Memory Vanished, Absent, and Confined: The Countermemorial Project in 1980s and 1990s Germany

Introduction

The 1970s-1980s boom of traditional (nineteenth-century) memorials to Germany's Nazi past led many theorists to overturn conventional conceptions of representation (or re-presentation). ¹ Memorial activity, which I call Denkmal-Arbeit, ² had become increasingly popular in West Germany during the 1970s, leading to what scholars have termed the memory boom. An emergent popular historicism--known as the New History movement--sought to reclaim a usable past, "to mourn and atone for its victims, to emphasize its diversity, and to celebrate its potential for a truly democratic society." ³ Growing antiquarianism emphasized the preservation of artifacts, monuments, and structures. By 1980, all West German federal states had passed legislation protecting historical sites. For many West Germans, the goal was to refocus German memorial activity on a collective identification with the West and with Europeanism. They began to emphasize the need for a German identity that worked through the experience of fascism during the Third Reich and told of a more affirmative national history. ⁴

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Denkmal-Arbeit began to shift its focus from the broader German experience with fascism toward the experience of the Holocaust. This shift was accompanied in time by an array of Holocaust novels, plays, and avant-garde films, leading some critics to speak of the "Shoah business." ⁵ The results of the memory boom were derided for aestheticizing the history of Nazism and the Holocaust. Denkmal-Arbeit became associated with the redemptive "normalization" of the German past through the construction of narratives and traditional monuments.

The new generation of the mid-1980s therefore found itself confronted on the one hand by overconsumption of memory, ⁶ and on the other by resentment against collective blame. ⁷ They turned to artists for new representations of the Nazi past that could disentangle Denkmal-Arbeit from the quest for redemption. The aesthetic and political response was the countermemorial project. Countermonuments would be memorial spaces conceived to challenge the very premise of the monument--to be ephemeral rather than permanent, to deconstruct rather than displace memory, to be antiredemptive. They would reimpose memorial agency and active involvement on the German public.

Among the first to examine countermonuments critically, James E. Young sparked renewed interest in the problems of representation particularly in the public sphere. ⁸ In his widely acclaimed studies of Holocaust representations, Young explored countermemorial lieux de mÈmoire (sites of memory). The links developed by Pierre Nora between lieux de mÈmoire and collective (national) identity are certainly present in Young's analyses. ⁹ Yet Young examines only the aesthetic and conceptual contributions of countermonuments. He does not scrutinize their production and consumption as collective memorial processes, which I define as the social activities and rituals (or representations) through which a community builds its narrative and constructs its social identity. ¹⁰

This gap in the literature is by no means surprising, since countermonuments began to appear in Germany only two decades ago. Nevertheless, their popularity, both within and outside the academy, begs a social historical inquiry. After all, countermonuments have become icons of a postmodern discourse with reunified Germany's "memorial conundrum" and have become entwined in debates on the new German identity and on Vergangenheitsbewältigung (working through the past). And if we are to understand the memory boom itself as a historical phenomenon, we must examine the social trends that emerge from the German public's engagement with the countermemorial project. As Wulf Kansteiner has argued, the history of collective memorialization is a "complex process of cultural production and consumption that acknowledges the persistence of cultural traditions as well as the ingenuity of memory makers and the subversive interests of memory consumers." ¹¹ Only through an interconnected examination of the conception (by "memory makers") and the reception (by "memory consumers") of countermonuments can we truly understand them as collective memorial processes.

This study aims to...