Berlin полностью

Not surprisingly, the Germans preferred, especially in the early stages of the commemoration process, to focus on places where they could find something positive amidst all the horror. Hence the emphasis was on resistance to Nazi terror rather than on the terror itself. Berlin (both East and West) sought to highlight its role in the German resistance by naming streets after resisters and placing plaques on the houses where they had lived. In addition to such simple markers, there were also efforts to create more elaborate “memory sites,” where the opposition to Nazi criminality could be contemplated in some detail.

The first such site in West Berlin was erected at Plötzensee, a prison used by the Nazis as an execution center for political prisoners and resisters. Almost 3,000 men and women, including hundreds of foreign nationals, were hanged or guillotined there during the Third Reich. The most prominent victims were German opponents to the regime. On December 22, 1942, eleven members of the Schulze-Boysen-Harnack group, known as the “Red Orchestra,” were executed at the prison. As noted above, following the failed July 20, 1944, assassination attempt against Hitler, several participants in the plot were hanged at the prison. In 1952 the Senate of West Berlin turned the execution chamber into a memorial to the people who had died there, and, by extension, to all those who had sacrificed their lives opposing the Third Reich. Although the victims here were diverse, the emphasis in the exhibit—as in most of the Federal Republic’s resistance commemorations—was on conservative opponents to Hitler. The Plötzensee memorial was also an integral part of Bonn’s effort to employ the resistance legacy as a ticket of readmission to the civilized world. As President Theodor Heuss declared in a speech commemorating the tenth anniversary of the Twentieth of July plot: “The blood of the martyred resisters has cleansed our German name of the shame which Hitler cast upon it. [The resistance] is a gift to the German future.” Since the early 1950s the story of the Twentieth of July assassination attempt has been told time and again, and Plötzensee has become a well-visited stop on the memory trail. With German unification it served as the place where the resisters’ ideal of a morally responsible Germany could he highlighted.

Another major “memory site” focusing on the German resistance was installed in the Bendlerblock, where, as we have seen, Count Stauffenberg and some of the other military resisters were shot. A statue memorializing the resistance martyrs was erected in the courtyard in 1953. Interestingly, the sculptor who designed this idealized figure, Richard Scheibe, had also crafted heroic statuary for the Nazis. The name of the street on which the complex is located was changed in 1955 from Bendlerstrasse to Stauffenbergstrasse. As at Plötzensee, contemporary ideological issues colored interpretations of the past. In dedicating the Bendlerblock statue, West Berlin mayor Ernst Reuter coupled the Twentieth of July legacy with the uprising against the SED-regime that had just occurred in East Berlin. Reuter’s gesture fit into the Federal Republic’s campaign to portray the GDR as the principal legatee of the Third Reich—a mirror image of East German efforts to depict West German capitalists as the true heirs of Hitler. By the early 1980s ideological blinkers had been cast off sufficiently to allow a somewhat more inclusive interpretation of the resistance legacy. A small museum in the Bendlerblock that had originally been installed in the 1960s was expanded and revised to offer a more comprehensive picture of the German resistance, with the inclusion of noted Communists. Yet this very inclusiveness enraged conservatives, who insisted that Communists had no place in the resistance pantheon. Following unification, Defense Minister Volker Rühe demanded the removal from the exhibit of pictures of Walter Ulbricht and Wilhelm Pieck, who, he said, “merely replaced one unjust regime with another.” Indignation, however, came from the other end of the political spectrum as well. On the eve of a celebration marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Twentieth of July plot, in July 1994, leftist students occupied the Bendlerblock museum in protest against what they saw as a dangerous veneration of reactionary militarists who had turned against Hitler only because he was losing the war.