Despite a barrage of criticism from historians, Jewish groups, various leftist and pacifist organizations, and the local art community, Kohl held fast to his plan. On “National Mourning Day” (November 14, 1993), the chancellor personally presided over the reopening of the Neue Wache. The monument had been restored essentially as he had proposed. An enlarged pietà reposed somberly beneath an opening in the ceiling that allowed sunlight to fall on the figure. The only significant change to Kohl’s original concept was a bronze plaque beside the entrance that named the specific victim-groups being memorialized. The long list, a Who’s Who of Nazi victims, did not include Waffen-SS men, but this did not prevent some folks from leaving flowers inscribed to the memory of SS officers killed in the war. Moreover, the last-minute addition of the inclusive plaque failed to make the memorial more palatable to most of its critics. Protesters shouting “murderers are not victims” attended the opening ceremony, which was pointedly boycotted by Berlin’s Jewish leader, Jerzy Kanal, and by the city’s senator for cultural affairs, Ulrich Roloff-Momin.
The controversy surrounding the Neue Wache, acrimonious as it was, paled in comparison to the bitter debate over a commemorative site that did not yet exist: a national monument in Berlin to all the Jews murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust. A plan to create such a site surfaced in 1988, shortly before the Wall came down. It was spearheaded by a television talk-show hostess named Lea Rosh. Originally, Rosh wanted to locate the proposed memorial on the former Gestapo/SS grounds, thereby displacing the “Topography of Terror” exhibit. When Germany and Berlin became unified, however, Helmut Kohl offered Rosh and her backers an even more prominent space, a five-acre site just south of the Brandenburg Gate. Like Rosh, Kohl believed that such a monument would help Germany atone for its greatest crime.
This plan immediately came under fire for a host of reasons. Berlin, as has been noted, possesses a number of sites which had figured prominently in the Holocaust. Many critics of the Rosh concept believed that it would be better to focus Germany’s commemorative and atonement efforts on “active museums” like the Sachsenhausen camp, the “Topography of Terror” exhibit, and the Wannsee villa. As it happened, the site offered by Kohl for the Holocaust memorial was close to a number of Nazi-era bunkers that lay buried under mounds of sand. In 1990 construction workers digging in the area found remains of the underground shelters for Hitler’s drivers, replete with eerie scenes from Nazi mythology. Later, Goebbels’s bunker and remnants of the Führerbunker (whose location was known, but kept secret) were unearthed as well. City officials insisted upon reburying all these sites, but proponents of the active-museum concept argued that they should be preserved as crime scenes, like the Topography of Terror. It would be a travesty, they said, if the proposed Holocaust memorial displaced actual sites of evil. Then there were those many citizens who were simply fed up with efforts by Berlin and Bonn to memorialize the Holocaust and thereby perpetuate Germany’s sense of guilt and obligation. As a character in Michael Kleeberg’s novel,
