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| You are here: 2000 / Workshops, Panels and Seminars / Workshops on Remembrance and Representation / Workshop 3 on Remembrance, "Art and other Media in Holocaust Education and Remembrance" / Presentation by Ms. Charity Scribner | |||||||||
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Report from Workshop 3 on Remembrance: "Art and Other Media in Holocaust Education and Remembrance" Presentation by Mr. Max Liljefors Presentation by Dr. Yosefa Loshitzky Presentation by Ms. Charity Scribner Presentation by Ms. Charity Scribner Scribner, Charity Oranienburg as a Site of Memory I would like to set the thesis questions of this workshop on art and mass media in Holocaust education within the context of a larger formation in European culture: the current museum fever which has Germany most tightly in its grip. In Oranienburg, a town just north of Berlin, for example, we find tensions building over the question of how cultural funds should be apportioned. Of the several projects competing for resources, I will focus on two: the Sachsenhausen memorial and the Museum of Kindergartens in the German Democratic Republic. The Kindergarten Museum participates in a new trend, that of curating the communist past. Its programming bears upon the work of collective memory in the new Germany, as it prompts critical questions about the relationship between the responsibilities of Holocaust remembrance and the task of making a requiem for communism. Frau Doktor Heidemarie Waninger, the curator of Oranienburg´s Kindergarten Museum, salvages objects from the former German Democratic Republic, specifically those used in kindergartens, and displays them both for reflection and for aesthetic contemplation. The museum takes up residence in a primary school which was closed after unification due to a sharp drop in the birthrate. Its classrooms-turned-galleries stage objects like felt puppets manufactured by the V.E.B. and unused boxes of chalk in various panoramas. The collection triggers memories of the not-so-distant past. A central element of this and other recently-opened museums of GDR everyday life is the guest book. Here many visitors record their private memories and so keep them present to a life world which is quickly transforming in the post-unification period. One visitor wrote of his delight at seeing a particular notebook in a vitrine at the Kindergarten Museum. What seems banal to the uninitiated a notebook here triggers a reverie of the same magnitude as Marcel Proust´s chamomile-infused madeleine. Not far from this museum, loom the gates of Sachsenhausen, the concentration camp which was turned into a memorial site in 1961, the same year the Berlin wall was erected. A proposal renovate the Sachsenhausen memorial, recently made by architect Daniel Libeskind, has encountered great resistance. Some Oranienburgers want to see more funds dedicated to the new GDR memorials, and fear that the Sachsenhausen museum will overshadow smaller projects such as the Kindergarten Museum, distilling the city´s complex history down to a single, overdetermining historical moment: the Holocaust. Libeskind plans to expand the Sachsenhausen memorial to include all of the camp´s former terrains. It would it would thus include not only the grounds and buildings where prisoners were held, but also, critically, the surrounding administrative and living quarters of the SS Guards and many camp employees, that is, buildings which currently house several dozen Oranienburg citizens. With the reinclusion of these areas, Sachsenhausen would be the first and only camp memorial to clearly disclose the fluid and essential link between a concentration camp and the rest of the city which surrounded and maintained it. The memorial would demonstrate that Sachsenhausen was not a prosthesis to the otherwise normal body of Oranienburg, but rather that it functioned as one of its vital organs. Karin Nass, an office clerk and citizen of Oranienburg, has organized a protest group to resist the expansion of Sachsenhausen. The group disagrees with the planners vision of subjecting her home to memorial protection. Although the residents would not be dislocated, they would lose sovereignty over decisions to renovate or structurally modify their houses. But aside from these questions of architectural and aesthetic freedom, Nass maintains that the incorporation of the outlying SS buildings would only serve to glorify the memory of the officers and would run the risk of inciting neo-fascist fervor. A large poster outside her house declares a memorial for the perpetrators? We say that Nass still has clear memories of the 1992 desecration of part of Sachsenhausen at the hands of neo-fascists, and contends that [our] biggest fear is the skinheads. Discord about the funding of the Sachsenhausen memorial is growing in Oranienburg, but to date no one has lodged a complaint about the establishment of the Kindergarten Museum. The dynamic of protest about the different Oranienburg museums seems to disclose an economy of memory and history, a circuit generated by the competing but not fully discrete histories of National Socialism and State Socialism, a circuit which Germans constantly retrace and redefine. Many Germans accepted the country´s division according to the London and Paris Treaties of 1954 and 1955 as the due punishment for the crimes committed under Hitler, and saw the Berlin Wall as a symbol of collective guilt. As long as it remained intact, many managed to convince themselves that reconciliation and atonement for the Holocaust could be realized. With the walls dismantling and the transition to unification, or rather, as some would have it, to reunification, Germans must reconfront the legacy of fascism in a new geopolitical landscape. Given this, the current press to musealize German history, not only in the form of Holocaust monuments (and the heated, even theatrical debates which surround them) but also via the recent explosion of GDR exhibitions, can be seen as an attempt to ground German-German identities in the material objects and structures which remain behind. In the absence of the wall and other cold war symbols of the nation´s punishment-by-division, Germans see these museums as the enduring stigmata of their violent history. The Kindergarten Museum sets memory work into play on a human scale by concentrating on everyday objects. By collecting these mundane artifacts, Waninger creates a space where viewers can not only come together to debate their past and future, but where they can also identify and insert their private lives, their own memories of countless tiny details, into the larger timeline of German history. Yet this practice also raises a series of urgent questions about the historicization of the GDR. Even during the brief forty-year life of the GDR citizens were troubled by the notion of a German national heritage or Erbe. What did it mean to be East German? What were the lines of filiation amongst the historical moments of the first unification of German states in the nineteenth century, the legacy of National Socialism, and the work-in-progress of Soviet-style communism? Sachsenhausen and the Kindergarten Museum are both part of the answer. It is easy to dismiss the Kindgarten Museum as so much retrograde nostalgia (or Ostalgie), as many critics have done. But rather than diagnosing the GDR exhibitions as the fetishization of a diseased past, perhaps they can be regarded in a more positive light. For not only do they remind viewers of GermanyÕs divided history, a history determined by the crimes of fascism and totalitarianism, these exhibitions also help to concretize the work of memory for the successes and failures of the socialist project. A kind of tender rejection, the growing desire to support and visit these museums can be seen in contradistinction to the more saturnine kind of memory, the melancholy fixation on the past. -I am indebted to Andrew Piper (Columbia University) for his research assistance and invaluable critical insight. >> Back to top |
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Introduction Opening Session: Messages and speeches Plenary Sessions: Messages and speeches Workshops, Panels and Seminars
Other Activities |
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| For information about this production and the Stockholm International Forum Conference Series please go to www.humanrights.gov.se or contact Information Rosenbad, SE-103 33 Stockholm, Sweden | |||||||||