insisted it should be preserved as an important relic of history.

  Kernd’l has an office in the Charlottenburg Palace. You can see the Nefertiti jewels as you enter the building. His manner is brusque and he speaks in a thick Berlin accent, a rarity in the western part of town. He also uses the phrase “typically German” a great deal, always with contempt. It is “typically German” to want to bury the past. The Japanese, he said, push their history away, but so do the Germans. What happened to Spandau prison just one month after Hess died? “Bang, blown to bits, another bit of our history gone. Typically German!”

  I asked him what the chances were of preserving the bunker. Not much chance, he said. “They only want history to be displayed in museums.” But why, I asked, did he feel that the bunker was worth preserving? “It is a sad thing,” he said, “that all that is left on a spot where royal mistresses had palaces, and Bismarck used to live, a spot which romantic poets once described as paradise, that all that is left there is a bunker for SS men. But it needs to be preserved. You see, the Germans have so little identity. Why destroy what little we have got?”

  Identity: I thought about all the German towns I had visited, each with its own Heimatmuseum, each hanging on for dear life to the artifacts of its folklore, its local history, as though to ward off the ravages of change. Napoleon built museums to glorify his reign and boast of his conquests. The great museums of Victorian England celebrated progress and imperial reach. The German Heimatmuseum shows who the local people are, or once were, or more precisely, who they think they are, or once were. But there is one thing that many European history museums have had in common, at least since the French Revolution: the aim of showing that the here and now, our customs, our taste, and even the way our societies are governed, are the logical, inevitable outcome of the past. This aim can be politicized, to give legitimacy to a revolution, a nation, a particular form of government. This is inevitably the case when the government ideology rests on a belief in the unshakable laws of history.

  There is a spot on top of a green hill outside Weimar where Goethe used to sit with his friend Eckermann. They would lean back against an oak tree, savor the green velvety folds of the Thuringian countryside, and discuss literature and life. Eckermann noted down the master’s words: “Here one feels great and free.”

  In 1937, when the forest was cleared to build a concentration camp, Goethe’s oak was protected by a special act, decreed by the Nazi regime. It was known as the Nature Protection Act. A fence was built around the oak, and thus it survived until the last year of the war, when one side caught fire during an American bomb attack. The Nazis decided to have it felled. An inmate of the camp, who made death masks in the medical block, used some of the wood to carve a human face, which can still be seen in the museum of the Buchenwald National Warning and Memorial Place (Nationale Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Buchenwald).

  The exact spot of Goethe’s oak was pointed out to me in the winter of 1991, on my second visit to the camp. My guide was a tall, thin man whose ingratiating manners suggested nervousness. “Here you can see,” he said, indicating the setting of the former camp in one swooping gesture, “the typical German mentality.” (The guide was himself a German.) “The Goethe oak—culture and romanticism; the crematorium—barbarism; the zoo—sentimentality.”

  I had not heard about the zoo before. Created to amuse the SS guards, it was located just outside the barbed-wire fence, near the main gate (the animals, needless to say, were treated far better than the inmates of the camp). Otherwise, my guide’s sketch of the German “mentality” was a cliché.

  But it was a cliché not often heard there until recently, for Buchenwald was the “Red Olympus,” the holiest shrine of the German Democratic Republic. Many important Communists were imprisoned in Buchenwald; Ernst Thälmann, the chairman of the prewar German Communist Party, was murdered there. And an alleged last-minute uprising led by Communist prisoners in April 1945 had entered Communist lore as one of the great historic events. That the German mentality was now being blamed for what had happened in Buchenwald fifty years ago was a sign of how much had changed in East Germany during the last two years.

  On my first visit to Buchenwald, a year earlier, everything was still normal—that is to say, orthodox. Like most visitors from the West, I was struck and somewhat horrified by the grandiose monuments erected on the site of the mass graves. Along the Street of Nations were eighteen huge stone pylons, crowned by great chalices, representing the countries where the Nazis had rounded up their victims. There was the soaring, forty-five-meter bell tower, whose bell, my guidebook said, would “echo through the land.” Inside the bell tower a bronze plate covered the soil taken from various concentration camps. Outside stood the groups of giant prisoners breaking their bonds and raising their stone fists. There were friezes of heroic figures punishing their tormentors, or better still, in the words of the Buchenwald Oath, taken on the day of liberation in April 1945, “tearing out the Nazi evil by its roots.”

  I saw the cell where Ernst Thälmann, the Stalinist hero, was killed. There was a plaque about the “great son of the German people and leader of the German working class, murdered by fascism,” an eternal flame, and wreaths from fraternal parties and trade union organizations.

  But the myth of Buchenwald, like similar myths all over the Soviet empire, had the usual hole in the middle. There was hardly any mention that there had been many Jews among the sixty-five thousand men, women, and children who died in the camp. Buchenwald was not a death camp, like Auschwitz or Treblinka, specifically designed to annihilate the Jews. Prisoners at Buchenwald were worked to death, or they died of disease, hunger, torture, and executions. All prisoners were treated horribly, but according to most accounts, the Jews were treated worst of all. Yet I found only one small plaque to commemorate the “special camp” where ten thousand German Jews had languished in terrible conditions, after being arrested during the Kristallnacht in 1938. About the transports from Auschwitz of tens of thousands of Jews, many of whose skeletal remains had to be literally scraped from the cattle cars, not a word.

  In Communist dogma, the war against the Jews did not really exist. World War II had been a class war, waged by fascists and plutocrats against the People. Jews, like Gypsies, were not essentially different from the other victims of fascism. As my guidebook, printed in 1988, put it: “Destruction of Marxism, revenge for the lost war, and brutal terror against all resisters, these were the stated aims of German fascism from the very start. What was really at stake was the interests of monopoly capital, lavishly used to promote the Nazi movement.”

  The Buchenwald museum did, however, offer a display of women’s hair and children’s shoes, and a human heart, pierced by a bullet, generously provided by the “memorial place Auschwitz.” And the guidebook contained two photographs of the selection ramp at Birkenau. But the only caption above these pictures was a quotation from Ernst Thälmann, stating that “the bourgeoisie is serious about its aim to annihilate the party and the entire avant-garde of the working class.”

  Like all former concentration camp sites, Buchenwald attracts the usual combination of tourists (one of the SS barracks was turned into a hotel), survivors, and ghouls. I was accosted in the parking lot, just outside the notorious iron gate, decorated with the motto “Jedem das Seine” (“To each his own”), by an American veteran who told me he visited the camp at least once a year. He claimed to have been with General Patton’s leathernecks, who liberated the camp on April 11, 1945. “The ovens were still warm,” he drawled, “the ovens were still warm.”

/>   This version of events hardly fit the orthodox view in the GDR. The myth of Buchenwald held that the inmates, led by members of Communist cells in the camp, liberated themselves in an armed rebellion. There was indeed a resistance organization in the camp, whose members had captured some weapons. But whether these weapons were ever used is open to question. Several surviving witnesses, living in the West, claimed that the camp was freed—without bloodshed—by the U.S. Army. As Patton’s tanks surrounded the camp, the SS guards either fled or surrendered.

  But it was an important story, for it served as the founding myth of the German Democratic Republic. Every East German schoolchild had to read the novel Naked Among Wolves, by Bruno Apitz, the man who carved a face mask out of Goethe’s oak. It is a clumsy novel of the socialist realist school, in which the men of the Communist resistance committee contrive, at great risk to themselves, to save a little Jewish boy, while plotting the final uprising. The book revolves around the question of collective versus individual interests. Is the fate of the community worth jeopardizing in the interests of one boy? The question is agonized over but never quite resolved. In the end, both boy and community are saved. In the final, climactic scene, the heroes press through the main camp gate and “drag along on the crests of their liberating waves the unstoppable stream of humanity.”

  And so began, in the words of the Buchenwald Oath (sworn on the parade ground that very same day), the struggle “toward a new world of peace and freedom.” The nature of this world soon became clear. When Otto Grotewohl, the first Prime Minister of the German Democratic Republic, addressed 80,000 people at a rally in the former Buchenwald camp in 1958, he declared that the oath had already come true in the socialist German state. And to pay tribute to this achievement, hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren, workers, socialist youths, soldiers, farmers, and foreign comrades flocked every year to the “Red Olympus” to lay wreaths, listen to speeches, march in torchlight parades, and generally demonstrate their resolve to continue on the road to the Communist millennium.