From Counter-Hegemonic Projects to State-Sponsored Institutions: Memorial Sites to the Nazi Crimes and the Politics of Memory in the Federal Republic of Germany

Abstract

The article considers the transformation of memorial sites to the Nazi crimes in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) from counter-hegemonic projects into state-sponsored institutions. It is claimed that this process cannot only be explained with reference to normative-democratic learning processes, but must also be seen in the context of the evolving 'German Question' and respective shifts in the FRG’s politics of memory. It is argued that before 1990, and in addition to a general reluctance to confront the Nazi past, official representation of the Nazi crimes would have symbolically undermined the FRG’s claim to the restoration of the German nation state, since it would have kept the historical and moral preconditions for its actual historic failure visible in the public space. Therefore, memorial sites to the Nazi past did not become a national project, but had to be initiated and enforced by civil society actors as a counter-cultural project. It was only after German unification and the resolution of the German Question that the Nazi past could be integrated into a new national master narrative, depicting the restored nation state as a country that had successfully 'learnt from its history'. Along with new memorial sites to the injustice committed in the Soviet Occupation Zone and the German Democratic Republic, memorial sites to the Nazi crimes were now officially declared to represent an 'anti-totalitarian consensus' among contemporary Germans. On this basis, memorial sites to the Nazi past could be smoothly incorporated into a new state-sponsored memory scape. In the article, the changing symbol-political status of memorial sites to the Nazi past is discussed against the backdrop of the overarching discourse on history and identity in the FRG. The article outlines the deeply divisive structure of this discourse in the old FRG, and shows how in the course of German nation building after 1990 these divisions could be bridged through the development of a new national master narrative. Promoting an anti-totalitarian teleology, this narrative provided the basis for a new memorial policy that allowed for the integration of memorial sites to the Nazi past into a representative national memory scape.