Autor/Autorin
Wouldn’t less sometimes be more?
In an open letter, Shraga Elam (Zurich) has spoken out against Munich’s plan to commemorate all Jewish victims of National Socialism in Munich with gold and silver „memorials“ – in the form of around 10,000 plaques and steles.
A survivor objected to this kind of thoroughness over 25 years ago. „Ironically,“ wrote Auschwitz survivor Lucille Eichengreen at the time, „it is the Germans themselves who have created the evidence“ that answers doubts about what actually happened in the Holocaust. While Eichengreen was writing her memoirs, she discovered during a visit to Germany in 1991 „that the German authorities kept meticulous, detailed records of the names, places, deportation dates, transports and numbers, just as they had recorded the numbers, death dates and burials of the same people the Germans had tried to eliminate from the earth – with equal thoroughness – in the recent past.“ „The question,“ Eichengreen wrote at the time, „remains unanswered to this day; but it must be asked again and again in the name of humanity: How is one to understand the Nazis‘ great respect for documents and statistics with simultaneous disregard for the lives of the people they designated for the ‚Final Solution‘?“ [1]
With regard to the national German „culture of remembrance“, Lucille Eichengreen’s question and Shraga Elam’s request not to commemorate his grandparents in this ultimately statistical way are even more acute today than they were in 1991. Remembrance has taken on a life of its own in many respects; it is not only ritualised by national days of remembrance such as those commemorating the victims of National Socialism or the pogrom of 9 November 1938, but also misused for nationalistic and personal purposes. Commemorative plaques certainly serve to illustrate suffering and reinforce the memory of the worst crime in human history. However, those responsible do not want to hear, see or know that this affirmation can also be extremely ambivalent and therefore dubious and, in its most extreme consequence, can even be directed against those who are to be commemorated because the crime is merely cemented on the outside. They are getting out of the affair with their comprehensive claim (BBC news is already talking about a new Munich „memorial system“) to commemorate all or at least as many (Jewish) Nazi victims as possible on gold and silver plaques and steles. At the cost of allowing the new/old nationalism with its flip sides of racism and anti-Semitism to continue to grow undisturbed.
The „excess“ criticised by Lucille Eichengreen and now again by Shraga Elam is the opposite of a critical, i.e. open debate about the tabooed questions in our history. The failure of denazification, which was initially reinterpreted as an unsuccessful failure, is to be turned into a national success story of „German remembrance culture“. In Munich, this form of lack of history, which superficially exhausts itself in „remembering Nazi crimes“, has a long tradition. It is an irony of history that, after the laying of „stumbling stones“ by artist Gunter Demnig was officially rejected in Munich due to an intervention by Charlotte Knobloch, they are now being replaced by silver and gold-coloured plaques and steles, BBC news reported as follows: „The city says the new memorial system will commemorate 10,000 Munich men, women and children murdered by the Nazi dictatorship in 1933-1945.“
In fact, Lucille Eichengreen and Shraga Elam ask themselves what reason there could be to commemorate all of Munich’s Jewish and other Nazi victims who were murdered by the Nazis and what interest in knowledge could be associated with this? And wouldn’t plaques and steles also have to be erected for all other murdered Nazi victims and, above all, the opponents of National Socialism, the negative memory confronted with the memory of the few who acted courageously?
Open letter to the
Coordination Centre | Signs of Remembrance
Munich City Archive
Winzererstr. 68
80797 Munich
Zurich, 6 August 2018
Dear Sir or Madam,
I would like to protest against the plan to commemorate all Jewish victims of National Socialism with „memorial signs“.
My father’s parents Julius Yechiel Sündermann, Regina Malka and Ferdinand Shraga Sündermann, who lived at Häberlstrasse 12/II, were deported together with other Munich Jews on 20 November 1941 and murdered by Nazis and their helpers in Kaunas/Lithuania on 25 November 1941 (see attachment).
For years I have been endeavouring to find out about the history of my family, who are long-established in Bavaria. However, I find the memorial plaques that have been initiated completely wrong, counterproductive and dishonest. How did my grandparents earn this honour? What did they achieve apart from being killed by Nazis? Why should they be singled out from the plethora of victims, which does not only consist of Jews, other numerous Nazi victims and other victims?
Is it not the excess of a false culture of remembrance that hardly provides any new insights, while important fundamental facts about the Nazi extermination of the Jews are hardly noticed by the public or are tabooed, despite several reports?
Doesn’t such a culture of remembrance degrade into a costly job creation programme for historians, architects and artists?
Holocaust deniers and the AFD benefit from this untenable situation.
I would prefer it if, for example, the Federal Intelligence Service’s files on its Nazi employees were finally fully disclosed instead of these commemorative alibi exercises being carried out in Munich and other cities.
For these reasons, I would ask you to refrain from your project and not to commemorate my grandparents in this way.
I hope for your understanding and send you my kind regards.
Shraga Elam
Israeli-Swiss journalist and author
specialising in NS-Judeocide research