Navigating an unresolved legacy: the memory and representation of Nazi forced labour (original) (raw)
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Discussing Slave Labourers in Nazi Germany: Topography of Research or Politics of Memory?
German History, 2001
'Without archives we cannot remember', Michael Vesper, Minister for Culture in North-Rhine-Westphalia, remarked in his opening speech in what promised to be an important conference on slave labourers in German-occupied Europe during the Second World War. This three-part conference, organized by the State Archive of Münster and the State Association (Landschaftsverband) of Westphalia-Lippe, took place at the Institute for Social Movements (House of History of the Ruhr Area) in Bochum, 26-28 March 2001. 1 Vesper's comments set the scene for animated discussions among about 200 historians and archivists about how best to coordinate and improve the processing of compensation applications submitted by hundreds of thousands of former slave labourers. The main focus of the conference was to take stock of the current state of historical research, address the situation of archives, assess the quality and quantity of accessible material, and outline ideas for future research initiatives and direction. In so doing the organizers had taken the lead in clarifying some of the many highly political, historical, economic, archival and moral issues in the current intense academic and public debate; addressing, for example, questions of definition of 'forced labourers' (Zwangsarbeiter) and 'slave labourers' (Sklavenarbeiter)-two distinctly ahistorical categories-forms of recruitment and paths of migration, day-today work and life experiences or methods and means of survival. The complexity of the subject and the large number of papers given permit a summary of only part of the conference. The kaleidoscope of issues, as Vesper noted, was 'truly important', bridging party-political and professional divisions. 'It was shameful', he said, 'that the subject was still of utmost topicality after half a century'. Far from having dealt with the issue of slave labourers in a responsible and humane fashion, 1 The official titles for the various sections of the conference were: 1) 'Archiv-und Sammlungsgut zur Zwangsarbeit in Deutschland 1939 bis 1945-Topographie und Erschliessungsstrategien'; 2) '"Zwangsarbeiterforschung als gesellschaftlicher Auftrag". Ö ffentliche Vortrags-und Diskussionsveranstaltung des Instituts für soziale Bewegungen'; and 3) 'Arbeitseinsatz in den besetzten Gebieten während des Zweiten Weltkrieges'. The third session simultaneously formed the sixth meeting of the 'Arbeitskreis "Unternehmen im Nationalsozialismus" der Gesellschaft für Unternehmensgeschichte', in collaboration with the Institut für soziale Bewegungen der Ruhr-Universität Bochum.
Undesirable Heritage: Fascist Material Culture and Historical Consciousness in Nuremberg
International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2006
This article seeks to explore the relationships between heritage and identity by drawing on analytical discussions of material culture and historical consciousness and focusing on an empirical case of ‘undesirable heritage’, that is, a heritage that the majority of the popula- tion would prefer not to have. The case is that of the Nazi or fascist past in Germany, with specific reference to the former Nazi Party rally grounds in Nuremberg. By looking at some aspects of the ways in which this vast site of Nazi marching grounds and fascist buildings has been dealt with post-war, the article seeks to show both the struggle with the materiality of the site and changing forms of historical consciousness. It focuses in particular on some of the post-war dilemmas associated with the perceived agency of architecture, the sacralising and trivialising of space, the role and implications of musealisation, and the growth of a more reflective identity-health form of historical consciousness.
Holocaust Studies
This paper explores the ways in which contemporary Germans engage in diverse artistic and social forms of Holocaust memory work today that repudiate the ethos of silence and forgetting that dominated the postwar decades. The examples considered include W.G. Sebald's hybrid novel Austerlitz, Gunter Demnig's 'stumbling stones' action art project, and the installation 'We Were Neighbors' in the Berlin-Schöneberg town hall. These examples employ narrative as a way of opening up channels for the belated process of mourning; they engage their work through 'Spurensuche', that is, the process of searching for the traces of evidence of National Socialist crimes that were covered up and forgotten; and they confront critically the repression of memory of the National Socialist crimes in the postwar years.
Quotidian and Transgressive Practices in Nazi Forced Labor Camps: The Role of Objects
International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 2017
We argue that archaeological investigations of Nazi-period Lager should include two elements. The first is excavation. Research confined to non-invasive methods documenting visible remains, archival research, and oral history leads to small gains in existing knowledge. Archaeology's full potential is realized when excavations are conducted allowing reconstruction of actual practices. Secondly, it is essential to evaluate spatially and quantitatively even the most inconspicuous objects. They are a fundamental means to understand conditions of suffering as well as transgressive actions by camp inhabitants. Excavations of a forced labor camp of Weser Flugzeugbau GmbH at Tempelhof airfield in Berlin serves as a case study. Keywords Suffering. Tempelhof. Forced labor. espace vécu. New forensis An archaeology of the Nazi era must necessarily be attentive to the suffering of millions of victims of the racist ideology and murderous policies of that regime and its followers. On the one hand, suffering must be understood as the singularity of individual experiences, which allow no comparison. Claude Lanzmann (cited in LaCapra 1998:119) described this situation with respect to the Holocaust: BBetween the conditions that permitted extermination and the extermination itself-the fact of the extermination-there is a break in continuity, a hiatus, an abyss.^The same chasm exists on a different level for exclusionary camps that housed prisoners of war, forced laborers, and others. Still, giving an account of suffering is impossible without a sense of the conditions under which it occurred (Pollock and Bernbeck 2016; Pollock 2016).
This paper looks at how historical museums in Germany that are not Holocaust or Jewish museums represent Jews. It examines the permanent and temporary exhibitions, as well as their visitors’ experiences, at the two largest national and state-sponsored historical museums: the House of History in Bonn and the German Historical Museum in Berlin. I first analyze the ways in which Jewish symbols and images of Jews tell the story of the Holocaust’s aftermath in those museums. The article then focuses on a temporary exhibition, ‘Shalom: Three Photographers See Germany,’ at the Bonn House of History (August 2015–June 2016). I suggest that the exhibitions create directed viewing, whereby the visitors look at Jews and project the experience of viewing Holocaust images. I argue that as they are presented and viewed in the ‘Shalom’ exhibition, Jews undergo temporal displacement whereby their subject position and possible roles both in remembering and in being remembered are limited. I conclude by showing that Jews, as well as other Holocaust victim groups and migrant groups in Germany today, are not equal subjects of memory, meaning both that their subjectivity as participants in the public sphere is limited to specific roles, times and spaces, and that inter-subjective communication about their representation is limited. Keywords: directed viewing; Jews in Germany; minorities; representation; subjectivity; temporal displacement
Germany's Metamorphosis: Memory and the Holocaust in the Berlin Repulic
Cultural Studies Review, 2013
I want to focus on two recent debates in Germany from the same inaugural period of Germany’s SPD–Green government, which both have as their focus the contestation of memory in relation to the Holocaust. In both debates the Holocaust serves as a negative myth of origin and a primal phantasmatic scene of guilt and shame around which German national identifications are organised. The first is the Walser–Bubis debate and the second the much more protracted but no less fierce debate about the building of a Holocaust memorial in Berlin, which peaked around the same time. Both debates are important in the German context because they come at the end of a long period of Christian Democratic (CDU) rule and at the beginning of a new SPD era in German politics. They are significant, moreover, because they appear to send contradictory messages about German self- understanding to the international community.