Immediately south of Unter den Linden, near the Deutsche Museum, a large plaza, Bebelplatz, lies empty. Today, if one happens to walk in the middle of this plaza, one sees an inscription identifying this space as the infamous area where the Nazis burned "inappropriate" books in a huge bonfire. Accompanying this inscription is a quotation which reads approximately: "Here men burned books. But in the end, men burned men as well." Near this quotation is a plate of glass in the ground, through which can be seen white, empty bookshelves signifying the number of books that were burned at this site. This memorial certainly seems a very thorough and responsible way to come to terms with the past. The inscriptions identify and contextualize the memorial and what it memorializes. Beyond this accomplishment, it also links this activity with the greater ramifications of war and the Holocaust by including an allusion to the burning of men as well as books. Significantly, this memorial was only added after reunification; the plaza was used as a parking lot under the DDR. The entire memorial thus suggests that while the DDR wanted to sweep the past under the rug and focus on the present and future, the Federal Republic recognizes the need for a coming to terms with the past. The changes indicate a realization that any future for Germany will have to take into account the past.
Across the street from Bebelplatz, the Neue Wache houses one of the most important state memorials of World War II and the Holocaust. Interestingly, the DDR was the first to use the site for this purpose. In 1960, the building was called the "Monument to Victims of Fascism and Militarism" (Dornberg 1968), and in 1969 an Eternal Flame was lit to coincide with the burial of an unknown soldier and an unknown concentration camp victim. The memorial demonstrates East Germany's socialist bias by suggesting that an alien fascism was defeated by a pristine socialism. German visitors of the memorial during DDR times were no doubt invited to identify with the victims of Fascism rather than with the perpetrators. Aside from this political bias, however, we can honestly ask how the DDR's treatment of the memorial differs significantly from the more modern version.
Today the Neue Wache houses the Monument to the Victims of Fascism and Militarism. The Eternal Flame has been extinguished, and the interior of the building now contains a statue, the original carved by Kathe Kollwitz, which depicts a woman mourning her dead son. Before this isolated statue are inscribed the words "To the victims of war and tyranny." Indeed, how is this display different or better than the DDR's version? The words before the statue invite the visitor yet again to identify with the victims, while their oppressors are not named, rather, they are included in the memorial. The woman grieving for her son could hardly be a Jewish mother mourning her son, for we know that entire families were lost in the Holocaust, and those who survived were more often men than mothers (Rürup 1989). The actors are missing from the equation again, and thus, as with the memorial on the Berlin street and Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg, the immediacy of the German responsibility for the Nazi past is also lost. Thus, the only real change to the Neue Wache, "the country's central war memorial" (Fisher 1995: 99), was the removal of the class struggle bias. The same old issues of vergangenheitsbewältigung remain.
