Bill Niven

War memorials at the intersection of politics, culture and memory

Abstract War memorials are amongst the oldest memorials in the world. This paper provides a brief history of the way their function has evolved, focusing in particular on European war memorials constructed after the First and Second World Wars. It argues that, generally speaking, war memorials before the First World War were celebratory in character and served to underpin the authority of victorious leaders or nations. After 1918, they functioned often as crystallization points for collective mourning and remembrance. But the political interest in constructing celebratory war memorials remained, not least after the Second World War, as the example of the many Soviet war memorials erected in Eastern European countries demonstrates. However, this paper warns against understanding war memorials as immutable statements. Many memorials have undergone rededication, alteration, removal and reconstruction, and relocation during their history. This makes them significant as markers of political and cultural change.

The Buchenwald child : truth, fiction, and propaganda

At the notorious Buchenwald concentration camp, communist prisoners organized resistance against the SS and even planned an uprising. They helped rescue a three-year-old Jewish boy, Stefan Jerzy Zweig, from certain death in the gas chambers. After the war, his story became a focus for the German Democratic Republics celebration of its resistance to the Nazis. Now Bill Niven tells the true story of Stefan Zweig: what actually happened to him in Buchenwald, how he was protected, and at what price. He explores the (mis)representation of Zweigs rescue in East Germany and what this reveals about that countrys understanding of its Nazi past. Finally he looks at the telling of the Zweig rescue story since German unification: a story told in the GDR to praise communists has become a story used to condemn them. Bill Niven is Professor of Contemporary German History at the Nottingham Trent University, UK.

Martin Walser's Tod eines Kritikers and the Issue of Anti‐Semitism

Martin Walsers latest novel Tod eines Kritikers has been the subject of intense debate in Germany, particularly prior to its publication in June 2002. For some, the novel is anti-Semitic and signals Walsers arrival in the far right-wing camp; for others, it is merely a largely harmless satire. The following article briefly examines the patterns of this debate, the course of which was influenced by a degree of scandalmongering. The main focus is on an analysis of Tod eines Kritikers. I explore the arguments for and against an anti-Semitic reading, arguing that any interpretation of the text as anti-Semitic overlooks its use of irony and distance.

The Legacy of Second German Empire Memorials after 1945

This book has largely been concerned with memorials constructed in the two Germanies after 1945, most of these constituting a response of one sort or another to the crime and trauma of the years 1933–45. By and large, the focus of these memorials is on the commemoration of suffering. They provide a framework for mourning, ritualized statements of the need to prevent the recurrence of war and genocide, and, increasingly, nationally self-critical engagement with the legacy of Nazi crime. While the heroic, celebratory mode of memorialization did not become a thing of the past (see, for instance, Scharnowski’s chapter on the GDR in this volume), it certainly became less common, ever more so as we reach the present. This begs the question as to how Germany has handled the stone legacy of monuments constructed before 1945, most of which certainly can be classified as heroic and celebratory, and some of which are of truly gargantuan proportion. This book has explored the evolution of counter-monuments; inscribed into their conception and design is a critical stance towards the heroic pose of earlier traditions of memorialization, especially those of the nineteenth century, but also those of fascism. Yet constructing counter-monuments has not really diminished the importance of Germany’s heroic monuments from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, many of which still exist and which are visited by tens of thousands of people every year. In this chapter, I examine the post-Second World War fate of a few suchmemorials, all built during the Second German Empire (after 1871), but before the outbreak of the First World War (1914).

Diversity and Difference. Changing People’s Attitudes and Behaviours Through a School and Community Based Holocaust Education Project

This chapter examines how teaching about the Holocaust can impact how people of difference are viewed in today’s society, where difference and diversity can be exploited to promote hatred and violence. The context for the chapter is the unique work undertaken by the National Holocaust Centre and Museum whereby pupils, parents, carers and other significant individuals from communities that experience high levels of hate crime and discrimination visit the centre and take part in a series of community-based workshops. Set against recent developments in Holocaust education research, key findings from this project are presented and a key focus on Holocaust education in primary schools explored—how learning about individual responsibilities during the Holocaust can challenge and change attitudes towards people of difference today.

Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany's 1968 Generation and the Holocaust

book are either too descriptive without further explanation of their findings or offer several redundancies. Furthermore it is methodologically opaque not to assess different indicators such as the motion of non-confidence and the ability to set the agenda, but to regard them as alike (p. 182). The same could be said for the party system and constitutional rigidity. Furthermore the depth of the discussion varies. The most emphasis is put on the party system and governments which take up more pages than the constitutional rigidity or decentralisation, without incorporating this depth in their indices. Additionally it does not take into account the role of the Bundesrat and its influence in the political system of Germany. Furthermore it would be interesting to know if the sub-national governments fulfil their obligation to report and inform their legislatures because this issue has been problematic on the federal level and is an essential part of the debate on the decline of legislatures (p. 183). Furthermore, some issues presented in the volume are not dealt with in a satisfying manner, for example, why some states (Hamburg or Saarland) are more prone to direct democracy even though they have high quota in this regard (p. 286). Even the sympathetic reader thus still needs other sources, especially if he looks for more detailed information on single states. Nevertheless, the edited volume brings new insights into the sphere of sub-national governments in general and into the German Länder in particular. By looking at the institutional character at the sub-national level the book reveals the varying character of democracy within the Länder. The volume thus closes various gaps in the research on the German Länder in a comparative perspective. Despite the shortcomings this volume contributes to the complex structures of the Federal Republic of Germany due to the bottom–up approach used in the book.

Remembering Nazi Anti-Semitism in the GDR

In his book Divided Memory, the American historian Jeffrey Herf argued that, while public memory of the Holocaust and sympathy for the concerns of Jewish survivors found a home in West Germany, in East Germany this was not the case.1 Herf’s book portrays the anti-Semitic purges in the GDR of the 1950s, the relegation of Jewish survivors in East Germany to the status of second-class victims, and the GDR’s hostility towards Israel — which it regarded as an imperialist and capitalist country, and to which it flatly refused to pay restitution. Herf also describes the SED’s shameless use of the Holocaust as an instrument in the Cold War against West Germany, some of whose official representatives became the subject of SED smear campaigns based on their roles or alleged roles during the Third Reich. According to Herf, ‘while some East German novelists and filmmakers addressed anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, these issues remained on the margins of East Germany’s official anti-fascist political culture.’2 Herf sees evidence that marginalization, indeed even exclusion of reference to Jews was characteristic of commemorative practices in the GDR generally, and particularly in the opening ceremonies of the Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen memorial sites: ‘solidarity with the Jews had no part in these ceremonies of remembrance’, which foregrounded rather antifascist resistance.3 Claudia Koonz is equally damning in her assessment of the GDR’s museum and memorial landscape at Buchenwald, which, focused as it was on the effects of ‘international fascist capitalism’, left no room for a memory of the Holocaust.4

The figure of the soldier as resister: German film and the difficult legacy of Claus Schenck Graf von Stauffenberg

Abstract This year, Bryan Singers film Valkyrie (2008) was screened in cinemas around the world. This article sets out to show that, while Valkyrie provides a very uncomplicated heroicization of the German resistance figure Stauffenberg, German films from the 1950s onwards situate their representations within a richer and more complex discursive framework. This was necessary, the article argues, because the legacy of Stauffenberg in post-war West Germany was a controversial one; not everyone saw him as a hero, and even today the value of his attempt on Hitlers life remains to a degree contested. Yet while German films often engaged with and sought to negotiate the problems attendant on Stauffenbergs legacy, in some respects they chose to ignore them: thus it was only with Jo Baiers film Stauffenberg of 2004 that Stauffenbergs response to anti-Semitism was significantly addressed.

Facing the Nazi Past: United Germany and the Legacy of the Third Reich

Facing the Nazi Past examines how the communist East viewed the events of these years very differently from West Germany during the Cold War. Following the unification of Germany, these contrasting memories of the Third Reich have contributed to a new perspective on this period of German history. Facing the Nazi Past explores the developments and debates that were symptomatic of this shift towards a more open confrontation with the past, such as: * the image of resistance to Hitler in united Germany * changes at concentration camp memorial sites since 1990 * the commemoration of 8 May 1945 in 1995 * how the revelations in Goldhagens startling book Hitlers Willing Executioners triggered new discussion * the plans for the construction of a Holocaust Memorial. Anyone; students, scholars or interested readers, who are involved in the study of European history, will find this an enthralling and informative read.

Retrospect and Review: Aspects of the Literature of the GDR 1976-1990

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