On Berlin, memory and forgetting
During last month’s visit to Berlin, I had drafted a post full of the raw immediacy that both blogs and conferences encourage. But when I reviewed it this morning I found it no longer rang true, or rather that its content is no longer what I recall most often.
Memory is a funny thing, and so is forgetting.
What sticks with me most now is a few hours spent wandering through Schöneberg with reknown typographer and designer Erik Spiekermann. He was a most charming guide and his knowledge of the neighbourhood’s architectural history never ceased to impress me, but what I really can’t seem to forget is the Bavarian Quarter Memorial.
In a city of such monumental memorials as Libeskind’s Jewish Museum and Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the small and decentralised memorial in Schöneberg seems rather unassuming. But if the grand memorials ask us to remember the people who died, this minor memorial forces us to remember the people who survived.
The memorial comprises 80 two-sided plaques on 80 lampposts throughout the neighborhood. On one side is a simple graphic, and on the other side a German law and the year it came into effect:
Vererbungslehre und Rassenkunde werden an allen Schulen als Prüfungsgebiete eingeführt. 13.9.1933 — Genetics and racial studies are required subjects at all schools and students are regularly tested. September 13, 1933
Wanderungen Jüdischer Jugendlicher in Gruppen von mehr als 20 Personen sind verboten. 10.7.1935 — Jewish youth groups are not permitted to hike in groups of more than 20 people. July 10, 1935
Jüdische Ärzte dürfen nicht mehr praktizieren. 25.7.1938 — Jewish doctors are no longer allowed to practice their profession. July, 25 1938
Walking through the neighbourhood I found myself imagining the people who made the laws and those who ignored them because they were irrelevant or inconsequential to their daily lives. I began to imagine what it might be like to bleed to death from a thousand tiny cuts. I began to understand how tragedy is as much a process as an event and I recalled Martin Niemöller’s famous story about the perils of social and cultural insularity.
Right now, weeks later, I relive a memorial that dared me to remember the people who died, and to not forget the people directly and indirectly responsible for their deaths. And perhaps for the first time, I think I understand what Hannah Arendt meant by the “banality of evil.”
Also: Place in Place Of: Berlin: A synchronic journal of places and especially the content on How did/do/will/should we remember? (via)