Beyond Berlin: Twelve German Cities Confront the Nazi Past (review)

This collection presents new work in the politics of memory, focusing on how a number of communities in East and West Germany dealt with buildings and monuments associated with the Nazi era. The book originated in two sessions of the German Studies Association's meetings in 2003 and 2006. Grouped into four sections, the localities covered are: Dresden, Cologne, Rostock, Wolfsburg, Essen, Nuremberg, Munich, Bremen, Quedlinburg, Potsdam, Hamburg, and Frankfurt am Main.

The authors include senior and junior scholars, and as might be expected, their methodological and theoretical approaches differ widely. Some, such as Jeffry Diefendorf and Michael Meng, offer fairly straightforward historical narratives, while others attempt to link their contributions to postmodern theory and the psychology of monuments and counter-monuments. Perhaps inevitably, many of the authors address the relationship of Nazism and modernity.

While the chapters vary, the editors and contributors seem to have agreed on one conclusion: very little was done to deal with the Nazi past in either East or West Germany before the 1980s. But this mantra is an oversimplification. In her otherwise excellent piece on Hamburg, for example, Natasha Goldman mentions the laudable work of the present Hamburg Institute for Contemporary History, but completely ignores the fact that this institution began life in 1959 as the Research Center for the History of National Socialism in Hamburg under its founder and long-time director, Werner Jochmann. The Research Center, which was part of the Hamburg city government, did important work not only in analyzing the history of Hamburg during the Third Reich, but also in forging ties with the international scholarly community, especially Polish and Israeli.

The book's contributors had rather different amounts of material with which to work. For instance, Rostock, the subject of Susan Mazur-Stommen's piece, does not have much of a Nazi building heritage; in fact, only one building in the city—a structure built for the Wehrmacht in 1936—has any real Nazi connection. Kathleen James-Chakraborty discusses the pithead of a coal mine in Essen that was not actually built under the Nazis, although they attempted to appropriate it as a manifestation of Nazi modernism. Jan Otakar Fischer, who writes on Wolfsburg, would seem to have a ready supply of material since the city was literally created by the Nazis, but the resulting community differed substantially from what the Nazis, and especially Robert Ley, head of the German Labor Front, originally envisioned. The book's editors Paul J. Jaskot and Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, writing on Nuremberg and Munich respectively, have, of course, no shortage of Nazi-associated constructions to discuss.

Overall, the scholarship exhibited in these pieces is impressive. The authors reveal an easy familiarity with the relevant literature, and most have done considerable research in archives as well. The illustrations are appropriate and helpful. The contributors also make good use of oral historical sources, especially Susan Mazur-Stommen, an anthropologist and the only non-historian among the contributors.

Despite their differing approaches, the authors reach remarkably similar conclusions. With few exceptions—notably Diefendorf and Meng—they agree that correctly memorializing the physical remnants of the Nazi past is an extremely important issue, and that for the most part Germans failed in meeting this need. Instead, they swept the question under the rug until the 1980s, and when finally confronting the issue, they primarily focused on abstractions of wartime losses and universal victimization rather than stressing German guilt. This assertion contains some truth, of course, but playing the role of stern moral judge brings with it the danger of ahistoricity. As noted earlier, the authors are convinced that their topic should be at the forefront of German consciousness; if not, this is evidence that the Nazi era still is being swept under the rug. For example, Mazur-Stommen complains in her Rostock chapter that respondents wanted to talk about the recent Communist past, which they had experienced, rather than the Nazi past...