Malcolm Forbes observes that in Berlin, “the powers-that-be have ensured that the dead live on”:
We can make a distinction here between celebration and commemoration: Berlin celebrates the dead through its plentiful street-names and statues but commemorates them in the form of plaques and memorials. And due to the horrors of the 20th century, Berlin is, unquestionably, a city of memorials.
Malcolm praises Zerstörte Vielfalt (“Diversity Destroyed”), the 2013 Berlin initiative that “highlights the social and cultural diversity that was dismantled and destroyed in Berlin by the Nazis”:
Especially hard-hitting are the open-air portrait exhibitions or urban memorials. There are 11 in total, dotted over the city in specific areas. Each is comprised of a cluster of striking advertising columns — so-called Litfaßsäule, actually invented by a German printer — which give accounts of Nazi-era episodes relevant to that locality, together with photographs and potted biographies of the many that suffered under the regime. Of the 200-plus portraits, some are famous figures like Einstein, Brecht, and Hannah Arendt, who were persecuted but became exiled survivors. Most of the portraits, however, are those of victims, their lives prematurely snuffed out.
[T]hese exhibitions have two vital new things to say. Firstly, and more directly, they provide histories of lesser known victims, restoring existences that the Nazis tried to permanently expunge from collective memory. Secondly, and more indirectly, they reveal a new German mindset, perhaps a generational shift, one that is now — for want of a better word — more comfortable at tapping into its calamitous past, as willing to commemorate untold dead in the street as to name that street after a renowned 19th-century philosopher.
Previous Dish on German notions of “memorial” here, here, and here.
(Photo of Zerstörte Vielfalt memorial by Allan Grey)
The Dish 