German Studies Review

At the time of writing, in January 2018, Germans are debating whether it ought to be mandatory for secondary school students to visit a concentration camp memorial. The idea is not new; for example, five years earlier, Schleswig-Holstein's culture minister Anke Spoorendonk had proposed that such an excursion be an essential part of the curriculum in her state. The most recent iteration of the debate followed a proposal by the influential Central Council of Jews in Germany. It has the support of prominent Social Democrat Sawsan Chebli, the State Secretary for Civic Engagement in the Berlin state government, who is the daughter of Palestinian asylum seekers.

The Central Council's initiative is unlikely to succeed in the short term, not least because many East Germans have unpleasant memories of obligatory visits to Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and other memorials. The proposal has nevertheless been taken seriously, evidenced by the status and role of concentration camp memorials in today's Germany, as well as the visitor numbers: the Dachau memorial alone is visited by about one million people a year. More than seventy years after the end of the war, memorials of national significance, such as those at Dachau and Buchenwald, and numerous local Gedenkstätten, are widely accepted and largely well-funded reminders of the Nazi past.

Jenny Wüstenberg asks why that is the case, and how today's commitment to a memorialization of the suffering endured by Nazi Germany's victims became possible. She establishes convincingly that memory activists belonging to either of two new social movements—the Gedenkstättenbewegung and the Geschichtsbewegung— [End Page 448] successfully agitated for the memorialization of the Holocaust. Her book details the protracted lobbying of grassroots initiatives for a new (West) German memory culture in the 1980s. She argues convincingly that by the 1990s, the "normative regime of remembrance" (8) demanded by these initiatives had been adopted by state institutions. Wüstenberg also explores how after 1989 East Germans pushed for a memorialization of injustices perpetrated in the German Democratic Republic.

This important book contains crucial and original insights into a phenomenon that has previously not received the attention it deserves, at least not from scholars writing in English. Its main weakness, in my view, is the author's reluctance to critically engage with what her interviewees, who include many former memory activists, told her. She tends to treat them as informants whose representations can be taken at face value. This is, of course, a common problem with projects that rely on oral history; it is easier to critically dissect an archival text than the recollections of somebody who has gone out of their way to assist the researcher. In this instance, the lack of a critical distance toward key informants may also be due to the fact that Wüstenberg shares the normative assumption that drove their activism; namely, that a comprehensive memorialization of the Holocaust is desirable, if not necessary.

My second quibble concerns Wüstenberg's focus on the "physical landscape of memory" (59) and her confidence that memorials are effective and that they necessarily "evoke the contention and power relationships that brought about their construction" (11). Robert Musil once famously remarked that "there is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument … they are impregnated with something that repels attention, causing the glance to roll right off, like water droplets off an oilcloth" (Posthumous Papers of a Living Author [1967], 61). I would like to suggest that this is now also true for some of Germany's Holocaust memorials. Here I do not have in mind nationally significant memorials such as the Topography of Terror or the Dachau concentration camp memorial, but rather local memorials that are meant to be reminders of the November 1938 pogrom or of sites of persecution such as camps or prisons. This is not to say that these memorials have always been invisible; however, their "visibility" was often most pronounced before they...