’The Whole Country Is a Monument’: Framing Places of Terror in Post-War Germany

Abstract

When it comes to framing places of terror and disappearance, Germany unfortunately has a wide range of cases to offer. In the intense discussion preceding and framing the building of the central German Holocaust memorial in Berlin, which was dedicated in 2005, an interesting comment came from Jewish historian Marianne Awerbuch. She wrote: ‘The whole country is a monument!’ (Assmann, 2011, p.222). The new monument for the murdered Europeans Jews was built in the centre of Berlin on neutral ground. With her statement Awerbuch wanted to prevent this new site somehow eclipsing, devaluing and displacing the authentic historical sites in the attention and memory of the Germans. A special paragraph concerning the obligation to preserve and care for the former concentration camps, that had been turned into historical sites of memory after the end of the war, had been inscribed into the treaty of unification of the two German states after 1990. This state of affairs, however, in no way demonstrated that ‘the whole country is a monument’. Hundreds and hundreds of less conspicuous sites had been made invisible after 1945, transforming them into nondescript places by deleting the traces of their history. If nobody intervenes, nature has a great capacity for de-historicizing places. ‘I am the grass, let me work’ is the tag line of a poem ‘Grass’ by Carl Sandburg (Sandburg, 2013) about the great battlefields of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.