| Germany, land of ideas : Berlin selectively remembers
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Unveiling of the sculpture "The Modern Book Printing": Mike de Vries, Managing Director of FC Deutschland GmbH, Professor Jutta Limbach, President of the Goethe Institute, and Clemens-Peter Haase, Head of Department Literature and Translation Promotion of the Goethe Institute (from left to right).
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A few weeks ago I was awakened from a daydream I was having during a
lecture at the Humboldt University of Berlin to the sound of construction.
From my seat near the window I could see a miniature crane on the square across the street wielding what looked like a stack of giant plastic books.
This must be a new monument to the book burnings that took place on that very square, Bebelplatz, in 1933, I quite reasonably reasoned. Upon closer inspection after class I learned what I should have already guessed: the true motivation for
the construction was, of course, soccer.
Over the past several months, Berlin has received a hasty facelift in
preparation for the 2006 World Cup, held in Germany since the beginning
of June. Much of the cosmetics have been privately funded and function
as advertisements.
For example, Berlin's famous TV Tower, once a symbol of the technical prowess of the socialist East German State, has had its spherical top painted by T-Mobile to look like a pink soccer ball.
The giant pile of cream-colored plastic books on Bebelplatz, however, belongs to an initiative put forth by the German state, under the slogan, "Germany, Land of Ideas." It is part of a "Walk of Ideas" tour that guides tourists around the center of Berlin to various temporary monuments – all constructed out of cream-colored
plastic – that commemorate the wealth of ideas put forth into the world by Germans. These include the printing press, the theory of relativity, and, of course, the invention of the modern soccer cleat.
For me, the vagueness of wording in the initiative's slogan begs the question: What kinds of ideas are to be celebrated here? Because the project serves to promote tourism in Berlin, the answer seems obvious: good ones, of course.
The celebration of good ideas takes on a certain difficulty, however, in a city whose gruesome past lurks around every corner. Berlin is indeed a city that never forgets, and the 2006 World Cup is to be no exception. For the final round of the tournament, games will be held in the 1936 Olympic Stadium, commissioned by Hitler for the last international sporting event hosted by Berlin.
The "Walk of Ideas" tour is a stroll down memory lane, one that oten, and, it would seem, quite intentionally sets its sights beyond the German traumas of the twentieth century. The book monument on Bebelplatz is, however, a perfect example of how resilient trauma can be. It is no coincidence that Bebelplatz was chosen as the site for the celebration of Gutenberg's printing press.
The statue of books, a pile of seventeen stacked volumes of different sizes, with the names of famous German writers since the Renaissance printed on their
spines, is defiant. It asserts the resilience of creative thought in the face of National Socialism's attempt to destroy it.
Yet this interpretation crumbles upon closer investigation. There are a mere two short sentences on the information plaque next to the statue that refer to the Nazi book burnings, which are described as "a temporary end to 500 years of German literary culture", rather than, for example, a precursor to the burning of people, as German poet Heinrich Heine once put it.
The generalization in this wording represents an injustice to the specific victims of the burnings, and the nature of the books that were burnt. In fact, of the seventeen names that are printed on the monument, only five had their works
burned by the Nazis. These include Heinrich Heine, Anna Seghers, Karl
Marx, the Mann family, and Bertolt Brecht.
The canon of great German thinkers that was approved for this monument therefore consists largely of works that were either approved by Nazi censorship or written after the war. By overwhelming the viewer with works that were
unaffected by the book burnings, the monument undermines the severity
of the Nazi censorship that took place at its very location.
Ultimately, and perhaps most embarrassingly, this ostentatious pile of oversized books draws visitors' attention away from the subtle memorial that already existed in the square: a small, inconspicuous glass panel in the ground that shows a vault of empty bookshelves under the viewer's feet. This permanent memorial, which emphasizes the absence and loss that resulted from Nazi censorship, is now itself absent to all but the most scrupulous of visitors to Bebelplatz.
Why, then, was Bebelplatz chosen as this new monument's location if he square's history was to be underplayed? It seems that Berlin's politicians and planners have underestimated the average soccer fan's ability to stomach the unpleasantness of history. Yet by referencing history's unpleasantness and subsequently underemphasizing it, Berlin has done an injustice to its citizens and visitors alike.
| Benjamin Good, an American Jewish student doing a
Fulbright Fellowship in Berlin, wrote this article for the Voices section, just before the start of the World Cup finals. |
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