Download PDF - Gedenkort für die im Nationalsozialismus ...

Professor Endlich wanted to know what opportunities there were for onememorial to elaborate differences in persecution and fates of the differentgroups of victims. Dr. Kaiser emphasized that racism was the core ideologyof National Socialism and the unified foundation for the persecution of differentgroups.Dr. Kaiser: “The decisive factor in how effective a memorial is dependednot on the discussion of the number of victims, but on imparting the horrificinjustice and suffering inflicted on people. The memorial, in principle, isdirected at everyone who lives in a society that is the successor of theregime that organized this injustice. From that, I believe it’s particularlyimportant that this memorial is not presented as a monument for a specificgroup of victims, but reaches out to all in the present, even though it is dedicatedto remembrance of a specific group. Only in this way can the fruitlessemergence of a hierarchy be avoided. Even given all the dangers ProfessorMorsch rightly emphasized, the opportunities manifested in centralizationand nationalization are that the society and state decide memorialsand remembrance are issues to be addressed by all and can be taken assuch.”The moderator requested Katharina Kaiser, Head of the municipal galleryHaus am Kleistpark, to identify from her experience, which artistic forms ofapproaching such a theme were more appropriate than others. ProfessorEndlich: “Is there a specific, and intellectually precise development in thearts that could be observed with particular awareness, or would that begeneralizing too broadly? Does every artistic form, every style and signaturehave its own possibilities?”Ms. Kaiser concurred with Professor Morsch when he described memorialsas expressions of their times, immortalizing contemporary thought of theperiod because they were so visible.Ms. Kaiser: “I share your view about the shaping of memorial sitesaccording to contemporary social and cognitive factors. At the same time, Ihave confidence in – as the initiative for the homosexual memorial formulatedin their first publication in 1995 – the “subversive power of art”. It is myfirm conviction that art can unfetter curiosity and bring people to allowthemselves to absorb the factual information communicated at memorials.But important indeed is that artists commissioned with shaping a nationalmemorial do not submit to the demands of representation. It is no accidentthat the really interesting, innovative memorials of recent years were notestablished at centrally located sites but on peripheries. The 1986 work ofGerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz developed a new memorial language throughtheir piece set in a worker’s district on the outskirts of Hamburg. Or in Saarbrücken,which is not exactly the centre of the world, where a memorialspace was shaped in the 1990s. And there’s the work of Sigrid Sigurdssonin Braunschweig, which has remained on the edge of the media’s perception.Even Micha Ullman’s silent memorial on Bebelplatz (Bebel Square),can be considered to lie on a periphery, a location that allowed him todevelop something conceptual that he would not have been able to createhad he been working under the rubric of a national monument. The memorialin the Bayerische Viertel (so called ‘Bavarian Quarter’) mentioned byProfessor Stephanie Endlich could only be carried off by Stih and Schnock118