WWII monuments are not easy to find in Berlin.
Some of this is because of rebuilding after the war, some of it must be a policy to move on.
The Berlin wall is a more pleasing historical detail.
The Jewish museum has an exhaustive display narrating the history of Jews in Germany. By exhaustive I mean German. Every German museum we went to had so much detailed information available that a stroll through a museum has a prolegomena and 20 chapters with appendices and footnotes (all on your own audioguide). So much detail. So long to tell a story.
And so it is with the Jewish museum - a display where the intent seems to me to be to an apology for the life of Jews in Germany, arguing that Jewish people have always been a part of Germany and Germans to boot.
So we saw history of Jewish traditions in Germany as well as Jewish contributions to German life when and where that was allowed. Particularly 18th and 19th centuries saw a flowering of Jewish participation in German life in philosophy, science, literature, business and film. Continual tensions were noted and the possibility of Jews being blamed and scapegoated were noted.
The years before WWII show that many German Jews did manage to leave Germany, many from 1936 on - to London, USA, Sth Africa.
Extermination was clearly part of the grand plan which, surprising to me, didn't get the space in the museum I would have expected.
As I got to the close of the exhibits I found myself asking 'Did anyone apologise?'.
In all I saw I could not find reference to apology, to repentance, to setting new social policy.
Certainly the proponents of teh Nazi ideal - those few brought to trial - were belligerent, believing they had done right and would do the same again.
One of the 1947 trial judges spoke of a total lack of remorse. Speaking 20 years later he raised the impossibility of determining justice in these post war trial. How do you determine the value of 6 million lives?. Germany was broke and couldn't pay. So they invented a legal fiction of seeking compensation when a father had been exterminated by calculating the number of years any children would have needed support before they could earn a living.
This is a core question. How do you determine the value of one life? How do you determine the value of 6 million Jewish lives? Or hundreds of thousands of Roma, Polish, Russians?
The century which was supposed to be the flowering of rationality gave birth to extraodrinary exterminations in at least 3 continents.
And I was left with the feeling that the Jewish museum was still wanting to find a place in the German nation fo the Jewish people.
More to the point were the exhibits at Auschwitz. This was not simply about the extermination of the Jewish people. Many nationalities were considered inferior and targeted for harsh or fatal treatment.
The Jewish memorial in block 27 was much more succint than the museum in Berlin. Using mainly photographs and minimal text it showed the intentional shaping of youth by Hitler into cruel, violent people (this was Hitler's stated aim) and showed the outcome of how you shape your youth.
The mechanical efficiency of the final solution defies comprehension.
