The designer of the memorial, Peter Eisenman, a New York architect, chose not to explain the meaning of the number 2,711, or very much else about the installation. “I wanted people to have a feeling of being in the present and an experience that they had never had before,” Eisenman told Der Spiegel the year it opened. “And one that was different and slightly unsettling.”
The company that once produced cyanide gas for the concentration camps now provides the protectorate applied to the concrete stones to prevent graffiti and defacement, which might be seen as either an act of atonement from the perspective of some or the very least they could do from the perspective of others. The installation is the most imposing of a series of memorials to the people killed under Hitler’s reign. “We have a memorial to everyone victimized by the Nazis,” Dunkley said. “There is a memorial to homosexuals who perished. There is a memorial to the Sinti and Roma right outside the Reichstag. We have lesser memorials to lesser groups. And then we have the stumbling stones.”
These are the micro-memorials of discreet brass squares the size of one’s palm inscribed with the names of Holocaust victims and placed throughout the city. More than seventy thousand of these stumbling stones, known as Stolpersteine, have been forged and installed in cities across Europe. They are embedded among the cobblestones in front of houses and apartment buildings where the victims whose names are inscribed on them are known to have last lived before being abducted by the Gestapo. “Here lived Hildegard Blumenthal, born 1897, deported 1943, died in Auschwitz,” reads a stumbling stone clustered among others outside an apartment building in western Berlin. Nearby are the stones for Rosa Gross and Arthur Benjamin, who were deported in 1942 and who perished in Riga.
The stumbling stones force the viewer to pause and squint to read the inscription, force the viewer to regard the entry doors the people walked through, the steps they climbed with their groceries and toddlers, the streets they strolled that were the everyday life of real people rather than abstractions of incomprehensible millions. Each one is a personal headstone that gives a momentary connection to a single individual. Leaning over to read the names on the stumbling stones forces you to bow in respect.
* * *
——
Nigel Dunkley made a slow turn near the site of the Reich Chancellery in the Mitte of Berlin and pulled his old Volvo up to a parking lot off Wilhelmstrasse. It was an asphalt square at the base of some concrete office and apartment buildings, and it had a low guardrail around it, like parking lots everywhere.
“You see that blue Volkswagen parked next to the white minivan?” he asked me.
From the car window, I looked past a recycling bin on the sidewalk and then over to the asphalt lot, the white lines separating each car, and saw the Volkswagen he was pointing to. It was parked in front of the low, straggled branches of untended barberry bushes.
“Right there, underneath that Volkswagen, was Hitler’s bunker,” Nigel said. The hideout had been built thirty feet underground and protected by two meters of reinforced concrete, in the event that Hitler should ever need a secure location. This is where Hitler spent the last weeks and hours of his life, hiding out from enemy shelling as the Allies closed in on them, where he heard that Mussolini had been executed and his Wehrmacht overcome on every front, where he married Eva Braun at the last minute as his closest confidants turned on him, where he shot himself in the head after biting into a cyanide pill, and where his hours-long wife had bitten into a cyanide pill just before him, on April 30, 1945. His body was unceremoniously dragged to a nearby lot and set afire.
In America, the men who mounted a bloody war against the United States to keep the right to enslave humans for generations went on to live out their retirement in comfort. Confederate president Jefferson Davis went on to write his memoirs at a plantation in Mississippi that is now the site of his presidential library. Robert E. Lee became an esteemed college president. When they died, they were both granted state funerals with military honors and were revered with statues and monuments.
An American author living in Berlin, who happens to be Jewish and to have been raised in the South, often gets asked about Germany’s memorials to its Nazi past. “To which I respond: There aren’t any,” Susan Neiman, author of Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil, has written. “Germany has no monuments that celebrate the Nazi armed forces, however many grandfathers fought or fell for them.”
Rather than honor supremacists with statues on pedestals, Germany, after decades of silence and soul-searching, chose to erect memorials to the victims of its aggressions and to the courageous people who resisted the men who inflicted atrocities on human beings.
They built a range of museums to preserve the story of the country’s descent into madness. They converted the infamous villa at Wannsee, where fifteen men worked out the details of the Final Solution to kill the Jews of Europe, into a museum examining the consequences of that fateful decision. The country converted the Gestapo headquarters into a museum called the Topography of Terror, a deep dive into the founding of the Third Reich. As for the man who oversaw these atrocities, Germany chose quite literally to pave over the Führer’s gravesite. There could be no more pedestrian resolution than that.
* * *
——
In Germany, displaying the swastika is a crime punishable by up to three years in prison. In the United States, the rebel flag is incorporated into the official state flag of Mississippi. It can be seen on the backs of pickup trucks north and south, fluttering along highways in Georgia and the other former Confederate states. A Confederate flag the size of a bedsheet flapped in the wind off an interstate in Virginia around the time of the Charlottesville rally.
In Germany, there is no death penalty. “We can’t be trusted to kill people after what happened in World War II,” a German woman once told me. In America, the states that recorded the highest number of lynchings, among them the former Confederate States of America, all currently have the death penalty.
In Germany, few people will proudly admit to having been related to Nazis or will openly defend the Nazi cause. “Not even members of Germany’s right-wing Alternative for Germany party,” wrote Neiman, “would suggest glorifying that part of the past.”
The Germans who may “privately mourn for family members lost at the front,” Neiman wrote, “know that their loved ones cannot be publically [sic] honored without honoring the cause for which they died.”
In America, at Civil War reenactments throughout the country, more people typically sign up to fight on the side of the Confederates than for the Union, leaving the Union side sometimes struggling to find enough modern-day conscripts to stage a reenactment.
In Germany, some of the Nazis who did not kill themselves were tracked down and forced to stand trial. Many were hanged at the hands of the Allies for their crimes against humanity. The people who kidnapped and held hostage millions of people during slavery, condemning them to slow death, were not called to account and did not stand trial.
In Germany, restitution has rightly been paid, and continues to be paid, to survivors of the Holocaust. In America, it was the slaveholders who got restitution, not the people whose lives and wages were stolen from them for twelve generations. Those who instilled terror on the lowest caste over the following century after the formal end of slavery, those who tortured and killed humans before thousands of onlookers or who aided and abetted those lynchings or who looked the other way, well into the twentieth century, not only went free but rose to become leading figures—southern governors, senators, sheriffs, businessmen, mayors.
* * *
——
On a gray November afternoon, couples with strollers, tailored women with their shopping totes, commuters in wool and tweed, all make their way to the Wittenbergplatz subway station off Kurfürstendamm, the buzzy, neon-lit Fifth Avenue of Berlin, on the west side of the city.
> They converge at the front doors to the station, and there to the right of them is the sign, nearly a story high, for every commuter, every shopper, every store clerk, every couple on a date, every backpacked student and tourist to see. Translated from German, it reads: Places of Horror That We Should Never Forget. Then it lists the places never to be forgotten: Auschwitz, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Treblinka, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and half a dozen other concentration camps.
It was through these station doors that thousands of Jews took their last look at their beloved Berlin before being forced onto trains that would carry them to their deaths. This fact, this history, is built into the consciousness of Berliners as they go about their everyday lives. It is not something that anyone, Jew or Gentile, resident or visitor, is expected to put behind them or to just get over. They do not run from it. It has become a part of who they are because it is a part of what they have been. They incorporate it into their identity because it is, in fact, them.
It is a mandatory part of every school curriculum, even for grade school students, and it is never far from view for any citizen. This is not to say that everyone is in agreement as to the lengths to which the country goes to reinforce this history. What seems not in contention is the necessity of remembering. A former member of the German parliament was once talking with Nigel Dunkley and thought out loud about his discomfort with the massive stone installation to the European Jews near the Brandenburg Gate, which some have compared to a cemetery in the middle of downtown. “Why can’t we have a nice park with grass and trees and a proper monument?” the former parliamentarian said. “Every time I drive past, I feel I am being punished by this higgly-piggly mess.”
“If that is what you really think,” Dunkley said to him, “that you’re being punished, then you are being punished.”
When Dunkley takes German students on tours of the history of the Third Reich, he asks them their reaction to what they have seen.
“Do you as Germans feel any guilt for what the Germans did?” he will ask them.
They will go off into groups and have heated discussions among themselves, and then come back to him with their thoughts.
“Yes, we are Germans, and Germans perpetrated this,” some students once told him, echoing what others have said. “And, though it wasn’t just Germans, it is the older Germans who were here who should feel guilt. We were not here. We ourselves did not do this. But we do feel that, as the younger generation, we should acknowledge and accept the responsibility. And for the generations that come after us, we should be the guardians of the truth.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Democracy on the Ballot
It was nearing the sesquicentennial of the end of the Civil War, and the turmoil in America had doubled over on itself through the summer of 2014 and into 2015, a metronome of unfiltered videos, one after another, of police attacking unarmed citizens from Staten Island to Los Angeles. Then came the mass demonstrations, protesters converging by the thousands to shut down FDR Drive in Manhattan and Lake Shore Drive in Chicago at rush hour, protesters dropping to the ground as had the victims in those shootings. And we could see on Twitter or cable news the office workers and undergraduates splayed together on the tile floor at the cosmetics counters at Macy’s or at Grand Central Terminal or the University of Michigan Medical School, the die-ins as they were called, under the tragically obvious rallying cry of Black Lives Matter.
By June of 2015, the first black president was delivering a eulogy at the funeral of the pastor killed in the Charleston church massacre. The president, looking grim-faced and stricken, sought to bring the country to a hoped-for redemption by leading the sanctuary through the refrain of “Amazing Grace,” the song itself a quest for absolution by the captain of a slaving ship.
It was shortly thereafter that the Confederate flag finally came down from the state capitol in Columbia after it had flown for fifty-four years. At the same time, Harper Lee’s second novel, Go Set a Watchman, was released, and the country discovered that the most beloved hero in American fiction, Atticus Finch, had actually been an unreconstructed bigot.
The country was being unmasked, it seemed. It moved me enough to write an op-ed about what appeared to be a moment of truth. I decided to reach out to a friend, Taylor Branch, the esteemed historian of the civil rights movement, to hear his thoughts. He was translating this through the lens of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s thirteen-year campaign for social justice. He believed then that the country had been hurled back to the 1950s, which he said he found hopeful, actually, because it could be the beginning of a breakthrough.
“It is building up to a crisis for those who want to will this away,” he told me, and I included him in my opinion piece in The New York Times that July.
Three years later, we were catching up over coffee, with a different president and the concentric circles of hate seeming to radiate outward to Muslims, Mexican immigrants, nonwhite immigrants overall, and now to Jews. It was November 2018. The month before, eleven Jewish worshippers had been gunned down as they prayed at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh.
“With everything going on, where do you think we are now?” I asked him. “Are you still thinking 1950s? I’m thinking 1880s.”
“Well, that’s awfully bleak,” he said. “There was a total exclusion of the black vote, total exclusion from political life. People were being lynched openly. That is not happening now. The 1880s was the start of a long period of suppression.”
I could see his point, and I told him I fervently hoped to be wrong. That era, the decades roughly between the end of Reconstruction and the start of World War II, was called the Nadir by the black historian Rayford Logan. Many black historians see the current era, starting roughly with the shooting of Trayvon Martin and other unarmed black people, combined with the rollbacks in voting rights protections, as the Second Nadir.
“We’re seeing the twenty-first-century version of the backlash,” I said. “The tools will be different than before.”
We both well knew that grandfather clauses had faded with the previous century, but now states were purging tens of thousands of voters for missing a single election, shutting down polling stations at the last minute in Democratic-leaning precincts. They were now requiring state ID just to vote, but were rejecting IDs that didn’t match the voter list to the letter or that were missing a single apostrophe. Since 2010, twenty-four states had passed one or all of these restrictions.
Then there were the shootings of unarmed African-Americans at the hands of authorities that, despite viral videos, often went without prosecution.
“The purpose of the lynchings was to keep black people in their place,” I said. “In both eras, people were killed with impunity. And now, the mass shootings.”
“Based on what you’re saying,” Taylor said, “that sounds like we’re at the end of the Weimar Republic!”
“It grieves me to think that,” I said.
“Donald Trump brought to the surface what had been there all along, and now that it is out, there is no denying it. So it should be easier to defeat.”
“I think what we’re looking at is South Africa.”
“They are more out front with their racism than here,” he said.
“By that, I mean the demographics and the dynamics of their demographics.”
“Yes,” he said of the predictions for 2042. “People were angry when the projections came out. People said they wouldn’t stand for being a minority in their own country.”
“Now there are troops at the border,” I said, “and shootings of black and brown and Jewish people.”
Taylor nodded. He contemplated the meaning of that. “So the real question would be,” he said finally, “if people were given the choice between democracy and whiteness, how many would choose whiteness?”
We let that settle in the air, neither of us willing to hazard a gue
ss to that one.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The Price We Pay for a Caste System
Leon Lederman was an American physicist who won a Nobel Prize in 1988 for his groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of the particles of nature. Decades afterward, when he was in his early nineties, he began to suffer memory loss and to require additional care. In 2015, he took the extraordinary step of auctioning off his Nobel Prize medal for $765,000 to cover medical bills that were mounting. In 2018, he died in a nursing home, his Nobel Prize in the hands of someone else.
Compared to our counterparts in the developed world, America can be a harsh landscape, a less benevolent society than other wealthy nations. It is the price we pay for our caste system. In places with a different history and hierarchy, it is not necessarily seen as taking away from one’s own prosperity if the system looks out for the needs of everyone.
People show a greater sense of joint responsibility to one another when they see their fellow citizens as like themselves, as in the nations of western Europe or in Australia, a diverse country with a looser hierarchy. Societies can be more magnanimous when people perceive themselves as having an equal stake in the lives of their fellow citizens.
There are thriving, prosperous nations where people do not have to sell their Nobel Prizes to get medical care, where families don’t go broke taking care of elderly loved ones, where children exceed the educational achievements of American children, where drug addicts are in treatment rather than prison, where perhaps the greatest measure of human success—happiness and a long life—exists in greater measure because they value their shared commonality.
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