The International Journal of Transitional Justice, Vol. 7, 2013, 136–156,
doi:10.1093/ijtj/ijs035
Advance Access publication: 16 January 2013
Remembering Complexity? Memorials
for Nazi Victims in Berlin
Christiane Wilke*
Abstract
How do memorials shape who we think we are? And how are our identities involved
when we debate, create and interact with memorials? This article engages in a conversation with scholarship on intersectional identities and memorial practices in Berlin.
Intersectionality scholarship, with its roots in US critical race feminism, has much to
offer for thinking about the complexity of identities, yet it does not consider the role of
memory, time and temporality. The scholarship on memory and memorials, in turn, does
not sufficiently consider the complexity of identities of those who are memorialized and
of those who visit memorials. The article asks how two different memorials for Nazi
victims in Berlin allow for or facilitate the memory of complex identities, illustrates that
memorial practices can be crucial in contemporary identity politics and social movements and calls for a more self-reflexive approach to the role of identities and complexity
in memorial scholarship and practice.
Keywords: memorials, intersectionality, sexuality, memory, Berlin, World War II
Introduction1
Memorials are about the past in the present. They are about those who are being
memorialized as well as those who come to visit the memorials. How do memorials for victims of atrocity represent the identities of those who were persecuted?
How do these memorials shape who we think we are? And how are our identities
involved when we debate, create and interact with memorials? This article starts a
conversation between transitional justice and theories of complex identities
through a case study of two memorials to Nazi victims in Berlin: the Herbert
Baum Group memorial and the Memorial to the Homosexuals Persecuted under
the National Socialist Regime. The article argues that transitional justice can
* Associate Professor, Department of Law and Legal Studies, Carleton University, Canada. Email:
[email protected]
1
On a cold December day, Lena Foljanty and I took intersectionality theories on a walk to memorials in Berlin. The places we saw are tied to the conversations we had while looking and walking.
Thus, the responses to the memorials are not only my own. They emerged on the basis of our
sustained conversations before, during and after charting the memorial landscape in Berlin.
I presented earlier versions of this article at the Annual Conference of the Canadian Law &
Society Association in Ottawa, at the Law & Society Research Cluster in Winnipeg and at the
Berlin Colloquium on Memory Work and Un/civil Society. Comments by Debra Parkes, Andrew
Woolford, Irit Dekel and Michael Rothberg were particularly helpful and inspiring.
! The Author (2013). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
For Permissions, please email [email protected]
Memorials for Nazi Victims in Berlin
137
benefit from insights by theorists of complex identities in order to become more
cognizant and reflexive of the work that transitional justice does in remembering,
representing and shaping identities.
In the past two decades, theories of identity have become more nuanced and
complex.2 Theorists of intersectionality and multidimensionality, arguing against
concepts of ‘collective’ identities, emphasize that we all have multiple, overlapping, fluid identities and social statuses.3 They also point out that political claims
based on single-identity frames often miss more complex points or result in new
forms of subordination. Identity markers, such as race, gender, sexuality, class,
religion and ethnicity, work not separately but in tandem. For example, black
women experience racism differently than black men and sexism differently than
nonblack women.4
Complex identities matter not only because we need to represent identities
more carefully, or because current concepts of discrimination might be insufficient, but also because they are targeted and mobilized in state violence. Some
scholars explore the connections between identity politics and transitional justice,
but there is no sustained exploration of intersectional and complex identities in
transitional justice.5 This is an important gap: violence and persecution are complex, and so are the people who have been targeted.
Consider the case of Magnus Hirschfeld, for whom a stretch of a Berlin street,
the Magnus Hirschfeld Ufer, was named in 2008. In 1897, Hirschfeld cofounded
the Scientific Humanitarian Committee (Wissenschaftlich-Humanitäres Komitee)
to campaign against Article 175 of the criminal code, which criminalized sex
between men.6 In the Weimar Republic, Hirschfeld, the director of the
Institute for Sexual Sciences (founded by him in 1919), was a polarizing figure
because he was both an advocate for sexual and gender diversity and Jewish. Many
of his opponents saw him as the incarnation of a deviant and threatening Jewish
2
3
4
5
6
For classic accounts of identity that focus on culture to the exclusion of class, gender and sexuality,
see the discussion in Amy Gutmann, ed., Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
See, Kimberlé Crenshaw, ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence
Against Women of Color,’ Stanford Law Review 43(6) (1991): 1241–1299; Nancy Ehrenreich,
‘Subordination and Symbiosis: Mechanisms of Mutual Support between Subordinating
Systems,’ UMKC Law Review 71(2) (2002): 251–324; Darren Lenard Hutchinson, ‘New
Complexity Theories: From Theoretical Innovation to Doctrinal Reform,’ UMKC Law Review
71(2) (2002): 431–445; Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the
Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995).
See, Crenshaw, supra n 3.
The International Center for Transitional Justice’s Identities in Transition project contains some
reflections on complex identities but no thorough engagement with complexity at a theoretical
level. See, Paige Arthur, ed., Identities in Transition: Challenges for Transitional Justice in Divided
Societies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Also see Fionnuala Nı́ Aoláin and Eilish
Rooney, ‘Underenforcement and Intersectionality: Gendered Aspects of Transition for Women,’
International Journal of Transitional Justice 1(3) (2007): 338–354. Elizabeth Jelin’s work on
memory and redress addresses complex identities without theorizing them as such. See,
Elizabeth Jelin, ‘Silences, Visibility, and Agency: Ethnicity, Class, and Gender in Public
Memorialization,’ in Arthur.
Toni Brennan and Peter Hegarty, ‘Magnus Hirschfeld, His Biographies and the Possibilities and
Boundaries of “Biography” as “Doing History,”’ History of the Human Sciences 22(5) (2009): 24–46.
International Journal of Transitional Justice, Vol. 7, 2013, 136–156
138
C. Wilke
sexuality. In 1920, Hirschfeld was viciously assaulted and left for dead by youths
brandishing swastikas. He was repeatedly singled out by Nazi propaganda as a
‘degenerate Jew,’ yet Hirschfeld did not identify as Jewish. In his view, the religion
of one’s parents did not determine one’s identity.7 And although he was widely
known to be gay, his advocacy work was based on the language of science, not on
claims to identity, rights and desires.8 On 6 May 1933, Hirschfeld was abroad
when the Institute for Sexual Sciences was raided by Nazi groups. Research
material was looted and destroyed, and approximately 10,000 books from the
institute library were burned.9 The raid on the institute was the dress rehearsal for
the centrally planned book burning that took place four days later in dozens of
cities. At the central book burning event in Berlin, the writer Erich Kästner
reports, ‘the head of the smashed bust of Magnus Hirschfeld was stuck on a
long pole, dangling high above the silent crowd.’10 Hirschfeld never returned to
Germany and died in exile in France in 1935. How can we account for the hostility
he suffered? What are the stakes in memorializing Hirschfeld and other people
whose lives and identities were complex?
These questions should have been asked long ago. To examine how transitional
justice mechanisms deal with the complexity of victims, one needs to know about
complexity in theory and practice. Most of the earlier research on Nazi violence
focuses on victim groups understood as entirely discrete, for example Jews or
communists. Other victim groups do not figure in this research, nor were they
publicly recognized as worthy victims. Concentration camp survivors who were
persecuted for being asocial or homosexual, for example, had to contend with the
continuing stigmatization of the identities that had led to their persecution by the
Nazi state. The clauses criminalizing same-sex desire among men that the Nazi
state introduced in 1935 were not completely lifted in Germany until 1994. As a
result, there are very few testimonies by gay men who were persecuted by the Nazi
state.11 And the testimonies by other concentration camp survivors often testify
more to the homophobia in the camps than to the lives of gays and lesbians.12
Research into persecution on the grounds of sexuality started only with the
growing prominence of the transnational gay rights movement.13 As the visibility
of gays and lesbians increased, the past became a resource for claims in the
present. Thus, the rise of identity politics and the rise of historical research into
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
Ibid., 30.
Ibid.
J.M. Ritchie, ‘The Nazi Book-Burning,’ Modern Language Review 83(3) (1988): 627–643.
Ibid., 630.
Rudolf Brazda, who was ‘discovered’ as a gay concentration camp survivor only in 2008, told his
story to Alexander Zinn. See, Alexander Zinn, Das Glück kam immer zu mir: Rudolf Brazda – das
Überleben eines Homosexuellen im Dritten Reich (Frankfurt: Campus, 2011).
See, Elizabeth D. Heineman, ‘Sexuality and Nazism: The Doubly Unspeakable?,’ Journal of the
History of Sexuality 11(1/2) (2002): 22–66; Rüdiger Lautmann, ‘Die soziale Ordnung des
Gedenkens: Opfergruppen in den nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslagern,’ in Exklusion in
der Marktgesellschaft, ed. Daniela Klimke (Wiesbaden, Germany: VS Verlag, 2008).
See, Lautmann, supra n 12.
International Journal of Transitional Justice, Vol. 7, 2013, 136–156
Memorials for Nazi Victims in Berlin
139
persecution on the basis of these identity categories are closely linked. With new
research on the complexity of Nazi persecutions, researchers and practitioners
face new questions about seeing, representing and refracting the complexity of
persecution and the complexity of victims.
Transitional justice as a practice and field of inquiry stands to gain much from
an engagement with intersectionality theories. These theories will help to recognize that state violence often involves the persecution of people with different and
intersecting identity markers. Memorials, especially those devoted to groups of
victims united by one identity marker, tend to simplify the identities of those they
memorialize. In doing this, memorials also serve contemporary identity projects.
Memorials mediate between past and present, between the identities of those they
memorialize and between the identities of those who come to visit them. There is
a temptation to ignore or downplay the complexity and fluidity of identities. For
the sake of justice and memory, it is imperative to recognize the complexities of
identities past and present and to remember that identities are always works in
progress.
Memorials in Berlin
Memorials mediate, represent and spark memories. Memorials are creations,
often sanctioned and maintained by the state, that remind visitors of past
events – suffering or triumph, victory or defeat – and aim to endow these
events with meaning through inscriptions, aesthetic references or placement.
Transitional justice scholars and practitioners consider the process of debating,
establishing and modifying memorials part of the broader field of transitional
justice.14 Memorials can be important visual markers of specific sites of past
violence and of state repression more generally.15
Memorials work and live through the interactions and appropriations of visitors.16 Visitors come with their knowledges, memories and expectations, and they
can walk away seeing these ideas affirmed, triggered anew or challenged and
troubled. As a consequence, a single memorial can have a range of meanings
and resonances. Visitors with different life experiences and knowledges ‘charge
[memorials] with their own memory and their own meaning.’17
Memorials in Berlin not only mark local history but also have become part of
arguments about broader German history. After all, Berlin has been the capital of
five different historical configurations of German statehood, and the cityscape
bears traces of different layers of state power, aesthetic vision and urban
14
15
16
17
See, International Center for Transitional Justice, Truth and Memory Program, http://www.ictj.
org/our-work/transitional-justice-issues/truth-and-memory (accessed 2 July 2012).
See, Jelin, supra n 5.
Irit Dekel, ‘Ways of Looking: Observation and Transformation at the Holocaust Memorial,
Berlin,’ Memory Studies 2(1) (2009): 71–86.
Elizabeth Jelin, ‘Public Memorialization in Perspective: Truth, Justice and Memory of Past
Repression in the Southern Cone of South America,’ International Journal of Transitional Justice
1(1) (2007): 147.
International Journal of Transitional Justice, Vol. 7, 2013, 136–156
140
C. Wilke
planning.18 Berlin, the political and cultural hub of Germany, has long been a
place for projecting social utopias, representing German nationhood and performing modernity.19 Berlin is never just old or new; its planners, inhabitants and
tourists constantly discover, emphasize, repudiate, preserve and create new or old
facets of the city.20
Berlin in the early 21st century sports a ‘memory district’ consisting, at least in
its official presentation, of three central places within walking distance of one
another: the Jewish Museum, formally an annex to the Berlin Museum; the
Holocaust Memorial; and the Topography of Terror International
Documentation Center.21 The official memory district organizes memorialization
into different groups of perpetrators and victims with distinct places of remembrance, and this organization of space and memory has triggered the emergence of
other, smaller, memorials. Much research on memorials in Berlin focuses on the
central memorial sites, especially on the Holocaust Memorial, with scholars
asking how this memorial in the heart of Berlin reflects and shapes German
national identity.22 This article, however, considers the contestations over less
central memorials that commemorate marginalized groups of victims: the memorial to the Herbert Baum Group and the Memorial to the Homosexuals
Persecuted under the National Socialist Regime. These memorials speak of and
to identities defined not on the basis of nationality but of political affiliation,
sexuality or class. Intersectionality theories, with their critical focus on singleidentity advocacy groups, help to shed new light on the forms of memory and
identity building that occur at (and through) these memorials.23
The struggle over memorials, their locations, their reference points and the
wording on their plaques is not only about historical accuracy. Representations
of past identities and past suffering call contemporary subjects into being. These
subjects, in turn, are invested in the memorials. Memorials often suggest easy
continuities between past and present identities and that different identity groups
existed in separation from one another. The investment in suffering then also
becomes an investment in defining group boundaries, in denying complexity and
in fighting over who can claim which victims.
In staging an encounter between intersectionality scholarship and memorials in
Berlin, this article challenges the scholarship on identities that neglects the role of
memory work in identity politics, as well as the research and activism relating to
memorialization that fail to reflect on its participation in identity politics.
18
19
20
21
22
23
See, Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2003); Karen E. Till, The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
Till, supra n 18.
Ibid.
Ibid.
See, ibid.; Huyssen, supra n 18; Dekel, supra n 16.
See, Crenshaw, supra n 3; Emily Grabham, Davina Cooper, Jane Krishnadas and Didi Herman,
eds., Intersectionality and Beyond: Law, Power, and the Politics of Location (New York:
Routledge-Cavendish, 2008).
International Journal of Transitional Justice, Vol. 7, 2013, 136–156
Memorials for Nazi Victims in Berlin
141
Identities of Memories, Memories of Identities
Identities are based on narrations of the past that tell members of a group ‘where
we came from.’ In the process of telling and remembering, the ‘we’ that suffered,
persisted, triumphed or was defeated is constructed as an entity with a past, a
present and a future.24 Memory work, in turn, is the (more or less) ‘self-reflexive
act of contextualizing and continuously digging through the past’ and of
‘remaking and re-membering the past in the present rather than a process of
discovering objective historical “facts.”’25 Memory work sorts the past into
meaningful stories that often entail morals with obligations for the present and
future.26 Memories, as a result, ‘are an integral part of the process of building and
recognizing collective identities (national and other).’27 Memories provide identities with roots. Identities, however, always come in the plural: we all are constituted along axes of gender, race, religion, age, class, sexuality and more. The
following section probes what intersectionality theories have to offer for transitional justice in general and for memory projects in particular.
The first formulations of intersectionality were developed by critical race feminists in the late 1980s to critique dominant ways of representing identities and
difference in US law. Kimberlé Crenshaw and others point out that seeing discrimination as having only one dimension leaves us unable to explain many facets
of social life. For example, ‘the violence that many women experience is often
shaped by other dimensions of their identities, such as race and class.’ The practices of antiracist and antisexist campaigns, Crenshaw observes, ‘expound identity
as woman or person of color as an either/or proposition’ and thereby ‘relegate the
identity of women of color to a location that resists telling.’ Crenshaw’s project is
to ‘advance the telling of that location’ of intersectional oppression without
claiming that intersectionality would amount to ‘some new, totalizing theory of
identity.’28
One of the basic insights of intersectionality approaches is that identities are
always complex. We are all positioned in different ways in the identity landscapes
of gender, race, sexuality, class, religion, age, (dis)ability and so on. Moreover,
different identity categories
are not distinct realms of experience, existing in splendid isolation from each other;
nor can they be simply yoked together retrospectively like armatures of Lego. Rather,
24
25
26
27
28
See, for example, Klaus Eder, ‘A Theory of Collective Identity: Making Sense of the Debate on a
“European Identity,”’ European Journal of Social Theory 12(4) (2009): 427–447.
Till, supra n 18 at 11. For a classic account of memory, see, Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective
Memory, ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). For a critical
review, see, Elizabeth Jelin, State Repression and the Struggles for Memory (London: Latin America
Bureau, 2003).
See, Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987).
Jelin, supra n 17 at 140.
Crenshaw, supra n 32 at 1242, 1244.
International Journal of Transitional Justice, Vol. 7, 2013, 136–156
142
C. Wilke
they come into existence in and through relation to each other – if in contradictory and
conflictual ways.29
Different identity markers work on one another and sometimes create ‘symbiotic’ combinations of privilege, subordination or marginalization.30 As
Crenshaw observes:
Because women of color experience racism in ways not always the same as those
experienced by men of color and sexism not always parallel to experiences of white
women, antiracism and feminism are limited if they do not work in tandem.31
Initial intersectional analyses focus on people disadvantaged along more than
one of the ‘axes of discrimination’ recognized in US civil rights law – race and
gender. Black women are the paradigmatic subject of these earlier applications of
intersectionality theories. They were victimized by racism and sexism, and yet
they were made invisible by the frameworks of antiracism and antisexism.
However, intersectional scholars aspire to do more than account for discrimination. Crenshaw expresses the hope that ‘intersectionality might be more broadly
useful as a way of mediating the tension between assertions of multiple identities
and the ongoing necessity of group politics.’32
How, then, can we bring intersectionality analyses into conversation with
memorials for Nazi victims in Berlin? How can a body of literature that analyzes
US jurisprudence help to raise questions about memorials in Germany? It would
be glib to say that in reading intersectionality scholarship one can replace the
word ‘law’ with ‘memorials’. Yet, intersectionality scholarship is indeed largely
concerned with understanding how social identities are represented in law. Law,
in this analysis, is interrogated as a system of norms and representations that
constitutes the categories and subjects it pretends merely to regulate. From this
perspective, memorials are not so different from law: memorials recognize the
suffering of a demarcated group of people and promise redress through representation and remembrance. Intersectionality theories can therefore be used to
examine and critique how social identities are represented in memorials and
memory projects.
There is a productive mismatch between the language and the metaphors of
intersectionality theories and memory scholarship. Intersectionality operates with
a vocabulary of space, whereas memory uses the language of temporality. The
spatial discourse of intersectionality scholarship frames intersectionality as a critique of representations, of maps and of places beyond the maps. This vocabulary
for representing complexity at the same time flattens the temporal complexity of
identities. ‘Mapping’, as Joanne Conaghan observes, implies ways of thinking and
29
30
31
32
McClintock, supra n 3 at 5.
Ehrenreich, supra n 3.
Crenshaw, supra n 3 at 1252.
Ibid., 1296.
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Memorials for Nazi Victims in Berlin
143
seeing that encourage a focus on the present to the exclusion of the past or the
future.33 Maps offer snapshot representations of a situation. They cannot show
people and identities on the move. Because of its focus on mapping, intersectionality analysis is often ‘more a discourse of representations than origins, one which
sees the possibilities for future transformation in interpretations of the present
rather than interrogations of the past.’34 This is why intersectionality theories
would benefit from a conversation with theories of transitional justice and
memory. Identities have a past, they have real and imagined roots, and often
this is a past of stigmatization and discrimination. The valence of an identity
marker such as gay or Jewish is established not only in the present but also
through making connections to the identity category of people who inhabited
this identity in previous decades or centuries. The past of an identity is part of its
present. Those who merely want to ‘map’ identities will miss their roots.
Intersectionality theories open up new questions for transitional justice scholarship and practice via three areas of questions that are vital to a more complex
understanding of persecution, victimhood and redress. First, what are the relationships between different forms of oppression and different categories of victims? Standard images of Nazi persecution distinguish different groups of victims,
for example, Jews, Communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Roma and Sinti and gays.
Yet, as the case of Hirschfeld helps to remind us, these are not mutually exclusive
groups: he was Jewish, gay and communist. Moreover, Crenshaw’s contention
that sexism is raced and classed invites us to consider how, for example, the Nazis’
homophobia targeted lesbians differently than gay men and targeted Jewish gay
men differently than non-Jewish gays. At the dedication ceremony of the Magnus
Hirschfeld Ufer, Lala Süsskind spoke as the representative of the Berlin Jewish
community and reminded the audience that for the Nazis, ‘homophobia and antiSemitism went hand in hand.’35 This recognition, however, is not often echoed in
memorial practices. For example, as Régis Schlagdenhauffen-Maika points out,
the Yad Vashem memorial museum makes no reference to Hirschfeld in its
otherwise detailed telling of the history of anti-Semitism, a practice that is consistent with the Jerusalem museum’s refusal to recognize gays as Holocaust
victims.36
How were anti-Semitism, homophobia and anti-communism connected? If
anti-Semitism was sexualized because Jews were constructed as a threat to the
German body politic, the categories ‘Jewish’ and ‘homosexual’ as constructed by
33
34
35
36
Joanne Conaghan, ‘Intersectionality and the Feminist Project in Law,’ in Grabham et al., supra n
23.
Ibid., 39.
Grusswort der Vorsitzenden der Jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin, Frau Lala Süsskind, anlässlich der
Einweihungsfeier ‘Magnus – Hirschfeld – Ufer’ am 6. Mai 2008. Lesben- und Schwulenverband
Berlin-Brandenburg. On file with the author. All translations from German to English are my own.
See, Régis Schlagdenhauffen-Maika, ‘The New Holocaust Memorial Museum of Yad Vashem and
the Commemoration of Homosexuals as Victims of Nazism,’ Bulletin du Centre de recherche
français à Jérusalem 16 (2005): 244–261.
International Journal of Transitional Justice, Vol. 7, 2013, 136–156
144
C. Wilke
the Nazis not only overlapped but also informed one another.37 Thus, the visual
metaphor of the intersection of identities and oppressions is limited. Someone
located at an intersection might be hit by different vehicles coming from different
directions. Yet, it is not clear that, for example, Nazi sexism, homophobia and
anti-Semitism are comparable to different vehicles. Rather, they were mutually
supporting systems of demarcating difference and instituting social hierarchies.
Thus, memorial practices and scholarship on memory need to recognize that
people like Hirschfeld, who were persecuted along more than one overt axis of
oppression, exist. Furthermore, it is not clear that we can, even analytically, divide
the persecution into separate categories. Although the Nazis stuck labels on their
victims (such as Jew, communist or habitual criminal), examples discussed below
show that these categorizations hid the fact that the persecutors were not always
certain how to categorize their victims. A focus on the apparently distinct categories of persecution – the yellow star, the pink triangle, the red triangle – can hide
the violence of constructing these categories and the violence of maintaining them
as separate and distinct.
Second, does the category of victim presume that all those whose suffering is
commemorated are exclusively victims of oppression? Or is there space for ‘complex political victims’?38 Memorials are dedicated to victims. As a result, they
represent people solely as victims of persecution. Thus, memorials potentially
reduce people to the identity markers under which they were persecuted. They
commemorate suffering and persecution, not privilege and complicity in atrocities. Can victims also be perpetrators or bystanders?
Practices of commemoration and redress frequently are interested in ‘pure’
victims only: those who were innocent and passive or those who heroically
resisted oppression.39 Such practices represent victims as impossible saints, martyrs and heroes – the stuff for national myth making. Real victims and survivors,
in contrast, are more complex. The expectation of moral purity and innocence,
however, has restricted redress measures to people who could credibly perform
the ‘innocent’ or ‘heroic’ victim. For example, West German compensation for
concentration camp survivors was restricted to those who ‘did not support other
totalitarian regimes’ – a code for excluding communists.40
Although the concept of complex political victims has been discussed in order
to understand persons who collaborated with their oppressors, little attention has
37
38
39
40
See, for example, Brennan and Hegarty, supra n 5; Geoffrey J. Giles, ‘Why Bother about
Homosexuals? Homophobia and Sexual Politics in Nazi Germany,’ J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro
Annual Lecture 2001, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Center for Advanced
Holocaust Studies, https://secure.ushmm.org/research/center/publications/occasional/2002-04/
paper.pdf (accessed 25 February 2010).
Erica Bouris, Complex Political Victims (Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press, 2007).
Leora Bilsky, Transformative Justice: Israeli Identity on Trial (Ann Arbor, MI: University of
Michigan Press, 2004).
See, Christiane Wilke, ‘Recognizing Victimhood: Politics and Narratives of Rehabilitation in
Germany,’ Journal of Human Rights 6(4) (2007): 479–496; Alexander von Brünneck, Politische
Justiz gegen Kommunisten in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1949–1968 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
1978).
International Journal of Transitional Justice, Vol. 7, 2013, 136–156
Memorials for Nazi Victims in Berlin
145
been paid to the ways in which privilege and subordination stemming from
different identity markers coexist.41 This is a blind spot that transitional justice
scholarship shares with much of the early intersectionality scholarship.
Intersectionality theories started as a way of conceptualizing the experience of
people whose disadvantage cannot be reduced to one discrete category of discrimination. Yet, as Nancy Ehrenreich argues, intersectionality cannot be reduced
to those who are subordinated and only subordinated.42 Most people enjoy
certain forms of privilege and suffer from forms of subordination. This combination of privilege and subordination calls for analyses that do not take the subject’s
victimhood for granted and that inquire into the complex forms of agency,
mimicry and ‘compensatory subordination’ in which people engage.43 The case
of Magnus Hirschfeld sits comfortably within the scope of the earlier intersectionality literature. He was racialized and seen as sexually deviant, and these
systems of oppression were mutually dependent and reinforcing. Yet, most
German gay men were not Jewish. How did they negotiate their racial privilege
in the context of Nazi genocidal projects? Where is the place to talk about these
complex locations?
Finally, how do memorials speak to current identities? How is a ‘we’ constructed
in the process of advocating for and setting up memorials? How does the memorial
address its visitors? Memorials ask visitors to establish a relationship to the people
who are memorialized. Typically, memorials have different messages for those
visitors who (are asked to) identify as members of the victim group than they
have for visitors who (are asked to) identify either as members of the group who
persecuted the victims or as members of ‘unrelated’ groups. The Memorial to the
Homosexuals Persecuted under the National Socialist Regime, discussed in more
detail below, provides an example of these differing messages. The monument
explains that ‘the Federal Republic of Germany’ wants to ‘keep the memory of
the injustices alive’ and ‘set a permanent sign against intolerance, hostility, and
exclusion aimed at gays and lesbians.’ This inscription constructs different visitor
subjectivities. On one hand, contemporary gays and lesbians are invited to remember the persecution of gays and lesbians in the past and to be assured that the
German state is devoted to their inclusion and toleration. On the other hand,
German visitors who do not identify as lesbian or gay are exhorted to be tolerant
of gays and lesbians. For them, the past becomes an obligation. Both groups are
invited to connect their identities and attitudes to the memory of the injustices.
In this process, memorials pose ‘historical injuries [as] constitutive of those
identities.’ What are the effects of tying identities to the memory of suffering?
Wendy Brown argues that stressing identities based on historical injuries results
in identity’s ‘investment in itself, and especially in its own history of suffering.’ If
identities are tied to ‘a present past’ of ‘unredeemable injury,’ they will forgo more
41
42
43
Bouris, supra n 38.
See, Ehrenreich, supra n 3.
Ibid., 296.
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146
C. Wilke
emancipatory politics in favor of seeking protection from the same state powers
that are complicit in their subordination.44 This is a perceptive point, and yet it is
too limited. Memorials not only help to enshrine historic injury at the root of
contemporary identities but also make group boundaries appear clear instead of
fuzzy and identify the memorialized group with only righteous suffering, not
moral complexity, collaboration or shame.
Intersectionality theories, in short, can help to raise important questions about
state violence and transitional justice with regard to the symbioses between different dimensions of persecution, the negotiation between discrimination in one
dimension and privilege in another dimension and the investment of identity
entrepreneurs in redress, memory and memorials. It is time, then, to turn to the
two memorials.
The Cube: Tales of Lost Friends and Friendships
The Lustgarten is a historic park located between a classicist museum building, an
imposing church and a huge void that was once filled by the Royal Palace. The
East German state destroyed the baroque Royal Palace in 1950 and built the
modernist Palace of the Republic in its place. The Palace of the Republic, in
turn, was condemned because of high levels of asbestos and slowly dismantled
between 2006 and 2008 to make space for a replica of the Royal Palace. The
Lustgarten is a contested space in which a succession of political regimes has
turned political visions into architecture.
In this park, between trimmed, low hedges, stands a cube-like structure, a
memorial inaugurated in 1982. When the memorial was unveiled, two opposite
sides of the structure had the following inscription in bold capital letters: ‘The
integrity and persistence of the antifascist group led by the young Communist
Herbert Baum is not forgotten.’ The other two opposite sides carried the following inscription: ‘Forever connected in friendship with the Soviet Union.’ The
memorial did not explain itself or which acts of bravery the group led by
Herbert Baum committed.
What had happened? In 1942, the Nazi state mounted a propaganda exhibit on
the Soviet Union in large tents in the Lustgarten. The exhibit, entitled Soviet
Paradise, portrayed the country in ways that were not only unfavorable but
also racist, anti-Semitic and generally consistent with the aggressive war against
the Soviet Union that the Nazi state had started the year before. On 18 May 1942, a
group of people placed bombs in the exhibition. Eleven visitors suffered injuries;
no one was killed. The authors of the attack were found and arrested soon thereafter, and 34 of them were executed between 1942 and 1943.
The 1982 memorial interpreted these actions within the framework of
communist resistance to the Nazi state. The target of the attack, the propaganda
exhibition on the Soviet Union, is consistent with this reading. From its
44
Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1995), xi, 55, 73.
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Memorials for Nazi Victims in Berlin
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inception, the memorial stood across the street from the Palace of the Republic,
the symbolic center of power of the East German state with its strong official
antifascist ideology. The East German state vanished in 1990, the Palace of the
Republic disappeared in 2008 and the Soviet Union, celebrated by the memorial
with the promise of eternal friendship, dissolved in 1991. Yet, the memorial is still
there. In December 2000, it was modified. It received an additional layer of
inscriptions, this time on semitransparent plastic. The old inscriptions are
barely visible beneath the layer of ‘transparency’ and commentary designed to
add to, and not cover up, the original inscriptions. The new inscription reads,
On May 18 of the war year 1942, members of the anti-fascist resistance group led by
Herbert Baum tried to set fire to the defamatory Nazi propaganda exhibition ‘The
Soviet Paradise.’ Thus they took a stance against the war and the National Socialist
terror regime. In connection with the acts of resistance at Lustgarten, more than thirty
young women and men, most of them Jewish, were killed. Most of them were guillotined at Berlin-Plötzensee. The reprisals of the Gestapo on May 28 and 29, 1942 led to
the deaths of another 500 Jewish men.
This memorial, designed by sculptor Jürgen Raue, was commissioned by the City
Government of Berlin (East). It was erected in 1982 and did not contain detailed
information about the acts of resistance at Lustgarten.
Thus, this memorial now documents the brave acts of resistance in 1942, the understanding of history in 1981, and our continuing remembrance of the resistance against
the Nazi state.
The new inscription offers much more detail about the acts that are memorialized. It starts by framing the acts of resistance in terms similar to the 1982
inscription: the group is called an ‘antifascist resistance group.’ Yet, it also
recalls that ‘more than thirty young women and men, most of them Jewish’
were killed ‘in connection with’ these acts of resistance. Who were they?
The ‘antifascist resistance group’ and the ‘young people, most of them Jewish,’
were the same persons. Because five out of the seven members of the group who
were caught in the days after the attack were Jewish, the Gestapo initiated a
reprisal: for each of the Jewish members of the group, 100 other Jews would be
killed.45
The 1982 inscription did not mention that most of the group’s members were
Jewish or that there were reprisals in the form of mass killings of Jewish men,
whereas the new inscription calls the group antifascist when speaking about them
as agents of resistance and calls attention to the Jewishness of most of the members when it speaks of their suffering. Both inscriptions tie the active resistance to
the Nazi state to the group’s antifascist stance. The group members’ political
identities seemingly explain the attack and its target. This account is consistent
45
See, Herbert Lindenberger, ‘Heroic or Foolish? The 1942 Bombing of a Nazi Anti-Soviet Exhibit,’
TELOS 135 (Summer 2006): 127–154. Also see, John M. Cox, ‘Circles of Resistance: Intersections
of Jewish, Leftist and Youth Dissidence under the Third Reich, 1933–1945’ (PhD diss., University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2005), 112.
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148
C. Wilke
with a longer history of associating communists with active, heroic, if often futile,
resistance.46 The East German state constructed its ideational heritage through
the communist antifascist resistance. The decision to put up this memorial, and to
refer to Herbert Baum and his comrades as ‘young Communists,’ is part of this
larger strategy of political legitimation through remembrance. The fate of Jews, in
contrast, was largely ignored in official East German historiography and memorialization politics. As elsewhere, Jews were associated with innocent suffering, not
with heroic resistance, and persecution on the basis of religious or ethnic identity
did not fit the categories of history that resonated in East Germany.
In ignoring the prominence of Nazi anti-Semitism, the East German state
ignored not only millions of Nazi victims but also the complex identities of
many members of the communist and socialist anti-Nazi resistance. In the
Weimar Republic, the socialist and labor movements included many Jews
drawn to social justice and equality. These movements did not have a sustained
engagement with Jewish identity; their main frame of reference was class based.
Many Jewish social and cultural organizations promoted values consistent with
the goals of leftist movements. Indeed, many members of the Baum Group grew
up within networks of both Jewish and socialist organizing.47 For them, the
cultural, social and political activities of Jewish and socialist groups blended
with one another.
After the 1933 Nazi takeover, socialists and Jews were among the first to be
persecuted by the new regime. Yet, the persecution of political opponents and of
Jews did not proceed according to the same logic or in the same temporal order.
The persecution of political opponents and their detention in makeshift concentration camps started in early 1933. Jews were socially ostracized and isolated early
on, but the mass detention of Jews only started later in the 1930s. There is
evidence that Jewish socialists and communists suffered the worst fates. Many
of them were detained and tortured shortly after the January 1933 takeover along
with their comrades. But unlike their non-Jewish comrades, they were usually not
released from police detention but transferred to concentration camps where
most of them died.
Nazi propaganda, including the exhibit that became the target of the arson
attack, posited the existence of a ‘Jewish–Bolshevik’ conspiracy centered in the
Soviet Union.48 This had powerful effects on people who were indeed Jews and
communists: they were targeted as enemies of the German people in more than
one way. Several members of the Baum Group testified that they were especially
enraged by the anti-Semitic focus of the exhibit.49 The propaganda association of
Jews and communists led to the increasing isolation of Jewish and socialist
46
47
48
49
See the discussion in Lindenberger, supra n 45.
See, Cox, supra n 45.
Ibid.
Ibid.
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Memorials for Nazi Victims in Berlin
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organizations from one another. The Communist Party’s leadership in exile
decided in 1936 that Jewish members should no longer participate in party
work because such associations had the risk of exposing the larger underground
networks.50 As a result, Jewish communists like Herbert Baum could no longer
rely on institutional support through party networks and, thus, became isolated
and autonomous. The affiliations that once had offered intersecting systems of
support, ideas and social networks now proved to be doubly isolating.
To the Nazi state, Jewish communists seemed to be living proof of the conspiracy theories of Jewish Bolshevism. They were spectacular ‘catches’ for the
authorities, and their detentions, trials and deaths were material for propaganda.
The Nazi authorities interpreted the arson attack on the Soviet Paradise exhibit as
part of a Jewish–Bolshevik plot and gleefully pointed out that among the 258
Jewish men shot in reprisals, there were 25 communists. When nine of the group’s
Jewish members, some of whom were not involved in the attack, were executed on
4 March 1943, bright red posters in public places informed the city’s inhabitants
about the executions. The names of the Jewish group members were rendered
more visibly Jewish, in accordance with Nazi regulations, by adding ‘Sara’ or
‘Israel.’51
In short, to the Nazis, Jewish communists were material for spectacles able to
‘prove’ through their bodies the existence of a worldwide Jewish–Bolshevik conspiracy. At the same time, Jewish communists – like most of the Baum Group
members – experienced profound isolation from all the communities to which
they had earlier claimed belonging. Their exclusion and spectacular persecution
cannot be accounted for by either their political affiliation or their identities as
Jews. One of the basic insights of intersectionality theories, that we need to pay
attention to the ways in which exclusion and persecution might have more than
one source and happen along more than one axis of oppression, is useful as a
reminder for the contentious politics of memory around the Baum Group. The
group would not have been what it was, have done what it did or have suffered
what it suffered if many of its members had not been socialist and Jewish.
In the current debate about the identity of the Herbert Baum Group, authors
associated with the socialist movement stress the group’s socialist credentials by
emphasizing that ‘they all hated fascism and war; they had great faith in the Soviet
Union’ and ‘only few of the members lived with Jewish traditions and the Jewish
religion.’52 Furthermore, the group members ‘never made the distinction between
“Jews” and “Germans” that the Nazis cemented in their fascist race theories – and
which is still prominent in many people’s heads today.’53 Here, no space is made
for Jewish identities apart from religious and traditional cultural practices or the
stigma imposed by the Nazi racial legislation. Yet, other accounts of the group
50
51
52
53
Ibid.
Ibid.
Vera Ansbach, ‘Die Widerstandsgruppe Baum’ Broschüre Gegeninformationsbüro (6 September
2005), http://www.gegeninformationsbuero.de (accessed 4 April 2009).
Ibid.
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150
C. Wilke
emphasize that members were socialized in both Jewish and communist youth
groups and that Jewish identities became more prominent for those group members who were persecuted as Jews.54 At the other end of the spectrum, scholarship
associated with West German historiography of resistance has the explicit project
of arguing that the group around Herbert Baum was ‘a Jewish resistance organization’ in repudiation of the ‘official interpretation of history in East Germany’
that the group was part of the communist resistance movement.55 For authors
from different circles of history production, stressing either the Jewish or the
communist side of the group is tantamount to rejecting any suggestion that the
‘other’ identity informed the actions of the group.
The contest over establishing the ‘true’ identity of the Baum Group members is
a reminder that memorials are more than representations of past suffering. They
also shape current identities and claims to power, and they highlight the political
investment in stressing one marker of identity over another. Both ‘communist’
and ‘Jewish’ identity markers provided points of identification for successive
German governmental and civil society actors who were interested in seeing in
Herbert Baum and his peers whom or what they wanted to see. Moreover, these
identity markers are culturally coded to refer to either heroic resistance or passive
suffering, and the complexity of the Baum Group members’ identities disturbs
this division of memorialization into categories of Jewish suffering and communist resistance. Still, the memorial manages to maintain the divide between these
two culturally resonant markers at the cost of making the inscription seem
incongruous.
The HomoMonument
The Herbert Baum Group memorial is dedicated to a named group of people
whose identities are subject to contestation. The Memorial to the Homosexuals
Persecuted under the National Socialist Regime, also known as the
HomoMonument, in contrast, memorializes all those who were persecuted as
homosexuals and invites questions about what it meant and means to be gay, to be
lesbian or to be queer.
The HomoMonument owes its existence to the efforts of gay and lesbian rights
organizations as well as the Holocaust Memorial across the street. In 1999, parliament authorized the Holocaust Memorial in a law that contained a clause recognizing that the Federal Republic of Germany is ‘under the obligation to
commemorate the other victims of National Socialism in appropriate ways.’56
In 2001, the Association of Lesbians and Gays (Schwulen- und Lesbenverband),
the largest German gay rights organization, joined a smaller initiative that had
54
55
56
Cox, supra n 47.
Wolfgang Wippermann, ‘Die Berliner Gruppe Baum und der jüdische Widerstand,’ Beiträge zum
Thema Widerstand 19 (Informationszentrum Berlin, Gedenk- und Bildungsstätte
Stauffenbergstrasse, 2001), 2.
Beschluss der Deutschen Bundestages (25 June 1999), http://www.holocaust-denkmal-berlin.
de/index.php?id=44 (accessed 13 May 2009).
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Memorials for Nazi Victims in Berlin
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worked since 1993 in demanding state support and authorization for a memorial
for homosexuals persecuted under the Nazis.57 In December 2003, parliament
decided that a memorial would be built. The Berlin state government subsequently organized a competition for the design of the memorial, and the winning
design was chosen in 2006: a concrete structure that aesthetically cites the concrete slabs of the Holocaust Memorial but incorporates a screen and a video
installation. The initial video installation was a loop of two men kissing – the
same kiss, repeated over and over.58 The monument is under the care of the
foundation that runs the Holocaust Memorial, and official information about
the HomoMonument is accessible through the website of the Holocaust
Memorial. The memorial was inaugurated in June 2008 by Berlin’s openly gay
mayor Klaus Wowereit.
What seems like a fairy tale was a complex and contentious process. Most of
the antagonism had little to do with homophobic resistance to the
memorial. Rather, participants in the process debated what, whom and how
the memorial should commemorate. They disagreed about the role of memory
in contemporary identity politics, about definitions of persecution and about the
place of persecution on the basis of sexuality within the larger context of Nazi
persecutions.
When the initiative for the monument started in 1993, it was called Initiative
Gay Monument and included only men.59 For a while, a woman joined the group
to ensure that the perspectives of lesbians were not excluded. At this point, the
initiative was renamed Initiative HomoMonument. This shift in 1995–1996 triggered a controversy about the scope and meaning of the memorial that is still
ongoing. One of the members of the group resigned, suggesting that inclusion of
the persecution of lesbians meant that ‘under the flag of apparent “political
correctness,” [English in the original] the ideologically motivated myth of a
Nazi persecution of lesbians is being cast in stone.’60 Subsequent workshops on
the history of Nazi persecution and the politics of memorials continued to question whether the memorial should be for gay men only or for lesbians as well and
how different histories of persecution can be compared or integrated into a larger
history lesson. When the winners of the public arts competition were announced,
the debate intensified again. EMMA, a feminist magazine, ran a story that
accuses the jury of the competition and the artists of the winning design of
perpetuating the invisibility of lesbians. The article ends in an appeal for
57
58
59
60
See, Initiative HomoMonument, ‘HomoMonument: Eine Replik auf eine selbstgestellte Frage,’ in
Der homosexuellen NS-Opfer gedenken, ed. Heinrich Böll Stiftung (Berlin: Heinrich Böll Stiftung,
1999).
The first film was replaced with a new film in January 2012. Both films can be viewed
at
http://www.stiftung-denkmal.de/denkmaeler/denkmal-fuer-die-verfolgten-homosexuellen/
film-im-inneren-des-denkmals.html#c955 (accessed 17 July 2012).
Heinrich Böll Stiftung, ed., Der homosexuellen NS-Opfer gedenken (Berlin: Heinrich Böll Stiftung,
1999).
Joachim Müller, Offener Brief (19 October 1996), reprinted in Heinrich Böll Stiftung, supra n 59 at
119.
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C. Wilke
signatures to a petition protesting ‘that the planned Homo-Monument only
represents male homosexuals’ and demanding that ‘female homosexuals need
to be included in an appropriate manner.’61 The winning design, EMMA
argues, violates the mandate for the memorial that was established by parliament:
‘The memorial place should honor the victims of persecution and murder, keep
alive the memory of this injustice, and create a lasting symbol of opposition to
enmity, intolerance, and the exclusion of gay men and lesbians.’ The parliamentary mandate for the memorial assumed that in remembering specific injustices,
the memorial can ‘create a lasting symbol’ for inclusion the present. The exclusion
of lesbian experiences from the aesthetics of the memorial was, accordingly, not
simply an issue of historical accuracy but a claim to inclusion and recognition in
the present. A few months later, EMMA ran another article that tries to buttress
the claim that the Nazi persecution of lesbians, though less visible, was comparable to the persecution of gay men.62 The article is based on recent research but
contains a number of mistakes and exaggerations. In its pitch and in its attempt to
measure lesbian victimhood up to a standard of gay men’s victimhood, ultimately
drawing on iconic representations of Jewish victimhood, the EMMA article is
indicative of the larger process of what it means and takes to establish collective
victimhood in the shadow of the Holocaust Memorial.
What can the debate about the place of lesbians in the memorial suggest about
the relationship between memory work and identities and between memorials
and social justice claims? The following section addresses the articulation of
victimhood in reference to standards of suffering and the troubles with keeping
categories of gender, sexuality and politics apart.
Standards of Suffering
Memorials make past suffering present and relevant. But what counts as ‘real’
suffering worth remembering? Given that the Nazi persecution of Jews now
operates as the most prominent image of victimization, research into ‘other’
victims often tries to establish narratives of persecution that mirror the Jewish
experience. As a result, injustices committed against, for example, Roma and Sinti
or gay men are often narrated against the foil of the Jewish Holocaust.63 Some
authors and initiatives use the term ‘Homocaust’ to suggest the parallels.64 To be
sure, histories of Nazi persecution on the basis of sexuality clearly state the
61
62
63
64
‘Mal wieder die Frauen vergessen!,’ EMMA, May 2006, http://www.emma.de/hefte/ausgaben2006/septemberoktober-2006/homo-mahnmal/ (accessed 27 November 2012).
Chantal Louis, ‘Zeit der Maskierung,’ EMMA, January/February 2007, http://www.emma.de/
hefte/ausgaben-2007/emma-das-heft-2007-1/lesben-ns-zeit-1-2007/ (accessed 27 November
2012).
See, Arlene Stein, ‘Whose Memories? Whose Victimhood? Contests for the Holocaust Frame in
Recent Social Movement Discourse,’ Sociological Perspectives 41(3) (1998): 519–540; Erik N.
Jensen, ‘The Pink Triangle and Political Consciousness: Gays, Lesbians, and the Memory of
Nazi Persecution,’ Journal of the History of Sexuality 11(1/2) (2002): 319–349.
See, for example, the visual presentation of the Homocaust website, http://www.homocaust.org
(accessed 13 March 2012).
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Memorials for Nazi Victims in Berlin
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differences between the persecution of Jews, whom the Nazis sought to eliminate,
and the persecution of homosexuals, whom the Nazis aimed to ‘reeducate’ rather
than annihilate and whose persecution was largely restricted to gays and lesbians
in Germany.65 Yet, references to parallels to Jewish suffering help authors to
structure their narratives and to make claims to collective victimhood and for
memorialization and redress in the present.
As a result of taking the Nazi persecution of Jews as a model, historiography of
the Nazi persecution of homosexuals has often worked with a narrow standard of
what constitutes suffering, a standard that mirrors key elements of the Jewish
Holocaust and includes an intent to destroy the group, though not necessarily
through extermination; numbers of concentration camp inmates and numbers of
victims killed; and a discriminatory categorization and identification in concentration camps (the pink triangle). Such a standard for identifying persecution sets
up a competition of victimhood. Moreover, establishing persecution on the basis
of an alleged intent to destroy, numbers of dead and numbers of concentration
camp inmates who wore triangles of particular colors (pink and black) ignores the
broader terrain of suffering created by Nazi policies. Tens of thousands of gay
men were convicted of homosexuality in civilian courts and sent to prisons.
Others were convicted in military courts and either executed or sent to frontline units as cannon fodder. Still others were categorized as mentally ill, institutionalized and some killed in the ‘euthanasia’ program (the mass killings of people
whom the Nazis considered sick or degenerate).66 Yet many authors who argue
for the recognition of gay and lesbian suffering have fallen into the trap of
tabulating, literally or metaphorically, counts of dead bodies with a pink triangle.
Opponents of the inclusion of lesbian experiences in the Berlin monument could
argue, backed by their formal authority as historians and the lack of detailed
research on lesbian history, that supporters of the inclusion had simply gotten
the history and numbers wrong. In this view, although lesbians would like to be
acknowledged as a sexual minority, they were not Nazi victims.67 The feminist
organizing around the EMMA article, in turn, tried to prove that lesbians were
systematically singled out and detained in concentration camps as lesbians. This is
a claim for which there is little evidence, in part because of precisely the same
invisibility of female homosexuality that the monument now tries to remedy.
Thus, the narrow focus on concentration camp inmates has helped to obscure
rather than clarify the contours of the Nazi persecution of gays and lesbians. The
text of the memorial, in contrast, steers clear of precise accounts of numbers and
standards of suffering. In its compromising stance between claims from the past
and claims about the present, the monument seems more truthful because it
makes fewer specific and therefore exclusive claims to victimhood.
65
66
67
See, Heineman, supra n 12.
Ibid.
Eberhard Zastrau, ‘Kein Gedenken im Tiergarten?’ (flyer, 2007), http://www.homo-denkmal.lsvd.
de/files/Kein%20Gedenken%20im%20Tiergarten.pdf (accessed 27 November 2012).
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C. Wilke
The Gender of Sexuality and Other Category Troubles
Were people who were persecuted as homosexuals actually homosexual? And
were people who identified as homosexual persecuted as homosexuals? The
case of Magnus Hirschfeld highlights the degree to which Nazi homophobia
was linked to anti-Semitism and racism. Thus, isolating the category of sexuality
from the broader field of Nazi ideologies and persecution practices is not helpful
for understanding how homosexuals were constructed as dangerous to the
German body politic or which people were particularly likely to be persecuted
because of their (apparent) sexuality.
Nazi constructions of homosexuality were tightly connected to constructions of
gender. Lesbians were, for example, persecuted more clearly as nonnormative
women than as homosexuals.68 Lesbians who counted as Aryans faced rigid
gender roles that included the expectation to marry, bear children and behave in
appropriately feminine ways.69 The decision not to criminalize sex between women
in the 1935 criminal law reform was taken on the understanding that women’s
same-sex intimacies would not be as public and visible as men’s and that lesbians
(unlike gay men) would not be lost to the National Socialist project of breeding the
master nation. In this view, women are ‘always ready for sex,’ so that women’s
same-sex sexual desires do not impede their function as breeders of the nation.
Women were simply not seen as sexual agents; they were subordinate to men.
Gay men, in turn, were not quite the men that the state wanted. Speculations
about the homosexuality of neighbors and colleagues, and denunciations of some
of them, became common with the onset of the criminal law reform penalizing
same-sex desire among men. Almost all denunciations regarded men, and most
described the alleged homosexual in terms that stressed lack of masculinity, not
any specific sexual acts. Some denunciations were found to be baseless, and some
of those accused, especially upper-middle class men with ‘proper’ families, could
convince the police that the denouncers had made up facts or drawn wrong
conclusions.70
The memorial’s focus on sexualities led many participants in the debates either
to ignore the complex identities and experiences of historical actors or to pit one
identity against another. Claudia Schoppmann tells the stories of several lesbian
women who were detained in concentration camps, but none of them wore the
black triangle that some argue could imply that they were clearly persecuted as
lesbians. Elli Smula and Margarete Rosenburg, for example, were detained in the
Ravensbrück concentration camp. The reason for their imprisonment is given as
‘lesbian,’ yet they wore the red triangle of political prisoners. Henny Schermann
and Mary Pünjer, in turn, arrived at the Ravensbrück concentration camp in
1940. Both were Jewish, and Pünjer’s file notes that she was a lesbian. Both
68
69
70
Heineman, supra n 12.
Ibid.
Stefan Micheler, ‘Homophobic Propaganda and the Denunciation of Same-Sex-Desiring Men
under National Socialism,’ Journal of the History of Sexuality 11(1/2) (2002): 105–130.
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Memorials for Nazi Victims in Berlin
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women were killed in the Nazis’ euthanasia program. In 1941 and 1942, from
15,000 to 20,000 concentration camp inmates were among those ‘selected’ for
these killings. In the cases of Pünjer and Schermann, the reasons for their selection
are given as ‘libidinal lesbian, only went to these locales,’ and ‘a very active
lesbian, kept visiting “lesbian places” and exchanged intimacies.’71 Were these
two women killed because they were Jewish, lesbians or both? Opponents of
commemorating the persecution of lesbians in the monument used the fate of
these two women to argue that they were not killed for being lesbians but for being
Jewish – which, incidentally, would shift jurisdiction for their commemoration to
the Holocaust Memorial across the street.72 Separating all victims into distinct
categories denies the possibilities of complex or misrecognized identities and fails
to interrogate the representational violence entailed in reducing victims to their
‘imposed identities’ or categories into which their persecutors grouped them. The
victims’ lived identities as well as the categories of persecution were complex and
fluid, so that tabulating the colors of triangles in concentration camps is insufficient for understanding the persecution and the identities of the persecuted.
The memorial does not reduce victimhood to counts of color-coded triangles,
but it also does not call attention to the ways in which different categories of
persecution were lived in conjunction with or opposition to one another. The
symbioses and tensions between different identifications and claims to belonging
easily remain invisible in the space between the memorials dedicated to different
victim groups.
Moral Complexity
The HomoMonument and the debates leading up to its establishment do not
thematize what might be called moral complexity: that German gays and lesbians
were among the perpetrators and bystanders of war crimes and genocide even as
they tried to hide their sexuality. Upon their release from prison, approximately 70
percent of the men convicted of homosexuality were drafted into the Wehrmacht,
where they participated in the war and the persecution of racial and political
others.73 Contemporary German gays and lesbians might identify with the suffering
of gays and lesbians under Nazi rule, but they should also know that their family
histories include acts of indifference and persecution. Identification with Nazi
victims is a key source of contemporary identity politics, but it can easily hide
the more complex legacies in families, social organizations and affiliations.
Conclusion: Categories Cast in Stone
Because the Berlin memorial landscape neatly separates groups – Jews are commemorated on this side of the street, homosexuals on the other side, Roma and
71
72
73
Claudia Schoppmann, ‘Zeit der Maskierung. Zur Situation
Nationalsozialismus,’ in Heinrich Böll Stiftung, supra n 59 at 41.
Zastrau, supra n 67.
Heineman, supra n 12.
lesbischer
Frauen im
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C. Wilke
Sinti further on toward the Reichstag, perpetrators in the south and communists
somewhere in the east – visitors do not have a single site for considering the
complexities of the experiences of people who belonged to more than one of these
groups. The Herbert Baum Group memorial and the HomoMonument allow
visitors to imagine or remember complex identities, but they do not actively
encourage considerations of complexity. Thus, visitors who come with an awareness of the fluidity and mutual implication of identities can see this awareness
reflected in some of the memorials. Visitors who do not come with such questions
will not be prompted to ask them.
Memorials to victims of state atrocity remind visitors of past injustices and
make these injustices relevant to the present. They often frame moral lessons
derived from past violence. Yet, history itself does not offer these lessons.
Historical events can be represented in very different forms and in very different
narratives that lend themselves to different ‘morals.’ These morals are products of
contemporary identities and interests. Eternal friendship with the Soviet Union
was the desired lesson when antifascist East Germany honored communists with
the Baum Group memorial. The HomoMonument, as mandated in the parliamentary resolution that authorized it, is meant to ‘create a lasting symbol of
opposition to enmity, intolerance and the exclusion of gay men and lesbians.’
The latter lesson might be less controversial than friendship with the Soviet
Union, yet both lessons derive their power from the flattening of fluid and changing identities into a single category that suffered persecution in the past and is
claimed by a social group in the present. Contemporary identity politics and
equality claims are bolstered by memorials for past persecution.
This article began by suggesting that memories shape identities. Through an
engagement with two memorials in Berlin, it shows that the influence is mutual:
identities shape memories and memorials as well. Memorials acquire their meanings in conversation with visitors and their identities. Thus, memorial practices
ultimately reflect not only past suffering but also present identities, claims and
relationships to the past. There is a significant difference, however, between
memory practices that simply reflect present identities and memory practices
that are self-reflexive about the identities that are reflected in them. It is this
latter reflexivity that is too often missing in memorials. Memory entrepreneurs
and visitors to memorials need to own up to what it is they are seeking to find in
memorials; that is, both past suffering and roots for their present sense of self. If
visitors take a photo of the video installation in the HomoMonument, they will
see themselves in the picture. When we come to see a memorial, we and the
reasons we chose to visit this memorial are already in the pictures we are
taking. The ethical challenge, then, is to look for more in memorials than the
reflection of ourselves and to engage with the complexity of the suffering, resistance and identities that the memorials can be made to speak to.
International Journal of Transitional Justice, Vol. 7, 2013, 136–156