Museum Transformations. Группа авторов

were the disputes surrounding Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, the plan to build a central Holocaust memorial, a speech by the writer Martin Walser, and an exhibition dealing with the crimes of the German Wehrmacht. The Holocaust was at the center of all these debates which raised important questions about guilt, responsibility, shame, and the role remembrance of the Holocaust should play in Germany’s national self-conception. Meanwhile, Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who promoted a “politics of history” as part of his government’s public policy, built a new historical museum in Bonn and revived the Neue Wache (New Guardhouse) in Berlin as a central place of commemoration for all victims of World War II. But this attempt to include each and every group and individual in the category of “victim” was not successful. The Central Council of Jews in Germany protested, as did members of citizens’ groups (Reichel 1999; Niven 2002, 197–200).

      Not least, as a result of the deficits of the Neue Wache, the project of a central Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which had been initiated in 1987 by a small citizens’ initiative based in West Berlin, became very prominent after the fall of the Wall and was soon hotly debated in public. Two architectural competitions to decide on the form of such a memorial took place during the 1990s; in 1992 the City of Berlin, the Federal Ministry of the Interior, and the citizens’ initiative (which called itself the Association Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe) had already agreed on a plan to build the future memorial on a barren strip of land called Ministry Gardens. The place is a prime example of an urban palimpsest (Huyssen 2003); it carries multiple layers of German history (Schlusche 2005; Jordan 2006). During the Nazi period it had been the backyard of the Ministry of Agriculture, situated not far from the former Reich Chancellery of Adolf Hitler and the Führer-Bunker; it had also housed the private home and bunker of the Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels. Bombing raids in the spring of 1945 had destroyed the buildings in the area.

      The site was cleared of rubble in the early 1960s. With the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the Ministry Gardens became part of the “death strip” behind the Wall (Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe 2010, 9–11).

A decision of the German Bundestag

      Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who had eventually consented to the idea of the memorial, vetoed the result of the first competition (Carrier 2005, 106, and passim). There followed more discussion, three colloquia, and a second competition with a new and smaller jury, and only a handful of artists were invited to participate. In 1996 the Federal Parliament (Bundestag) also discussed the issue, reconsidering questions already debated in the press: whether such a national memorial should be built at all, to whom it should be dedicated, and the form it should take. Finally, in 1999, after the new coalition government under Chancellor Gerhard Schröder took office, the Bundestag decided that Germany would erect the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. The Resolution stated:

       1.1 With the memorial we intend tohonor the murdered victims,keep alive the memory of these inconceivable events in German history,admonish all future generations never again to violate human rights, to defend the democratic constitutional state at all times, to secure equality before the law for all people and to resist all forms of dictatorship and regimes based on violence.

       1.2 The memorial will be a central monument and place of remembrance, connected to other memorial centers and institutions within and beyond Berlin. It cannot replace the historical sites of terror where atrocities were committed.

       1.3 The memorial will be erected at the designated site in the centre of Berlin the Ministry Gardens.

       1.4 The Federal Republic of Germany remains committed to commemorating and honoring the other victims of the Nazi regime.

       1.5 Peter Eisenman’s scheme for a field of stelae (Eisenman II) will be realised. Incorporated in the concept is an Information Centre referring to the commemorated victims and the historical sites of remembrance. (Deutscher Bundestag 1999)

      For the implementation of the Bundestag decision, the Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (foundation) was founded by law and established in April 2000. It was headed by the president of the Bundestag. The bidding process and construction work on the memorial were to be carried out and supervised by the Berlin Senate Department for Urban Development. It soon became clear that the decision of the Bundestag was not the end of controversy. Not all issues had been clarified. While delays and problems caused by the construction of this complicated project could be overcome, one question could not be resolved easily because nobody at least not the Bundestag had discussed the issue in the first place: should certain companies, which had been in existence during the Nazi regime, actually be excluded from participating in the construction?

The Degussa debate

      The Degussa debate showed how close history can be and how strongly the past still impinges on present-day German society. This debate erupted during construction work on the memorial. When it became known that the chemical firm Degussa was to participate in providing the antigraffiti coating for the memorial, the board of the foundation called for an abrupt halt to construction work. In the fall of 2003 an intense public debate took place in the media with intellectuals, politicians of all parties, and the general public, during which the past of the firm Degussa and other chemical firms in Europe and their involvement in Nazi crimes were researched and discussed. Degussa’s now defunct affiliate company Degesch had distributed Zyklon B to concentration camps and processed stolen Jewish gold during the Holocaust.

Three weeks later, after it became clear that the current firm Degussa only carried the name of its predecessor, had completely changed its structure, and was not run by the same people any more, the foundation’s board revised its earlier decision and allowed construction work to continue. A decisive reason for this reversal was the fact that there simply was no chemical firm in Germany that had not formerly been involved with either IG Farben or Degesch. They or their predecessors had conformed to the National Socialist racial policy, fired their Jewish managers and officials, and done business with the Nazis (Hayes 2001, 2004). Furthermore, it turned out that other chemicals used in the production of the concrete slabs and their foundation on the memorial site already contained ingredients that had in part been developed by Degussa or by Hoechst, also a successor of IG Farben. The devil was everywhere.

      As the foundation’s managing director, I was a close witness of these conflicts and, together with all the people in charge of realizing the memorial project, under enormous pressure. My office did not have the power to decide on the selection of individual firms but, in my view, as a historian and a political administrator, it was not possible to build a memorial like this in Germany, on such historically contaminated ground, without the participation of German firms. It also seemed to me impossible to single out one firm. This was Germany. It was not going to be possible to produce a guilt-free memorial. But I also knew that the name Degussa, as a symbol, would cause pain for survivors. This conflict demonstrated the deep division between the memories of survivors and their descendants on the one hand, and those of the descendants of the perpetrator generations on the other. But of course the reactions were by no means homogeneous on either side. This was visible in the diverse articles and statements in the press, but also among members of the foundation’s advisory board. On the one hand, Alexander Brenner, chair of the Berlin Jewish Community, argued that Degussa should be excluded because the firm’s name was highly symbolic and would hurt survivors. He pointed out that he himself would probably not visit the memorial if Degussa were to participate. On the other hand, a speech by Michael Blumenthal, the American Jewish director of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, most significantly influenced members of the board in the opposite direction. Blumenthal said that he understood Brenner’s feelings, but that his own were different. He told the board that he had also lost relatives in the Holocaust, but that for him this was symbolized not so much by Zyklon B and Degesch as by the Reichsbahn that had deported them. He pointed out that victims associated their own experiences with different symbols, and questioned the assertion that the Zyklon B issue should exclude Degussa from participation in the building of the memorial (Krah 2004).