Introduction: Monuments and Memories
Monuments in Germany are different from monuments in other countries.
Since the middle of the nineteenth century, the visitor to Paris, London and Munich has been greeted in each city by a triumphal arch in the grand Roman style commemorating national triumphs in the convulsive European wars of 1792–1815. At Hyde Park Corner, the British erected the Wellington Memorial Arch, capping it nearly a century later with the huge bronze quadriga. It stands not just at what was then the western edge of London, but in front of the house of the victor of Waterloo himself. The Arc de Triomphe, colossal and over-scaled, carrying scenes of soldiers setting off to battle, is set at the centre of a star of broad avenues, three of them named after great Napoleonic victories over the Prussians and Austrians.
In Munich, the Siegestor, or Victory Gate, was built in the 1840s to celebrate the valour of Bavaria in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Like its Roman model the Arch of Constantine, the Siegestor is richly decorated, its two upper registers on the north side adorned with relief sculpture. On top stands the bronze figure of Bavaria in her chariot drawn by lions, proudly facing north, the direction from which most visitors enter the city. Below her is the inscription “Dem Bayrischen Heere”—“To the Bavarian Army”—to honour whose feats the arch had been erected.
The Siegestor, south side (Credit itr.1)
The Arc de Triomphe, Paris (Credit itr.2)
The Wellington Arch, Hyde Park Corner, London (Credit itr.3)
So far, so completely conventional. At first sight you might think that the Wellington Arch, the Arc de Triomphe and the Siegestor are all doing exactly the same thing in exactly the same way. But what makes the Munich arch so interesting is its other side, which tells quite a different story. It was badly damaged in the Second World War, but its restoration makes no attempt to reconstruct the sculpted classical details that were destroyed by bombs. The top register on this side of the arch is merely a blank expanse of stone. Underneath this uncompromisingly empty space are the words “Dem Sieg geweiht, vom Krieg zerstört, zum Frieden mahnend”—“Dedicated to victory, destroyed by war, urging peace.”
Where the London and Paris arches look back only to moments of high success, presenting a comfortable, if selective, narrative of national triumph, the Munich arch speaks both of the glorious cause of its making and the circumstances of its later destruction. Unlike the other two, its original celebratory purpose is undercut by a very uncomfortable reminder of failure and guilt. It proclaims a moral message: that the past offers lessons which must be used to shape the future. Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the role of history in Germany today is that, like this arch, it not only articulates a view of the past, but directs the past resolutely and admonishingly forward.
If German monuments are different from those in other countries, it is because German history is different. Both Britain and France, shaped by centuries of strong central power, can (more or less) credibly present their history as single national narratives. The long political fragmentation of Germany into autonomous states makes that kind of history impossible: for most of German history there can be no one national story. Although the Holy Roman Empire, which encompassed most of German-speaking Europe (Map 1), offered a framework for a sense of German belonging, it was rarely in a position to coordinate, let alone command, the many political units that made up the Empire. In consequence, much of German history is a composite of different, sometimes conflicting, local narratives.
Perhaps the clearest example of this conflict is the figure of Frederick the Great, King of Prussia in the middle of the eighteenth century, whose military successes would in other countries have ensured his status as a national hero. But Frederick’s victories—certainly most of his territorial gains—were in large measure won at the expense of other German states. A hero in Berlin, he is a villain in Dresden. In the course of the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) Prussia roundly defeated Saxony and in 1760 Frederick’s troops caused huge damage in the Saxon capital. Bernardo Bellotto, whose paintings of baroque Dresden captured one of Europe’s most beautiful cities (see Chapter 18), also recorded the Kreuzkirche reduced to ruins by Frederick’s bombardment. As a key ally in the Seven Years’ War against France, Frederick the Great was both celebrated and revered in Britain: the Worcester factory produced a whole series of tributes in porcelain and as late as 1914 there were still pubs across England proudly called The King of Prussia. But there can be no pan-German view of Frederick the Great: Dresden porcelain unsurprisingly failed to celebrate Frederick and no Saxon hostelry bears his name. A similar ambivalence lies behind the Munich Siegestor. It is dedicated carefully “To the Bavarian Army,” leaving unstated the uncomfortable fact that that army, for most of the Napoleonic Wars, fought with the French against other German states. So the Siegestor is a doubly ambiguous monument: not simply an untriumphal triumphal arch, recording defeat as much as victory, but also the troublesome fact that the enemy could be German as easily as foreign.
The history of Germany is thus inevitably, enrichingly and confusingly fragmented. There is a strong awareness of belonging to the same family, but until the unification of Germany in 1871, there was only a flickering sense of common purpose. There are, however, a large number of widely shared memories of what Germans have done and experienced: evoking and engaging with some of them is the purpose of this book. It does not attempt to be—it cannot be—in any sense a history of Germany, but it tries to explore through objects and buildings, people and places, some formative strands in Germany’s modern national identity. The earliest object is Gutenberg’s bible of the 1450s, perhaps the first moment at which Germany decisively affected the course of world history—indeed laid one of the foundations of all modern European culture. The latest is the very recently restored and refurbished Reichstag, seat of the German Parliament. Of the making of memories there is no end: I have tried to select those that seem to me particularly potent, likely to be shared by most Germans, and especially those that may be less familiar to non-Germans.
Many of those memories are of course also shared by the Swiss and the Austrians, but this book is about the Germany that came into being twenty-five years ago and the memories of those who now live there. Switzerland began to separate politically from the rest of Germany at an early date; its neutrality in the two great wars of the last century has left it with a radically different past. Austria, whose story has been far more closely intertwined with its neighbour’s, is dissimilar in many defining respects. It was not permanently split by the Reformation; its response to the Napoleonic invasions was not to articulate national particularism so much as to consolidate the ancestral Hapsburg lands; and it did not experience the long Cold War division of the state, with all that has since flowed from that for Germany. Above all, Austria has not carried out the public, painful examination of memories and responsibilities in the time of the Nazi Reich with anything like the rigour and integrity of modern Germany. A book which included Austrian memories would be very different.
The ruins of the Kreuzkirche, Dresden, destroyed in 1760 by Prussian bombardment. Bernardo Bellotto, 1765. (Credit itr.4)
All major countries try to construct a reading of their history that leads them, reassured and confident, to their current place in the world. The United States, strong in its view of itself as a “city on a hill,” was long able to affirm its manifest destiny. Britain and France in different ways saw their political evolution as a model for the world, which they generously shared through imperial expansion. After Bismarck had welded the different constituent states into the German Empire in 1871 and then into the leading industrial and economic power of the continent, Germany might have been able to devise some similar national myth. But defeat in the First World War, the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the murderous criminality of the Third Reich have made any such coherent narrative impossible. German scholars have struggled in vain to piece the different parts of the jigsaw together, but none has been able, convincingly, to fit the great intellectual and cultural achievements of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germany and the moral abyss of the Nazis into a comprehensible pattern. This is in a profound sense a history so damaged that it cannot be repaired but, rather, must be constantly revisited—an idea powerfully visualized by Georg Baselitz’s tattered and confusedly inverted national flag.
However diverse the experiences of the different regions and states of Germany, all have been marked by four great traumas that live in the national memory.
The first, the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), saw every German state, and troops from all the major European powers, fighting in Germany. It was devastating for the civilian population and for the economy. As armies criss-crossed the country they spread terror and plague. Jacques Callot recorded the brutal impact on villagers in Lorraine (then part of the Holy Roman Empire) of the arrival of a pillaging army. Similar horrors were experienced across all Germany, and were never forgotten. It is generally conceded that the economic consequences of the war were still discernible well into the nineteenth century. In early May 1945, Hitler’s successor, Admiral Dönitz, ordered the German armed forces to stop fighting. Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and Armaments Minister, rationalized the capitulation by explaining:
Inverted Eagle with the Colours of the German Flag, by Georg Baselitz, 1977 (Credit itr.5)
The destruction that has been inflicted on Germany can only be compared to that of the Thirty Years’ War. The decimation of our people through hunger and deprivation must not be allowed to reach the scale of that epoch.
The outbreak of European war in 1792 saw French Revolutionary armies invade the Rhineland and occupy large parts of western Germany. Many historic cities, including Mainz, Aachen and Cologne, were incorporated into France and were to remain French cities for nearly twenty years. In 1806, after routing the Prussian army at the battles of Jena and Auerstädt, Napoleon entered Berlin in triumph. By 1812 the French had effectively occupied all Germany from the Rhineland to Russia. There was no effective military resistance left on German soil. Every major German ruler was compelled to send troops to fight with the French in the Russian campaign. It was a humiliation deeply felt, but one that eventually stirred the nation to define itself in a new way and to unite in resistance against the invader. The memory of the great humiliation of 1806 was burnt into the consciousness of all Germans, enduring to the end of the nineteenth century and beyond.
The Hanging, from The Miseries and Misfortunes of War, by Jacques Callot, 1633 (Credit itr.6)
Germania, by Adolph Menzel, 1846–57 (Credit itr.7)
The most devastating and intractable of the four traumas was the Third Reich. This child’s cut-out paper model of Hitler reviewing the Nazi Brownshirts exemplifies the extent to which the Nazi regime infiltrated and contaminated every aspect of German life. The crimes committed by the Third Reich, both in Germany and across Europe, and the part played in those crimes by members of almost every German family, are a widely shared memory—in many cases a shared silence—still highly charged today and still far from being exorcised. The terrible price paid by the German population, flight and expulsion from the east, and the destruction of cities like Hamburg and Dresden (Chapter 27), are a second memory which the Third Reich has bequeathed to almost all Germans.
The ultimate consequence of Nazi aggression was the invasion and occupation of all Germany by the four Allied powers, and its long division between the Federal Republic in the west and the German Democratic Republic in the east. It condemned East Germany to a further forty years of dictatorship and oppression. The human cost of that division, epitomized by those who lost their lives desperately trying to cross the Berlin Wall, is still being assessed.
Children’s cut-outs, c. 1935 (Credit itr.8)
Hamburg after the Allied bombing raids of 1943 (Credit itr.9)
It is now twenty-five years since the Wall came down and nearly twenty-five years since a new Germany was born. In that time Germans have made enormous efforts to think clearly and courageously about their national history. The re-unification of Germany coincided with a more clear-eyed historical investigation into the complicity of much of the German population in crimes long simply ascribed to “the Nazis.” As Berlin has been rebuilt there has been a conscious attempt to make public the most painful memories, the supreme example being the Holocaust Memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe. In this also it can be said that German monuments are not like those in other lands. I know of no other country in the world that at the heart of its national capital erects monuments to its own shame. Like the Siegestor in Munich, they are there not only to remember the past but—and perhaps even more importantly—to ensure that the future be different. As Michael Stürmer, a distinguished political commentator, observes: “In Germany, for a long time, the purpose of history was to ensure it could never happen again.”
Peter Fechter, aged eighteen, the first person to be shot dead climbing over the Berlin Wall, August 1962 (Credit itr.10)
The photograph on the following pages shows three great monuments at the centre of modern Berlin. To the right in the middle distance is the Brandenburg Gate, subject of my first chapter. Behind it is the Reichstag, the subject of my last chapter. In the foreground is the Holocaust Memorial, which commemorates events discussed in the later sections of the book. These three monuments and their meanings together convey much of modern Germany’s unique attempt to wrestle with its historical inheritance and its complex and changing memories.