Leave it to the Germans to have a specific word for “coming to terms with the past.” For those wondering, the straight-forward word is spelled “vergangenheitsbewaltigung” and no, I haven’t any desire to attempt pronouncing it. This concept of “vergangenheitsbewaltigung” is explored in Peter Reichel’s article “Coming to Terms with the Past Through Politics and the Law,” and I found the article and its impossible-to-pronounce vernacular focus evoked often whilst exploring both Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp Memorial, and The Topography of Terror Museum.
Both entities today serve as means not only of remembrance but also seek to enforce a sense of accountability. The German relationship today with the Holocaust is one I have yet to understand. We are briefed to not mention it before Germans, and yet they as a population have ensured that its presence is evoked at every corner. With each stumbling stone one is reminded of an individual murdered by a once popular regime. Concentration camps stand largely unaltered and German children visit them regularly on field trips. With this in mind we departed for Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp Memorial. The weather was dismal and rain beat down upon us as we were guided from one barrack to the next between claps of thunder. It seems a crucial experience for any visitor to Germany to visit a concentration camp and I had been long waiting for the experience, certain that in simply standing upon the land, one would be immediately emotionally assaulted by the memories of terrors committed upon it. I imagined that on such unaltered landscape the echoes of brutality would never cease to ring. And yet as we wandered the camp in sodden clothes, I felt nothing. It didn’t make sense. Here I was in the exact place where thousands were murdered, tortured, and I could focus on nothing but the rain leaching through my jacket. We passed through barracks and the tour guide told us of torture by water, death by the cold, and I felt as no more moved than I would have been had I been reading such testaments from home. “I am cold and wet and uncomfortable,” I mused, “Shouldn’t I be able, here of all places, to move beyond my own minimal physical complaints and connect with the real sufferers?” I wished to read the stories of individuals plastered to barrack walls, but we were ushered on, not given the opportunity to really connect with any victims for we did not know their stories. Located on the land which formerly housed the Nazi Gestapo and SS headquarters, Topography of Terror now serves as a museum documenting the rise and fall of the Third Reich and the many crimes committed during the Nazi party’s reign. Once again we moved across a landscape steeped in historical significance, exposed to relevant accompanying information. This time there were only two of us, the rest of the class having gone to Hamburg for the weekend, and we experienced the exhibit at our own pace, without the restriction imposed by the presence of tour guides. I read plaque after plaque, immersing myself in journals of Nazi officials and Jews forced into hiding. I followed images and accompanying reports, narratives, through the ultimate narrative of the exhibit: the narrative of the Third Reich, the narrative of the complicit, the narrative of the victimized, the murdered. We spent over two hours at Topography of Terror, utterly exhausted both physically and emotionally by the end. It felt as if we had emerged from the war, eye witnesses first hand to the atrocities committed. I weighed my two experiences. While both exhibits harnessed historical ties to the land on which they occupied, one ended up focused far more on the testament of horror as evoked physically, and the other evoked more through traditional narrative. It is not my role, or anyone’s, to dictate which means is more effective in helping individuals come to terms with the past. I can only speak to my personal experience, my personal observations. While the use of the land to evoke emotional response can be extremely effective and powerful, my time at Sachsenhausen was ultimately disappointing. The echoes of atrocity perhaps have become too dulled by time, perhaps there just wasn’t enough narrative structure to allow us to grasp the spatial significance, perhaps it was just raining to hard and we weren’t in the right mental space. I thought of the German school groups I had witnessed at the camp; most were composed of giggling children, fully oblivious to the significance of the land on which they gossiped. In Topography of Terror, as visitors were forced to face memories of the Third Reich and Holocaust in the form of words, in the form of narrative, they were unable to tune out the echoes of history. The faces of visitors were somber, contemplative. Both Sachsenhausen and Topography of Terror serve fascinating roles in Germany’s process of coming to terms with its past. I wonder how my experience at Sachsenhausen would have differed had I gone to Topography of Terror first. There is something so impacting about narrative, and it was the narrative structure of Topography of Terror which allowed me to emotionally grasp the significance of the Germany’s Past. First comes emotional understanding, and then physical recognition. This key to “coming to terms with the past” involves both Topography of Terror and Sachsenhausen, but, as there is an order to the elements of coming to terms (first emotional understanding and then physical recognition), there must also be an order to how these two exhibits are experienced. Topography of Terror offers narrative. Sachsenhausen demonstrates recognition. Perhaps it is only with the narrative fresh in mind that the echoes of Sachsenhausen can be properly heard and interpreted. Perhaps someday I will test this theory, ideally on a day less rainy.
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AuthorStudent at the University of Washington, Sophie Aanerud, will be studying abroad in Berlin, Germany. Here are some of her thoughts . . . Archives
August 2017
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