Facing the horrors of the Final Solution
Detroit Free Press
BERLIN -- The past is never far off in Germany's capital, even as construction cranes continue to reshape the European Union's unofficial focal point as it eyes expansion eastward.
The majestic, 18th-Century Brandenburg Gate, with its chariot, still defines the old border between East and West, just down the road from the Sony Center and glitzy malls at nearly rebuilt Potsdamer Platz. A transparent glass dome shares the Reichstag, home of Germany's parliament, with a stone foundation from the century predating tragedies of world wars.
Berlin just took another monumental step in confronting its troubled past: Marking the 60th anniversary of the Wannsee Conference, during which senior Nazis met Jan. 20, 1942, to determine a final fate for Europe's Jews, the German Historical Museum opened Berlin's first-ever exhibition devoted solely to the World War II Holocaust.
The free-of-charge exhibition is titled "The Nazi Genocide and the Motifs of its Remembrance" and runs through April 9. During its opening weekend, the exhibition received an average of 2,500 guests a day.
Two floors divide the landmark attraction: The first floor documents the concentration camps until they were liberated in 1945. A more abstract focus on how Germans have dealt with the Holocaust since the end of the WWII is upstairs.
The exhibition is presented in conjunction with museums from three countries that helped post-war Germany deal with its past: the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland, the Yad Vashem in Israel and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington,D.C. All loaned materials to Berlin featured on the second floor.
"The collaboration with the Auschwitz Musem, the Yad Vashem and the museum in Washington, D.C., shows that the Holocaust is not just a German topic but an international one," says Burkhard Asmuss, exhibition curator. "What we are doing could not have been possible without their help."
Better late than never
The size of crowds visiting the exhibition and the mere fact that it is taking place are striking, Asmuss says. Reinhard Rrup, from Berlin's Topography of Terror Foundation, a museum chronicling the history of the SS brigade, would agree. "Better late than never," he was quoted in German newspapers.
But the Holocaust exhibition didn't receive rave reviews from the local media. The Tageszeitung, a progressive newspaper in Berlin, faulted the exhibition for lacking originality.
"The trip to the capital is recommended for those who wish to view what's well known and seen often. Who hopes for surprises, the spectacular and a new perspective will be disappointed, however," the paper stated.
Admittedly, much is not new. A photo of the one-way train tracks entering Auschwitz is well known. An abandoned violin, a suitcase belonging to a concentration camp prisoner, pictures of life in a ghetto are borrowed items. What's makes this exhibition significant is not the collected artifacts so much as its setting.
"This is not an art history exhibit," says Rabbi Andreas Nachama, former president of the Berlin Jewish Community and director of the Topography of Terror museum. "Trying to document the Holocaust originally is a mistake. Doing it thoroughly is more important. This is the first time that an exhibit in Germany tries to work as much as possible with original documents."
Nachama isn't surprised that 57 years passed before the Holocaust was featured in a Berlin museum. "When I went to school in the '60s, we were visited by those who themselves were concentration camp survivors. One learned of their horrors firsthand, so there was no need to learn about it in a museum."
Final Solution
To understand Germany's struggle to comprehend its past, one must first understand its horrors. Museum visitors walk through history on the first floor, beginning with the end of World War I and the German Jews who fought for the Vaterland.
Prominent Jews like Albert Einstein and the writer Alfred Dblin played major roles in Weimar Germany during the 1920s, eventually becoming scapegoats for hard times. The Nazis, their propaganda, boycotts and book burnings follow in the 1930s. Poland was invaded and ghettos created. Finally, the Wannsee Conference and the invasion of the Soviet Union led to the Final Solution.
The tragic history is depicted graphically and academically, as one enters a conference room mirroring the one on picturesque lake Wannsee, where SS officer Reinhard Heydrich proposed extermination of Europe's Jews. Visitors read about Heydrich and other Nazis in attendance and study the only existing records of the conference.
The most striking sight on the first floor is Polish sculptor Mieczyslaw Stobierski's enormous model of the Auschwitz crematorium, created during the Auschwitz guard trials that began in 1946.
Crematorium II at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp is a huge white sculpture constructed in stages. Visitors first see a long line of families marching into the crematorium, their faces calm and composed. Once underground, the people undress, now with expressions of longing and disbelief as they hold their clothing in hand. The next room contains the cramped gas chambers where they clutch their necks as poison Zyklon B fills the room.
Stobierski's model concludes on the opposite side of the gas chambers, where piles of bodies are shoved into ovens.
Just before ascending the stairs toward post-war Germany, visitors face a quote from Dachau survivor and author of "Night," Elie Wiesel:
"Our first act as free people was to storm the food supplies. One thought of nothing else, neither on revenge nor on one's parents -- on nothing other than bread."
Overshadowed by East vs. West
The exhibition's second floor shows that time and pressure were necessary for Germany to come to grips with the killing of 6 million Jews, Socialists, homosexuals, gypsies and the handicapped. Throughout the Cold War, Germany's past was overshadowed by a propaganda battle between two states.
According to the exhibition, talk of the Holocaust quickly dissipated in East Germany, and paranoia grew as citizens began fearing a "conspiracy to promote Jewish capitalists."
American intentions immediately after the war went awry in West Germany when citizens forced to tour liberated concentration camps recalled their own suffering at the hands of the Nazis and Allied bombing.
Germany began confronting its past in earnest after "The Diary of Anne Frank" circulated through West Germany in the 1950s and the American TV mini-series "Holocaust," a fictional tale of the Weiss family's struggles through the war, premiered in 1979.
"Until the Holocaust movie, a 'Fascism theory' circulated widely in Germany and kept the subject on a theoretical level for many," Nachama says. "But watching the suffering of a specific family brought the reality closer to home. People asked, 'How was it possible that this happened in my town, in my country?' "
The fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification of Germany ended the East-West finger pointing, and popular films like "Schindler's List" and "Life is Beautiful" offered a new opportunity for Germany to reconsider its past.
Wehrmacht crimes
The exhibit's implication that ordinary Germans share guilt for the Holocaust has stirred unrest in certain circles, and the radical party the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or NPD, has protested the portrayal of its forefathers as mass killers.
The exhibit shows a striking photograph of an unhappy boy at a demonstration in Munich holding a poster stating, "Our grandfathers were no criminals!"
The German Historical Museum's decision to open the exhibit was inspired by demonstrations against the NPD and intolerance on Nov. 9, 2000, at the Brandenburg Gate.
The date is significant in German history. Nov. 9, 1938, Nazis encouraged German citizens to loot and burn Jewish businesses and synagogues during Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. On that date in 1989 the Berlin Wall fell.
"Nov. 9, 2000, was inspiring for us, and we asked ourselves how we could contribute," Asmuss says.
"This is a reflective exhibition which looks back at how Germans have dealt with the crime. It couldn't have taken place here in 1965, for instance, because not enough time had passed for reflection, and, of course, Berlin was a divided city. It needed years -- and generations."
If you go: The exhibit runs through April 9 at the Kronprinzenpalais on Berlin's historic Unter den Linden, across from the Deutsches Historisches Museum (German Historical Museum). To get there, take the S-train to Hackescher Markt or Friedrichstrasse, or the U-train to Franzsischer Strasse, Hausvogteiplatz or Friedrichstrasse. Or buslines 100, 157, 200 and 348 and get off at Staatsoper or Lustgarten.
Hours are 10-6 Monday, Tuesday, Friday-Sunday, 10-10 Thursday, closed Wednesday. Entrance is free. For information, go to www.dhm.de. Jacob Wheeler, originally from Empire, lives in Copenhagen, Denmark.
BERLIN -- The past is never far off in Germany's capital, even as construction cranes continue to reshape the European Union's unofficial focal point as it eyes expansion eastward.
The majestic, 18th-Century Brandenburg Gate, with its chariot, still defines the old border between East and West, just down the road from the Sony Center and glitzy malls at nearly rebuilt Potsdamer Platz. A transparent glass dome shares the Reichstag, home of Germany's parliament, with a stone foundation from the century predating tragedies of world wars.
Berlin just took another monumental step in confronting its troubled past: Marking the 60th anniversary of the Wannsee Conference, during which senior Nazis met Jan. 20, 1942, to determine a final fate for Europe's Jews, the German Historical Museum opened Berlin's first-ever exhibition devoted solely to the World War II Holocaust.
The free-of-charge exhibition is titled "The Nazi Genocide and the Motifs of its Remembrance" and runs through April 9. During its opening weekend, the exhibition received an average of 2,500 guests a day.
Two floors divide the landmark attraction: The first floor documents the concentration camps until they were liberated in 1945. A more abstract focus on how Germans have dealt with the Holocaust since the end of the WWII is upstairs.
The exhibition is presented in conjunction with museums from three countries that helped post-war Germany deal with its past: the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland, the Yad Vashem in Israel and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington,D.C. All loaned materials to Berlin featured on the second floor.
"The collaboration with the Auschwitz Musem, the Yad Vashem and the museum in Washington, D.C., shows that the Holocaust is not just a German topic but an international one," says Burkhard Asmuss, exhibition curator. "What we are doing could not have been possible without their help."
Better late than never
The size of crowds visiting the exhibition and the mere fact that it is taking place are striking, Asmuss says. Reinhard Rrup, from Berlin's Topography of Terror Foundation, a museum chronicling the history of the SS brigade, would agree. "Better late than never," he was quoted in German newspapers.
But the Holocaust exhibition didn't receive rave reviews from the local media. The Tageszeitung, a progressive newspaper in Berlin, faulted the exhibition for lacking originality.
"The trip to the capital is recommended for those who wish to view what's well known and seen often. Who hopes for surprises, the spectacular and a new perspective will be disappointed, however," the paper stated.
Admittedly, much is not new. A photo of the one-way train tracks entering Auschwitz is well known. An abandoned violin, a suitcase belonging to a concentration camp prisoner, pictures of life in a ghetto are borrowed items. What's makes this exhibition significant is not the collected artifacts so much as its setting.
"This is not an art history exhibit," says Rabbi Andreas Nachama, former president of the Berlin Jewish Community and director of the Topography of Terror museum. "Trying to document the Holocaust originally is a mistake. Doing it thoroughly is more important. This is the first time that an exhibit in Germany tries to work as much as possible with original documents."
Nachama isn't surprised that 57 years passed before the Holocaust was featured in a Berlin museum. "When I went to school in the '60s, we were visited by those who themselves were concentration camp survivors. One learned of their horrors firsthand, so there was no need to learn about it in a museum."
Final Solution
To understand Germany's struggle to comprehend its past, one must first understand its horrors. Museum visitors walk through history on the first floor, beginning with the end of World War I and the German Jews who fought for the Vaterland.
Prominent Jews like Albert Einstein and the writer Alfred Dblin played major roles in Weimar Germany during the 1920s, eventually becoming scapegoats for hard times. The Nazis, their propaganda, boycotts and book burnings follow in the 1930s. Poland was invaded and ghettos created. Finally, the Wannsee Conference and the invasion of the Soviet Union led to the Final Solution.
The tragic history is depicted graphically and academically, as one enters a conference room mirroring the one on picturesque lake Wannsee, where SS officer Reinhard Heydrich proposed extermination of Europe's Jews. Visitors read about Heydrich and other Nazis in attendance and study the only existing records of the conference.
The most striking sight on the first floor is Polish sculptor Mieczyslaw Stobierski's enormous model of the Auschwitz crematorium, created during the Auschwitz guard trials that began in 1946.
Crematorium II at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp is a huge white sculpture constructed in stages. Visitors first see a long line of families marching into the crematorium, their faces calm and composed. Once underground, the people undress, now with expressions of longing and disbelief as they hold their clothing in hand. The next room contains the cramped gas chambers where they clutch their necks as poison Zyklon B fills the room.
Stobierski's model concludes on the opposite side of the gas chambers, where piles of bodies are shoved into ovens.
Just before ascending the stairs toward post-war Germany, visitors face a quote from Dachau survivor and author of "Night," Elie Wiesel:
"Our first act as free people was to storm the food supplies. One thought of nothing else, neither on revenge nor on one's parents -- on nothing other than bread."
Overshadowed by East vs. West
The exhibition's second floor shows that time and pressure were necessary for Germany to come to grips with the killing of 6 million Jews, Socialists, homosexuals, gypsies and the handicapped. Throughout the Cold War, Germany's past was overshadowed by a propaganda battle between two states.
According to the exhibition, talk of the Holocaust quickly dissipated in East Germany, and paranoia grew as citizens began fearing a "conspiracy to promote Jewish capitalists."
American intentions immediately after the war went awry in West Germany when citizens forced to tour liberated concentration camps recalled their own suffering at the hands of the Nazis and Allied bombing.
Germany began confronting its past in earnest after "The Diary of Anne Frank" circulated through West Germany in the 1950s and the American TV mini-series "Holocaust," a fictional tale of the Weiss family's struggles through the war, premiered in 1979.
"Until the Holocaust movie, a 'Fascism theory' circulated widely in Germany and kept the subject on a theoretical level for many," Nachama says. "But watching the suffering of a specific family brought the reality closer to home. People asked, 'How was it possible that this happened in my town, in my country?' "
The fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification of Germany ended the East-West finger pointing, and popular films like "Schindler's List" and "Life is Beautiful" offered a new opportunity for Germany to reconsider its past.
Wehrmacht crimes
The exhibit's implication that ordinary Germans share guilt for the Holocaust has stirred unrest in certain circles, and the radical party the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or NPD, has protested the portrayal of its forefathers as mass killers.
The exhibit shows a striking photograph of an unhappy boy at a demonstration in Munich holding a poster stating, "Our grandfathers were no criminals!"
The German Historical Museum's decision to open the exhibit was inspired by demonstrations against the NPD and intolerance on Nov. 9, 2000, at the Brandenburg Gate.
The date is significant in German history. Nov. 9, 1938, Nazis encouraged German citizens to loot and burn Jewish businesses and synagogues during Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. On that date in 1989 the Berlin Wall fell.
"Nov. 9, 2000, was inspiring for us, and we asked ourselves how we could contribute," Asmuss says.
"This is a reflective exhibition which looks back at how Germans have dealt with the crime. It couldn't have taken place here in 1965, for instance, because not enough time had passed for reflection, and, of course, Berlin was a divided city. It needed years -- and generations."
If you go: The exhibit runs through April 9 at the Kronprinzenpalais on Berlin's historic Unter den Linden, across from the Deutsches Historisches Museum (German Historical Museum). To get there, take the S-train to Hackescher Markt or Friedrichstrasse, or the U-train to Franzsischer Strasse, Hausvogteiplatz or Friedrichstrasse. Or buslines 100, 157, 200 and 348 and get off at Staatsoper or Lustgarten.
Hours are 10-6 Monday, Tuesday, Friday-Sunday, 10-10 Thursday, closed Wednesday. Entrance is free. For information, go to www.dhm.de. Jacob Wheeler, originally from Empire, lives in Copenhagen, Denmark.
posted by Jacob Wheeler at
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