The 25-year jubilee of the Memorial Museums Department of the Topography of Terror Foundation provides a good opportunity to review the development of the memorial sites that commemorate the crimes of Nazism in Germany, and to take a timely look ahead. This is all the more necessary today because many things that seemed certain have become fragile, and the memorial museums are facing major challenges. On the one hand, politicians and the public increasingly expect these museums to achieve important goals in areas like educating for democracy, promoting integration and preventing anti-Semitism. On the other hand, they are encountering political challenges and fundamental questioning of a kind that has not occurred since the reunification of Germany in 1990.
For a full review we have to go back beyond the year 1993. The Memorial Museums Department has a prehistory that dates back at least as far as the beginning of the 1980s, when a new phase of the process in Germany called “coming to terms with the past” began as part of a generational change. This concept, which was current at that time, implied that one day it would be possible to finish with the criminal legacies of Nazism, finally to “overcome” them at some future date. At the same time, interest turned towards the actual sites and the victims of Nazi crimes, breaking with the cover-up attitude that had defined the postwar decades and moving towards revelation and exposure. Examples of the rupture in consciousness from 1979 to 1984 include the shock caused by the screening of the American TV series “Holocaust” in 1979 about the persecution and fate of the Weiss family, who were Jewish, contrasted with the German perpetrators, the Dorf family; the school competitions for the prize sponsored by the Federal German president; and the emergence of history workshops. The historian Detlef Siegfried has characterised these five years as the period with the highest level of popular mobilisation in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany.
In many places, initiatives organised by youth federations and church and trade union groups began putting up commemorative signs at former Nazi prison camp sites or in similarly significant places. The documentation that emerged in such contexts, which described forgotten camps on people’s doorsteps, first reawakened people to the fact that during the war Germany was covered in a network of concentration camps and forced labour camps. At the actual sites it was important back then to overcome fierce resistance among the local population and engage in conflicts, often for years, with local community and government bodies.
As individual memorial centre initiatives began to express the wish to exchange information and coordinate their activities throughout Germany, the association Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste e.V. (Action Reconciliation Service for Peace – ARSP), which had worked with volunteers in Auschwitz and other memorial sites outside Germany assumed responsibility for this. On the weekend of 17–18 October 1981 in Hamburg, at the sidelines of the opening of the documentation centre at Neuengamme, there was an initial meeting of activists from Berlin, Dachau, the Emsland area, Essen, Moringen, Ulm, and the Wewelsburg area. The meeting came up with the idea of producing a book about the “forgotten concentration camps”,[1] about repressing the past and the resistance in society against the memorial centre work that was gradually developing. It also arranged for regular meetings in the future.
The memorial centres and their objectives increasingly drew public attention. The second meeting of the memorial centre initiatives that took place in Dachau from 21 to 23 May 1982 had already gained the support of the Federal Agency for Civic Education. The following year, the mayor of Hanover, Herbert Schmalstieg, was present to greet the participants arriving at Hanover Town Hall from all parts of West Germany – a sign of the growing importance of memorial centre work.
A crucially important moment for the networking of the memorial centres was the establishment of a central coordination post at ARSP. The first incumbent, from the beginning of 1983, was the vicar Thomas Vogel, who was succeeded in 1983 by the teacher Thomas Lutz, then aged 27. After studying history, politics and sport in Marburg, Lutz had chosen civilian service for the ARSP as an alternative to military service, and had hosted visitor groups in Auschwitz Memorial Centre. After his second state examination he set to work in the Berlin ARSP office, building up the Memorial Museums Department. He has now coordinated the cooperation between the Federal German memorial centres for over 33 years, organising conferences and advanced education programmes for them, supporting their projects and increasingly representing them abroad, in neighbouring European countries, in Israel and the USA, and worldwide.
This was all completely unforeseeable in the mid-1980s. Although there is no space here to present the varied history of the memorial centres, we shall briefly outline how the former sites of persecution were dealt with in the previous decades. By the 1950s there was hardly any continuing public interest in the numerous memorials, which had usually been created on the initiative of former victims of persecution under the auspices of the Allied military forces at locations of camps and sites of imprisonment and murder, and the memorials created in many cities to commemorate the victims of the Nazi terror regime. Remembrance from the 1950s onwards was dominated by memorials for the victims of aerial bombing, the returnees from the war and the people expelled from central and Eastern Europe. The original sites were forgotten, often because they were later used for other purposes. It is commonly known that not only the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs of the Soviet Union (NKVD) used the former Nazi concentration camps at Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen as special camps, but also that the Western allies used the former concentrations camps of Dachau, Esterwegen and Neuengamme as internment camps. To begin with, after the war the grounds of former sites of Nazi terror in the Federal Republic were often used for accommodating refugees and expellees before being converted for use as prisons, police academies and military institutions.
From 1958 to 1961 the German Democratic Republic (East Germany – GDR) established national memorial centres in Buchenwald, Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen– not least for reasons of self-legitimation as shrines of “the anti-fascist legacy”. It was only then that West Germany also created memorial centres with exhibitions at concentration camps, for example in Dachau in 1965 and in Bergen-Belsen in 1966.
The above-mentioned change that began in the early 1980s in the discussion of how to deal with the sites of Nazi crimes led during that decade to the opening of a whole series of memorial sites complete with exhibitions and accompanying educational programmes. This was further reinforced in reunified Germany in the 1990s, contradicting the initial worries of the victims’ associations both within and outside Germany that the memorial centres would now be disbanded. In the unification process the question arose of the continued maintenance of the central memorial sites that had been ideologically co-opted in the GDR. Political interest started to focus on this at the beginning of the 1990s due to media reports on the use of Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen as Soviet special camps after the war, and the discovery in the camps of the graves of prisoners who had starved to death there after 1945 under the jurisdiction of the Soviet secret service, the NKVD.
From that time on, as new concepts were developed and new memorial centres were established to commemorate the injustices of the East German regime led by the Socialist Unity Party (SED), there was growing awareness that the German nation as a whole should bear responsibility for the memorial centres that commemorated the Nazi crimes. For the first time these centres, provided they were recognised as being important for the entire nation, were co-funded by the German government. Memorial centres with exhibitions and permanent information programmes were set up in many regions and municipalities with support from federal German states. All these foundations were accompanied by strong civic participation.
At the same time, questions about the self-image of united Germany and the lessons from the experience of two different dictatorships reinforced interest in the memorial centres. The increased social consensus, the rising visitor numbers and the support from public funds led to a professionalisation of the memorial centres which were now gradually able to begin developing into museums of contemporary history and modern educational centres. In barely more than a decade they moved from the periphery into the centre of policy about history.[2]
During this period of conflicts over interpretation in relation to identity politics and the development of a memorial culture for Germany as a whole, in March 1993 the Topography of Terror Foundation took over the management of the Memorial Museums Department from the ARSP. After ten years and the strain of unifying the East and West German sections of the organisation, the ARSP could no longer cope financially with this additional task.
According to the then director of the Foundation, this decision “was linked to considerable expansion in the range of assignments of the Topography of Terror Foundation.”[3] The vacant post of a research assistant for press and public relations work was filled by Thomas Lutz. For the Memorial Museums Department, which has been reinforced over the years with a position for a specialist worker, a budget for fees and the input of volunteers from the FSJ, the voluntary social service year in the field of culture, being part of the Foundation meant a share in its scholarly expertise and a big boost to its professionalism.
The Topography of Terror is a documentation centre that provides information about the SS terror that originated at that location and spread throughout Germany and the parts of Europe occupied by the Wehrmacht. The institutionalisation of the memorial centre coordination and the related public impact clearly brought great benefits for this documentation centre. In my opinion, there can be no argument about an institution that is jointly funded by the central government and the federal state of Berlin assuming responsibility for an overlapping task that benefits all of the memorial centres and memorial museum initiatives in Germany.
The Memorial Museum Department has long been a universally recognised port of call for advice and information for memorial centres and initiatives, municipalities and the Federal states, and for the media, politics and research. The department fulfils its coordinating function very efficiently in a variety of ways. Thomas Lutz inherited a newsletter that was introduced by his predecessor in 1983 as a collection of duplicated pages. Meanwhile Lutz has developed the Memorial Centre Newsletter into a widely distributed specialist journal that is well respected beyond the memorial centres. Originally published every two months, later quarterly, the journal’s issues have been professionally designed since 1997 and provide more topical input than the specialist periodicals for historical sciences and historical education in this thematic field, most of which appear annually. At the same time the size of the issues allows scope for specialist contributions and practical information on new exhibitions and publications, events and conferences. In May 2001 the 100th edition of the Memorial Centre Newsletter appeared as a jubilee issue with highly controversial articles on specification of memorial centre locations. Now it is almost time for the 200th edition.
In 1999 the Memorial Centre Forum began as an interactive platform with a practical and topical press review, notices of events and literature, information on research projects, and contributions to discussion, although the latter are regrettably not as strong as may be desired on this platform.
The conferences organised through the Department, and often held in cooperation with other educational organisations, are a core element for exchanging experiences and for further education. The memorial centre seminars are still held today at different venues and with different approaches to various topics. Specialist conferences for specific groups and international seminars and symposia are also part of this picture.
The annual memorial centre conferences held since 2012 are mainly for the delegates who represent the FORUM of the German federal states’ working groups of memorial centres, memorial sites and initiatives, the head offices of the Federal Agency for Civic Education and the Working Group of Concentration Camp Memorials in Germany in the different federal states. Their purpose is to serve the debate about the future development of commemorative sites in the context of present-day challenges. The FORUM of the Federal States’ Working Groups presently comprises 265 memorial centres and sites of remembrance maintained by full-time staff and volunteers.[4]
The Memorial Centre Conference is consequently particularly important because in some respects it substitutes for the joint organisation of all the memorial centres for the victims of Nazism in Germany, which is still lacking today.
When the Working Group of Concentration Camp Memorials in Germany was founded twenty years ago, Thomas Lutz assumed the role of its managing director. The group covers the eight memorial centres Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Flossenbürg, Mittelbau-Dora, Neuengamme, Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen, which are jointly funded by the federal state where they are situated and by the German government. The Working Group brings together their management representatives, who have formed a close cooperative network, organise common projects on occasions, and promote exchange between working groups in the field of memorial centre archives, libraries and educational work. With its numerous initiatives and contacts in the political sphere, the Working Group is involved in developing the memorial centre landscape in Germany. In doing so, however, it does not see itself as a lobby group for its own interests but as an advocate for strengthening the smaller institutions and initiatives that are essential for the decentralised structure.
The great esteem awarded to the work of the Memorial Museum Department is shown by the fact that the German parliament, the Bundestag, stipulated in its resolution of November 2008 for continuation of the memorial centre conception that a representative of the Memorial Museum Department should be part of the expert body that gives recommendations on the suitability of projects for funding to the Federal Government commissioner for culture and the media. Above and beyond this function, Dr. Lutz occupies numerous positions in expert commissions and on advisory boards. He is also the long-serving chairman of the International Advisory Committee of the Brandenburg Memorials Foundation.
In addition, the expertise of the Memorial Museums Department is increasingly in demand internationally. Aside from lectures and expert reports or statements, this includes, for example, collaboration on competitions for the design of exhibitions, monuments and memorial centres. The Department is a co-founder of the specialist section on memorials in the International Council of Museums (Icom) and held the post of vice-president for six years at the head of the International Committee of Memorial Museums in Remembrance of the Victims of Public Crimes (IC Memo), which includes museums concerned with different crimes of regimes around the world. Since 2000 the Department has been appointed as a delegate of the German Foreign Ministry in the organisation known today as the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (Ihra), in which over 30 nations now cooperate.
For many international partners, the Memorial Museums Department of the Topography of Terror Foundation is something like an ambassador of Germany’s memorial centres. At the Department’s tenth anniversary, Wesley A. Fisher, a long-serving member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC acknowledged his appreciation by saying that in the quest for a key contact partner only the Memorial Museums Department had fulfilled the qualifications for a central professional organisation for Holocaust matters in Germany.[5] This was the American view. It reveals another advantage of the allocation of the Memorial Museums Department to the Topography of Terror Foundation: it demonstrated in an international context that after the dominance of the Holocaust, the Shoah, the other mass crimes committed by the Nazis should not be marginalised.
The catalogue of activities underlines the key importance of networked coordination, particularly in Germany with its highly differentiated and valuable decentralised structure of educational sites that are usually located directly at the historical sites of the Nazi crimes. Unlike in other countries such as the USA, Israel, Poland and France, there is no central national institution in Germany that prescribes the narrative of remembrance and the historical picture.
In Germany a largely pluralistic and cosmopolitan society has evolved through civic commitment, the unification process, immigration and international networks. In particular, the self-critical approach to the Nazi past testifies to a mature democratic fabric and a new kind of sincerity. As the then president of Germany, Joachim Gauck, said in a speech on 27 January 2015, “there is no German identity without Auschwitz.”[6] There is no doubt that acknowledging the guilt of Nazi Germany has become an established part of Germany’s self-conception, because it is the only way the nation can live self-confidently with its historical crimes from its own perspective and on the world stage. The former Bundestag president Norbert Lammert summed this up in a speech in 2013: “This memorial culture is an indispensable precondition for re-establishing Germany’s reputation in the world. It is a condition for a defeated, politically lost and morally discredited nation … to be able to walk tall again.”[7]
Given the increasingly urgent challenges facing us today, there is a need to reinforce the memorial centre network that has now developed, not least as a result of the German government’s concept for memorial centres. The guidelines it developed in the 1990s, with their emphasis on the shared responsibility of central government, the different federal states and local authorities, on scholarly expertise and on defining the relationship between the Nazi genocide and the crimes of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), together with the creation of international advisory committees for the victims, support the decentralisation and independence of the memorial centres.
The development of memorial centres in the years following the reunification of Germany seems like a success story. Meanwhile more than 300 memorial centres in all the big cities and almost everywhere across the country provide information about the crimes of the Nazi regime. The number of visitors to memorial centres is growing, and has reached over five million annually. Nonetheless, the memorial centres are facing difficult times.
It is precisely the real or presumed success in relation to Germany’s troubled historical legacy that has fostered the conclusion that everything has been done in this area that needed to be done. Regardless of concrete problems such as the physical preservation of buildings, the memorial centres for the victims of Nazism are seen as being at saturation point, and the history as thoroughly researched. It is thanks only to parliamentary criticism of the cancellation of group visits due to resource shortfalls for visitor facilities that funds were finally increased for educational work in the memorial centres in the last two years.
Nowadays there are scarcely any remaining witnesses who can describe the Nazi crimes from their own personal experience. This increases the responsibility of the memorial centres as visible testimonies for preserving the memory of the injustices committed in the Nazi era. Just because the survivors will fall silent, the memorial centres should not become silent edifices reserved for remembrance only on particular occasions. In fact, they should remain exceptionable, they should encourage people to speak out rather than keep silent, and they should raise important questions.
Other major challenges include: the growing distance in time since the Nazi period the fading out of the generation that examined the Nazi crimes in a way that was often motivated by a sense of shame about their parents’ silence, and its replacement by more uninhibited, less biographically influenced approaches the rapidly changing possibilities of access to audiences – not just young people – in the digital world the challenges of an increasingly multi-ethnic society with different background experiences and refugee narratives that are not influenced by the events of the Second World War the growth of anti-Semitism emanating from the midst of society as well as through refugees who flee to Germany from civil war and persecution, many of whom have grown up in surroundings characterised by hatred of Israel and the Jews.
In this situation the memorial centres are being confronted with the expectation of making greater contributions to integration and stabilising the culture of democratic values.
In relation to the expectations placed on memorial centres, I would like to take this opportunity briefly to discuss the issue of compulsory school visits to concentration camp memorials. In my opinion this is a pseudo-debate because visits by school classes as part of the appropriate curricula are naturally desirable and educationally necessary. However, relevant recommendations for excursions outside school that are embedded in the teaching already exist in the timetables and curricula in many federal states in Germany. It makes sense educationally, of course, not to run crash courses but to organise project days with qualified guidance in which school students are not just lectured on guided tours but offered an integrated approach, wherever possible incorporating interactive elements, participation with the students doing their own enquiries in tasks designed for their particular interests, and above all, discussion phases. It is obviously necessary to create the preconditions for this both in the school context and in the memorial centres. Today, many memorial centres, especially the ones with large visitor numbers, are already unable meet the present demand. To give just one example: at Neuengamme concentration camp memorial we offer a variety of programmes depending on age, type of school or training scheme, and languages, to over 2,000 accompanied groups annually. We have now reached the limits of our present staff capacity. We simply lack the resources to do more.
The pedagogical criticism voiced in the debate, including from memorial centre circles, concentrated on the fixed idea of compulsory visits that are credited with achieving a near-cathartic effect by showing the Nazi crimes clearly and vividly. Particularly because school by its very nature has the character of a duty, there is no point in forcing anyone. We can see this from the experience of the GDR, where prescribed anti-fascism actually had the opposite effect. When school students and teachers have the impression that a certain attitude is required of them, they close up and develop internal resistance. Yet for learning experiences and emotional accessibility we need students with open minds and hearts who are not afraid to ask questions of anyone.
Changes in the political field of reference that always have a bearing on the work in the memorial centres are also conditioned by the increasingly threatening situations in recent years, military conflicts and global crises that affect us directly in the form of social distortions or terrorist threats. In periods when autocrats propagate the self-interest of nation states and isolation and rearmament in both domestic and foreign affairs, many people ask themselves whether the social roots of democratic achievements, the institutional safety mechanisms of the constitutional state and the international blueprint for lasting peace are strong enough. The memorial centres are increasingly hearing from survivors of Nazi terror, who are now very old, and their relatives, asking how far the lessons from the historical experience of Nazism can apply now.
The past decades have seen a difficult process of establishing memorial culture across Germany on a firm basis and gaining social understanding for this. Today, in a situation of growing uncertainty, these achievements are being fundamentally challenged by the growth and strengthening of right-wing populism. Once again we are hearing declarations that “we no longer have to be reproached for those twelve years”, and there are public calls for “an about-turn in memorial policy”. The speech of Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker on 8 May 1985 on the liberation from Nazism is stigmatised as “a speech against his own nation” and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is lambasted as a “symbol of shame”. These were not momentary lapses. They were intentional moves to prepare the way for a new type of nationalism and the return of denial, deliberate offsetting and relativisation. We must continually be prepared for attacks on memorial culture that will assume a new character. In fact, this concerns the issue of national identity and our country’s conception of itself.
Conflicts about the political interpretation of history have their impact on the memorial centres which became part of the state’s political philosophy in the newly formed Federal Republic of Germany after the country’s reunification following the two different experiences of dictatorship. Now the memorial centres are no longer so sure of themselves, either. The critique of rituals of remembrance expressed in research circles as “uneasiness about memorial culture”[8] and the affirmation that has come to replace the earlier offensive attitude in the memorial centres is currently being voiced from a different side and motivated by completely different reasons. The memorial centres are discovering how far their success mobilises opposing forces and how relevant the discussion about the past still is, and that, contrary to some assessments published in recent years, it is still a matter of “hot history”.
There is no question that right wing extremists have always hated the memorial centres which bear witness to the crimes of the Nazis, and therefore to German crimes. As far back as thirty years ago, the nationalist German journalist Armin Mohler specifically mentioned overcoming “the fuss about coming to terms with the past” as a precondition for a liberated sense of national self-confidence. This demand was clearly formulated in 1985 in the “Deutschen Monatsheften” (“German Monthly Bulletins”) published by a far right organisation, the “Deutschen Kulturwerk Europäischen Geistes” (“German Cultural Factory of the European Spirit”): “The road to self-liberation of the Germans runs over the rubble of the concentration camp memorial centres.” Liberation from what they call “the guilt cult” in order to pave the way for a new type of nationalism was, and still is, a key concern of not a few masterminds of the New Right. There are grounds for fearing that, from now on, this kind of thinking will be vociferously advocated in parliament and will probably also be expressed in broadcasting councils or supervisory bodies of centres for political education, and maybe even in memorial centres. Now it will depend on how strong the opposition and resistance in our society proves to be. As yet there is still broad and gratifying political unanimity among all democratic forces and parties in this country to confront the demon in a decisive way.
Right-wing extremism is undoubtedly the biggest challenge we are facing today, in Germany as well as in many other countries where large sections of the population are economically insecure and feel anxious, which makes them receptive to rabble-rousing against alleged culprits. The problem involves not only the populist right wing parties but also the dangers of erosion in the middle of society. We could say that political weight has shifted across the whole spectrum. What we need here is a clear bulwark against ideology that is hostile to human rights. The challenges of the significant rise in right-wing extremism confront the memorial centres for commemoration of Nazi crimes with a substantial task. They now have to prove themselves and contribute to strengthening democratic counter-forces and demystifying the new prophets of doom.
Under the influence of changing social challenges, rising visitor numbers and expanding tasks, last year the Working Group of Concentration Camp Memorials and the FORUM of Working Groups in the Federal German states addressed a joint declaration to the public and to politicians.[9] They demanded greater efforts for researching into and analysing the past and for the work of communication, and an end to the imbalances in this field. The following points should be prioritised in the further development of the German government’s memorial centre conception: support for innovative pedagogical projects, especially the development of integrative formats for migrants, ways of financially supporting individual projects and smaller memorial centres for the field of work on Nazi history along the lines of existing government budget allocations for the Federal Foundation for the Reappraisal of the SED Dictatorship, preservation of old buildings and remains that are under acute threat of collapse in the former concentration camps and at comparable sites, securing and cataloguing of collections and archives to safeguard knowledge transfer for the next generation.
Given the particular need for networking among the decentralised memorial scene in Germany, the permanent security and significant reinforcement of the Memorial Museums Department is a core feature of this declaration. Especially with regard to the generation change that is due here in the coming period, a structure is urgently required to save the accumulated knowledge and experience of the past decades. As early as the tenth anniversary, Reinhard Rürup pointed out the indispensability of the Department for the work of memorial centres in Germany.[10] On that occasion, in 2003, Knut Nevermann, who was then head of the office of the minister of state for culture and the media, declared that the Memorial Museums Department would have to be expanded on a long-term basis but that “through the Department’s efficiency and the collegial contact between memorial centres” a professional level had already been reached that was unmatched elsewhere in the world. He added, “It would be absurd to cast doubt on a structure that is so meaningful and productive.”[11]
Although I assume there can be no possible threat to the continuation of such a successful project, the planned expansion – and the fifteen years that have elapsed since then should have been time enough for it – has largely failed to occur. The Topography of Terror has had no scope for this within the framework of its budget.
In this light, we sincerely hope that in Thomas Lutz’s remaining years in office the basis will be laid for increased resources for this indispensable mission to tackle the growing demands on it. Perhaps then our colleague Thomas Lutz will be able to realise a project that he mentioned in an interview when he was asked about his great professional dream: “To have enough time one day to write a record of the development of the research and communication of the history of the Nazi period in memorial centres.”[12]
Dr. Detlef Garbe is the director of Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial and spokesman for the Working Group of Concentration Camp Memorial Museums in Germany.
[1] The book appeared a year later: Detlef Garbe, ed. Die vergessenen KZs? Gedenkstätten für die Opfer des NS-Terrors in der Bundesrepublik. Bornheim-Merten 1983.
[2] See Detlef Garbe. “Von der Peripherie in das Zentrum der Geschichtskultur. Tendenzen der Gedenkstättenentwicklung.” In Bernd Faulenbach and Franz-Josef Jelich, eds. “Asymmetrisch verflochtene Parallelgeschichte?” Die Geschichte der Bundesrepublik und der DDR in Ausstellungen, Museen und Gedenkstätten. Essen 2005, p. 59–84.
[3] Netzwerk der Erinnerung. 10 Jahre Memorial Museums Department der Stiftung Topographie des Terrors. A publication of the Stiftung Topographie des Terrors, Berlin, edited by Reinhard Rürup. Berlin 2003, p. 8.
[4] See Thomas Lutz with Marie Schulze. “Gedenkstätten für die Opfer nationalsozialistischer Gewalt in Deutschland.” In Gedenkstättenrundbrief Nr. 187 (9/2017: 3–17.
[5] Cited from: Netzwerk der Erinnerung (see Note 3), p. 47.
[6] Speech by German President Joachim Gauck on Holocaust Memorial Day, 27 January 2015, https://www.bundestag.de/dokumente/textarchiv/2015/kw05_gedenkstunde/357044 (accessed on 8. 2. 2018).
[7] Speech of the President of the German Bundestag, Prof. Norbert Lammert, in “Gedenkstunde der Hamburgischen Bürgerschaft zur Erinnerung an das gewaltsame Ende der ersten parlamentarischen Demokratie in Deutschland im März 1933 und an die Opfer des Nationalsozialismus im Plenarsaal des Hamburger Rathauses” on 11 April 2013. Published by Bürgerschaft der Freien und Hansestadt Hamburg, Hamburg 2013, p. 14–33, esp. p. 31.
[8] See Aleida Assmann, Das neue Unbehagen an der Erinnerungskultur. Eine Intervention. Munich 2013.
[9] Arbeitsgemeinschaft der KZ-Gedenkstätten/FORUM der Landesarbeitsgemeinschaften in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland der Gedenkstätten, Erinnerungsorte und -initiativen in Deutschland, Erklärung “Erinnerungskultur und historisch-politische Bildung stärken – Gedenkstätten an den Orten des NS‑Terrors fordern größere Anstrengungen für Aufarbeitung und Vermittlung und ein Ende der Ungleichgewichte”, Berlin, 5 May 2017
[10] Netzwerk der Erinnerung (see Note 3), p. 9.
[11] Cited from ibid. p. 47.
[12] Cited from ibid. p. 19.