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The Politics of Memory: Rededicating Two Historical Monuments in Postwar Germany
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 May 2008
Extract
For much of the past two centuries German governments encouraged or even sponsored the construction of war monuments. By the turn of the twentieth century Germany was covered in more than a thousand such shrines, most of which had local or regional significance as places of annual celebration or commemoration. Government, media, and business all contributed to an elaborate hagiography of Germany's battles, war heroes, and martyrs, with monuments usually serving as the centerpieces. Millions of middle-class Germans attended or participated in commemoration ceremonies at war monuments all over the country, and/or filled their homes with souvenir trinkets, tableware, wall decorations, coffee-table books, and other quotidian items that reproduced images of the monuments or scenes from the events they memorialized.
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- Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 2008
References
1 Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). Jan Assmann, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” New German Critique 65 (Spring–Summer 1995): 126. Patrick Hutton, History as an Art of Memory (Burlington: University Press of New England, 1993).
2 To name only a few, in each case Wulf Kansteiner, In Pursuit of German Memory: History, Television, and Politics after Auschwitz (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2006); Sabine Hake, German National Cinema (London: Routledge, 2002); Brent O. Peterson, History, Fiction, and Germany: Writing the Nineteenth-Century Nation (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005); Rudy Koshar, Germany's Transient Pasts: Preservation and National Memory in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998) and From Monuments to Traces: The Artifacts of German Memory, 1870–1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Alon Confino, Germany as a Culture of Remembrance: Promises and Limits of Writing History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Alon Confino and Peter Fritzsche, eds., The Work of Memory: New Directions in the Study of German Society and Culture (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002); Konrad Jarausch and Michael Geyer, Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003).
3 For the latter, see the rendering of Schill and his rebels as “freedom fighters” in Carl Cranz, “Sie starben als Preußen und Helden,” Heimatkalender Landkreis Rees 1959 (Rheinberg: Schiffer, 1958). See also his “Unvergessene Opfer für die Freiheit,” Heimatkalender Landkreis Rees 1960 (Rheinberg: Schiffer, 1959), as well as Wolfram von Wolmar, “Der tollkühne Opfergang des Majors Ferdinand von Schill,” Das Freie Wort 38 (September 19, 1959); and Günther Gieraths, “Handelte Schill auf eigene Faust?,” Zeitschrift für Heeres- und Uniformkunde 165–166 (1959).
4 The report submitted to Napoleon on July 15 is in the Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin-Dahlem (hereafter GS-PK): III HA, I. Nr. 524: Der Abzug des Major von Schill.
5 The most widely read version appeared in 1905 under the title Letters of a Young Bride from the Era of the German War of Liberation. The letters became the basis for another entire genre of patriotic fiction in the Imperial and Nazi periods: stories for girls about the brave German women of the Napoleonic Wars.
6 His report is displayed in the museum at the Citadel of Wesel: Schillkasematte (hereafter SAW).
7 For contemporary reports of the festival, see Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv/Staatsarchiv, Wolfenbüttel (hereafter NSLA): 7 B Neu, Nr. 446.
8 For correspondence, program brochures, media commentary, and photographs from these events I have depended upon the SAW. The documentary was not completed until 1939. It was titled Die Schillschen Offiziere and has unfortunately been lost.
9 Bomber Command's official Web site repeats the claim without statistics, noting only that Wesel itself had concurred: www.raf.mod.uk/bombercommand.
10 As above, I have used the (largely uncataloged) collections of the SAW and Prussian Museum to trace the story of the post-war industrial development plans and the ensuing debate about the monument.
11 Although a public debate gradually developed for a decade regarding whether the July 20 conspirators were indeed heroes, public spaces were being named for them as early as 1949, the year in which the Scholl siblings also got their street in downtown (East) Berlin. By the time of the Wesel controversy, in 1953, CDU politicians increasingly referred to the conspirators as heroes. For a recent analysis of this phenomenon, see Tobias Baur, Das ungeliebte Erbe. Ein Vergleich der zivilen und militärischen Rezeption des 20. Juli 1944 im Westdeutschland der Nachkriegszeit (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2007).
12 The commission lasted from the early 1950s through 1965, when Dr. Otto-Ernst Schüddenkopf presented a comprehensive report on 146 different national and international conferences that had been held on the subject. The UN's original mandate also contained seed money for what became the Georg-Eckart Institute for Schoolbook Research, in Braunschweig.
13 Wesel had only a single mayor for the entire duration of the Third Reich. In those years, its primary claim to fame had been as the hometown of Hitler's foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop.
14 See, for instance, the front-page story by Karl-Heinz Reuber, “Soll das Denkmal der Schill'schen Offiziere einen anderen Standort bekommen?,” General-Anzeiger, May 22, 1954. For the proceedings of the meeting I used the records kept by the SAW: Nr. 2/9.
15 The site is now a youth hostel.
16 Wesel's post-war government was dominated by the CDU until 1956.
17 The exact division of men is not clear. Not only do prisoner-counts vary in almost every account, but apparently another 100+ Schillschen who had been captured from various detachments and flying columns were finally collected by mid-June and joined the main group. See État des frais d'entretien et de surveillance des prisonniers du corps de Schill pour le mois de XXX 1809 by General Michaud, the commander at Magdeburg, in the GS-PK: V HA, Rep. 6 VI, N.17.
18 Walther Eckermann, “Ferdinand von Schill zum 150. Todestag,” Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Pädagogischen Hochschule Potsdam (Oct. 1959): 93–106. See also Stadtarchiv Prenzlau: Rep. 8 Prenzlau Nr. 629: “Befreiung von 17 Gefangenen des Schillschen Korps, die von französischen Truppen gefesselt durch Prenzlau gefahren werden sollten.”
19 For examples, see Karl Friedrich von Vechelde, Die Vierziehn vor Braunschweig erschossenen Schill'schen Krieger (Braunschweig: n.p., 1836). No page numbers.
20 Ibid.
21 See also W. Riehl, “Ferdinand von Schills Ende und die Opfer und Denkmäler zu Wesel und Braunschweig,” Der Veteran (Berlin: Carl Schultze, 1859): 11–27.
22 The acquitted twelve apparently escaped all punishment. See Karl Friedrich von Vechelde, Programm und Einladungsschrift (Braunschweig: Otto, 1837), 3. On the escapees, see also Riehl, “Ferdinand von Schills Ende,” 11–27.
23 Gertrud Vorwerk-Semmler, Ferdinand von Schill und seine Wirkung auf seine Zeit (Braunschweig: Appelhaus, 1941), 131.
24 The Vechelde-Blume correspondence in the NSLA (VI Hs 15 Nr. 41) deals with his arrangements with the director of the collections at Leyden. A portion of Vechelde's correspondence with the Dutch government can be found in NSLA: 19 A Neu, Nr. 131.
25 NSLA: 7 B Neu, Nr. 446.
26 NSLA: VI Hs 15, Nr. 41 Vecheldische Papiere, 1836–1846: Bärsch to Vechelde, August 4, 1839.
27 For a home-grown example, see Koshar, Germany's Transient, 155–160.
28 Stadt Braunschweig, Gedächtnißstätte Schilldenkmal 1939–1945 (Braunschweig: Appelhaus, 1955.)
29 For example, see Braunschweigische Zeitung, Sept. 5, 1953.
30 Mund served in the 17th Infantry Regiment, part of the 31st Infantry Division, a formation that fought for years in Russia and was overwhelmingly comprised of men from the Braunschweig region.
31 NSLA: 175 N, Nr. 41. Mund's official title was “Spokesman for the Schill-Committee.” Regarding the Totenkopf, note the letter to Mund from the leader of another veterans' group on November 5, 1965, concurring with the pride in the symbol, noting that his unit had included such worthies as Rommel, Guderian, Hoth, and Höppner, and sketching out plans for their group to attend the next Volkstrauertag.
32 Correspondence and papers of the veterans' groups who organized the events each year may be found in the NSLA: 175 N, Nr. 41 (through 1979), and Nr. 42 (for the more recent controversies and the redesign).
33 NSLA: 175 N, Nr. 42.
34 For example, see Braunschweiger Anzeiger, Nov. 19, 1990.
35 Note the 1992 report of Human Rights Watch-Helsinki, titled Foreigners Out! Xenophobia and Right-Wing Violence in Germany. In some of the eastern Länder, however, left-wing extremists were every bit as much to blame, and allegations of police brutality and/or violence against foreigners committed by former Stasi officers spiked in 1990, particularly in Sachsen-Anhalt and the Land Brandenburg.
36 Braunschweiger Zeitung, November 18, 1991. Regarding the triumphal tone about the fall of Communism, “Powerless people in chains nonetheless together broke the former DDR, and its ideology fell across all of eastern Europe.”
37 For samples of the coverage, see NSLA: 30 Slg, Nr. 14179; and NSLA: 175 N, Nr. 42.
38 The boys had been shouting through megaphones, which the police had also confiscated and destroyed.
39 Braunschweiger Zeitung, November 22, 1994.
40 Although not all of the newspapers, certainly. The Braunschweiger Zeitung ran a two-page historical feature on Schill on Sept. 29, 1995, without ever mentioning the slave-labor camp or the debate about it.
41 Braunschweiger Zeitung, November 1, 1995.
42 NSLA: 175 N, Nr. 42.
43 At the time of this writing, the city has sponsored a new Web site for the site and “Open Archive” at http://www.schillstrasse.de.
44 Kansteiner, In Pursuit of German Memory, 6.