Remembering the Past

One of the reasons that Berlin feels like such a cold and hard city is that it has devoted itself to remembering the past truthfully and owning up to its dark history. Bringing the truth to light following the Holocaust can’t have been easy, but now, 70 years after the conclusion of WWII, the story is being told so that the systemic evil that existed during Hitler’s reign of terror will never be possible again.

Much work has been done to memorialize the dead so that what happened here won’t ever be forgotten. Germany wants to raise up future generations that will be fully aware of the country’s past so that the past cannot be repeated.  Monuments throughout the country (and regular visits to them by school children) will ensure that the memory of the victims lives on.  It was amazing to see just how powerful and plentiful  these memorials were.

Stolpersteins, or stumbling stones, created by Gunter Demnig, are small brass cobblestones that mark the former homes of holocaust victims. Unless you look where you are walking, you’d never see them. You literally stumble upon them and are reminded again and again that real people lost their lives in a real act of genocide in a civilized nation. We learned about the stones in Berlin, but saw them in every city we visited. Each stone names a person who was a victim of the Nazis and what their fate was.

A walk through the Tiergarten (central park) in Berlin takes you through several more visible memorials to those murdered under the Third Reich’s National Socialist regime of ethnic cleansing. There are memorials to the murdered Roma and Sinti people (known commonly as “Gypsies”), homosexuals, and the Jews. Each monument, in its own right, creates space for reflection about the people who are no longer here because of the holocaust. The Roma-Sinti memorial is a beautiful reflecting pool surrounded by trees and stones that name the death camps where these nomadic people lost their lives. Haunting violin music plays from speakers in the trees while you mourn the loss of these vibrant, yet marginalized, people.

The monument to murdered homosexuals, also in the Tiergarten, is a stark stone slab that encases a video of two men in a loving embrace . . . as if their love has been frozen for all time, no longer living and breathing.

The Memorial to Murdered Jews stands near to the Brandenburg Gate, highly visible on a main thoroughfare through the city for all to see. It is an entire city block covered with stone slabs (“stelae”) that seem representative of gravestones (over 2000 of them), but as you enter the memorial, you feel a sense of overwhelming disorientation as the stones grow taller and taller and eventually surround you, blocking out the light and creating a feeling of helplessness and aloneness that is hard to fathom in a place that is so highly populated with visitors.

Each monument evoked emotions that are difficult to shrink into words. A combination of sorrow for what has been done in the past and longing for a future where the love of God moves more deeply in and through our encounters with one another . . . especially the others with whom we have, perhaps, little in common . . . permeated my time at these places of remembering.

Visiting the Jewish Museum helped us understand the systemic racism that led to Hitler’s desire to solve the “Jewish problem.”  Jews had been marginalized for centuries in Europe, often targeted as the scapegoats in the communities in which they lived.  Words painted on a remnant of the Berlin wall spoke eloquently about how each of us has the power to prevent the marginalization of others by how we treat them.

Though we typically think only of the “marginalized” victims of the Nazis, there were many other victims, including the prisoners of war that were captured and sent to concentration camps (over 10,000 Soviet prisoners of war were murdered in a concentration camp just outside of Berlin alone). There were also many political victims of the Third Reich.  Near the Reichstag, there is a memorial to the members of the Reichstag who were murdered because of their political dissent. I learned much more about Hitler’s political victims during our time in Germany.

At the Topography of Terror Museum, you learn how systematically Hitler removed every person who spoke out against the National Socialist regime. It was not only the members of the Reichstag who lost their lives. Thousands were sent to concentration camps for taking a stand and speaking out against what they knew to be corrupt policies.

When we were in London, we saw a play called Taken at Midnight, starring Penelope Wilton (from Downton Abbey), that told the horrifying story of how Hans Litton, a celebrated lawyer who won a case against the S.A. (the Storm Troopers) by putting Hitler on the witness stand in a bold (and perhaps foolhardy) move that quickly labeled him as a Nazi enemy. He was later arrested, after Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, and placed in “protective custody” which ultimately resulted in his death in a Nazi concentration camp.

Every voice that spoke out against Hitler was silenced. In fact, many German Lutheran pastors who worked and preached against the regime were sent to concentration camps.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer was arrested in 1943 for his resistance work, imprisoned at both Buchenwald and Flossenbürg Concentration Camps, and eventually murdered just days before the camp was liberated. You can learn more about him through the amazing 2003 documentary: http://www.bonhoeffer.com/ Bonhoeffer.

Martin Niemöller, survived the war, but was also imprisoned by the Nazi’s from 1938-45 (at the Sachsenhausen and Dachau Concentration Camps we visited) for speaking and preaching against the National Socialist Party. One of his sermons was on display at the German History Museum, along with Hans Litton’s court robe. Words that Niemöller spoke in post-war lectures were quoted by guides at the two concentration camps we visited:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Visiting the concentration camp memorial sites was not easy. Though the two camps we visited were not “extermination camps” in the same way that Auschwitz was, the S.S. still killed tens of thousands through prisoner maltreatment and outright murder. Sachsenhausen, the nearest concentration camp to Berlin (and one of the first, intended as a model prison for all concentration camps), was a work camp, where the words on the gate, “work makes free,” were a lie of seismic proportion. Inmates were worked to death, seen as machinery more than as people. Interestingly, Sachsenhausen was the site of the famous counterfeiting operation, in which the Nazis worked round the clock to produce British and U.S. currency during the war. A recent film,  The Counterfeiters (Germany, 2007), will give you a sense of how camp life was for the elite group of prisoners involved in the operation. Elite as they were (because of their valuable skills that the Nazis needed), you will see that the counterfeiting prisoners were victims of the Nazi horrors too.

Learning the history of these camps, you can lose faith in humanity. Thankfully, we don’t ever have to lose faith in God.

During our stay, we worshipped at the American Church in Berlin, where we were warmly welcomed. After our visit to Sachsenhausen, our worship with fellow Christians was especially meaningful. Praying the Lord’s prayer had special significance when we realized that our German friends prayed for God’s “reich” (German for “kingdom”) to come. The words to the hymns that we sang in solidarity came alive in a whole new way, especially words like, “Let sin have no dominion here,” from the hymn Oh, That the Lord Would Guide My Ways, that we sang at the American Church in Berlin. Click the hymn title to see all of the words that spoke so powerfully to me.

We worshipped at the American Church in Berlin on more than one occasion because the congregation and pastor were so welcoming. It was fun to sing the night prayer setting with them as they were trying it for the very first time from their brand new cranberry-colored Evangelical Lutheran Hymnals! The congregation is a congregation that has formed and reformed . . . a community that had its roots in the American occupation of Berlin following WWII. Since American troops left the city following the fall of the wall in 1989, the congregation waned and now in on the move again, having recently purchased a vacant inner-city church building for 1€ (beautiful, but missing its original stained glass windows as they—like most stained glass in Germany—were destroyed by the allied bombing during the war). How amazing to see the American church as the immigrant church needing support to thrive in a foreign land!

How wonderful to know that Christians around the globe are praying in unity for a new kingdom to come.