Monuments to the unthinkable, part II
How would it be if we, the United States, came to grips with our past? Would we heal?
The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, recognized as the official Holocaust memorial of Germany, sits in the center of downtown Berlin, just south of the famous Brandenburg Gate and a block away from the site of the bunker where Hitler died by suicide. Designed by the American Jewish architect Peter Eisenman and spanning 200,000 square feet, it consists of rows of 2,711 concrete blocks that range in height from eight inches to more than 15 feet tall. The space resembles a graveyard, a vast cascade of stone markers with no names or engravings on their facade. The ground beneath them dips and rises like waves.
The memorial is significant not only for its size and location—the equivalent, in the United States, would be the placement of thousands of stone blocks in Lower Manhattan to honor those subjected to chattel slavery, or on Constitution Avenue in Washington, D.C., to remember the victims of Indigenous genocide—but also because it was constructed with the political support and full financial backing of the German government.
Steiner told me that, in her opinion, the stumbling stones are a much better means of memorialization than something like the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. “This has more to do with the German society and the expectation of having something big,” she said, stretching her hands out again. “We did a big Holocaust, we have a big monument.”
Steiner said that whenever she went down to the memorial, she saw people smoking while standing on top of the columns, or jumping back and forth from one to another. “It’s lost its purpose and meaning,” she said. “Maybe it never got it.”
James E. Young writes that “memory is never shaped in a vacuum,” and that the reasons for the existence of Holocaust museums and monuments in Germany, and across the world, “are as various as the sites themselves.” Some, he argues, were built in response to efforts of Jewish communities to remember, and others were built because of “a government’s need to explain a nation’s past to itself.” The aim of some is to educate the next generation and forge a sense of collective experience, while others are born of guilt. “Still others are intended to attract tourists.” The messy truth is that all of these ostensibly disparate motives can find a home in the same project.
It wasn’t always obvious that Germany would build memorials to the Nazis’ victims; for decades there was mostly silence. In her book Learning From the Germans, the philosopher Susan Neiman writes that families in Germany simply did not discuss the war in the years immediately following it. “Neither side could bear to talk about it,” she writes, “one side afraid of facing its own guilt, the other afraid of succumbing to pain and rage.”
When 22 of the Third Reich’s leaders stood trial in Nuremberg, from November 1945 to October 1946, the four major Allied powers vowed to publicize the proceedings. Officials in the American zone put up billboards and posters with photographs depicting Nazi crimes, had films made that documented the gruesomeness of the concentration camps, and ensured that German newspapers and radio stations reported on the trial. The Allies hoped that the public nature of the trials, and the extensive documentation presented, would help educate Germans about the true scope and horror of what the Nazis had done. According to the military historian Tyler Bamford, in the final month of the tribunal, 71 percent of Germans surveyed by American authorities said that they had learned something new from it.
But awareness did not necessarily translate into reckoning. For some, even those who had supported Hitler, Nuremberg provided the opportunity to wash their hands of culpability, and pin responsibility only on the Nazi leaders on trial. When confronted with the Nazis’ atrocities, many Germans repeated the phrase “Wir konnten nichts tun”—“We could do nothing.” In the years after the trial, former Nazi officials rejoined mainstream society, and many took on positions similar to those they’d held before the war.
Neiman writes that in those postwar years, many Germans saw themselves not as perpetrators, but as victims—as people who had experienced enormous suffering that wasn’t being acknowledged by the rest of the world. Husbands, sons, and brothers had died in battle; women and children had spent long, freezing nights in cellars as bombs dropped overhead; civilians survived on scraps of potato peels. Not only were they being asked to accept having lost the war, but they were being told, amid all their hardship, that they were responsible for evil. The German psychoanalysts Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich write in their book, The Inability to Mourn, that the nation experienced a sort of paralysis, in which people couldn’t countenance their soldiers moving so quickly from heroes to victims to perpetrators. If they couldn’t even mourn their sons and brothers because the world was telling them they were monsters, how could they bring themselves to mourn the people those soldiers had killed?
“There wasn’t really a confrontation until the ’60s, when the young generation started asking their parents what they did during the war,” Berger told me. They wanted to know what had happened in their community—and their country—and why there was so much silence. Germans, Berger said, many of them the children of those who had witnessed or participated in the Holocaust, began tracing Jewish histories, inviting Jewish families who had fled to come back to visit their towns.
As Berger and I spoke, I wondered about the people leading the various museums, memorials, and other cultural institutions that had resulted from this push in the decades since the ’60s. How many of them were Jewish? Did it matter?
I had heard that Germans would sometimes create events, commissions, and institutions centered on commemorating Jewish life without meaningfully consulting any Jewish people. Berger found this unacceptable, so she approached officials in the Interior Ministry. She was appalled by the response she got. “They said, ‘Well, Jews are not impartial enough, because they’re part of the story.’ ”
I was struck by how much this idea echoed what Black scholars in the United States have navigated for generations. The preeminent early-20th-century Black American scholar W. E. B. Du Bois faced questions from white scholars and funders who doubted his ability to do his work objectively and with the appropriate level of scientific rigor, because they thought he was too invested in the issues he was studying. He was often encouraged to partner with white scholars, who could balance out his ostensible biases.
When I asked Berger what she thought of the Stolpersteine, she told me she feels ambivalent. On the one hand, she said, the project has brought communities together to research their history. But on the other hand, she finds the idea that people are stepping on the names of Jewish people deeply unsettling. “Every time, I cringe,” she said. “They should be plaques on the wall. And why aren’t they? Because most of the owners of buildings wouldn’t accept, even to this day, a plaque saying, ‘Here is where a Jewish family lived.’ ”
Berger is not alone in this sentiment. In Munich, Charlotte Knobloch, a Holocaust survivor who is the former president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, persuaded the city to ban Stolpersteine in 2004. The city eventually created plaques at eye level. “It is my firm belief that we need to do everything we can in order to make sure that remembrance preserves the dignity of the victims,” Knobloch has said. “People murdered in the Holocaust deserve better than a plaque in the dust, street dirt and even worse filth.”
Berger also believes that sometimes the laying of the stones can serve as a sort of penance: After a Stolperstein has been placed, people wipe their hands and believe that they have done all there is to do.
Even though Berger and the American Jewish Committee had, for years, been some of the most prominent advocates for the memorial where we now stood, she also has mixed feelings about how the space turned out. “It’s overwhelming. And the symbolism isn’t entirely clear to me. I mean, we don’t need to have a cemetery,” she said, looking around at the stones. “The whole country is a cemetery.”
But Berger says she is grateful—and relieved—that the space exists.
Eisenman, the architect who designed the memorial, was cognizant of how difficult—perhaps impossible—it would be to create a Holocaust memorial commensurate with the history it carries. “The enormity and horror of the Holocaust are such that any attempt to represent it by traditional means is inevitably inadequate,” he wrote in 2005.
Criticism of the monument has come in many forms. In 2017, a leader of the far-right AfD party said that the monument was a “symbol of national shame”; he didn’t think that shame was a good thing. On the other end of the ideological spectrum, some critics have charged that the memorial isn’t inclusive enough. Demnig, the originator of the Stolperstein project, supports the memorial as a whole, but has been critical of its exclusive focus on Jewish victims. “There were other drafts that would have included all groups of victims that, in my opinion, would have been more effective,” he said in 2013.
The New Yorker writer Richard Brody visited the monument in 2012, and took issue with the very framing of the memorial: “The title doesn’t say ‘Holocaust’ or ‘Shoah’; in other words, it doesn’t say anything about who did the murdering or why—there’s nothing along the lines of ‘by Germany under Hitler’s regime,’ and the vagueness is disturbing,” he wrote. “The passive voice of the title—‘murdered Jews’—elides the question that wafts through the exhibit like an odor: murdered by whom?”
I understand some of these criticisms, and still, I couldn’t help but appreciate the scale and scope of the space. I couldn’t help but admire how centrally located it was in the city. There was no missing it. There was no avoiding it. No other nation on Earth has done anything quite like it. Not the United States for its genocide of Indigenous peoples or centuries of enslavement; not France or Britain for their histories of colonial violence; not Japan for its imperial projects across eastern Asia.
Walking through the monument’s columns amid the cacophony of the city all around me felt haunting, but appropriately so. It is a space meant to haunt, meant to overwhelm. But beneath the stones, in the memorial’s underground museum, there was only silence.
I stepped into one of the subterranean exhibits. The room was dark but for illuminated glass panels underfoot. Other visitors moved through the space like shadows, each of us silent, looking down at the glowing glass beneath us. Below each pane were letters, diary entries, and accounts written by people who had been murdered in the Holocaust. I leaned in closer to the panel I was looking at.
There was a note written by a 12-year-old girl named Judith Wishnyatskaya, included as a postscript to a letter her mother had written to her father on July 31, 1942:
Dear father! I am saying goodbye to you before I die. We would so love to live, but they won’t let us and we will die. I am so scared of this death, because the small children are thrown alive into the pit. Goodbye forever. I kiss you tenderly.
Yours J.
Judith and her mother were killed shortly afterward. Their letter was found by a Soviet soldier near the eastern-Polish town of Baranowicze (in what is now Belarus).
Each panel told the story of another victim, the floor glowing with accounts of murder and terror, a fluorescent extension of the work the stumbling stones were doing throughout the city. There was something about the physical act of looking down, of having your body pause and hover over the names, that made the experience feel somehow intimate.
After reading all of the panels, I took a seat on a bench toward the back of the room. In front of me, and to my left and right, and then behind me, I saw numbers with the names of different European countries alongside them. I quickly realized that these numbers reflected estimates of how many Jews from each nation had been killed in the Holocaust.
Belgium 25,000–25,700
Hungary 270,000–300,000
Greece 58,900–59,200
Latvia 65,000–70,000
Italy 7,600–8,500
Lithuania 140,000–150,000
Germany 160,000–165,000
Poland 2,900,000–3,100,000
I stopped at this last number and caught my breath. I hadn’t known that half of the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust were Polish. (Ninety percent of Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland were murdered, I would later learn.) By the end of the war, only 380,000 Polish Jews survived.
In school, I read more books about the Holocaust than perhaps any other atrocity in human history, including those that took place on American soil. I have watched countless films and documentaries on World War II and the Holocaust. But it wasn’t until this moment, surrounded by these numbers that stretched around the room and the stories that glowed underfoot, that I began to fully feel the scale of this atrocity.
Approximately two-thirds of all the Jews in Europe were killed in the span of just a few years, a level of slaughter that is overwhelming to consider. Something about being there—in Berlin, in this museum, in this room—made it all feel so much more real.
As the legal scholar James Q. Whitman has documented, when Nazi officials first formulated their Nuremberg race laws, in 1934, they drew inspiration from the U.S., modeling them in part on the Jim Crow laws. The Nazis looked to America’s history of oppression in other ways, too. As Susan Neiman writes, “Hitler took American westward expansion, with its destruction of Native peoples, as the template for the eastward expansion he said was needed to provide Germans with Lebensraum—room to live.”
I met Jennifer Neal, a journalist and an author, on the steps of. The Topography of Terror museum. Neal is Black, and originally from Chicago. She has lived in Berlin since 2016.
Neal told me that, in some ways, Germany has done an admirable job of reckoning with its history. For example, the government has paid reparations through a program called Wiedergutmachung, which translates roughly to “making good again.” In 1952, West Germany agreed to pay Israel 3 billion German marks over time, which played a crucial role in ensuring the young nation’s economic stability. It also provided funds for individual payments, which continue to this day. As of 2020, Germany had paid out more than $90 billion. (The process of applying for individual reparations, however, was difficult and traumatic for many survivors, Neiman writes in Learning From the Germans. Those who survived Auschwitz, for example, had to outline how and when they’d arrived at the camp; obtain two sworn statements from witnesses who could confirm that they’d really been there; submit the number that had been tattooed on their skin; provide evidence of any injuries they’d suffered at the camp; and also prove that they had a low income.)
Neal is flummoxed by the notion that taking down Confederate statues would somehow be “erasing history.” She told me that watching the conversation in the U.S. about whether Confederate statues should come down seems especially ludicrous from her vantage point in Europe. She’s flummoxed by the notion that taking down the statues would somehow be “erasing history.”
“What Germany does well in regards to the Holocaust is show that when you honor the victims instead of the perpetrators, you’re still remembering history,” she said. “But you’re making it clear who the aggressors were, who the victims were, and who we honored. I think this is important in terms of how the country heals.” She shook her head. “That is why I think the United States is very far from healing.”
In early October of this year, I visited Dachau. To enter the concentration camp—now a memorial site—visitors must walk across a small concrete bridge and through the gates of the Jourhaus, a cream-colored building topped with a watchtower that juts up from the roof like a steeple. Inscribed on the black iron gates is the phrase Arbeit Macht Frei, “Work Sets You Free.” The slogan, Nazi propaganda meant to present the camps as innocuous places of “work” or “reeducation,” appeared at the gates of concentration camps across Europe.
Gravel crunched beneath the feet of visitors walking between exhibitions; the sea of small gray pebbles was interrupted only by the brown and yellow leaves that had been scattered by the wind.
Dachau’s history, in part, reflects the different ways that East and West Germany remembered the Holocaust in the postwar years. Former concentration camps in Soviet-controlled territory in the east—such as Buchenwald, Ravensbrück, and Sachsenhausen—were turned into memorials soon after the war, with restoration funds coming from both the state and individual donations. Dachau, located in the Allied-controlled western territory, did not receive any public funding until 1965, when a group of former prisoners persuaded the state of Bavaria to help finance a memorial there. Not until after the reunification of East and West Germany in 1990 did any memorial sites at West German camps receive federal funding.
When Dachau was built, in 1938, it was designed to hold 6,000 prisoners. But by April 29, 1945, when American forces liberated the camp, it held about 32,000. Barracks built to house 200 people held as many as 2,000. The originals were demolished in the 1960s, but as I walked through the reconstructed barracks I tried to imagine so many people living in them at once: The women pushed against one another between the splintered, wooden bed frames. The diseases that swept over men’s bodies and turned them into silence. My breathing quickened. My stomach churned.
Visiting the memorial site, I was struck by how close it was to the homes, restaurants, and cafés around it. This was not a concentration camp in the middle of nowhere. Surely, I thought, those who lived nearby during the war knew what was happening there.
George Tievsky, an American medic who helped liberate Dachau, had a similar reaction. “I could smell the stench from the camp,” he said of walking through the town on a Sunday in May 1945.
And I said to myself how can this be? How can this be? How could this exist here? These people. This town. Beside this death camp? These people knew what was in the camp. They heard the trains coming with people, and the trains go out empty. They smelled the smell of death. They saw the smoke from the chimneys … and yet when I asked them … did you know about this? … They all denied it. They all denied knowledge of it. There was no guilt. There was no remorse.
In 1949, W. E. B. Du Bois visited Warsaw, where he witnessed firsthand the aftermath of Nazi destruction. “I have seen something of human upheaval in this world,” he said. “The scream and shots of a race riot in Atlanta; the marching of the Ku Klux Klan; the threat of courts and police; the neglect and destruction of human habitation; but nothing in my wildest imagination was equal to what I saw in Warsaw.”
Du Bois said that the experience “helped me to emerge from a certain social provincialism into a broader conception of what the fight against race segregation, religious discrimination, and the oppression by wealth had to become if civilization was going to triumph and broaden in the world.”
Americans do not have to, and should not, wait for the government to find its conscience. Ordinary people are the conscience.
As Du Bois stood amid the rubble of what was once the Warsaw Ghetto, he looked around. “There was complete and total waste, and a monument,” he said. He was referring to the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, which commemorates those who fought in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943. It was the largest uprising of Jewish people during World War II; approximately 7,000 Jews were killed. That monument helped him see the Jews not simply as victims, but as people who rebelled, much like Black people in the United States had rebelled against slavery and Jim Crow.
After spending time in Germany, I, too, gained a sense of clarity about the interconnectedness of racial oppression and state violence. I left with a clearer understanding of the implications of how those periods of history are remembered, or not.
Some in the U.S. have undertaken efforts reminiscent of those in Germany. In Connecticut, a group of educators started the Witness Stones Project, modeled after the Stolpersteine in Germany. The group works with schoolchildren in five Northeast states to help them more intimately understand the history of slavery in their town. In Camden, New Jersey, a local historical society has erected markers in places where enslaved people were sold, echoing the memorials to deported Jews at train stations in Germany. In Montgomery, Alabama, the civil-rights attorney Bryan Stevenson, who often cites Germany in his work, has built the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which commemorates the history of slavery and the oppression of Black Americans. The space has a similar physical and emotional texture to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.
None of these projects, whether in the U.S. or Germany, can ever be commensurate with the history they are tasked with remembering. It is impossible for any memorial to slavery to capture its full horror, or for any memorial to the Holocaust to express the full humanity of the victims. No stone in the ground can make up for a life. No museum can bring back millions of people. It cannot be done, and yet we must try to honor those lives, and to account for this history, as best we can. It is the very act of attempting to remember that becomes the most powerful memorial of all.