Sausage Museum on camp? Great the outrage, the proposal was quickly off the table. However, places of memory must always be memorials? In NS-barracks on the outskirts of Berlin you can have both: everyday life and memory.
“To the rear out to the garden it is nice and bright, now that we have new open window. We would wish also for the front rooms.” Birgit Groll, the head of the nursery, ray of Sunshine, the taken care of 50 children in Berlin-schöneweide, leads through the colorful decorated rooms with raging children, which suggests that here, more than 70 years ago Nazi forced labourers were housed. The front – small window should, however, remain the same, the monument protection it wants. Birgit sighs a grudge, tells of the further difficulties with the roof reorganization and thermal insulation. You live in the Now, for the children. That is not to say, however, that it is the memory of the place is aware of: “When you service is here in the morning alone, it is a little weird.”
The Kita ray of the Sun belongs to a barracks-Ensemble of 1943, the Nazi forced labour camp in the middle of a residential area in the Berlin district of Schöneweide was built. It is one of an estimated 3000 of such stock to the capital and today the only thing that is still preserved. Because here are the 13 barracks made of stone, and not as usual made of wood were built, and survived both the war and, later, the turn of the turmoil and remind, today, on behalf of around 500,000 in Berlin, exploited forced labourers under national socialism. One half of the barracks is a public documentation center, the other is rented out already since the times of the GDR, or in private possession: day care, workshops, physical therapy, Sauna, car dealership and a bowling club.
Front view of the Kita ray of Sunshine – in the past, forced labourers were housed here
Omnipresent Crime
Although there were around 13 million people were deported to forced labour in the German Reich – including civilian forced labourers, prisoners of war, prisoners and concentration camp inmates – are you up to today, a “forgotten group of victims,” said Christine Glauning. She is the Director of the documentation centre on Nazi forced labor, now in six barracks. Previously, this had been from the vaccination Institute in the GDR. “Forced labour was a visible, public crimes,” says the historian. Most of the forced labourers in columns went to the Farms, workshops, factories, cemeteries, or to the private house, in which they were exploited. “There were many points of contact with the civilian population. This was in spite of strict supervision, not to prevent it.”
The first permanent exhibition of the documentation centre, which opened in 2013 in one of the barracks, means, therefore, “forced labour in the daily”. On the basis of biographies, multi-media will be told the life stories of the victims. As the Polish Genowefa Czub, which has been moved from the concentration camp Auschwitz for forced labour in several factories in Berlin. Or the Russians Nikolai Fedorovich Galuschkow, had to work with only 15 years of age in a cemetery as a gravedigger. Or the Ukrainian Zinaida Baschlai, was deported in 1942 to Berlin, and as a maid of a pilot officer, had to work.
The exhibition in the documentation centre: 17 of once 500,000 in Berlin, the Nazi forced labourers tell the story of your life
The exhibition touched, the former forced laborers to come to the visitor by the private photos, and the latest video interviews, very close. Running in this memory out of the barrack at the documentation centre over the road, stood first of all the language. How are you supposed to go in another barrack in the Sauna, where forced labourers were freezing in the Winter? How to buy a car, if once a worker in metal, forced-processing plants were exploited? How “all new” bowling in the face of suffering, that here prevailed?
Sausage Museum, Selfies, and a picnic?
“I think that’s interesting,” said Christine Glauning. “It is the content of a different level in dealing with historic places. What you can’t do that?” A Germany-wide controversial debate, not least in Thuringia. The state is known for its Bratwurst, and visited the corresponding Museum well, and was looking for an expansion opportunity. Was found this, of all things, on the site of a subcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp. After a public storm of indignation was in the meantime elected to another place.
Bowling Club “To The Friendship Of The Peoples”. The shutters of the barracks are still in their original condition from 1943
Historian Christine Glauning does not come down flat against the redevelopment of places of Remembrance, but in one case they had a clear position: “a few years Ago, it was discussed whether a refugee accommodation in a former barracks of a concentration camp-outside of camp could be established. I think that’s just wrong.” In fact, German refugees and prisoners of war were housed after the war, partly in former Store.
Also in the centre of Berlin is often controversial discussion about the appropriate use of the monument for the murdered Jews of Europe. The artist Shahak Shapira provoked once with a photo montage : He put photos of happy visitors who put up at the monument for a Selfie in the scene, in addition to photos of mass graves of murdered Jews. Peter Eisenman, the architect of the stele field, saw the less stringent. In an Interview with “Spiegel Online” said he once, that the monument was not “Holy place”. “People will nod, in the field pick. Children are playing Catch in the field. There will be Mannequins, the pose, here, and here, movies are shot.”
Search for the collective memory
Birgit Groll would like to decorated in the nursery-garden of the long outer wall of the adjacent barracks, together with the children colored. “Hooray, let’s do something Creative! But no, the monument protection”, a sigh of resentment and murmurs, “so be it”. Whether you have visited the documentation center? No, she admits. “I am very interested in history, but I’m always very emotionally to it. My grandfather was himself a prisoner of war.”
On nearly every street corner: map of the storage locations in Berlin
Christine Glauning, who has previously worked in Nazi memorials, has observed this many times: “You prefer to visit the memorial right in front of the front door.” A place of the crime is difficult to combine with the own feeling of home, of home. It gnaws at one’s own identity, and brings this to falter. A place of humiliation does not fit to a place of safety.
The longer it is observed, as a visitor to everyday life in Berlin-schöneweide, the more the calmness and the different handling of memory surprised. “To irritate memorials,” says Glauning. Here it is rather the conversion of the barracks, which leads to friction. To what extent should the protection of monuments, when it comes to the care of children in a daycare center? A barracks, for decades a car repair shop is located in the same dreary color to be painted, such as the documentation centre? Starts memory inevitably just when you are at the present and day-to-day rubs?