Leseprobe

1 3 0 G E R M A N Y Memorials and commemorative sites dedicated to the memory of resistance and persecution and to the victims of the dictatorship in the SOZ/GDR were inaugurated in Germany long before the fall of the SED regime. In West Germany and West Berlin, there were already more than 60 com- memorative markers by 1989, which mainly served as reminders of the division of Germany, the victims of the border regime and the People’s Uprising of 17 June 1953. The first memorial stone for the victims of Stalinism, the result of an initiative of former prisoners of the Soviet special camps who were able to flee to West Germany after their release, was set up in Berlin-Charlottenburg on 4 November 1951. In the GDR itself, there were no official memorials to post-war resistance and political perse- cution until 1989. Official places and acts of remembrance, admonition and commemoration were dedicated exclusively to the victims of Nazi persecution. Politically instrumentalised and subordi- nated to the interests of the SED, these focused on communist resistance to the Nazi regime. The largest space in the memorial landscape, which is dedicated to the second dictatorship and expanded rapidly after 1989/90, is taken up by the commemoration of the division of Germany. More than 300 memorials and museums along what used to be the internal German border and the course of the Berlin Wall commemorate the division and its victims. They document the forced resettlements and the many, often fatal attempts to escape through the Iron Curtain. Finally, numerous markers in the public space raise awareness of the Peaceful Revolution and the opening of the border in the autumn of 1989. Another important place in the topography of memory is occupied by the more than 80 sites dedicated to repression and resistance and the victims of Stalinist terror in the 1940s and 1950s. These include the “memorials with a ‘double past’”, the redesign of which was the subject of fierce controversy in the 1990s: former Nazi concentration camps such as Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen, which remained in use as special camps under the Soviet military administration after 1945, prisons such as the “Roter Ochse” (Red Ox) in Halle, Münchner Platz in Dresden, Moritzplatz in Magdeburg, Demmlerplatz in Schwerin, and the prisons in Bautzen, where victims of political persecution were imprisoned both before and after 1945. The fact that the Soviet occupying power imprisoned Nazi functionaries, political opponents and victims of denunciations and arbitrary arrests—one in three of whom did not survive imprisonment—alike under inhumane conditions in its special camps and prisons particularly serves to highlight the problem of “double memory”. The more than 35,000 dead and those who survived imprisonment, many of whom consequently suffered from severe health effects, are seen as victims of an inhumane prison regime that cries out for appropriate commemoration. More than 40 memorial sites near former camps and prisons or mass graves alone contribute to meeting this need. Another focus is on memorial sites and markers commemorating the injustices committed in the GDR by the Ministry of State Security (MfS), the Ministry of the Interior and the Volkspolizei (People’s Police). These include in particular the exhibitions and documentation centres set up in former prisons and other State Security service buildings. One example is the museum in the “Runde Ecke” (Round Corner) in Leipzig, which was set up after the city’s MfS district adminis- tration was occupied by the local citizens’ committee. There are also permanent exhibitions in the former prisons and the MfS headquarters in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen, Magdeburg and Halle, and in the former MfS headquarters in Berlin’s Normannenstrasse, with its “Mielke Suite”, which attract many interested visitors.