Chloe Paver writes:
It’s easy enough to translate the term Zivilcourage as ‘civic courage’; what’s more difficult is to explain the meaning and status of the idea in German society. One way of getting a handle on it is to Google Zivilcourage alongside ‘Schulmaterialien’ (teaching materials) or ‘Lehrplan’ (curriculum). Your search will produce many thousands of hits. You could also ask a German teenager: depending on their personality they might offer you a mature assessment of the role that Zivilcourage has to play in today’s society – or they might tell you they are sick to death of hearing about it.
In Germany, Zivilcourage means standing up publicly on behalf of others to protest that they are being unfairly treated, even if that means putting your head above the parapet, risking rebukes, harassment, or social isolation. It implies action rather than just belief: stepping in to stop injustices, not just reading the newspaper and tutting. It is the opposite of walking on by or watching from the sidelines. It means taking responsibility for what happens in your immediate environment rather than leaving the policing of society’s values to systems and a professional caste. Since neo-Nazis often believe that other neo-Nazis are being unfairly treated, it needs to be added that it is based on a commitment to democratic values.
Today in Germany, Zivilcourage is associated largely with standing up for victims of racism or homophobia, but its centrality to German education is due to its perceived absence during the National Socialist era. So many people stood by and watched, so few people stepped in and said ‘This isn’t right’ that German society today promotes Zivilcourage as a prophylactic against a possible slide back into barbarity.
This has led to the odd situation where German youngsters are being formally taught a moral quality that is not taught to their UK counterparts, although doubtless something similar is promoted in anti-bullying and diversity classes, without necessarily having a name. What would we call it in English if someone on the Tube shouted racist abuse and someone else gave them a talking to for it, at the risk of getting thumped? I’m not quite sure. Would we do more of it if we knew that this behaviour had a name? An interesting question.
Having a name for it, and a history of positive and negative examples to draw on, certainly makes Zivilcourage a more visible and active social value in Germany, a common currency that can be discussed and rewarded – and occasionally disputed.
It would be tempting to say that the Memorial to the Quiet Heroes is a museum of Zivilcouage. Certainly, school groups are likely to come to the alleyway of Rosenthaler Str. 39 and visit all three museums in preparation for writing essays or projects about precisely this civic value. All the newspapers that reported on the opening of the memorial used the word ‘Zivilcourage’. The three speakers at the opening (a federal minister, the mayor of Berlin, and a Holocaust survivor) all used the word ‘Zivilcourage’.
Yet the memorial itself does not use it. It appears only once, in the heading given to a minor article, on the website. A statement by historian Dr Beate Kosmala, who helped establish the memorial, goes some way to explaining this. In a contribution to a summer school at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, Dr Kosmala argues that Zivilcourage describes a form of behaviour in democratic societies but does not fit the situation of a dictatorship, where standing up for others is only possible at the risk of imprisonment and death. The memorial therefore promotes a discussion of the possibilities for Zivilcourage today, without diminishing the bravery of those who helped Jews escape Nazi persecution by suggesting that their actions were equivalent to objecting to racism today.
The other interesting aspect of the memorial is its location. Of the three museums, only one, Otto Weidt’s former workshop, is at an authentic site, but the other two museums, the Anne Frank Centre and the Gedenkstätte Stille Helden, have clustered around it. They co-operate with one another, for instance offering school groups a joint tour.
Authentic sites are given a high value in German memory culture: saying ‘it happened here’ and marking the exact spot has become a form of civic duty, repeated thousands of times across Germany. It is seen as a guarantee against forgetting, the opposite of letting grass grow over the past.
But authentic sites are not always practical. History is very poor at anticipating the future needs of tourists. The Gedenkstätte Stille Helden’s parent museum is the Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand (German Resistance Memorial Centre), housed in a former government building. Here, high-ranking officers attempted to mount the putsch against Hitler’s regime on 20th July 1944, in the mistaken belief that Stauffenberg’s assassination attempt had succeeded. Here, too, many of the officers involved in the putsch were executed.
That a memorial to their bravery and a museum about resistance under National Socialism are based at the site of their execution is right and proper. It is, however, some way off the tourist trail (at least for a city where the tourist trail is conveniently compact). For a while, when Potsdamer Platz was the first great wonder of Berlin’s architectural revival, it must have benefitted from added footfall. Now, however, the tourist centre has arguably shifted back to Unter den Linden and tourists are unlikely to find the Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand unless they know where they are going – past the Holocaust Memorial, Potsdamer Platz, and the Berlin Philharmonic.
For this reason, having a smaller museum right in the centre of the tourist maelstrom that swirls around the Hackesche Höfe is a shrewd practical move.
German History Museums 