Chloe Paver writes:
What’s In a Name?
Compared with the fact that this museum is located at a site with a direct connection to the killing operations at Auschwitz, the fact that it has an odd name may seem trivial. But it tells us something important about German cultural memory.
The translator has done a reasonable job: the German name ‘Erinnerungsort Topf & Söhne, die Ofenbauer von Auschwitz’ has become ‘Topf & Sons, Builders of the Auschwitz Ovens. A Place of Remembrance’. By the ‘Auschwitz ovens’ the translator means the crematoria furnaces at Auschwitz, which were used to burn the victims’ remains. That may not be as clear as the museum thinks, though the word ‘ovens’ is used fairly widely in academic writing and in survivor testimonies. The site recalls the technical expertise and industrial co-operation needed to make Auschwitz work as an extermination camp and shows how close to normal German life Auschwitz came, despite the deliberate isolation of the camp itself.
Because ‘a place of remembrance’ is made up of several words and comes at the end in the English translation, it may not be clear that this is, in German, a name for a type of institution. Museums dealing with the National Socialist era categorize themselves through their names. Until relatively recently there were only ‘museums’ and ‘memorial sites’. Museums generally deal with National Socialism as one of many subjects (there are no ‘Museums of National Socialism’) while memorial sites (‘Gedenkstätten’) mark the places where crimes happened and victims suffered, particularly at the former concentration camps. More recently, ‘documentation centres’ have emerged: historical information centres that draw on archival material (see more under the background research for the NS-Dokumentationszentrum München). Newer or smaller institutions might call themselves ‘Erinnerungsort’ (‘place of remembrance’), ‘Denkort’ (‘place of reflection’) or ‘Geschichtsort’ (‘place of history’). There is even a ‘Memoriam’. Why not just ‘museum’ or ‘memorial site’? After all, all of these places show exhibitions and provide information about the past. There seems to be a wish to avoid the positive cultural connotations of ‘museum’ (as a place where valuable objects are stored). Also, many of the newest exhibition sites are concerned with Nazi perpetrators or sympathisers and appear to want to reserve ‘Gedenkstätte’ for sites honouring victims.
In other contexts, such as a nature reserve or power station, organisers might choose the word ‘information centre’. The emphasis on ‘remembering’ or ‘reflecting’ in the case of museums dealing with National Socialism shows a different kind of commitment to historical awareness: a promise to acknowledge the country’s past crimes in order to avoid their repetition. Not that ‘information’ is frowned upon. The ‘Holocaust Memorial’ in the centre of Berlin contains an underground exhibition called the ‘Place of Information’ (‘Informationsort’). There, ‘information’ anchors in fact and historical context an otherwise vague and diffuse architectural response to the Holocaust.
The Topf & Söhne museum tells its own pre-history in a chronology at the website (‘The Site and its History’). Another way of telling the pre-history is to say that it is both typical and atypical for such sites in Germany. What is typical is that a site where perpetrators or their collaborators operated was neglected and even forgotten in the decades after 1945 until residents with an interest in local history discovered it and started a campaign to force the city council to take responsibility for marking the site. Having once reached the tipping point where the support of the city was secured, the museum’s designers set about marking the site extremely thoroughly. Even though most of the old factory has been knocked down and only one building remains, visitors are made aware of the exact extent, boundaries, and appearance of the factory. The designers have even gone to the trouble of using rusted metal columns to stake out the front boundary of the property, even though this conveys no particular historical information.
The Bürgerengagement (citzens’ acitivism) which led to the museum’s foundation was untypical in one respect: part of the derelict factory site was squatted. The well-organised squatters arranged cultural activities from their premises (the ‘Besetztes Haus’), including guided tours of the former factory and an exhibition about deportations of Jews from the region. When I visited the newly opened museum, visitors with connections to the squat complained (in written comments and also in person) that the role of the squat in bringing the past to public attention had received insufficient recognition by the museum, which they felt acted as if it alone were responsible for commemoration at the site. While the squatters’ role is mentioned in the section of the exhibition about post-war forgetting and remembering, evidently this was felt to be poor acknowledgment of their considerable engagement.
The museum’s own chronology hints at where the tension lies: the squatters were evicted from site in preparation for its development as housing and retail space, having turned down an offer of an alternative site for their cultural centre. The English translation at the website speaks of an ‘independent cultural centre’, but the German word is ‘autonomous’ (‘autonom’) rather than ‘independent’. ‘Autonome’ are groups of people who seek to live outside of society’s norms (the English word ‘alternative’ does not quite convey the German scene). Generally they are on the Left and consider themselves anti-fascist and anti-racist. This creates an odd position between compliance with the official norm (which is by now decidedly anti-fascist and anti-racist) and an insistence on existing in ‘power-free’ spaces.
Two issues seem to have become entangled in the dispute in Erfurt: the usual enmity between squatters and developers and the squatters’ more unusual investment in mediating between the public and a hidden National Socialist past. Once the site was no longer a hushed-up secret but a publicly acknowledged site of memory, it was evidently difficult to adjust to the absence of a role. This is therefore an interesting case where a sub-culture is obliged to retire into the background once mainstream public memory takes over.
German History Museums 