Commemorating Hell: The Public Memory of Mittelbau-Dora

8. The Modern Gedenkstätte

8. The Modern Gedenkstätte The anxiety within the Gedenkstätte gradually lessened during the first years after the reunification of Germany as the new director, Cornelia Klose, gained knowledge and understanding of the camp through her work with staff and survivors and became a well-known and well-liked figure in Nordhausen. The importance of the site had grown regionally, nationally, and internationally as scholars addressed the history of the Mittelbau-Dora complex using records and data that had not been available to the GDR historians. Along the way, the name Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Mittelbau-Dora was changed to simply KZ-Gedenkstätte Mittelbau-Dora (Concentration Camp Memorial Mittelbau-Dora). No longer was mahn a word to be used. The first memorial had admonished and warned about the return of fascism, and the words of Berthold Brecht were often quoted: “Der Schoss ist fruchtbar noch aus dem dies kroch” (The womb from which it crept is still fertile).1 Reunification and Normalization Stresses that were placed upon the director and her staff in the 1990s were not so much local as national in scope. With reunification came a new effort to place Germany in a better light, to normalize it in the community of nations.2 The FRG had already attempted normalization under Chancellor Helmut Kohl, to little avail. He spoke of the “ups and downs” experienced by societies and the tragedy of war for all the participants, but it was not an acceptable discourse for many. Trying to place the country among others that had periods of violence from which all suffer came to a head in the ceremony at Bitburg, Germany, on May 5, 1985, in which President Ronald Reagan on a state visit placed a wreath to those who suffered in World War II in a military cemetery that also included SS officers. This drew an outcry from many who rose up in objection to the efforts of placing Germany within the “normal” community of nations and demanded that Germany remain a nation that placated the world by atoning for its guilt and shame. This was better accomplished by speaking of Germany’s assistance to Israel and marking certain days for national remembrance of the Holocaust. Reframing the Second World War as a fight against the Western world’s common enemy, communism, was clear in the Bitburg fiasco. “The sequence of Bergen-Belsen in the morning and Bitburg in the afternoon, implicitly disputed the singularity of the Nazi crimes; and shaking hands with the veteran generals in the presence of the U.S. president was, finally, a demonstration that we had really always stood on the right side in the fight against Bolshevism.”3 In the FRG there had been years of debate among historians about how to approach World War II history. Many believed that World War II should at this date be placed “in the sequence of normal wars” and the Third Reich should be seen “as a tragic but, in the face of Bolshevist aggression, understandable entanglement.”4 Many German historians opposed this point of view. The debate became known as the “historians’ argument” (Historikerstreit ). While some historians were interested in working through history, others came to believe it could be relativized within a broader concept, such as “totalitarianism” or “extremism.” The East Germans had had no real information about the Holocaust, no information about Germany’s role in genocide, and no social movement of young people inquiring into their parents’ potential involvement in the Third Reich. All questions about the Third Reich had been subsumed under the theory of monopolistic capitalism, with responsibility left at the doorstep of large military-industrial concerns, and their actors. The lack of information and debate made it an easy step, therefore, for many intellectuals to put forth the hypothesis that eastern Germany had been under the totalitarian yoke for almost sixty years, two generations, and that at least a part of the Gedenkstätte should be devoted to this victimhood of the citizens of the GDR. There was little questioning of the FRG’s reluctance in the same time period to examine the role of the military-industrial complex in the creation and execution of the war. The impetus for Germans to look at Germany’s key position in developing technology that today plays such an important role in human events was also almost irresistible. Germany had been a pioneer of rocketry and a scientific 138 chapter eight [3.144.187.103] Project MUSE (2024...