Chloe Paver writes:
The Erinnerungsstätte Notaufnahmelager Marienfelde belongs to that category of museum which places a high value on the authentic site – the exact location where past events happened – even though its authentic site is not in the least convenient for today’s tourist.
The museum also belongs to a small group of sites that continue to fulfil their original purpose in the present day. My colleague Susanne Knittel has written interestingly about how the memorial at Schloss Grafeneck in Swabia shares its site with a home for the disabled, which is what the Schloss was both before and after the Nazis turned it into a killing institution in their ‘euthanasia’ programme. Anyone visiting the memorial to the victims of that programme is likely to meet some of the 100 residents with learning difficulties and mental health problems. Knittel has argued that this forces visitors to confront their own and society’s limitations in treating the mentally ill and disabled fairly and positively today. The site questions the comfortable assumption that democratic society is in all things the polar opposite of the Third Reich.
In the case of Marienfelde, the museum shares a building with a temporary housing centre for modern-day refugees. Unlike Grafeneck, the visitor is not especially likely to encounter any refugees, although the doors to the two institutions are only yards apart. On a sunny day you may well hear refugee children playing out in the courtyard. That evokes a sense of family life not normally found at a museum and momentarily unites past and present. This unscripted sound effect is also heard, much less congruously, at the main Stasi Museum in Berlin, where children in the courtyard were playing riotously with a paddling pool and hosepipe on my last visit. In that case, the authentic site was never likely to retain any remnant of its former use and the conversion of most of the Stasi office complex into homes works in a different way, to re-humanise the space.
Even if real-life encounters with refugees are unlikely in Marienfelde, the museum has attempted to make a link between refugees from communism and those seeking refuge in Germany today. This is a live social issue for Germany because refugees and asylum seekers have repeatedly been the target of far-right violence while also being scapegoated by some on the parliamentary right.
As well as providing some general information on immigrants and asylum-seekers in Germany, the museum uses the final section, which shows how the living quarters looked in the 1950s, to integrate modern-day refugees into the story of the GDR refugees. Quotations from refugees are displayed on the walls. They alternate between statements made by refugees from the GDR and by 21st-century refugees from Chechnya, Syria, and Afghanistan. Today’s refugees do not simply express gratitude (which would leave the German visitor with a comforting picture of Germany’s hospitality), but also express similar sentiments to earlier refugees: that this is just a temporary home and they long to move on from it. That challenges the German visitor to envisage their integration.
From the point of view of my own research I am interested in the way in which this museum (like the Mahnmal St Nikolai in Hamburg) examines the emotions of the people who underwent these historical processes. The number of refugees from East German communism was far fewer than the number of those affected by bombing, so that escape from the GDR falls short of being a generational experience. Nevertheless, if one considers these refugees together with those who fled the Soviet army in 1944-45 and those who are still arriving, then refugee experiences affected large numbers of families and are woven into the psychological fabric of German society today.
In emotional terms, the museum sees no need to make a positive escape-to-freedom story out of the experiences of refugees from the GDR. Even if that is indeed the overarching life narrative for those who left a corrupt, repressive country to live in a democracy, the museum’s focus on the transitional period between the two worlds allows it to be honest about the negative emotions involved in leaving the certainty and stability of one life for the uncertainty of another, often losing social status in the process.
The museum recalls the particular difficulties for young people who made the journey to the West alone. They were often disappointed with what they found in the West and were treated with some suspicion in the press. Because they had been educated in the GDR, it was considered necessary to take charge of their education and holding centres were set up to prepare them for working life in the West. While allowing that some young people may have been naïve in their expectations of a consumerist paradise in the West, the museum also shows sympathy with their feeling that the government was making decisions on their behalf and subjecting them to unnecessary rules and regulations.
In one example, a young man who escaped in 1960 resented being sent to a youth holding centre in the Saarland. Here, something interesting gets lost in translation. Because British English uses ‘refugee camp’ only for makeshift, tented communities such as we see in Syria today, and ‘refugee centre’ for a built facility, an English-language version of this story can lose sight of the fact that these were all ‘Lager’ (camps) in German. The young man went from a ‘camp’ at Marienfelde to a work ‘camp’ in West Germany, and all this only 15 years after ‘camp’ had meant something much more threatening under National Socialism. In fact, the two main youth holding centres mentioned by the museum, Sandborstel and Westertimke, had been prisoner of war camps during the Second World War. Little wonder that life in government camps – even camps that helped people on their journey to freedom – left a bitter taste.
Germany is learning to be open about such irresolvable social tensions in its history museums, but this does not necessarily help express or defuse current-day tensions.
German History Museums 