History and the ways of remembering

If we want to frame history as something from which we must yank moral lessons, let these lessons include more ideas and identities.

People relaxing on the stone blocks of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe on a sunny day in Berlin. | Photo Credit: Getty Images/ iStock

Walking around Berlin, you will see graffitied fragments of the Berlin Wall, which came down in 1989, and memorials strewn about the city to those who were hounded into concentration camps under Nazi rule: Jews, homosexuals, Romas, the disabled. There are also regular sightings of Stolperstein, or “stumbling stones”, concrete cubes embedded in sidewalks with brass plaques to commemorate individuals who perished in the swastika’s shadow. The plaques have their name, birth year, date of deportation, and destiny—sometimes “murdered in Auschwitz” or oftentimes “fate unknown”.

If a street snaked through where the Berlin Wall once stood, you would see a double row of paving stones to mark where the wall once was, with brass plaques in the pavement for context. Elsewhere, in the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, there is scant text, only 2,711 blocks—ranging in height from less than a feet to taller than the Berlin Wall—in straight and parallel rows that require people to walk alone, or in a single file, consumed by the solitary experience of being enveloped by smooth concrete.

In 2017, a prominent right-wing politician, angered by the memorial, exclaimed: “We Germans are the only nation in the world to plant a monument of shame in the heart of the capital.” He was worried that German identity was being recast as one of disgrace, of violation. In his book The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape, the urban historian Brian Ladd writes of Helmut Kohl, a former Chancellor of Germany, “want[ing] to create a single category of victims as an expression of national unity. His desire to build an identity out of their common status as victims ‘of war and tyranny’.” That Germany, once a country that celebrated Heldengedenktag, the Day of Commemoration of Heroes, was now observing Volkstrauertag, the people’s day of mourning.

Built into the fabric

It is impossible not to feel that you are present in a city whose people suffered, and this memory of suffering is woven into the fabric of everyday experience. As you walk towards, say, the Berlin Philharmonic for a concert, you will pass through a 24-metre-long blue glass wall that stands as a reminder that the building you are walking into to consume culture was one where the Nazi “euthanasia” programme once stood.

For a country that is so sensitive to the violence it committed in the past, how is it that it is so immune to the violence being committed today, a similar genocidal campaign, a similar racialised acid thrown for the liquidation of Gaza? When, in 2016, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), an intergovernmental organisation, was drawing up a definition of “antisemitism”, it gave examples that ranged from obvious calls for the persecution of Jews to “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour” and “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis”. The unwillingness to distinguish anti-Semitism from anti-Zionism has seeped into the German psyche. Today, this unwillingness is being deployed across the cultural sphere, to police thought and throttle critical thinking.

It is impossible not to look at Germany’s “memory culture”, with mushrooming memorials that came out in the 1990s and early 2000s as a source of this strangely myopic posture of the present. Germany is one of the few countries in the world to take responsibility for past crimes by institutionalising it into the cityscape. It is a testament to what Friedrich Nietzsche noted a century ago about Germany’s overdeveloped sense of history.

Protests against the CAA and NRC in January 2020 at Shaheen Bagh, New Delhi. | Photo Credit: SUSHIL KUMAR VERMA

This overdeveloped sense of history has burped up a nation where guilt is made unexceptional and mundane. Sometimes, it borders on the farcical, as for instance when a theme-park Wall experience, with actors playing border guards, was discussed—and understandably dropped. But more troubling is what it does to one’s sense of history, when, as Masha Gessen noted, this culture “insure[d] that only this particular history is remembered—and only in this way”.

An inability to see that victims of a certain kind of violence could fester into becoming perpetrators of another kind of violence comes from the way these memorials and museums have calcified what it means to be an eternal victim of history—to be Jewish.

Lesson from Germany

Are there ways of thinking of history, then, that can pay homage to the horrors suffered by a specific group of people without making that suffering somehow exclusive to one group and one history? If we want to frame history as that thing from which we must yank moral lessons, let the lessons have room to include in their embrace more ideas, more identities.

In the context of India, with a historic amnesia that erases traces of things as recent as Shaheen Bagh—whitewashing all those murals—where state-sanctioned murder is allowed visibility only in academic works, and sometimes not even that, Germany provides both a path and a warning. To find ways to hold on to the violence on which we have built our society, to not let it slip our collective gaze. But also to not let that blind us into binaries, to not let it sink into ideological indolence, to not be comfortable with ideas of eternal victimhood, and so, to not make guilt feel natural, even comfortable. Because, if you are to feel guilt every day, walking down the street, to work, to a club, to a museum, the guilt is soon touched by indifference. It no longer stings; guilt is no longer guilt.

Prathyush Parasuraman is a writer and critic who writes across publications, both print and online.