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John Jackson
I was in Germany on Monday of this week to set up one of my instruments at a company in Jena (in the former East Germany) and train the people who bought it. On Tuesday morning I traveled to Berlin and had half a day there before my flight back to the U.S. early Wednesday morning.
On the flight over I read the December 2022 cover article of The Atlantic “How Germany Remembers the Holocaust”. The article describes the various ways both the German government and private groups have sought to document and acknowledge this awful period in German history.
The article was written by Clint Smith, a black Atlantic staff writer. In spite of the provocative subtitle “America still can’t figure out how to memorialize the sins of our history - what can we learn from Germany?” there is only a fleeting and indirect mention of current attempts in the U.S. to rewrite and sanitize our history books (but as you read the article it’s hard not to think about it).
The article is long and describes the many ways Germany has owned up to the horrors of the Nazi period, but one monument that keeps appearing and reappearing is Berlin’s “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe” (how’s that for a not-so-subtle title?). I’d seen this memorial on a previous trip but since I had just read the article, I visited it again Tuesday afternoon.
The monument (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_to_the_Murdered_Jews_of_Europe) is enormous – it occupies a couple of large city blocks and consists of 2700 rectangular concrete blocks whose length and width suggest coffins (although each block is roughly twice the size of a coffin). The heights of the blocks range from maybe two to twelve feet and the coffins gently undulate over a landscape so large it’s hard to take them all in.
This monument, moreover, is hardly hidden away in some out-of-the-way spot. In fact it’s difficult to overstate what a prominent place it occupies – it’s a block away from the Brandenburg Gate, Berlin’s equivalent of the Eiffel Tower and the city's most important gathering site for public events. The American Embassy is directly across the street from the monument and the British and French Embassies are each a block away. The rear of the Adlon Kempinski Hotel, the most exclusive and expensive hotel in Berlin (Michael Jackson dangled his infant son by his arms from the window of his suite there), looks out onto the memorial. The dome of the Reichstag (Germany’s Parliament building, equivalent to our Capitol) is visible a few blocks away. The site of Hitler’s underground bunker, where he lived during the last weeks of the war and where he committed suicide as the Allies closed in, is a two-minute walk away. The site is now a small unpaved parking lot for a nearby apartment building and only a small sign (which you have to search for) marks the location.
But after this lengthy explanation, here’s my real point: in the half hour I was at the monument I saw at least 4-5 groups of 30 or so junior high or senior high school students there with their teachers and the students were also going into the underground exhibit that consists entirely of excerpts from the diaries of people who died in the extermination camps.
The article mentions many other Holocaust memorials, large and small, throughout Germany. Another example - tens of thousands of small plaques have been placed in sidewalks in front of the places where murdered Jews lived, each showing a name, a birth date, a death date and the extermination camp where they died. Germany is definitely not trying to whitewash its Nazi past and it’s also making sure that the generation growing up today knows what happened in their great-grandparents’ generation.
We all grew up during the turmoil of the civil rights period and the last Ku Klux Clan lynching occurred in 1981. Having lived through this intense period, how many of us have been so consumed with white guilt that we have been unable to function as adults?
Germany in 1900 was one of the most advanced, civilized and prosperous countries in the world and 30 years later we all know what happened. The reason to teach kids uncomfortable history is not to guilt them but to make them realize (and also to remind us adults) that this kind of stuff can and does happen and it can happen almost anywhere (and on short notice).
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