From Monuments to Traces: Artifacts of German Memory, 1870-1990 (review)

After producing a wonderful monograph about preservation and national memory in Germany’s twentieth century ¹, Rudy Koshar presents us with a marvellous interpretative synthesis of the existing literature on Germany’s memory landscape. The interrelationship between national memory, culture and society is analysed with particular reference to the ‘physical environment’. He divides his rich material into four main chapters: In the first one, Koshar examines the national monument as a ‘framing strategy’ to enhance national loyalty in a state which is exceedingly young and unsure of itself. Attempts to produce a common sense of history came fully into their own under Wilhelm II who encouraged and, in many respects, symbolised the growing consumption (through an increasingly organised tourism and entertainment industry) of monuments, buildings and other physical objects in the memory landscape. For the period from 1870 to 1914 he discusses with meticulous expertise a wide range of iconographic objects, such as the Cologne Cathedral, the Marienburg, the Walhalla, the Victory Column, the Hermannsdenkmal, the Kaiser Wilhelm Monument and the proliferation of Bismarck statues and monuments up and down the country. He observes an increasing racialisation of an assumed ethnic core of national identity resulting in the hypernationalism of the Kyffhäuser Monument and the Leipzig Monument to the Battle of Nations. The analytical focus on monuments is enriched by a look at the preservation and Heimat movements as well as historist architecture.

In the second chapter Koshar investigates the centrality of the ruin in Germany’s memory landscape between 1914 and 1945. Twice in this period, German armies left behind trails of unprecedented death and destruction in their attempts to achieve European and world hegemony. He reminds us that the revolution of 1918/19 might have radicalised modernist architecture but did not produce major incidents of iconoclasm. After the mass slaughter of the First World War, military cemeteries and war monuments became lynchpins of heavily gendered nationalist myths which were easily appropriated by the National Socialists. Their cult of death and martyrdom increasingly transformed the national memory landscape into a ‘biologised terrain of meaning’. (p. 116) At the same time, the commercialisation of national memory did not stop at the gates of war memorials and cemeteries, as Koshar demonstrates in an intriguing discussion of guidebook literature on First World War battlefields.

The third chapter puts the two Germanies’ ‘collective allergy to ruins’ (p. 154) centre-stage and traces the debates about reconstruction. Questions of what was going to be reconstructed, what was going to be destroyed and what was going to be built anew were highly contested in both Germanies. Koshar also looks at the early iconography of the holocaust, presenting the period from about 1945 to 1970 as one in which attempts to remember the genocide were difficult and incomplete rather than absent. While much of what he says here is utterly convincing, the impact of Allied and Jewish sources on the early reception of the holocaust in Germany can be overstated (p. 200). As Helmut Peitsch’s work on the autobiographies of concentration camp survivors demonstrates, there was no shortage of indigenous German accounts in the immediate post-war years. However, the camps, and in particular the holocaust, rapidly became a taboo subject in West Germany, and this began to change only very slowly from the late 1950s onwards. ²

Koshar’s final substantive chapter investigates the impact of ‘popular historicism’ (p. 230)—i.e. the history workshop movement and the history from below approaches—on the German memory landscape between 1970 and 1990. Their early concentration on the history of the labour movement, National Socialism and the holocaust significantly broadened the national memory, but it also produced a conservative backlash in the 1980s, symbolised by the two museum projects for German history, Bitburg and the Historians’ Debate. Once again, the chapter also looks at developments in East Germany, where the impact of the heritage and tradition debate is discussed.

Overall, a range of...