Kategorie: TeacMem

This arti­cle is a fol­low-up to the dis­cus­sion on Stéphane Lévesques mod­el of his­tor­i­cal com­pe­ten­cies as pre­sent­ed in Pub­lic His­to­ry Week­ly, a few days ago, titled “Remov­ing the ‘Past’: Debates Over Offi­cial Sites of Mem­o­ry“¹ and my first extend­ed com­ment on this pub­lished here on this blog.

A crosstab­u­la­tion of com­pe­ten­cies and patterns/logic of sense­mak­ing as sug­gest­ed by Stéphane Lévesque² is indeed use­ful for “read­ing” indi­vid­ual mon­u­ments and mak­ing sense of their “mes­sage”, also. Lévesque’s fill­ing of the table is a bit abstract, gen­er­al for this, so the fol­low­ing would in part be my own understanding.

It also is based on Rüsen’s notion that while the dif­fer­ent pat­terns were devel­oped sequen­tial­ly over time, to “old­er” ones are not lost, but still avail­able and indeed vis­i­ble in mod­ern day think­ing, in fact most of the time in com­bi­na­tions. What char­ac­ter­izes mod­ern-time his­tor­i­cal think­ing, then, is the pres­ence and dom­i­nance of “genet­ic” think­ing, while pre-mod­ern thought would not have this type at its dis­pos­al at all. But then, our exam­ples here are all “mod­ern”, so that it may be a ques­tion of dom­i­nance and rel­a­tive weight.

Take a mon­u­ment for a civ­il war general:

• A spec­ta­tor today may read it as a reminder to the ori­gin of the cur­rent state of affairs, pos­si­bly the “los­ing of the cause” (e.g. both the hon­oured gen­er­al and the spec­ta­tor being southen­ers) or to the lib­er­a­tion of the slaves (both northen­ers). In both cas­es, the mon­u­ment would be seen as point­ing to an ori­gin of what is seen as valid today (the very def­i­n­i­tion of Rüsen’s “tra­di­tion­al” type). This might explain why peo­ple adher­ing to the north­ern nar­ra­tive would oppose to south­ern mon­u­ments, and vice ver­sa, not believe­ing their sto­ry in the first place — and maybe fear­ing that keep­ing the mon­u­ments would sig­ni­fy that their ver­sion was to be seen as valid.
• In an exem­plar­ic mode, how­ev­er, both may accept the “oth­er side’s” mon­u­ments, because what they point at would not be seen as the ori­gin of affairs, but rather a gen­er­al rule, e.g. hon­our­ing peo­ple “brave­ly fight­ing for their respec­tive (!) cause”. The log­ic would be that each soci­ety would hon­or “their heroes”, who do not so much stand for the spe­cif­ic cause but for a gen­er­al rule. What hap­pens on the ground in Get­tys­burg, e.g., is some­thing along this line: “Tra­di­tion­al” com­mem­o­rat­ing attracts most peo­ple going there, but an exem­plary “cov­er-nar­ra­tive” allows for com­mon remembrance.

Con­sid­er an exam­ple from Ham­burg, where I work³: On our “Rathaus­markt”, there is a mon­u­ment, hon­our­ing Hamburg’s dead from WW1. When it was erect­ed in 1932, it looked as it does today. The inscrip­tion on one side reads “FOURTY THOUSAND SONS OF TOWN LEFT/LOST THEIR LIVES FOR YOU” (in Ger­man: “Vierzig Tausend Söhne der Stadt ließen ihr Leben für Euch”) while the oth­er side shows relief by Ernst Bar­lach depict­ing a woman (moth­er) and child (daugh­ter) appar­ent­ly com­fort­ing each oth­er in mourn­ing (and there­fore some­what rem­i­nis­cent of a pietà).

In 1938, the relief was exchanged for a “phoenix” fly­ing up.⁴ 

In 1938, under Nazi rule, the relief was exchanged for a „phoenix“. Did it change the nar­ra­tive and com­mem­o­ra­tive eval­u­a­tion of the loss of the 40000 Ham­bur­gians? To my view, it most cer­tain­ly did.

The addi­tion of the last part “FOR YOU” to the inscrip­tion already before the ini­tial instal­la­tion of the mon­u­ment was a con­ces­sion to the right par­ties, chang­ing (in Rüsen‘s terms) a more tra­di­tion­al mes­sage into a more exem­plary one:

While the com­bi­na­tion of the ini­tial word­ing with­out the addi­tion „FOR YOU“ and the moth­er-child-relief fit into a devel­op­ment of mon­u­ment cul­ture devel­oped in WW1 which has been iden­ti­fied in ret­ro­spect, name­ly mon­u­ments which which do no longer pro­vide an author­i­ta­tive sug­ges­tion of the mean­ing of the protagonist‘s death, but rather ques­tion this mean­ing.⁵ It did so because it expressed the con­tin­u­ous loss, refer­ring to the dead sol­diers rather as vic­tims of a greater con­text of war, to be mourned, by point­ing to their their death and loss as the rather trag­ic ori­gins of the com­mon grief.

Adding „FOR YOU“ to the inscrip­tion did not ful­ly erad­i­cate this neg­a­tive-tra­di­tion­al nar­ra­tive pat­tern, but added an addi­tion­al lay­er of dif­fer­ent nar­ra­tive and eval­u­a­tive char­ac­ter both to the deaths, which are ascribed a pur­pose, and to the con­cep­tu­al fram­ing of the dead, which are no longer only vic­tims but also (self-)sacrifices for a com­mon good. Inter­est­ing­ly, both con­cepts, that of vic­tim and that of sac­ri­fice, are present in the Ger­man term „Opfer“ explic­it­ly used, but allud­ed to, here.

The exchange of the mourn­ing moth­er/child-relief by a „phoenix“ in 1938, then, erad­i­cat­ed the thin lay­er of ques­tion­ing the pur­pose and mean­ing of the loss, the notion of „vic­tims“ and ren­dered the 40,000 Fathers, Broth­ers and „Sons of Town“ heroes – not only self-sac­ri­fices for the well­be­ing of their respec­tive fam­i­lies, but role-mod­els to be cel­e­brat­ed and emu­lat­ed.⁶ In 1948, then, the lost Bar­lach-relief, was restored, alas not by Bar­lach him­self, who had mean­while died.

I do have a hard time con­struct­ing a genet­ic under­stand­ing of such a mon­u­ment, maybe because a mod­ern, genet­ic way of think­ing needs to have been informed by the “crit­i­cal” mode of at least part­ly de-legit­imiz­ing the ori­en­tat­ing pow­er of tra­di­tion­al and exem­plar­ic thinking.

Maybe this is the back­ground for mod­ern mon­u­ments being quite dif­fer­ent, either often non-fig­u­ra­tive — as Peter Eisenman’s Memo­r­i­al to the Mur­dered Jews in Berlin, or many works by Jochen Gerz⁷ — or tak­ing on forms of counter-memo­ri­al­iza­tion⁸, thus set­ting in motion a kind of change, not just re-present-ing a past, but encour­ag­ing or even enforc­ing crit­i­cal reflec­tion on it.

It is eas­i­er for the Ham­burg mon­u­ment: Genet­ic think­ing would ques­tion whether not only this hero­ify­ing way of com­mem­o­rat­ing heroes (even if not indi­vid­ual), but also the con­crete form of pub­lic acknowl­edg­ing of trag­ic loss can be time­ly, after we expe­ri­enced anoth­er war and an inhu­man dic­ta­tor­ship and geno­cide which was not least based on feel­ings insti­gat­ed by such com­mem­o­rat­ing.⁹

But there is some­thing more to reflect­ing about nar­ra­tives — and espe­cial­ly on how to relate to them. As I wrote above, Memo­ri­als are nar­ra­tives. Rüsen calls them “nar­ra­tive abbre­vi­a­tions”, point­ing to them stand­ing for a spe­cif­ic nar­ra­tive, i.e. a spe­cif­ic rela­tion between a past (under mem­o­ry), the present (of the authors and erec­tors of the mon­u­ment as well as the intend­ed pub­lic), and with regard to a spe­cif­ic future, con­struct­ed only part­ly in ver­bal nar­ra­tive form, but also with non-ver­bal and sequen­tial­ly nar­ra­tive ele­ments (even though in some cas­es it is only the ver­bal inscrip­tions which real­ly hint to any his­tor­i­cal meaning).

Memo­ri­als are more than only pro­to-nar­ra­tives. Their (often) promi­nent (albeit also often over­looked) posi­tion­ing, their (proto-)narrative struc­ture and their own qual­i­ty for last­ing a long time (cf. “mon­u­men­tum exe­gi aere peren­nius), they do not only con­sti­tute a nar­ra­tive rela­tion from one tem­po­ral and social posi­tion towrds the past and the future, but also are meant to pro­long the sense they make and to impose it on lat­er gen­er­a­tions. Mon­u­ments are about oblig­at­ing their audi­ence, the spec­ta­tors with a cer­tain nar­ra­tive and inter­pre­ta­tion. That qual­i­fies them as parts of what we call “pol­i­tics of his­to­ry”, not only of com­mem­o­ra­tion, and what makes them political.

It there­fore is para­mount to read mon­u­ments as nar­ra­tives, and not only in the de-con­struc­tive sense of “what did those erec­tors make of that past back then”, but also in the re-conc­truc­tive sense of “in how far or how does this nar­ra­tive fit into my/our rela­tion to that past). In oth­er words: Stand­ing before a mon­u­ment and think­ing about mon­u­ments, we all need to (and in fact do) think in a com­bi­na­tion of under­stand­ing the oth­ers’ and delib­er­at­ing our own nar­ra­tive mean­ing-mak­ing.
There­fore we need to read them as nar­ra­tives first, and become com­pe­tent for it.

Mon­u­ments often take on the form of address­ing peo­ple. Some­times — as in the Ham­burg case above — they address the spec­ta­tor, remind­ing them of some kind of oblig­a­tion to com­mem­o­rate.¹⁰ But who is talk­ing to whom? If the sen­ate of Ham­burg talkes to that to the Ham­burg cit­i­zens of 1930–1932, can/will we accept that (a) the Ham­burg Sen­ate of today still admon­ish­es us like that, and b) that we Ham­burg cit­i­zens of today are still addressed in the same way?

In oth­er cas­es, (inscrip­tions in) memo­ri­als might explic­it­ly address the com­mem­o­rat­ed them­selves, as e.g. in the con­fed­er­ate mon­u­ment in Yanceyville, N.C., whose plaque reads “To the Sons of Caswell Coun­ty who served in the War of 1861–1865 in answer to the Call of their Coun­ty”, and con­tin­ues in a “We-Voice”, signed by the Caswell Chap­ter of the Unit­ed Daugh­ters of the Con­fed­er­a­cy”. So far so con­ven­tion­al. This might be rather unprob­lem­at­ic, since speak­er-posi­tion and addressees are clear­ly marked. One might leave the mon­u­ment even if one dis­agreed, not hav­ing to align with its nar­ra­tive. Only if the pres­ence of such com­mem­o­rat­ing in itself is inac­cept­able, action is imme­di­ate­ly called for.

But there are oth­er mon­u­ments which seem to talk from a neu­tral posi­tion, which in fact is that of the erec­tors, but by not being qual­i­fied, includes the spec­ta­tor into the speak­er posi­tion. The exam­ple I have ready at hand, is not from the US and not about war heroes, but again from Ham­burg, this time from Neuengamme con­cen­tra­tion camp memo­r­i­al. In 1965, an “inter­na­tion­al mon­u­ment” stele¹¹ was erect­ed there, togeth­er with a whole series of coun­try-spe­cif­ic memo­r­i­al plates. The inscrip­tion on the mon­u­ment reads “Your suf­fer­ing, your fight­ing and your death shall not be in vain” (my trans­la­tion).
This now clear­ly is inter­est­ing in at least two respects: (1) it ascribes not only suf­fer­ing and death, but also fight­ing to those com­mem­o­rat­ed and there­by pos­si­bly does not refer to those inmates who nev­er had a chance or did not “fight”, who were pure vic­tims, and (2) it speaks from a neu­tral voice which is not marked in time and social, polit­i­cal or event-relat­ed posi­tion. Who­ev­er mourns at that place pos­si­bly silent­ly co-signs the statement.

Con­sid­er an equal hon­our­ing of con­fed­er­ate gen­er­als in, say NC: “Your fight­ing shall not have been in vain.” I would spark much more con­tro­ver­sy and con­cers — and right­ly so.

Still anoth­er exam­ple, the first Ham­burg mon­u­ment for the vic­tims of Nation­al Social­ism (from late 1945) on the Cen­tral Ceme­try in Ham­burg-Ohls­dorf, has an inscrip­tion “Injus­tice brought Us Death — Liv­ing: Rec­og­nize your Obligation”.

Again, for ana­lyz­ing and under­stand­ing, we need to rec­og­nize. The speak­er posi­tion here, is clear­ly (metaphor­i­call) held by the vic­tims to be com­mem­o­rat­ed. But whom do they speak to? Lit­er­al­ly, it is the “liv­ing”. In a very broad under­stand­ing, the monument/memorial there­fore address­es all humans, quite in a way what Rüsen has addressed as the high­est lev­el of nor­ma­tive plau­si­bil­i­ty: broad­en­ing the per­spec­tive to the lev­el of human­i­ty.
This is not very prob­lem­at­ic, since the inscrip­tion does talk of “duty”, not of “guilt”, it does not con­flate the addressees with those who inflict­ed the injus­tice upon the vic­tims. But it could have done. In 1945, the mes­sage would be clear­ly not mere­ly uni­ver­sal­ly human­is­tic, but at least also address­ing the Ger­mans as the soci­ety of the per­pe­tra­tors. It does not con­demn, but calls for rec­og­niz­ing the “duty” and respon­si­bil­i­ty for com­mem­o­rat­ing and non-repeat­ing as well as over­com­ing the struc­tures of NS injus­tice, hint­ing at respon­si­bil­i­ty for not pre­vent­ing them or even par­tic­i­pat­ing in them in the first place.

And today? In how far is the mes­sage the same for today’s soci­ety in Ger­many? The peo­ple liv­ing in Ger­many today do — apart from very few excep­tions — not share any per­son­al guilt or respon­si­bil­i­ty for what hap­pened. In how far can or should they see them­selves addressed?

Again, there is no ques­tion as to the very gen­er­al, human­i­ty-relat­ed address. This is direct­ed at any audi­ence. But would that mean that there is no dif­fer­ence between any oth­er vis­i­tor to the memo­r­i­al and Ger­mans? Has the Nazi injus­tice (and sim­i­lar­ly the Holo­caust) become a mat­ter of gen­er­al, uni­ver­sal his­to­ry only? Is there no spe­cial belong­ing to and mes­sage for Ger­man his­to­ry? All these ques­tions can and need to be addressed — and espe­cial­ly so, since a con­sid­er­able part of Ger­man soci­ety con­sists not only of peo­ple born and raised (long) after the “Third Reich”, but also of many who immi­grat­ed from oth­er coun­tries, soci­eties and cul­tures mean­while. Are they sim­ply count­ed into the per­pe­tra­tors’ soci­ety? — no, I think; but as peo­ple liv­ing in Ger­many, they also are adressed in a more spe­cif­ic way than any oth­er vis­i­tor — and they are expect­ed to feel addressed, also. While there may be (and often indeed is) not spe­cif­ic respon­si­bil­i­ty for what these memo­ri­als and mon­u­ments refer to, there sure­ly is a spe­cif­ic respon­si­bil­i­ty from or out of this his­to­ry — and these mon­u­ments there­fore serve not only as gen­er­al mark­ers to a set past, but also as marks which have spe­cif­ic mes­sages and dif­fer­ent (but com­pat­i­ble) ones for dif­fer­ent recip­i­ents. This is what also is a part of what is need­ed to be reflect­ed and dis­cussed with regard to mon­u­ments in pub­lic his­to­ry cul­ture and what his­to­ry edu­ca­tion needs to enable learn­ers to par­take in.

In order to make up our minds on mon­u­ments we have “inher­it­ed” not only in polit­i­cal terms, we need to reflect their spe­cif­ic nar­ra­tive mes­sage in a spec­trum of time-rela­tions. And we need to dif­fer­en­ti­ate our ter­mi­nol­o­gy and enable our stu­dents to mas­ter a set of con­cepts relat­ed. We need, e.g., to dis­tin­guish hon­or­ing forms of com­mem­o­ra­tion from remind­ing and admon­ish­ing ones.

In Ger­many we have (not easliy) devel­oped the notion of “Mah­n­mal”, admon­ish­ing, to be dis­tin­guished from a mere “Denkmal” (lit­er­al­ly a “think­ing mark”). But even this dis­tinc­tion is insuf­fi­cient. A Mah­n­mal (in fact the lit­er­al trans­la­tion to “mon­u­ment”, from Latin “admonere”) may admon­ish to remem­ber our own suf­fer­ing inflict­ed on us by our­selves, some trag­ic or by oth­ers, but also may admon­ish to not for­get what we inflict­ed on oth­ers. This is the spe­cif­ic form “neg­a­tive mem­o­ry” of Ger­man memo­r­i­al culture.

There­fore, there’s a lot more to be reflect­ed in commemorating:

• Who “talks”? who authors the nar­ra­tive — and is what capac­i­ty (e.g. in lieuf of “the peo­ple”, of a cer­tain group, …)?
• whom does the mon­u­ment explic­i­ty address?
• what is the rela­tion of explic­it addressees and fac­tu­al spectators?
• in how far is the mes­sage the same for us today as it was envi­sioned back then — and pos­si­bly real­ized? is it the same for all of us?
• what kind of mes­sage is perceived?

(cf. Kör­ber 2014)

Ref­er­ences:

• Has­berg, Wolf­gang (2012): Ana­lytis­che Wege zu besserem Geschicht­sun­ter­richt. His­torisches Denken im Hand­lungszusam­men­hang Geschicht­sun­ter­richt. In: Mey­er-Hamme, Johannes / Thüne­mann, Hol­ger / Züls­dorf-Ker­st­ing, Meik (Hrsg.): Was heißt guter Geschicht­sun­ter­richt? Per­spek­tiv­en im Ver­gle­ich. Schwalbach/Ts. / Wochen­schau, S. 137–160, p. 140.
• Klin­gel, Ker­stin (2006): Eichenkranz und Dor­nenkro­ne. Kriegerdenkmäler in Ham­burg. Ham­burg: Lan­deszen­trale für Poli­tis­che Bildung.
• Kör­ber, Andreas (2014): De-Con­struct­ing Mem­o­ry Cul­ture. In: Teach­ing his­tor­i­cal mem­o­ries in an inter­cul­tur­al per­spec­tive. Con­cepts and meth­ods : expe­ri­ences and results from the TeacMem project. Hrsg. von Helle Bjerg, Andreas Kör­ber, Clau­dia Lenz u. Oliv­er von Wrochem. Berlin 2014, 145–151.
• Kör­ber, Andreas (2016): Sinnbil­dungstypen als Graduierun­gen? Ver­such ein­er Klärung am Beispiel der His­torischen Fragekom­pe­tenz. In: Kat­ja Lehmann, Michael Wern­er und Ste­fanie Zabold (Hg.): His­torisches Denken jet­zt und in Zukun­ft. Wege zu einem the­o­retisch fundierten und evi­denzbasierten Umgang mit Geschichte. Festschrift für Wal­traud Schreiber zum 60. Geburt­stag. Berlin, Mün­ster: Lit Ver­lag (Geschichts­di­dak­tik in Ver­gan­gen­heit und Gegen­wart, 10), S. 27–41.
• Rüsen, Jörn (2017): Evi­dence and Mean­ing. A The­o­ry of His­tor­i­cal Stud­ies. Unter Mitar­beit von Diane Kerns und Katie Digan. New York, NY: Berghahn Books Incor­po­rat­ed (Mak­ing Sense of His­to­ry Ser, v.28).

1.   Lévesque, Stéphane: Remov­ing the “Past”: Debates Over Offi­cial Sites of Mem­o­ry. In: Pub­lic His­to­ry Week­ly 6 (2018) 29, DOI: dx.doi.org/10.1515/phw-2018–12570. There also is a Ger­man and a French ver­sion. [↩]
2. Anoth­er such crosstab­u­la­tion has been sug­gest­ed (in Ger­man) by Wolf­gang Has­berg (Ana­lytis­che Wege zu besserem Geschicht­sun­ter­richt. His­torisches Denken im Hand­lungszusam­men­hang Geschicht­sun­ter­richt. In: Mey­er-Hamme, Johannes / Thüne­mann, Hol­ger / Züls­dorf-Ker­st­ing, Meik (Hrsg.): Was heißt guter Geschicht­sun­ter­richt? Per­spek­tiv­en im Ver­gle­ich. Schwalbach/Ts. / Wochen­schau, S. 137–160, p. 140). For my cri­tique see Kör­ber 2016 (in Ger­man). I also pro­vid­ed a table, includ­ing the dif­fer­ent niveaus, but restrict­ed to “Fragekom­pe­tenz” (sim­i­lar to Lévesque’s “inquiry com­pe­tence”). [↩]
3. I used this also in a twit­ter-dis­cus­sion with Kim Wag­n­er (@KimAtiWagner) recent­ly. [↩]
4. For more pic­tures and infor­ma­tion see also https://www.denk-mal-gegen-krieg.de/kriegerdenkmaeler/hamburg-lo-os/. [↩]
5. On this type of mon­u­ments cf. Kosel­leck, Rein­hart (1994): Ein­leitung. In: Rein­hart Kosel­leck und Michael Jeis­mann (Hg.): Der poli­tis­che Totenkult. Kriegerdenkmäler in der Mod­erne. München: Fink (Bild und Text), S. 9–20, here p. 18f. [↩]
6. Accord­ing to Klin­gel, Ker­stin (2006): Eichenkranz und Dor­nenkro­ne. Kriegerdenkmäler in Ham­burg. Ham­burg: Lan­deszen­trale für Poli­tis­che Bil­dung, p.71, the mourn­ing-relief ini­tial­ly was to be replaced by “war sym­bols” but all sktech­es hand­ed in by artists (includ­ing a wrath with swords by Ruwoldt) were reject­ed, so that he was com­mis­sioned to cre­ate an eagle, which he did, but in a way which far more resem­bled a dove than an eagle. In how far this can be inter­pret­ed as a sub­ver­sive rejec­tion of the new mar­tial char­ac­ter and even be eval­u­at­ed as an act of defi­ance, is high­ly ques­tion­able, since the sym­bol­ism of the dove as the uni­ver­sial sym­bol for peace was cre­at­ed by Picas­so only after World­War II. [↩]
7. Cf. e.g. his “Invis­i­ble Mon­u­ment” in Sar­brück­en: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platz_des_Unsichtbaren_Mahnmals. [↩]
8. Cf. a.o. Wijsen­beek, Dinah: Denkmal und Gegen­denkmal. Über den kri­tis­chen Umgang mit der Ver­gan­gen­heit auf dem Gebi­et der bilden­den Kun­st. München 2010. [↩]
9. There’s a lot more to be reflect­ed in com­mem­o­rat­ing: Who talks to whom, here? What do they say and expect? Who is the “you”? Is it ” us” — still today? And if so: in how far is the mes­sage the same for all of us, those with Ham­burg ances­tors of the time, and those with­out, maybe immi­grants? In how far can this aspect define our atti­tude? Can we force all recent immi­grants into our own “nation­al” nar­ra­tive (and even more so when it is not WW1, but Holo­caust relat­ed)? But then, how can we not? (cf. also Kör­ber 2014, and see below. [↩]
10. My moth­er used to explain the Ger­man word “Denkmal”, lit­er­al­ly refer­rring to a “mark(er)” for ini­ti­at­ing think­ing, as an imper­a­tive: “Denk mal!”, refer­ring to the oth­er mean­ing of the word “mal” as “for once”, result­ing in “do think for once!” [↩]
11. Cf. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/15/Neuengamme_memorial.jpg/800px-Neuengamme_memorial.jpg, (pho­to by Hao Liu in the pub­lic domain) [↩]