Commemorating Nazi victims in Saxony: A culture of forgetting

W hen it comes to German history, right-wing extremists often become nostalgic. There's a pretty big part of it that they don't like to think about very much. And above all, they don't want to publicly remember the horrors of the National Socialist dictatorship. They speak disparagingly of “cult of guilt,” of “the bird shit of history.”

The city council decision in Heidenau to commemorate the victims of the Nazi dictatorship in the cemetery and to no longer approve stumbling blocks for them avoids historical revisionist language. But he is engaging in a similar shift toward a culture of forgetting. The memory of specific victims should disappear from everyday life in the city.

The stumbling blocks, small brass plaques, are usually laid in the ground in front of the victims' last homes to commemorate them. They remind everyone alive today of who the Nazis persecuted: people from the neighborhood. Jews, Sinti and Roma, politically persecuted people, homosexuals, trans people, disabled people. Their names are written on the stumbling blocks. They are visible in everyday life. The memory comes to you whether you want it or not.

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The motion in the Heidenau city council, supported by AfD and CDU members, said that the stumbling blocks were not a dignified commemoration because passers-by would thoughtlessly step over the names of the victims. This disturbs relatives and memorial initiatives, the applicants put forward a compassionate perspective. But when representatives of the Jewish communities in Saxony, the Association of those Persecuted by the Nazi Regime - Association of Antifascists (VVN-BdA) and the International Auschwitz Committee criticized the application, they ignored it. The majority of the city councilors in Heidenau still decided to banish the commemoration to the cemetery.

The second part of the application shows how little they care about the victims of National Socialism. A memorial area is to be created in the cemetery, which is generally dedicated to victims of “war, terror, dictators, expulsion and especially National Socialism in Heidenau”. As if the same lessons were learned from terrorist attacks as from the Holocaust.

By the way, there would also have been alternatives. In Munich, for example, where Holocaust survivor Charlotte Knobloch criticized the stumbling blocks embedded in the ground, the “Memorial Signs” project is attaching similar plaques to steles or house facades. The names of victims of National Socialism are also written on them, usually at their last place of residence, in the middle of everyday life, but at eye level.

Accordingly, Knobloch also refuses to be used to justify the decision and described the application in Heidenau as a “transparent maneuver by the extremists”.

One thing is clear: the decision against the stumbling blocks goes back to AfD members. Their primary concern is to put an end to the culture of remembrance. This is probably intended to fade the parallels between their ideology and that of the Nazis back then. It is all the more shocking that CDU members openly supported the proposal.