A group of war veterans, former members of armies from Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia, accompanied and supported by two journalists¹ and the four of us from the Centre for Nonviolent Action, visited Berlin from 15 to 21 October 2012.
The veteran group consisted of people who had in the past few years actively participated in peace building by getting involved in various joint actions of visiting sites of death throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina and hosting similar events. By inviting them on this study visit, we wanted to encourage their further activity in peace-building and express our gratitude for what they have done so far and for the courage to make a constructive step forward in their local communities and throughout the region towards facing the past.
Given the diverse public interpretations of history in our region that are often a source of conflict, the aim of the study visit was to emphasise the need to find the words, gestures, memorials and monuments that explain the past in appropriate terms and seek a way to establish a common future without renewing past traumas and by taking into account the various views of the past.
The purpose of visiting memory sites in and around Berlin was to see how German society relates to the past and what ideas and strategies can be transferred to our region and culture of memory. Germany is in the midst of an active process of facing the past that has come to comprise two dimensions since the reunification of the country: apart from the National Socialist, it also takes into account the heritage of communist totalitarianism. That is why the choice of sites to visit included memorials and monuments from both periods that directly determine Germany’s present view of the past.
We visited the following sites:
– Topography of Terror – museum and centre researching, documenting and educating about the Nazi past,
– The Holocaust Memorial – monument to the killed Jews of Europe that has an Information Centre beneath the memorial, underground, with four main rooms documenting and showing the killing of the Jews in the Holocaust,
– Hohenschönhausen memorial site (former DDR prison for political prisoners) – the memorial was opened within the complex of the former prison for political prisoners constructed by Soviet forces after World War II, and mainly used by the DDR special police. It remained operation until the very last days of the DDR.
– Missing House – installation by French artist Christian Boltanski at the site of a building in Berlin in Grosshamburger Street No. 15-16 destroyed in the 1945 Allied bombing of Berlin, but previously inhabited mostly by Jews. Boltanski had the idea of marking this site by putting up plaques bearing the names of the tenants, their occupations, years of birth and death, all more or less in the spots where they had lived.
– Pervasive sites of memory – “Stolpersteine” or “stumbling stones” are metal plates 10 by 10 cm installed in the cobblestones in front of buildings where victims of Nazism used to live as a way to commemorate them: Jews, Roma and Sinti, homosexuals, dissidents, Jehovah’s Witnesses and victims of enforced euthanasia, those that were deported and killed.
– Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church – the conserved remains of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church from the late 19th century severely damaged during the Allied air raid in 1943 when its tower was destroyed. Symbols of reconciliation can be found inside the church. The Stalingrad Madonna, copies of which were presented to Stalingrad, today Volgograd, and Coventry, the icon of the Virgin Mary from Volgograd and the Cross of Nails made from the nails in the roof timbers of Coventry Cathedral bombed by the Nazis in 1940.
– Socially engaged art in Schönenberg – the installation consists of signs resembling ads put up on lampposts. On the one side is a stylised drawing, and on the other an example of a Nazi law or regulation along with the year it was passed.
– Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp Memorial Centre in Oranienburg – one of the first Nazi concentration camps that the Soviets used for denazification after World War II. Today, Oranienburg is also the home of a police school located next to the very centre of the camp. The school uses some of the buildings that used to be part of the camp, those where SS troops had been accommodated. At the entrance to the university complex, there is a large sign with information about what this space was used for when it was part of the camp.
As part of the study visit, the Berghof Institute hosted a workshop on the topic of “Facing the Past for a Nonviolent Future – War Veterans for Peace: Experience from the Balkans and from Germany”, where apart from our group and our host partner from the Berghof Foundation, other partners and friends of CNA were also involved, including representatives of the Buchenwald Memorial Foundation, the Robert Bosch Foundation, Peace and Security/Civil Peace Service – BMZ Berlin, Centre for Training and Networking in Nonviolent Action – Kurve Wustrow, „FriEnt“ Working Group for Peace and International Development from Bonn, and a representative of Zeitenspiegel/Peace Counts. Before opening discussions, the workshop included presentations of examples from German history after 1945 and the approach and activities of CNA in engaging war veterans in joint actions as examples of an inclusive culture of memory.
On the last day when we visited sites of memory in the Schöneberg district, we had the honour to meet members of the Berliner Geshichtswerkstatt nongovernmental organisation² , brave enthusiasts who are not historians by professions, but whose actions highlighted the need to mark places of residence and deportation of Jews, Roma and Sinti, Jehovah’s Witnesses, communists, homosexuals and others condemned to extinction by the Nazi regime. The members of this organisation mobilised the whole of society with constant pressure on those responsible to appropriately mark these sites. Some of their initiatives came to fruition only after 20 years of efforts. There were also cases where families of victims were not satisfied with the concept design, and this lead to obstructions justified by the claim that it was a further dehumanising of the victims³.
When we look back at the study trip, it is clear that the impressions it left on our group are very deep and it will take us time to process them and put everything in order. What is certain is that we acquired new knowledge and an insight into German society and the way it interprets and carries its heavy burden of the past.
A.D.
1. Description of the places visited and personal impressions from the “pens” of Zoran Panović and Faruk Šehić are available on our website.
2. Berlin History Workshop
3. For example, in the case of the Stolpersteine or “stumbling stones”, it was said that the installation was “inappropriate” because the plates with the names of victims would be trampled underfoot, which was seen as an additional act of humiliation against the victims.
SEE: Photo gallery from the study trip for war veterans from the region
“Culture od remembrance”, Berlin 15-21.10.2012
http://foto.nenasilje.org/SP2012_RBerlin/