Berlin is filled with non-places, strange spots where history feels like a force field keeping people away. One such place is a patch of grass, empty except for some randomly-placed trees, adjacent to the modern chancellery.
Few who pass this way know it was once the site of the Kroll opera house, demolished in 1951. From 1933, after the mysterious fire in the Reichstag opposite, the opera house became Germany’s provisional seat of parliament. It was here that German MPs voted out democracy for fascism, and where Hitler justified his invasion of Poland in 1939, triggering the second World War.
On Thursday, 80 years after the war ended, a memorial stone was unveiled on the vacant site to remember the unspeakable horrors Germany inflicted on Poland. Among those attending the opening was Florian Mausbach, the former head of Germany’s federal building office, whose 2017 open letter for such a memorial got the stone rolling – against considerable opposition.
“One journalist asked me why we wanted another ‘wreath dumping ground’,” he said after laying flowers. “But people need places to mourn – and Germans need to be reminded just how the Nazis planned to eliminate Poland and extinguish Polish life and culture.”
Eventually a German-Poland historical house will be added to the site. That even this simple memorial has taken so long tells its own tale.
Despite decades of educational work, a representative survey last year found just one in five Germans know how many Poles were killed during the Nazi wartime occupation. The most common guess was one million, the real number is five times that.
The same survey showed one third of Germans either do not know who started the second World War – hint: their grandparents and great-grandparents – or believe other nations were involved.
Even eight decades after Nazi Germany agreed – twice – to a complete capitulation, ending what Winston Churchill called “the German war”, the shadows of the past are encroaching once more on the present. That was most obvious when Russia’s war on Ukraine meant Moscow representatives – and Russian flags – were excluded from Thursday’s official ceremonies.
In a national address President Frank Walter Steinmeier dismissed claims that Vladimir Putin’s war continues the “fight against Nazi tyranny”.
“This historical lie is nothing more than a smokescreen for imperial madness,” he said. “The liberator of Auschwitz has become an aggressor.”
Turning to his audience in the Bundestag, and those watching at home, the German president tackled an uncomfortably consistent statistic from the 1960s to today: how every second German favours “drawing a line” under the Nazi past.
“What’s that supposed to mean, exactly? That we forget what we know?” he asked. “Our history is not a prison but a precious treasure trove of experience, and the key for us, our children and our grandchildren to master the crises of the present and the future.”
Not everyone agrees. One in four Germans support a political party, the Alternative for Germany, that rejects the country’s official memorial narrative as a “guilt cult”.
This is just the latest of the self-exonerating mental leaps in this country since the capitulation.
In 1949, socialist East Germany was founded as an “anti-fascist state”, an elegant piece of magical thinking that allowed its 18 million citizens view the former fascists in their midst as an ideological impossibility.
Even in West Germany, where studies show three-quarters of government ministries were ex-Nazis, the first – staunch anti-Nazi – chancellor Konrad Adenauer declared the opposite. In April 1961 he said “in the German national body, in the moral life of the German people, there is no longer any National Socialism, no National Socialist feeling”.
It wasn’t until 1985 when the West German president Richard von Weizsäcker, the son of a Nazi diplomat and convicted war criminal, reframed May 8th as a “day of liberation” from National Socialism.
That kick-started decades of real interrogation of the past, and in the last 20 years a stream of memoirs from children and grandchildren of Nazi-era perpetrators. A recent addition is Blind Spot by German-Jewish psychologist Louis Lewitan, discussing the “lip service” in modern German memorial work.
For him popular German terms like Trauerarbeit (mourning work). or Vergangenheitsbewältigung – (coming to terms with the past), sound “suspiciously like an administrative act...with a punch clock, three-shift system and breaks”.
After postwar decades – first of shamed silence, then focus on Nazi victims – Lewitan is not alone in hoping the future brings more empathy, emotion and critical self-reflection.
A common reflection on Thursday was how much of how Germany deals with its past depends, in the future, on the appetite of ordinary people to acknowledge the perpetrators, opportunists and fascist fellow travellers in their own family trees.
“The war didn’t just break out, it was started,” said Pastor Kathrin Oxen at Berlin’s calling, the official anniversary memorial service. The 80th anniversary was, she said, a date “full of mourning for what people did, and allowed happen, but also full of thanks for the liberation and the new beginnings”.
