If the memorials and “memory sites” in the former West Berlin testify to the hesitancy, tortuousness, and ambiguity of the commemoration process, this is doubly true of the sites that were established in the East. To the extent that the GDR government wrestled with the legacy of National Socialism at all, it was mainly to interpret the crimes of the Nazis as the consequences of a crusade by “monopoly capitalism” against the Communists, who were portrayed as both Nazism’s primary victims and as its heroic conquerors. If the leftist resisters happened to be Jewish, this was downplayed or ignored. Only in the 1980s did the GDR regime begin to acknowledge the fate of the Jews under Nazism with commemorative sites in East Berlin. Monuments or plaques were placed at the Jewish cemeteries at Weißensee and Schönhauser Allee and at the deportation site at Grosse Hamburger Strasse. Yet even this belated effort was half-hearted and spotty. A small monument in the Lustgarten dedicated to the Communist resister Herbert Baum failed to mention his Jewish origins, and the location on the Rosenstrasse where demonstrations by non-Jewish wives had led to the release of their Jewish husbands was acknowledged only after German unification.
A typical example of GDR memory politics was the memorial erected at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienburg, about twenty-five miles north of Berlin. As with the larger memorial at Buchenwald near Weimar, this exhibit focused almost exclusively on the Communist prisoners and Red Army POWs. The plight of the Jews who were incarcerated there was hardly mentioned. Moreover, beyond installing their tendentious museum, the GDR authorities did little to preserve the camp’s buildings and facilities, which were allowed slowly to rot away. Even worse was the situation at the women’s camp at Ravensbrück, where the National People’s Army built a base on the grounds.
After unification, the federal government and the state of Brandenburg announced plans to thoroughly restore the Sachsenhausen site, but little was done beyond a partial revision of the exhibits. In 1992 neo-Nazi vandals burned some of the Jewish barracks at the camp. Due to a lack of funds, the foundation responsible for the site was unable either to repair this damage or to prevent further deterioration of the property. At several places on the grounds visitors were warned away from buildings by signs reading, “Caution! Danger of Collapse. No Trespassing.” The custodians were also unable to hire guides to conduct tours or to adequately catalog the new material donated to the camp on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of its liberation in 1995. “This is an authentic site, a place where the evil was actually perpetrated,” said the foundation’s director. “It is a place that horrifies even people who have read many books about the Holocaust. When the federal government moves to Berlin in a few years, it will become more important than ever. But we don’t have the resources to do what needs to be done here.”
A lack of resources was not a problem at the Neue Wache, which in the first half of the twentieth century stood as Germany’s main shrine to its fallen soldiers—a German version of Britain’s Cenotaph and France’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Upon being absorbed into the commemorative culture of reunited Germany, this hallowed structure became embroiled in a revealing struggle over how the new nation should memorialize the victims of military violence and political tyranny in the era between 1914 and 1945.
