International Holocaust Remembrance Day: It’s not about guilt, but about responsibility
The 1961 novel Friedrich by Hans Peter Richter was on the curriculum of my 6th grade German class at the beginning of the 2000s. The narrator of the book is a young German boy recounting the fate of his neighbor and best friend, a Jew, under the Nazis. It was the first time I consciously came into contact with the history of the persecution of Jews in Germany.
“At that time it was the Jews… Today it’s the blacks. Here the students… tomorrow it might be the whites, the Christians or the public officers…” stated the foreword of the book. “The public officers?” my 11-year-old self questioned reflexively at the time. Yet, I also suddenly realized the enormity of those lines.
From that point on, the history of the Nazi era and the Holocaust never let go of its hold on me. They remained my constant companion. Of course, in history lessons, but also in German, English and French classes.
We watched the films Schindler’s List and Life is Beautiful. We went to plays, visited museums and educational and memorial sites. In the evenings, it was a topic often discussed among my family at the dinner table. Later in the evening, documentaries and feature films were aired about it on television.
Giorgio Cantarini and Roberto Benigni in “Life Is Beautiful” (1998)
For me, it’s unimaginable that it could ever have been any different.
But it was. For the post-war generation of my grandparents, the Holocaust was a taboo subject. Nazis still held posts everywhere: in the courts, in the ministries, in the classrooms and lecture halls, at home on the couch. For the first 20 years after the war there was only silence.
It wasn’t until the 1968 generation rolled around that people began to ask the radical question: “What happened back then?”
The Holocaust as an integral component of German Identity
I, on the other hand, grew up with the knowledge of the Nazi dictatorship and the Holocaust. It is an integral part of my identity. It is an integral part of an German identity in general, even if many don’t want to admit it anymore. For me, too, the reports and images often appear surreal, too inconceivable to be true.
“How can such a thing ever repeat itself? Everyone knows that it was all very horrible” — that’s the attitude one is tempted to take.
But this utopia is not only naïve, it is also extremely dangerous. Political systems can change. And when that happens, it’s not necessarily with a big bang; it rather takes place incrementally, so that one hardly notices it — until it is too late. People of my generation need to be conscious of this, even though we’ve only known peace.
Because there has been war in Europe, even after 1945. The world has also witnessed many more genocides after 1945, in which millions of people have been murdered: whether in Rwanda, Cambodia, Myanmar or in our immediate neighborhood, the Balkans. Who can assure me that it won’t happen again in Germany?
People fleeing persecution in Myanmar
It’s not about guilt, it’s about responsibility
Historical-political education is certainly a key factor in avoiding a repetition of past tragedies. Germany has dutifully processed its fascist past — in contrast to other countries like Italy or Japan.
Nevertheless, a look at the present is worrying. Synagogues and other Jewish institutions are under police protection. The number of crimes motivated by anti-Semitism in Germany and other European countries has risen dramatically in recent years.
Alexander Gauland is not the only AfD politician to stir controversy with his far-right comments
A party sits in the German parliament (and, meanwhile, in all the 16 state parliaments) whose leading members have called the 12-year Nazi dictatorship a dot of “bird shit” in German history (Alexander Gauland) and described the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin as a “monument of shame” (Björn Höcke). Höcke even claimed that Germany was “crippled” by its “stupid” politics of Holocaust remembrance and the AfD allows him to remain in the party.
Far-right politicians rant against the “cult of guilt.” But it is not about guilt at all. The people of my generation are not “guilty” of the acts perpetrated by our great-grandparents.
We nevertheless bear the responsibility to ensure that the darkest chapter of our history is never repeated. Former German Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker, in his speech on the 40-year anniversary of the end of the war on May 8, 1985, hit the nail on the head: “Those who turn a blind eye to the past become blind to the present. Those who do not want to remember the inhumanity of that time become susceptible to new contagions.”
Read more: Bundestag slams far-right AfD, reaffirms Holocaust remembrance
School classes should visit concentration camps
Soon, the voices of the last contemporary witnesses will become silent because they will have passed away. Then we will only the interviews with them, their books, their letters — but the fissure will be there. Because with time, emotions will fade.
In the last year before completing my Abitur (high school finishing exam), I visited the concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial site with my class. Standing with my own feet on the floor of the gas chambers, seeing with my own eyes the mountains of shoes, hair, and suitcases of the men, women and children who were murdered, was undoubtedly one of the most moving events in my young life. These are impressions that have shaped me forever: “Never again Auschwitz.”
Entrance of the former German Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau
Perhaps visiting a concentration camp memorial site is more effective than any history lesson, precisely because it touches us emotionally and brings the events that occurred so much closer than any of the schoolbooks and feature films can.
Germany is a country of immigration. People from all over the world come to us whose identity has not been shaped by the Holocaust. It is not their history, and yet as people living in Germany, they should also confront it like everyone else should.
After all, the history of the Nazi dictatorship and the Holocaust is not only German history, it is human history. It teaches us to what acts people are capable of under certain circumstances. This knowledge concerns everyone.
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‘Never Again’: Memorials of terror
Wannsee House
The villa on Berlin’s Wannsee lake was pivotal in planning the Holocaust. Fifteen members of the Nazi government and the SS Schutzstaffel met here on January 20, 1942 to plan what became known as the “Final Solution,” the deportation and extermination of all Jews in German-occupied territory. In 1992, the villa where the Wannsee Conference was held was turned into a memorial and museum.
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‘Never Again’: Memorials of terror
Dachau
The Nazi regime opened the first concentration camp in Dauchau, not far from Munich. Just a few weeks after Adolf Hitler came to power it was used by the paramilitary SS “Schutzstaffel” to imprison, torture and kill political opponents to the regime. Dachau also served as a prototype and model for the other Nazi camps that followed.
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‘Never Again’: Memorials of terror
Nazi party rally grounds
Nuremberg hosted the biggest Nazi party propaganda rallies from 1933 until the start of the Second World War. The annual Nazi party congress as well as rallies with as many as 200,000 participants took place on the 11-km² (4.25 square miles) area. Today, the unfinished Congress Hall building serves as a documentation center and a museum.
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‘Never Again’: Memorials of terror
Bergen-Belsen
The Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Lower Saxony was initially established as a prisoner of war camp before becoming a concentration camp. Prisoners too sick to work were brought here from other concentration camps, so many also died of disease. One of the 50,000 killed here was Anne Frank, a Jewish girl who gained international fame posthumously after her diary was published.
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‘Never Again’: Memorials of terror
Buchenwald Memorial
Buchenwald near the Thuringian town of Weimar was one of the largest concentration camps in Germany. From 1937 to April 1945, the National Socialists deported about 270,000 people from all over Europe here and murdered 64,000 of them.
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‘Never Again’: Memorials of terror
Memorial to the German Resistance
The Bendlerblock building in Berlin was the headquarters of a military resistance group. On July 20, 1944, a group of Wehrmacht officers around Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg carried out an assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler that failed. The leaders of the conspiracy were summarily shot the same night in the courtyard of the Bendlerblock, which is today the German Resistance Memorial Center.
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‘Never Again’: Memorials of terror
Hadamar Euthanasia Center
From 1941 people with physical and mental disabilities were killed at a psychiatric hospital in Hadamar in Hesse. Declared “undesirables” by the Nazis, some 15,000 people were murdered here by asphyxiation with carbon monoxide or by being injected with lethal drug overdoses. Across Germany some 70,000 were killed as part of the Nazi euthanasia program. Today Hadamar is a memorial to those victims.
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‘Never Again’: Memorials of terror
Holocaust Memorial
Located next to the Brandenburg Gate, Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe was inaugurated sixty years after the end of World War II on May 10, 2005, and opened to the public two days later. Architect Peter Eisenman created a field with 2,711 concrete slabs. An attached underground “Place of Information” holds the names of all known Jewish Holocaust victims.
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‘Never Again’: Memorials of terror
Memorial to persecuted homosexuals
Not too far from the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, another concrete memorial honors the thousands of homosexuals persecuted by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945. The four-meter high monument, which has a window showing alternately a film of two men or two women kissing, was inaugurated in Berlin’s Tiergarten on May 27, 2008.
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‘Never Again’: Memorials of terror
Sinti and Roma Memorial
Opposite the Reichstag parliament building in Berlin, a park inaugurated in 2012 serves as a memorial to the 500,000 Sinti and Roma people killed by the Nazi regime. Around a memorial pool the poem “Auschwitz” by Roma poet Santino Spinelli is written in English, Germany and Romani: “gaunt face, dead eyes, cold lips, quiet, a broken heart, out of breath, without words, no tears.”
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‘Never Again’: Memorials of terror
‘Stolpersteine’ – stumbling blocks as memorials
In the 1990s, the artist Gunther Demnig began a project to confront Germany’s Nazi past. Brass-covered concrete cubes placed in front of the former houses of Nazi victims, provide details about the people and their date of deportation and death, if known. More than 45,000 “Stolpersteine” have been laid in 18 countries in Europe – it’s the world’s largest decentralized Holocaust memorial.
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‘Never Again’: Memorials of terror
Brown House in Munich
Right next to the “Führerbau” where Adolf Hitler had his office, was the headquarters of the Nazi Party in Germany, in the “Brown House” in Munich. A white cube now occupies its former location. A new “Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism” opened on April 30, 2015, 70 years after the liberation from the Nazi regime, uncovering further dark chapters of history.
Article source: https://www.dw.com/en/international-holocaust-remembrance-day-it-s-not-about-guilt-but-about-responsibility/a-47208360