history, aesthetics, and contemporary commemorative practice in berlin

History, Aesthetics, and Contemporary Commemorative Practice in BerlinAuthor(s): John CzaplickaSource: New German Critique, No. 65, Cultural History/Cultural Studies (Spring - Summer,1995), pp. 155-187Published by: New German CritiqueStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/488540 .

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History, Aesthetics, and Contemporary Commemorative Practice in Berlin

John Czaplicka

In postwar Germany, the public acknowledgement of human loss caused by Nazi terror has taken concrete form in works of art, memorials, and monuments as well as in the building of museums and the reclamation and reconfiguration of historical sites. Such efforts not only raise questions about the intentions of those involved, they also engender disputes about the appropriateness of the means employed to evoke the enormous human loss and suffering and to indicate the historical crimes that caused them. The artists, architects, historians, politicians, and engaged citizens, who seek in various manners to con- figure that past in the present, confront a knot of issues about representation. What role should aesthetics and documentation play in the mediation of human history? Which groups should be represented? How can one begin to mediate events so horrible they seem to defy representation altogether? A simple reversion to artistic or documentary conventions would not seem to suffice to undo this knot. Still, rather than merely proposing some admonition about the "limits of representation" - whether by aesthetic or historical means - and rather than letting Adorno's dictum about "poetry after Auschwitz" become a prohibition, one might more usefully probe the possibilities

* I am indebted to David Blackbourn, Andreas Huyssen, and Lisa Saltzman for reading earlier versions of this essay. Hans Dickel, Thomas Lutz, Simone and Karl- heinz Barck, Johannes Tuchel have my gratitude for providing me with materials and information.

155



156 History, Aesthetics, and Commemorative Practices

of representation.1 The renunciation of the possibility of "aesthetically artic- ulating the recent past" (be it ever so horrifying) denies us an evocative and powerful means of contemporary approach that would help build a bridge to those "historical" victims of Nazi terror and that might even allow us to sense their suffering. Still the aesthetic and empathetic evocation of their situation is best combined with the controlling instance of historical documentation, lest the aesthetic means merely call forth a beholder response that plays on the emotions and delves into sentimentality or worse.

In the search for effective public-commemorative representations, one is left trying to navigate between the Scylla of cold historical fact and the Charybdis of moody evocation. On the one hand, the conventions of artistic representation often fail the immensity of the crimes and, as Saul Friedliinder has so eloquently noted, may approach kitsch when they broach the horror of torture and death to evoke an empathetic response. On the other hand, mere historical conventions, the assembled material facts, statistics, and documents in archives and museums or reproduced in books and films, sometimes seem only to mimic the cool factual calcu- lations of a criminally efficient regime: they leave one without much empathy for the victims whose suffering and demise deserve a human response.2 The causes and manner of their victimization question perhaps more the basis of our humanity than the powers of our reasoning, and that basis lies in both an ethos and a pathos.3

1. Cf. for discussion of these issues the essays in Probing the Limits ofRepresenta- tion: Nazism and the "Final Solution, " ed. Saul Friedllinder (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992). James E. Young has, however, given us an excellent summary of "Memory and Monument," Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective, ed. Geoffrey Hartmann (Bloom- ington: Indiana UP, 1986) 103-13, and The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorial and Meaning (New Haven: Yale UP, 1993).

2. "No matter which history book one consults, when it comes to the Third Reich, authors back off. The experience of/lor empathy with the historical context stops, along with the desire for historical narration. The history of National Socialism is no longer suppressed, but it is atrophying into mandatory reading." Martin Broszat, quoted in exh. cat. of the Kunsthaus und Kunstverein, Arbeit in Geschichte, Geschichte in Arbeit (Hamburg: Nishen, 1988) 13.

3. In his discussion of the term Entschddigung [compensation/recompense], Alf Liidtke underlines the relationship between the emotional and the cognitive: "To turn to 'the other' and try to experience relationships between 'me' and 'the other' seems to necessitate connecting both cognitive and emotive practice. In this view, to construct and reflect upon a relationship between one's own past and the past of others cannot be separated from practical consequences." See Alf Liidtke, " 'Coming to Terms with the Past': Illusions of Remembering, Ways of Forgetting Nazism in West Germany," The Journal of Modern History, 65:3 (Sept. 1993): 562.



John Czaplicka 157

Three public-commemorative sites in contemporary Berlin do effectively conjoin an aesthetic and therefore sensual representation with a mediation of historical facts that may lead to a contemplative and enlightening involvement of the visitor.4 At Christian Boltanski's site- specific art work, Missing House (1990), and at two more standard public-commemorative sites in Berlin - the execution chambers used by the Nazis at the Pl6tzensee Prison (1952-present), where resisters were murdered by the Nazis, and the Topography of Terror (1987), at the site of the former Gestapo headquarters - one sees an interplay among facts, fascination, and beauty, between the archive and aesthetics, that mediates history in a manner that may engender a profound reflection on the meaning of past events. By analyzing and comparing how the evocative and factual work together at three distinct sites, one can begin to draw some conclusions about the relationship between aesthetic and documentary means in a modem process of commemoration at historic sites.5

Christian Boltanski's Missing House, employs a visual rhetoric of absence (an empty urban lot) while combining various historical indications to engage the visitor's retrospective imagination and therein to make her or him mindful of history. At the Pl6tzensee Prison, the stark aesthetics of an execution chamber provide space for a searching contemplation of those victims' fates and of the system that condemned them. On the Topography of Terror, several experiential paradigms. related to the telling of history and to investigative archaeology, as well as to the aesthetics of the ruin and to the viewing of a landscape, converge and render the commemorative experience at the site authentic.

4. These sites are being transformed by the elements and by the various agencies and government institutions responsible for them. My consideration of them derives from visits to Berlin in late 1993 and the spring of 1994. For the periodization of monuments in postwar Germany, see Jochen Spielmann, "Gedenken und Denkmal," exh. cat. of Ber- linerische Galerie, Gedenken und Denkmal: Entwiirfe zur Erinnerung an die Deportation und Vernichtung derjiidischen Bevilkerung Berlins (Berlin: Briider Hordmann, 1988) 7- 46; Jochen Spielmann, "Denkmale in Bewegung - Der Wandel von Gestalt, Widmung und Funktion von Denkmalem in ehemaligen Konzentrations- und Vernichtungslagern 1945-1991 - Ein Uberblick," UBER-LEBENS-MITTEL: Kunst aus Konzentration- slagern und in Gedenkstdtten fir Opfer des Nationalsozialismus (Marburg: Jonas, 1992) 103-30.

5. In the traditional German art historical literature, the term most closely approx- imating the effect the configuration of such sites has on the viewer, is Andacht. The effective involvement of a visitor with a commemorative site, however, should not imply the sometimes mystifying and overly religious connotations of that term.




All three commemorative complexes6 garner authenticity7 by engaging the visitors in a self-instructive and analytic process of commemoration. The aesthetic articulation of the objects and the configurations of space, along with presentations of documentary evidence encourages the imagination and insightful recollection. The following considerations will explore the different experiential paths to such insightful recollection, best expressed by the German concept das Eingedenken.8 They are not meant to engage directly and theoretically Adorno, Benjamin, or Horkheimer with whose work this term has been most closely associated, but rather to ask simply how each of the commemorative sites under consideration renders commemoration insightful through the use of aesthetic and historical means. The theoretical construct, das Eingedenken, which demands an empathetic engagement of an informed beholder in a contemplation of material, formal, and documentary configurations, will be defined concretely in three descriptive and self-reflec- tive case studies. I chose these specific sites because they demonstrate the effective documentary and aesthetic mediation of history. Each in their own way provides for a contemplative circumstance that may lead to commemorative insight or, to recall Aby Warburg's phrase,9 to a retrospective contemplativeness [retrospektive Besonnenheit]. An examina- tion of the beholder's engagement and potential self-enlightenment at each of these sites is at the core of my theoretical considerations.

6. A tendency by other authors to view single elements at a commemorative site in isolation - a museum, a monument, or a reconstruction - leads me to employ the word "complex" here; the experience of the visitor at a particular site is collectively influenced by its location in the city, its accessibility, the approach to it, its topography, and the combination of elements presented at the site.

7. "Authenticity" here relates to experience - an experience that may involve a "strenuous moral experience" and one that provides an "exigent conception of the self and of what being true to it consists in." Here the authentic is garnered in the moment of self- reflection that allows for a "wider reference to the universe and man's place in it, and a less acceptant and genial view of the social circumstance of life." Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1972) 12. In this sense, authenticity is seated in the ethos and in the mind of the beholding subject and not immanently in any object. (David Blackbourn brought Trilling to my attention).

8. See, e.g., Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, Das Eingedenken der Natur im Subjekt: Zur Dialektik von Vernunft und Natur in der kritischen Theorie Horkheimers, Adorno und Marcuses (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1990).

9. In his article in this issue of New German Critique 65 (Spring/Summer 1995), Jan Assmann refers to another of Aby Warburg's metaphors, "islands of time," to indicate the "space" constituted for a retrospective presence of mind. See also Roland Kany Mne- mosyne als Programm: Geschichte, Erinnerung und die Andacht zum Unbedeutenden im Werk von Usener, Warburg und Benjamin (Tiibingen: Niemeyer, 1987) 168ff.



John Czaplicka 159

The Missing House: Engagement of the Imagination

What I do is similar to what a Zen master does. He tells a little story and each listener gives his own meaning to the story. I try to make my pieces very open; each person brings his own story to it.

- Christian Boltanski1o

In 1990 Christian Boltanski created the two-part art work The Miss- ing House in eastern Berlin and The Museum in western Berlin as his contribution to an exhibition Die Endlichkeit der Freiheit [The Finitude of Freedom] that was a collection of international artistic responses to the political situation in East and West after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Planned according to a concept developed by the artists Rebecca Horn and Jannis Kounellis and the playwright Heiner Miiller, who lent the project its name, the exhibition contained a broad spectrum of artistic installations by artists from western and eastern Europe as well as from America."1 The cultural department of the Berlin Senate invited artists to create public works of art related to the current historical transformation and to the history of specific sites within Berlin. The artists were charged with creating a public and ephemeral art that would inform the city but not decorate it or provide it with new monuments. The art works were to articulate the individual significance and history of their specific urban sites, and each artistic commentary or intervention was to join in an informative network uniting the two halves of the city in a dialogue of East and West.

Previous exhibitions such as the Skulptur Projekte (1987)12 in Min- ster and Bezugspunkte 38/88 (1988) in Graz,13which had also asked for

10. Christian Boltanski, quoted in Nancy Stapen, "The reluctant Holocaust artist," The Boston Globe 4 Feb. 1995.

11. Exh. cat., Die Endlichkeit der Freiheit, eds. Wulf Herzogenrath, Joachim Sarto- rius, and Christoph Tannert (Berlin: Edition Hentricht, 1990). The leaflet that accompanied the exhibition explained its purpose : "DIE ENDLICHKEIT DER FREIHEIT is an international, artistic confrontation with the transformed political situation in East and West. In Berlin, the disruption of the system and of the bloc[k]s is becoming especially clear. Daily the city is changing. The visible becomes invisible, the hidden comes to light, the cosmopolitan meets the provincial, utopias collide with practice and bureaucracy. DIE ENDLICHKEITDER FREIHEIT tries to respond to these processes, or to influence them. ... The basic idea is to realize each work in both the persisting sides of the city at one time. The works refer to one another and take up the specificity of their site."

12. Exh. cat. of Westfiilisches Landesmuseum fiir Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Skulp- tur Projekte in Miinster, eds. Klaus Bussmann and Kaspar K6nig (Cologne: Dumont, 1987).

13. Exh. cat., Bezugspunkte 38/88, ed. Werner Fenz (Graz: Streirische Herbst, 1988).




ephemeral, artistic commentary at historical and public sites, served as immediate predecessors of Die Endlichkeit der Freiheit. This series of exhibitions follows a general tendency in the 1980s toward artists' removal of their art from the market-oriented closure of the gallery and the confines of sacral-cultural museum spaces and toward their address- ing their publics directly and engaging them in a broader, artistic, social, and political discourse. The activism of such artists as Agnes Denes, Jochen Gerz, Hans Haacke, Barbara Kruger, Olaf Menzel, and others has led them to install their artworks in places where they would be less interpreted by the institutions's "showing" and framing than by the artists' own choice of site and juxtaposition. The recurrence of site- specificity also became one of a specific history, and this binding of art in time and place increased critical and consciousness-building potential. The Berlin exhibition of 1990, however, distinguished itself from its predecessors by engaging art to comment on a contemporary historical transformation as it was taking place.

One notes how art works included in Die Endlichkeit der Freiheit, such as those by Hans Haacke and Krzysztof Wodiczko, undermine institutions of power in both the East and the West. Haacke's placement of a slightly transformed Mercedes Star on an East German guard tower and Wodiczko's projection of a Polish shopper-in-Western-paradise onto the statue of Lenin in the former Stalinallee14 both present juxtapositions that need little commentary in their plays on power through the logo of a multinational concern or the gigantic figure of Lenin. By travestying conventional means for the propagation of power and public identity, the ephemeral works of art by Haacke and Wodiczko intervene in the contemporary political landscape. Still, the momentary impact of such polem- ical agit-prop "performances" has a limited historical scope. Their effect is topical. In their works Haacke and Wodiczko revealed the content of established institutions and ideology: one links political power and ideology (the guard tower) to an apparently innocent economic strategy (the logo) while the other overlays the heroic representation of a political ideology (Lenin) with its historical-economic consequences (deprived con- sumers). Following the limited charge given them by the exhibition organizers, these artists commented on a contemporary situation.

14. For the removal of this major monument to communist orthodoxy and for the wholesale removal of monuments in the GDR see: Demontage ... revolutiondrer oder restaurativer Bildersturm?, ed. Berd Kramer (Berlin: Karin Kramer, 1992).



John Czaplicka 161

Other works in the exhibition like Boltanski's engaged the public in a more searching historical analysis of the sites for which they were con- ceived. Boltanski's two-part piece paired The Missing House, the artist's reconfiguration of a vacant lot, with a second piece called The Museum. The Missing House consisted of name plates attached to the fire walls of houses adjacent to an empty lot created by the destruction of a house in World War II (fig. 1). The plates included the name, dates of residence, and professions of the last inhabitants of the destroyed house. The Museum consisted of ten vitrines set down on the abandoned and overgrown exhibition area near the Lehrter train station not far from the Reichstag in West Berlin - an area once used for art exhibitions and later as a museum for airplane technology by Hermann GOiring (fig.2). Boltanski had the vitrines filled with the copies of documents concerning the former residents of the missing house, many of whom had been deported to the death camps. Displayed under glass were the protocols of interviews, copies of documents (some of them deportation proceedings), photographs, postcards, and other assorted materials that were the result of the historical research done by Boltan- ski's assistants (fig. 3). At the close of the exhibition in 1990, the vitrines were removed after they had been vandalized.

The name plates of Missing House, however, remained, and at the behest of the Berlin Senate and, with some support of the local popu- lace, they will remain until the lot is filled or until they have weathered into indecipherability. Because an explanatory panel at the entry to the empty lot has also been removed, the uninformed visitor is left even more to his or her own devices in relating the names to the place and in filling the empty space.15 Yet despite the paring down of the historical documentation, the Missing House in its present state still configures an empty space into a commemorative and a historical site - eine Gedenkstdtte und eine historische Stdtte. As a site that inspires contemplation, it might better be called contemplation site [eine Denkstdtte] (to borrow a term from Peter Steinbachl6). Still, the ability of the Miss- ing House to inspire thought and reflection depends on the receptivity

15. With the removal of the documentary vitrines and the explanatory panel, Boltan- ski's work moves a step closer to the ideally and ideologically posed purity of the autono- mous art object, for this evacuation of information is also an evacuation of history.

16. Peter Steinbach, "Gedenkstitten zu Denkstlitten - Thesen zu zeitgeschichtli- chen Ausstellungen," Faszination und Gewalt, zur politischen Isthetik des Nationalso- zialismus, eds. Bernd Ogan and Wolfgang W. WeiB (Nuremberg: Tiimmels, 1992).




of the beholder. An awareness of the history and environs of the site itself remain key to a deeper understanding.

At 11:55am on February 3, 1945, Allied bombs fell into the center of Berlin at the Gro8e Hamburger-StraBe 15-16 and demolished a house located between the graves of the historian Leopold von Ranke (1795- 1886) and the Enlightenment philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729- 1785). At one end of the street are the remnants of the oldest Jewish cemetery of the city, whose single and last marked grave is dedicated to Mendelssohn, the Jewish German philosopher who propagated tolerance and laid the groundwork for the emancipation of the Jews in Ger- many. Toward the other end of the street, in the churchyard behind the Protestant Sophienkirche, stands the tombstone of Ranke, whose famous phrase about reconstructing history as it actually was -... wie es eigentlich gewesen - suggested that history could only be known from the documents and monuments of the past.17 When Chris- tian Boltanski transformed the empty lot between these graves into Missing House, he spanned the distance between them by marking his chosen site with information from historical documents that subtly broach the question of tolerance in the history of Germany (fig. 4). Once cleared of rubble, the opening in the line of buildings at the Gro8e Hamburger-StraBe 15 and 16 hardly stood out in a quiet and historic East Berlin neighborhood still marked by bullet-ridden facades, crumbling stucco, and other empty lots, all left by the ravages of war or postwar urban planning. Yet, with only minor additions Boltanski transformed this opening into a powerfully signifying work of art that in itself raises central issues about the relation between aesthetics and the telling of history. The artist's "work" here consisted in choosing the site; in having research done by his two assistants, Christine Biichner and Andreas Fischer; in designing signs to display the results of that research; and in having these installed at particular places on the barren walls of adjacent buildings framing the empty lot.

17. This phrase from Ranke's introduction to his Histories of the Latin and Ger- manic Nations from 1494-1514 reads: "One has attached to history the task of guiding the past, of instructing contemporaries in the use of future years: present-day attempt doesn't undertake such a high duty: it will merely show how it actually was." Histories of the Latin Germanic Nations from 1494-1514 (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1885) VII. At the beginning of modem historiography, Ranke's dictum placed the study of sources and the critique of sources at the center of the discipline; Ranke himself has been received as the protagonist of "objectivity," who sought "to let the sources speak for themselves" and to let the subjectivity of the historian disappear behind them.



John Czaplicka 163

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Fig. 1 Christian Boltanski, Christine Biichner, Andreas Fischer. The Missing House (1990), Berlin-Mitte. GroBe Hamburger Stral3e 15/16. View from above looking into the courtyard. Postcard accompanying the exhibition Die Endlich- keit der Freiheit. From photograph by Werner Zellien.




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Fig. 2 Christian Boltanski, Christine Biichner, Andreas Fischer. The Museum (1990), Berlin, Alt-Moabit. The set of vitrines containing documentary material about the residents of The Missing House. Set on the former location of the halls for the Berlin Industrial Exhibition, the vitrines were vandalized and removed at the close of the exhibition, Die Endlichkeit der Freiheit in 1990. Postcard accompanying the exhibition Die Endlichkeit der Freiheit. From photograph by Werner Zellien.

Fig. 3. (opposite page) A typical declaration of possessions by those deported to the concentration camps by the Nazis. This particular form was filled out by a resident of Hamburger Strale 15/16. A facsimile was displayed in a vitrine of The Museum. Note the names of Israel, for the man, and Sarah, for the woman, that German Jews were forced to assume. Photograph taken from the booklet The Missing House, ed. Andreas Fischer, Michael Glasmeier (Berlin: Heimatmuseum Berlin-Mitte, 1990).



John Czaplicka 165

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Fig. 4 Aerial view showing the neighborhood of The Missing House (1925) and listing the religious institutions, sites and street names. Photograph from booklet The Missing House.



John Czaplicka 167

The research yielded the names, duration of residence, and professions of those who last occupied the demolished edifice. Boltanski presents this personal data in bold black letters against a white field of large name- plates in black frames that imitate the death notices [Todesanzeigen] of German newspapers.18 The dates on the plates bracket a shared history which roughly coincides with the Nazi period. Their professions demon- strates the participation of these individuals in the big city, all having pur- sued their jobs away from this common abode. The distribution of the signs on the firewalls of buildings that once formed the wings of the missing house, seems to locate the apartments occupied by the former inhabitants. With this information, the artist has re-collected the basic parameters of the everyday: name, profession, date, and place of residence.

The disclosure of such topical information in situ constitutes an act of documentation that makes The Missing House a work of history as well as a work of art. Moreover, through its material and formal state and in its inscriptions, the artist configures a concrete environment for memory - i.e., if we consider memory "in a formal sense, [as] the unity of what has actually taken place over time, and the ideal reprise of a relation between past and present in a contemporary consciousness."19 To better understand the workings of memory at this missing house, one can esti- mate the pattern of visitors' experiences at the site. That experience leads to a reconstitution not of a specific, significant event nor of a series of causal relations, but rather of a space for memory.20

18. Boltanski has made use of another form of death notice in his work, Les Suisses morts; photographs of the recently deceased that appeared in the obituaries of the Swiss newspaper Le Nouvelliste du Valais were exhibited in an installation in the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (1990) and deposited in the Museum fiir Moderne Kunst in Frank- furt\Main, 1991. See Giinther Metken, Christian Boltanski, Memento mori und Schatten- spiel (Schriften zur Sammlung des Museums fiir Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main) (Frankurt Main: Museum fiur Moderne Kunst, 1991).

19. Horst Folkers, "Die gerettete Geschichte. Ein Hinweis auf Walter Benjamins Begriff der Erinnerung," Mnemosyne: Formen und Funktionen der kulturellen Erin- nerung, eds. Aleida Assmann, and Dietrich Harth (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1991) 364.

20. The leitmotif of Boltanski's work might indeed be seen as one of reconstitution. Installations of photographs, everyday objects (such as the recent installations of Lost and Found in Grand Central Station), or documentary materials are Erinnerungfiguren (War- burg/Assmann) meant to transmit and aid in the mnemonic process. Lynn Gumpert has provided a thorough and admirable history of such themes in the artist's oeuvre, Christian Bolstanski (Paris: Flammarion, 1994). For the concept of "reconstitution" in Boltanski's work see especially Gumpert 78ff. Also see most recently: Holland Cotter, "Lost, Found and Somewhere in Between," The New York Times 26 May 1995. Cotter's article is interest- ing in its consideration of the atmosphere and mood conveyed by a Boltanski installation.




The Missing House effectively engages its beholders in the retrieval of a complex past by combining the allusive aesthetic of the ruin, historical facts, and the powerful symbolism of a destroyed house. This combination of physical elements and archival materials serves as an indicator of the unrepresented, the unsaid, and demands that the viewer engage his or her imagination, knowledge, and memory in a process of completion. As far as this engagement follows the material presence and archival excerpts to reconstruct the past in the present, the experience may lead to a consciousness of history or to a process of analytic commemoration, whereby the informed viewer may reflect on the causes and effects of the violent eradication extant in evident absence.21

Such contemplation of the absent house, a physical-structural container of a basic human community, may precipitate the recognition of the destruction of a living Gemeinschaft (the Hausgemeinschaft). Rather than recalling some dramatic historical event or setting such as death in the concentration camps, the house refers to everyday life and to the common life that was destroyed. This pattern of reference makes the Missing House exceptional in postwar German commemorative practices because it refers directly to the living, to the common and everyday, and only indirectly to the victims of Nazism, all of which enables a more personal involvement on the part of the viewer.22 Boltanski effectively configures a departed presence of humanity.23

While photographing the Gro83e Hamburger-StraBe 15 and 16 in Septem- ber 1993, an encounter with an old woman residing in a still extant wing of the same building helped to clarify my thinking about the structure. At 72, she had been living there for 53 years, so she had moved into her apartment ca. 1940. The first thought to cross my mind was that she had probably taken an apartment vacated by a Jewish family. Putting suspicions about her past aside, however, I let her describe the missing house for me.

She remembered it as a "well-tended garden-house" [gepflegtes Gar- tenhaus], a noble structure set back from the street in a manner com- pletely untypical for this part of downtown Berlin. It had not just been a

21. The modifier "analytic" here refers both to an analysis of the "facts" inscribed in the site and to a self-reflexive analysis of the observer.

22. Because of this personal involvement, the memories reconstituted at the site will vary according to the informed viewer.

23. This effectiveness may depend upon the retrieval of "lives" rather than the retrieval of the circumstances of death, and "this confluence of the mundane and open- ended symbolism renders Boltanski's work accessible; it also infuses it with pathos and ambiguity." Stapen 31. I am in part indebted to Andreas Huyssen for these considerations.



John Czaplicka 169

typical Berlin "back-house" [Hinterhaus] opening onto a non-descript inner-courtyard containing small workshops. Rather it had been exclusively residential and without such a "workshop courtyard" [Wirtschaft- sholA.24 She noted that this rather noble structure should not to be associated with the rent barracks [Mietskaserne] or the two or three story hovels of the nearby Scheunenviertel, that voluntary ghetto of cheap living quarters between the Miinzstrasse and the former Billow Platz, where the poor Jews from the East and especially Galicia had conre- gated in Berlin during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Referring to the names on the barren firewalls outside, the same woman assured me that not only Jews had resided in the garden house and that they had not even been a majority. All one had to do was "read the names." But reading the names in combination with the dates gives pause. For even if one has not consulted the relevant deportation files for those who once lived in the house (displayed in Boltanski's The Museum vitrines), the dates of residency point to a sudden shift in population between ca. 1933-1942. Because the Germans, more so than Americans, tend to sink roots, an informed viewer soon draws the rather obvious and simple conclusions. This place was where many assimilated Jewish Germans had long settled, but no Jewish German would or could have called the now missing house home, especially after the deportations began in earnest in 1942.

The long-standing resident also reassured me that those who had resided here in the 1940s had survived the war and that each had died in a "normal" fashion.26 A survivor herself, she thought the empty lot [Bauliicke] should be closed. I speculated that perhaps to her the empti- ness was unheimlich, uncanny and foreign. At her age, she only wanted her peace - and now all those "memory tourists" came, for the missing house had been integrated into a trail of historical traces and rebuilt

24. I was able to corroborate her descriptions with old photographs of the site. 25. In her book, Im Scheunenviertel (Berlin: Severin und Siedler, 1981) 12, Eike

Geisel quotes an unnamed police official who gives a more exacting impression of the bor- ders to the Scheunenviertel that have become blurred in the post-war period: "By 'Scheuen- viertel' one means the streets and alleys that are grouped between Alexanderplatz and Rosenthaler Platz, from the Lothringer Street to the Stadtbahn at MiinzstraBe, that is, the Weinmeisterstral3e." The East European Jews on their way further west and perhaps fleeing conditions to the east were looked down upon by the largely assimilated Jewish Germans and sometimes referred to as Kaftan Jews. That more indigent population occupied quarters to the north of Alexanderplatz and to the east of Rosenthalerstra8e.

26. The last residents had survived the bombing in the cellar of the building.




structures maintained as a testament to the violence that had taken place here during World War II and to the lost Jewish community. The bullet ridden facades in the surroundings still testify to this violence,27 and Hebrew script emerging from beneath peeling paint suggests the former character of the neighborhood.28 The tourists who come are informed by a guide or fill the Bauliicke, this empty space set apart from the rest of Berlin, with their own memories or knowledge of history. Because this area once had one of the densest concentrations of Jews and Jewish institutions in Berlin, their absence above all fills the empty site at Grole Hamburger-StraBe 15-16.

On a tour of the area, one goes from site to site through a religiously integrated German neighborhood. One passes by the protestant Sophien- kirche; the catholic St. Hedwig's Hospital; the jewish Old Folks Home (later a gathering point for deportation); the newly renovated synagogue in the OranienburgerstraBe with its intricately patterned and gleaming golden dome jutting gaudily over the housetops; the recently re-opened Jewish School (formerly the Jewish Knabenschule); and the former Sche- unenviertel on the other side of the Rosenthaler-StraBe nearby. The tour I took included police with machine pistols in front of a Jewish restau- rant and caf6, a sign of the extant and virulent anti-Semitism. Though this degree of protection had greeted me already in the 1970s in Vienna and Paris as I walked into the Jewish quarters of those cities, it was my first experience with this sort of protection in Berlin, where I had lived, in the western half, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. We also visited the oldest Jewish cemetery in Berlin just down the street from The Miss- ing House; it has been reduced to a few tombstones set into a wall.29 The cemetery contains the Moses Mendelssohn commemorative stele which is usually piled with stones as a sign of Jewish mourning. Near the stele is the admonishing monument to the deportation of the Jews.

Returning to the site of The Missing House after the tour, I became more aware than ever of those deported to the concentration camps, of

27. When in 1987, on the occasion of the 750th anniversary of Berlin, the city planned to renovate the facades of the GroBe Hamburger-StraBe, residents organized themselves to retain the traces of street fighting during World War II. I thank Simone Barck for this information.

28. The artist Shimon Attie has brought this aspect of the area to light in projections and installations. Cf. Scheunenviertel, Die Schrift an der Wand: Shimon Attie (Heidelberg: Edition Braus, 1993).

29. This was as much the result of GDR urban renewal as of Nazi violence - the tombstones that were still piled here after the war were removed to an unknown site.



John Czaplicka 171

the loss to the local community and to German culture in general. There, I reflected on the current artificial renaissance of Jewish culture in Ger- many: a rebirth largely in the absence of a living Jewish-German element in everyday Germany, but accompanied by the lavish and ineffective Jewish Museums in Berlin, Frankfurt, and Vienna - museums filled with unused ritual objects from a culture now foreign to Ger- many.30 Both physical and discursive elements began to fill out the site, violently evacuated of a common Jewish and German collective memory and identity. As an informed viewer, the place engaged me intellectually and emotionally, making me more mindful of the history of loss. The peculiar manner of this engagement deserves more rigorous attention.

The passage into the empty space of the missing house, die Leer- stelle (to transfer Wolfgang Iser's term of literary Rezeptionstheorie to a concrete circumstance), brings one away from the street, through a garden, and between the fire walls of tall buildings with ruinous structural outcroppings of brick and mortar. Separated and secluded from the systemic workings of its modem urban context, this space has been rightly termed a "contemplative place."32 For the passage is to nowhere if not to a site of contemplation, where one can engage in Eingedenken - a constructive process of filling-in that may lead to a reciprocal and commemorative insightfulness. The work is incomplete, and the beholder is called upon to complete it. The remains of a material presence and the names, dates, and professions evoking the presence of earlier residents supply the frame and object for contemplation of a place once full and now vacated.

To the extent that the commemorative insight into the place involves self-reflection and personal involvement, the contemplative subject may empathize enough to gain a consciousness of self in history and even to experience the loss mediated here as a personal one. It seems appropriate that this loss be experienced in Germany on a street once called

30. One cannot help recalling Hitler's plans for a Jewish ethnographic museum in Prague. 31. Engagement is thus due to the appellative structure of the site, i.e., its openness

to interpretation. Cf. Wolfgang Iser, "Die Appellstruktur der Texte," Rezeptionsiisthetik, ed. Rainer Warning (Munich: Fink, 1975) 228-52.

32. Michael Glasmeier, "Das unmtgliche Leben," The Missing House, eds. Adreas Fis- cher and Michael Glasmeier (Berlin: Berliner Kiinstlerprogramm des DAAD., 1992). War- burg might have viewed the site as an "island of time" constituting a space for a retrospective presence of mind ["Zeitinseln zu einem Erinnerungsraum 'retrospecktiver Besonnenheit' '"], Jan Assmann, "Kollektives Gedichtnis und kulturelle Identitiit," Kultur und Geddchtnis, eds. Jan Assmann and Tonio Htlscher (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1988) 12; cf. also Kany 168ff.




ToleranzstraBe, because Germans of all faiths had congregated and were at home here. On this street, Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish institutions had all coexisted.33 Against this background, the raggedness of the structures that frame an opening in the line of buildings becomes a token of the violent rupture that led to a loss of tolerant circumstances.

The pattern of indirection and of the suggestive absences that con- spires to call forth memory and produces history at the Missing House is artful. With this artfulness, the artist enlists the informed viewer's retrospective imagination in a dialogical, projective, and/or recreative fashion. One contemplates and remembers as if in "a space marked out for the observation of auguries."34 The soundings and readings of the informed beholder follow the data of the "archive" on the walls, an objectified "modem memory" that makes contemplation of the past more objective.35 The Missing House may predispose one less to a simple personal mourning for the dead (who are absent and not indi- cated) than to a type of analytic commemoration - in which individual histories of the dead (names), social history (the house in a city), and the personal memory of the living beholder all converge. The effectiveness of Boltanski's Missing House in evocation and illu-

mination of history becomes apparent if we compare it to other commemorative complexes that also have a strong aesthetic component. By doing so, we can also better understand the instrumental character of his work of art. Like Boltanski's The Missing House, the Gedenkstitte Plitzensee (1952) and the Topographie des Terrors (1985) on the site of the old Gestapo headquarters,36 combine a material-situational factic- ity with an aesthetic component to attain a high degree of authenticity - an authenticity derived from the engagement of the visitor that lends

33. The Jewish old folks home here was transformed into a collection point for the deportation of German Jews in 1941. More than 50,000 Berlin Jews passed through it on their way to concentration camps.

34. See the etymology and definition of"contemplate," Webster s Ninth New Colle- giate Dictionary (Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, 1986) 283.

35. In considering the archive, collective memory, and the archaeology of knowledge, the work of Michel Foucault and of Pierre Nora are obvious reference points. A very illuminating consideration of the current intellectual and historical considerations of the use and essence of the archive can be found in the special issue of Werkstatt Geschichte 5 (Aug. 1993) on this subject.

36. Multiple state entities of the Nazi regime occupied the site: Geheime Staat- spolizei, die Reichsfiihrung der SS, Sicherheitsdienst der SS, and die Zentrale des Reichs- sicherheitshauptamts. Cf. exh. cat., Berlin: Bilder einer Ausstellung, eds. Gottfried Korff and Reinhard Ruirup (Berlin: Berliner Festspiele, 1988) 164.



John Czaplicka 173

them a relative effectiveness as commemorative sites.37 Of course these official and public places commemorating the victims of a corrupt Nazi justice-system have no designated artist-author, but in Boltan- ski's work the authorial subject also recedes before the objective dimensions of the history made evident at the site.

Pl#tzensee: Anonymous Chambers of Death

Where there is experience in the strict senses of the word, certain contents of the individual past combine with material of the collective past.38

In 1952 the West Berlin Senate dedicated part of the Plotzensee prison complex in Berlin-Charlottenburg to commemorate the anti-Nazi resistance and the "victims of fascism." It became the first large public commemorative site in the western part of the city. At Plotzensee the city government refurbished former execution chambers, added a small documentary exhibit to it, and erected a memorial wall to "The Victims of the Hitler Dictatorship" abutting these structures39 (fig. 5). Although Pl6tzensee later came to be more exclusively associated with the Ger- man resistance against the Nazis, it was originally designated as a site of broad commemorative scope, where political prisoners and both foreign and German resisters who died fighting Nazism were meant to be memorialized. A document that was sealed in the memorial wall as a testament on the occasion of laying the cornerstone corroborates these intentions. It read: "At this place during the years of the Hitler dictatorship from 1933-45, hundreds of people were murdered because of their struggle against the dictatorship for human rights and political freedom. These included people from all social strata and from almost all nations. With this memorial, Berlin honors the millions of victims of the Third Reich who were defamed, abused, robbed of their freedom, or killed because of their political persuasions, their religious beliefs, or their racial background." Because eighty-nineof the approximately

37. This authenticity is seated in the mind of the viewer and predicated in part on the disappearance of the site's secondary author (the artist in this case) so that it has the appearance of genuiness. Trilling notes: "The concept of authenticity can deny art itself, yet at the same time it figures as the dark source of art .. ." Trilling 12.

38. Walter Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1989) 159.

39. One thinks of the Pierre Lachaise cemetery in Paris as well as the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.




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Fig. 5 The memorial wall at Pl6tzensee (1952) dedicated to "The Victims of the Hitler Dictatorship of the Years 1933-1945" and the memorial urn with earth from the concentration camps added in 1957. Photograph, Landesbilds- telle, Berlin.

Fig. 6 (opposite page) The exterior of the execution chambers at Platzensee. The memorial wall is to the left. Photograph, Landesbildstelle Berlin.

Fig. 7 (opposite page) The interior of the execution chambers at Pl6tzensee. The guillotine stood before the tile wall to the left. Photograph, Landesbildstelle Berlin.



John Czaplicka 175

.----

. . . .

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3000 victims of Nazi injustice executed by hanging or guillotine at the Plotzensee prison were conspirators involved in the famous assassination attempt on Hitler on July 20, 1944 - an attempted military coup-d'etat - this site soon became closely associated with their commemoration. Still the broader scope of commemoration was never lost, where social democrats such as Julius Leber and Wilhelm Leuschner, communists such as Robert Stamm, looters, religious advocates, and clandestine radio listeners of various political stripes were murdered by the Nazis.

Plotzensee came to serve both the communists in the GDR and the democrats in the FRG as a commemorative site. One can glean a communist reading of the memorial's significance from the Ehrenbuch der Opfer von Berlin-Plitzensee [Honor-book of the Victims of Berlin-Pli*tzensee4] (1974) published in West Berlin by a communist publishing house. This book lists by name more than half of those killed here, gives their dates of execution, and classifies them according to profession, age, and national- ity. These simple if incomplete statistics suggest that the number of foreign "resisters" killed at Plitzensee might well have outnumbered the German resisters. Still, the communists skewed their survey by representing only 50 percent of the victims at Pla*tzensee: only those whose official files gave evidence that they actively opposed the Nazi regime were selected for the "book of honor." The editors of the book referred to these as "anti-fascist resistance fighters."

Despite this biased method of selection, the book of honor clearly indicates the much greater exclusiveness of the other, current and past popular conception of the site that links it primarily with German resistance. Other statistics in that text give us a breakdown of those executed by profession. In a table we can read that the number of blue and white collar workers killed outnumbers that of the next most numerous professional group - listed as the intellectuals in this text - by almost five to one. Such demographics and basic vitae of the Nazi victims, even if skewed according to a political perspective, are telling. They remind us who has been subsumed and forgotten in the generic category of victim and in the official cult of heroes practiced in the West, for instance, at a site such as the commemorative site in the

40. Ehrenbuch der Opfer von Berlin-Pldtzensee: zum Gedanken den 1574 Frauen u. Manner, die wegen ihrer politischen oder weltanschaulichen Einstellung und wegen ihres mutigen Widerstandes gegen des faschistische Barbarentum in der Strafanstalt Berlin- Plotzensee von 1933 bis 1945 hingerichtet wurden. ed. Willy Perk and Willi Desch together with VVN-Westberlin (Berlin: Das Europ. Buch, 1974).



John Czaplicka 177

Stauffenbergstrafle, where the noble and military attempt to depose Hit- ler ended in a fiasco.41 The "simple" white and blue collar workers and especially the foreigners - some of whom were in Berlin as forced laborers and others who were resisters "imported" for questioning - deserve a more discriminating representation at this former site of indis- criminate Nazi justice.

Despite such deficiencies, any visitor with a basic knowledge of recent German history will admit that this commemorative complex renders a more authentic impression of political resistance and victimization than others in western and eastern Berlin. Located in an industrial district of Berlin-Charlottenburg, the memorial adjoins the Plotzensee penitentiary for youth, whose high wall topped by barbed wire lines the narrow way to the memorial along the Hiittigpfad, a street named after the first Communist to be executed at Pli0tzensee on June 14, 1934. Entering the memorial, one goes through an iron gate into a semi-circu- lar courtyard lined by trees and meets a stone wall that rises from a three-stepped pedestal and is dedicated vaguely to "The Victims of the Hitler Dictatorship of the Years 1933-45." To the left of the wall, stands an oversized and bulging urn filled with earth from concentration camps listed on its rim.42 The Senate of Berlin dedicated the Plotzensee execution site to the victims of the Hitler dictatorship in 1952, but the urn was put in place in 1957, adding another dimension to the commemorative practice. Behind the wall stands a small restored brick building much like any one might find in this highly industrialized area of Berlin. This structure once housed the execution chamber (fig. 6).

Standing at the memorial wall and speaking during a ceremony commemorating July 20, 1944 in 1966, Alfred Mozer, a social democrat who fled Germany and joined the Dutch resistance during the war, called Pldtzensee an "erschiitternde Gedenkstitte," a moving and shock- ing memorial. Doubtlessly, the memorial wall before which he stood had not unnerved Mozer. His reaction may have been to the seemingly innocuous urn whose conventional form belied its horrific contents. But more than likely this observation derived from having stood in the small

41. This limitation has found its corrective in the erection of a museum to all resisters at the same site.

42. The urn incorporated into the site returns inadvertently to the blood and soil [Blut und Boden] mythology of the Nazis in its consecration of earth at a sanctified site. It had, however, a very practical aspect in that it offered the West Berliners a conveniently accessible location for the commemoration of the concentration camp victims.




restored execution chamber, a space of serene and ascetic beauty, and from having contemplated the fate of those murdered there (fig. 7).

After leaving the bright daylight of the memorial grounds and entering the chamber of death, it takes time for the eyes to adjust to the relative darkness and for the visitor to recognize the dark metal meathooks aligned before barren white-washed walls and round- arched windows. The sparseness impresses powerfully. It also concen- trates the mind of the contemplative subject on the barest of concrete indications. These do not so much impose an interpretation on a viewer as - if one has the history in mind - let him or her imagine how those opposed to the regime hung. Stark whiteness and arched windows conjure up a sacral space in which the meat hooks are transformed into the attributes of martyrdom. At the same time, these imple- ments of death by hanging make palpable the viciousness of a regime toward even its vanquished opponents.

One gets a sense of how many executions took place by reading one of the official reports sent to the Ministry of Justice from Plotzensee : "Sta- tus of the executions at Plttzensee (September 8, 1943, 1pm): 186 of the condemned have been executed, 117 are still in the prison. The executions will continue today at 6pm. An additional 17 execution orders have already arrived. Moreover, the State Secretary is being kept informed." Devoid of sentiment, factually correct, the bureaucratic language in regard to a wasting of human life in such reports incriminates absolutely. A guide to the memorial explains how Hitler himself had given a personal command that some of those involved in the conspiracy of July 20 should die in this manner and how he had asked a camera team be sent to record them in their last throes. One camera team refused the assignment.

The row of slaughterhouse hooks from which these victims hung con- note a modem martyrdom that is en masse, anonymous, painful, and anti- heroic, because individual identity is entirely lost in the process of such summary execution. Remains of the victims were not released to their rela- tives for burial; instead, the Nazis cremated the bodies or delivered them to the anatomical institute for study and dissection. Members of the victim's family were forbidden to bear his or her names.43 The Nazis expunged all physical remnants of those it executed, and, as far as possible, extinguished

43. See Victor Gostomski and Walter Loch, Der Tod von Pl6tzensee: Errinnerun- gen, Ereignisse, Dokumente 1942-1944 (Frankfurt\Main: Bloch, 1993) 9. This revised edition includes several lists of names.



John Czaplicka 179

their personal history and memory, lest their relics or even their names offer a focus for the rise of a cult of martyrdom or a point from which to conceive an alternative site of memory. Unlike the courtyard of the Bendler block that, in 1960, was marked by a memorial plaque with the names of the murdered "noble" resisters of high military rank, a listing of names is still absent from Ploitzensee. In the language of the Nazi justice-system, the resisters and opposition figures had "dishonored" themselves "forever" and were therefore to be excluded from the the community of the people [Volks- gemeinschaft]. Through the elision of their names and the denial of burial rites, the totalitarian regime extended condemnation beyond physical extinction of its victims to the extinction of their memory.

At odds with this extinction are the well-kept files of an efficient Nazi bureaucracy that recorded the name, profession, accusation, judgment, and execution date of its victims. The self-incriminating archives of the corrupt judiciary, the "modem memory" according to Pierre Nora, maintained the official trace of the individuals it condemned. Some documentation of individuals who were executed at Plbitzensee can be found in the room adjoining the execution chamber, but what is missing in this configuration of memory are the names and dates of all those who died here. The addition of such simple data would personalize their experience, and some mention of their political or religious affiliation would more genuinely historicize their martyrdom in these ascetic surroundings. In German, the tendency to classify all of those murdered by the Nazis as Opfer, indiscriminately labels them both victims and sacrifice. Certainly all those who resisted, who looted, who listened clandestinely to the radio, who joked at the expense of the Nazi regime, who slipped unwittingly into the cogs of Nazi justice - all were "victims." But what of the honor due to those who sacrificed their lives for a reason, suffered death and indignity for a cause? One diminishes their active role in history by subsuming them under the facile rubric "victims." The addition of the urn containing the ashes of concentration camp victims further complicates this undiscriminating commemorative practice at Plotzensee. It concretizes the set and practically indivisible phrase "resistance and persecution" [Widerstand und Verfolgung], which implic- itly equates the victims of and resisters to the Nazi regime.

Still, at Plaitzensee, despite the referential problems, the spatial, aesthetic, and archaeological aspects combine to engage the viewer and lend more substance and credibility to the narration of murder at the




hands of the Nazi system than any monument might have done. The picture of resistance, if viewed through the lens of the commemorative practice at Berlin-Pl6tzensee, may seem impersonal, indefinite and, in its emphasis on victimization, merely existential, but as far as it retains specific history in the archaeology of the site, it possesses an aura of authenticity and affectively engages the beholder. To add a more personal and human note, however, one might follow the artist Boltanski and add the "archive" left by the Nazis, the names, dates, and professions, to make Plotzensee more of a documentary-historical site.44

The Topography of Terror: Concrete Historical Discourse The competition to transform the grounds of the former Prinz-Albrecht Palace,45 which became the Gestapo headquarters, SS offices, and headquarters of Reich Security [Reichssicherheitshauptamt] under the Nazis, into a commemorative complex, aroused the interest of young historians in Berlin, and encouraged them to found a "history workshop" under the tutelage of the historian Reinhard Riirup to excavate and study the site (fig. 8). A documentation in catalogue form - the now well-known Topographie des Terrors46 - and a temporary historical exhibition installed in the remnants of buildings that once occupied the site resulted from their deliberations, engagement, and work. At different locations within the excavation area, the historians provided background texts and photos to explain the function of each part of the complex. The catalogue, the exhibition, the explanatory signs, and photographs illuminate the administrative plans and workings of the terror regime that had its enforcement headquarters here. Although originally erected

44. Johannes Tuchel, director of the Gedenkstdtte Deutscher Widerstand has informed me of their current project to assemble all the names of those killed at Plitzensee by the Nazis from the files of various agencies. The international (pan-European) aspect of resistance will probably come to the forefront once this list is complete. Brigitte Oleschin- ski's new booklet, Gedenkstdtte Pldtzensee, (Berlin: Gedenkstiitte Deutscher Widerstand, 1994), provides a new ordering of those executed according to categories of victims and is a vast improvement over the previous brochure; though one can still question the emphasis on the "noble" resistance figures. The site itself remains unchanged.

45. Dokumentation: Offener Wettbewerb: Berlin, Siidliche Friedrichstadt/Gestaltung des Geldndes des ehemaligen Prinz-Albrecht-Palais (Berlin: Bausstellung Berlin, 1985).

46. Topographie des Terrors, Gestapo, SS und Reichssicherheitshauptamt auf dem "Prinz -Albreht-Geldinde, " Eine Dokumentation, ed. Reinhard Riirup (Berlin: Arenhbivel, 1987). See also Thomas Lutz, "Gedenkstlitten-Rundbrief, Topography of Terror Founda- tion, special edition," Making Historical Sites Visible/ Holocaust Memorials in Germany (Berlin: Topography of Terror Foundation, 1994).



John Czaplicka 181

as a temporary structure for the 750th anniversary of Berlin in 1987, the exhibition building has been allowed to remain, and the catalogue has been republished several times. The commemorative complex stretches over a large open area near the Martin-Gropius building and the former site of the Berlin Wall, a location very close to the center of the city. In a barren cityscape left by the ravages of war, the results of a modem archaeological dig together with a historical documentation in a museum-setting combine with the spatial experience of an historical site to effect one of the most enlijhtening if troubling commemorative experiences in postwar Germany.4 The tall pile of rubble and the bulldozed- flatness of this cityscape serves as a symbol for the active suppression of the Nazi past and removal of its traces.48 Near what once was the border between East and West, an unobtru-

sive, utilitarian structure marks one corner of a broad and open area and re-occupies the excavated ruins of a cellar that are among the last structural remnants of the central headquarters of the SS-State.49 This has become the exhibition space (fig. 9). It employs blown-up black and white photographs, mug shots, newspaper clippings, slides, film clips, information panels, and facsimiles of documents such as letters or arrest warrants to inform and impress the visitor in a five-part exhibition (fig. 10). The all important atmospheric impressionthat underlines this documentation derives from a relatively sparse and very restrained

47. Peter Steinbach has perhaps best expressed the reasons for the effectiveness of this site: "In the current pedagogy of memorials, the question playing a role is whether the historical sites that reflect a history of the perpetrators can be made appropriate to a reference point of historical memory. The arrangement of the former Gestapo grounds at 8 Prinz-Albrecht Street must count as an attempt which often takes the breath of the observer away in favor of a feeling of apprehension. It is in my opinion especially impres- sive because it opens up not only the historical site, but also its meaning for 'remembering' in the postwar period. Sand mountains and plateaus become symbols of the active suppression, the excavations symbols of a new recollection." Steinbach 295.

48. Peter Steinbach has perhaps best expressed the reasons for the effectiveness of this site: "In the current pedagogy of memorials, the question playing a role is whether the historical sites that reflect a history of the perpetrators can be made appropriate to a reference point of historical memory. The arrangement of the former Gestapo grounds at 8 Prinz-Albrecht Street must count as an attempt which often takes the breathe of the observer away in favor of a feeling of apprehension. It is in my opinion especially impres- sive because it opens up not only the historical site, but also its meaning for 'remembering' in the postwar period. Sand mountains and plateaus become symbols of the active suppression, the excavations symbols of a new recollection." Steinbach 295.

49. This kitchen and storage facility for the Gestapo and the SS personel was built in 1943. I thank Thomas Lutz for bringing this to my attention.




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John Czaplicka 183

hanging of the assorted black and white media on panels suspended between and attached to barren and decrepit brick walls in a subterranean environment of ruins; the unfinished and coarsely textured walls, the concrete and material presence of history at this site of terror, are allowed to shine through the over- lay of discretely and intelligently placed pictorial media. Although these rooms were only part of a kitchen complex attached to the headquarters, their material character adds an important aesthetic note to the exhibition.

The catalogue - its reserved layout in black and white, with its documentary texts, brief commentary, photographs, maps, and building plans accompanied by terse explanations or biographies - extends this reserved museological presentation. Both the catalogue and museum record and collect information in a fashion analogous to the institution they have set out to re-present. This Konzentration of materials docu- menting the extensive operations of the centralized state security organi- zations throughout the Third Reich gains the aura of authenticity through its appropriate siting and careful conservation.

The affective aesthetic of display that enhances the mediation of history in both museum and catalogue is sustained by the topography before the museum building which lies unobtrusively low to the ground. The abandoned urban setting displays physical traces of past use, which are marked for the benefit of the viewer. The subtext of the restrained commemorative composition on the Prinz-Albrecht- or Gestapo-Geliinde is one of discovery and recognition. This pattern of experience is impressed upon the visitor who descends into the intimate and intricate museum to query the material debris and documentary fragments of history assembled there. It is the same as one emerges and traverses the excavated area, a "dig" into modem history. Moving from site to site on that topography, absorbing clue and fragment, trace and document, induces the informed viewer to reconstruct history in place. By virtue of ubiquitous incompletion, the viewer is compelled to piece things together for him- or herself, to depend on his or her own knowledge. The ruinscape resembling an ensemble of archaeological digs may engage the viewer in investigation and reconstruction. Neither literary nor literal, the peripatetic and occular experience does not so much approximate reading a text as filling in the missing pieces of a picture puzzle.50 The catalogue accompanying the "exhibition" seems to repli- cate this effect because its narrative is interrupted, made disjointed by

50. An emphasis on a "reading of the symbols and signs" tends to obscure the role of materials and forms as well as of the topography and siting in the commemorative practice.




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Fig. 9 and 10. The interior of the exhibition hall on the Topographie des Ter- rors (above), showing the view from ground level into the subterranean exhibition space and a view (below) into that space. Photographs (July 1987) by Margret Nissen. Copyright by M. Nissen. Topographie des Terrors Archiv.



John Czaplicka 185

the frequent introduction of photographs, maps, plans, lists, captions, and sun- dry sorts of documentation. Demands are made on the reader/walker/viewer to dispose her or his own knowledge. Gaps have to be filled, breaks overcome, and the thread of narrative rewoven if the Topography of Terror is to become telling. Potentially, such a challenging manner of engagement enlightens.

Though historically instructive, a certain indirection also character- izes this viewing and traversal, for there is no authoritative or hierarchi- cal marking of the pathway; the buildings above ground are less objects of representation than casings or frames for securing evidence. The museum is but a shell above the solid brick and masonry remains upon which it is founded and to which the museum design has been coordinated; the roof without walls hovering above the remnants of Gestapo cells only protects ruins from weathering. Triimmerberge, "mountains" of debris and rubble from war and postwar destruction, add yet another historical element to the commemorative ensemble. One of these rather formless artificial heaps has been bulldozed on one side to provide a platform from which to view the topography of terror and its integration into the fabric of the surrounding city. At the edge of the Gestapo-Gellinde, the city of Berlin has left a segment of the Ber- lin Wall standing - as a monument and perhaps as an admonishment. The topography and the wall stand together.

Here and at the site of Missing House, the aesthetic of the ruin evinced in fragments, traces, and the signs of material decay suggest a precarious balance of perceived formation and perceived dissolution, which is the passage of time in place. This predisposes the ruin to become a central metaphor for history, for what is history without the retrospect and prospect in the present condition. The engagement with the ruin is concrete, tactile, and affective. The affective response to the "atmospheric place" created by the ruin may conjure up an image of melancholy or even one of nostalgia, for in the absence of completion there is often a sense of loss. But on the topography of terror and at the missing house, this "romantic" tendency is compensated for by a factual historical presence in the form of documentation. Not a sense of loss but a recognition of loss should be the result: mourning (the sense of loss and the melancholic engagement) becomes reasoned in the recognition of what or who has been lost. Most importantly, at the Gestapo Headquarters, at the missing house, and in the execution chambers at Pl6tzensee, the relic place and its aesthetic entices the beholder to engage his or her own imagination in a process of reconstruction, which is at base a contemporary consciousness




of history through which one can prospect future topographies.51 The power of these three commemorative complexes in conveying his-

tory depends on their ability to convince their visitors of their authenticity. This quality of truth and genuiness, this foundation for the construction of belief, depends on several factors. Firstly, a structural- material presence and its signs of transformation (traces of history) make the passing of time palpable and concrete. Secondly, the specificity of the site - this is where the event actually took place - strength- ens the sense of authenticity. Thirdly, the factual augmentation in the form of photographs, documents, and other media allow the beholder to read the history of the specific site better. Fourth, there is an aesthetic enticement that engages the viewer's imagination and invites him or her to participate in and complete history. The aesthetic moment is one of indirection and pleasure that brings the subjective mind into a sort of "play" that can involve one in an analysis of self and of the objective evidence. This involvement may lead to a recognition of self in history, an effect of the substantive, factual, and experiential authenticity52 conveyed by Missing House, the Pl6tzensee memorial, and the Topography of Terrors. Commemoration in this manner at these places is effective and potentially insightful.

Still, topolatry is the imminent danger in the sanctity of place conveyed by the starkly ascetic aesthetic of the P16tzensee chambers of death.5 In the museum on the topography of terror, despite the "natural" surroundings, a residual theatricality of performance and "discovery" still

51. Remembering is "a form of constructive activity ... a putting together of a claim [or a vision - J. Cz.] about past states of affairs by means of a framework of shared cultural understanding." Alan Radley, "Artefacts, Memory and a Sense of the Past," Collec- tive Remembering, eds. David Middleton and Derek Edwards, (London: Sage, 1990) 46.

52. Here authenticity means perception derived from viewer participation at these sites. 53. In an early German usage of this term, Karl Markus Michel writes. "A wave of

commemoration spreads across the country, almost everything can become a memorial, if it has remained unnoticed until now or carries the mark of infamy. There is only the condition that it be accessible and palpable. ... One could call it topolatry, corresponding to idol- atry, the worship of images. Or one could, by employing fashionable concepts [Begriffsbesetzung] speak of the employment of place [Ortsbeseztung]. Whether concept or place: in both cases it is a question of appropriation, the taking possession of a topos by an itinerant meaning, that resides there, like a genie in a bottle." Michel argues against the stark subjective and affective involvement at historical sites. Against what he calls "Folk- lore des Gewesenen" [Folklore of What Was] or "experiential space" ["Erlebnisraum"], he offers examples from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when monuments were "Ver- miichtnisse," i.e., an inheritance to be fulfilled in the future. Karl Markus Michel, "Wunsch nach authentischen Gedenkst~itten und die Liebe zu Ruinen," Die Zeit 11 Sept. 1987.



John Czaplicka 187

obtains in the experience of following a historical pathway and visiting a former center of power. The missing house teeters always on the edge of oblivion; it does not stand out. Whereas the first two sites remain more or less imposing in their relation to institutionalized commemorative practice, the constellation of material, formative, and factual elements that compose The Missing House allows, I think, for the greatest subjective involvement or self-reflection. At the same time, it demands the best-informed and cognizant viewer. In the terseness of artistic language, in the significance of insignificant siting, and in a dig- nified reserve in subjective artistic expression, the viewer will recognize a receptive framework for the contemplative mind and will linger between the graves of Moses Mendelssohn and Leopold von Ranke, between enlightenment and history, and perhaps be led to reflect on issues of tolerance and humanity.

Science as Culture SaC 21 (1995) includes: Demolition derby: ritual

of destruction (S.Zehr) Electronic curb cuts and disability (D.Hakken)

The zoo as theatre of the animals (S.Montgomery)

SaC 22 (1995) includes: Supermarket science? (S.Macdonald)

Realism in representing race (T.Teslow)

Making nature 'real' again (S.Allison)

01 c

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