In your face! Bringing Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial to Thuringia: reaffirming German memory culture through creative place-taking

ABSTRACT

This article analyses one act of informal creative place-making/taking. In 2017, the Berlin art collective Centre for Political Beauty installed a partial replica of Peter Eisenman’s 2005 Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in a back garden in the Thuringian village of Bornhagen. The site was chosen because of who lived next door: a leading figure in the right-wing party Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany), Björn Höcke. This DIY, guerrilla-like intervention by activist artists raises broader questions about both “informality” and “place-making.” As we suggest, the work Deine Stele (2017-ongoing) represents a profound paradox: an otherwise highly critical art collective, not least towards the government, replicates an official state-sanctioned memorial in order to defend and enforce the so painfully won hegemonic memory culture. Both the work and its realisation combine complex elements of formality and informality. Moreover, while located very intentionally in Bornhagen, Deine Stele sits somewhere between, and connects, Berlin, Bornhagen and digital space. Rather than engaging deeply with local stories, it makes a more abstract theme – German commitment to Holocaust memory – concrete. We read this antagonistic intervention as a playfully provocative act of creative place-taking rather than place-making.

KEYWORDS:

• Formal and informal creative place-making
• place-taking
• German memory culture
• antagonistic memory
• Centre for Political Beauty’s Deine Stele
• Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

Introduction, materials and methods

In 2005, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe was inaugurated in the centre of the reunited German capital. It began as a civil society initiative in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell. After years of strenuous debate and several competitions, a field of over 2700 grey concrete stelae was erected close to significant landmarks of national identity such as the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag, home of the German Parliament. This act of formal memorialisation and urban creative place-making by the state made a vast, visible statement: the commemoration of the genocide of the European Jews committed by Germans during Nazi rule had been accepted as a raison d’être of the Federal Republic. While some feared that Eisenman’s memorial was an endpoint to a necessarily ongoing debate about the Holocaust, others were confident that its sheer scale and central placement ensured that the crimes committed against Europe’s Jews would be remembered now and in the future (Young 1994; Young 2000). The memorial’s prominent location has guaranteed thousands of visitors daily, whose reproduction and sharing of their visits on social media act as an additional vehicle for the obligation to remember.

However, this seemingly hegemonic memory culture proved to be fragile. Twelve years after the memorial was inaugurated – the same number of years that the Nazis were in power – this symbolic representation of official German memory culture was attacked by a leading figure in the right-wing party Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany; hereafter AfD): Björn Höcke, chair of the regional parliament of Thuringia and representative of the party’s ultra-radical right. In a speech given in Dresden in January 2017, Höcke called for a “180-degree-turn” in national memory culture (Höcke 2017b). The location where the speech was given was significant: Elbe-Florence Dresden, with its history of allied bombings today regarded as war crimes, was offered up as an alternative German capital and as the capital of the “Bewegung” (movement), this time not of the National Socialists but the AfD. Throughout his speech, Höcke fundamentally rejected the centrality of Holocaust memory to the political culture of the Federal Republic, supposedly shared by the majority of citizens (Cento Bull and Clarke 2020; Widmann 2017). He urged the nation to move away from atoning for the Nazi past and decried Eisenman’s Berlin memorial as a “monument of shame” in the “heart of the capital” (Höcke 2017b). While Höcke was right that the monument was a visual manifestation of German guilt and shame, he strongly opposed this officially agreed upon memory culture.

Höcke’s speech did not go unnoticed: neither by his own party which considered expelling him (DER SPIEGEL 2017), nor by the Berlin art collective, the Centre for Political Beauty (Zentrum für politische Schönheit, hereafter ZPS). The ZPS decided to act, specifically seeing the growing normalization of ultra-right-wing views within mainstream media and political debate in Germany as deeply problematic (Ruch 2019, 17, 68, 76). They countered Höcke’s verbal attacks through an act of informal, creative place-making. Hiring a house adjacent to Höcke’s home in the Thuringian village Bornhagen, some four driving hours from Berlin, the ZPS presented him with a downsized version of Eisenman’s memorial to view from his property on a daily basis (Leber 2018). Although on closer inspection one realizes that the 24 duplicate stelae are not made of concrete but plywood frames coated in plaster, there was no doubt that the installation stood as pars pro toto for the officially-agreed-upon national memory culture that Höcke wished Germans to turn away from. The ZPS’s hands-on-action was an attempt to overcome growing ignorance of, and impotency towards, the opponents of national memory culture, who they simultaneously viewed as enemies of democracy. As the ZPS explains, Deine Stele is “a monument against the creeping normalisation of fascism in Germany” (Political Beauty 2022).

In this article, we draw on discourse analysis of press reports, speeches and published statements alongside visual analysis of Deine Stele (2017–ongoing). Our discussion is framed around a number of concerns of wider interest to scholars working on informal creative place-making and urbanism. We start by interrogating how this act of seemingly “informal” creative place-making includes complex aspects of both informality and formality (Douglas 2015). On the one hand, Deine Stele is not an officially sanctioned intervention in public space and it clearly bears traces of DIY-practice seen in informal creative place-making. However, this work was not illegal, and rather than countering the state it reasserted the claims of the state-sanctioned Holocaust memorial erected in Berlin. Replicating the most formal of state-sponsored place-making acts through an informal artistic intervention signals a need to complicate the binary of formal and informal creative place-making in ways that extend beyond the existing literature (Douglas 2015). In doing so, we also suggest that something more than place-making was intended by Deine Stele.

Creative place-making is commonly used to refer to works that engage deeply with place (Pollock and Paddison 2014). However, the replication of a memorial from Berlin on rented property in Bornhagen was not designed to chime with the history of the village. Rather, it was intended to confront Höcke – and through (social) media, the wider German nation – with an antagonistic provocation that was a visual reminder of the nationally-agreed-upon-memory narrative that was seen to be under threat. The installation in Bornhagen found an enormous echo in German and international media which is how most experienced the work – virtually and at a distance, although it also was made accessible through guided tours to those who visited the site. The importance of digital encounter and partial replication of an artwork from elsewhere to confront local attitudes clearly does not fit neatly with existing ideas of creative place-making. As we suggest in the final part of this article, this action is better understood as antagonistic creative place-taking.

Results

Deine Stele as informal and formal creative place-making

The binary of formal-informal has both framed, and been critiqued, in the extensive scholarly literature on urbanism and place-making (see e.g. Douglas 2015; McFarlane 2012). While the concept of informal urbanism has been applied to everything from the growth of cities through informal and unsanctioned slum development in the Global South, to informal and unsanctioned place-making projects such as guerrilla gardening in the Global North (Gaffikin and Perry 2012), scholars have suggested that rather than working with opposites, there is a need to think in more dynamic terms along a continuum from formal to informal interventions (Douglas 2015). The complex interplay of aspects of formality and informality that scholars have suggested in other cases certainly applies to the place-making of the ZPS in and through Deine Stele. Moreover, examining this intervention points to the need to rethink the binary of formal-informal and move from concerns primarily with legality and knowledge to consider the complex relationship between official, state memory work and acts of informal creative place-making.

When the ZPS constructed 24 slabs that repeat the form of the Holocaust Memorial, they were careful not to contravene local building laws in the process. Thuringian law stipulates that anyone can erect a monument in their own garden providing that it is no higher than four metres (Leber 2018). Far from breaking local planning laws therefore, the ZPS skilfully used the law to create a legal monument in private space. The ZPS was well aware of the range of freedom guaranteed by Thuringian and German law for private property, tenancy and art. When the landlord of the rented house sought to evict them, his move was rejected given the protection afforded to renters (Reinsch 2017). Moreover, the privacy offered by a domestic property afforded an opportunity for their action to be undertaken secretly, claiming that the preparations were for a forthcoming wedding (Gogos 2018). While the project has a DIY-look and feel to it with its plywood and theatre plaster, the logistics of creating the work undercover, involving around one hundred individuals and in line with local planning law, testify to the formal and technical knowledge that the ZPS has gathered over a number of years (Leber 2018).

Here the ZPS shares many of the characteristics Douglas has identified for acts of something-more-than-informal place-making, such as acting as civic-minded improvers drawing on sophisticated knowledge. As Douglas notes, un-sanctioned DIY-interventions are often shaped by young, white, middle-class professionals or well-educated, and privileged individuals who are “confident that they are in the right” (Douglas 2015, 118). These actors trust that they are most likely to get away with their unauthorized actions, and take matters in their own hands, doing that “with savvy, knowledge and skills” (Douglas 2015, 124). Actors in informal creative place-making interventions are fully aware of their privileged positions and regard their knowledge and status as an obligation to take action. They step in where they think the state has failed, thereby at time appearing paternalistic (Douglas 2015, 128–129). This is also the case with the ZPS. Their self-belief and self-demand to act and fill a gap is clearly expressed in the title of the book by the ZPS founder Philipp Ruch Wenn nicht wir, wer dann? (If not we, who?) (Ruch 2015). The ZPS regards themselves as “gelebter Demokratieschutz” (living protection of democracy) who are aware of the fragility of democracy and act to safeguard it through artistic interventions (Gogos 2018; Ruch 2019, 107). In line with other DIY-acts of creative place-making, the ZPS steps in where it sees the state, media and civil society failing, seeing unauthorized interventions as necessary to “inspire others to look at things differently” (Douglas 2015, 127).

After the ZPS unveiled Deine Stele in November 2017, the public reception was overwhelming. Within four hours, supporters – who learnt about the work through social media – had donated the sum necessary to keep the project going, including paying the rent for the property for more than two years (FAZ 2017). This support did not cease and seven years later the work is still in place, currently – like the Berlin memorial – undergoing renovation. This model of volunteer funding can be seen as another dimension of DIY-practice which allows people outside the ZPS to partake in the action. Funding models that rely on private donations instead of state support are typical of more informal acts of activist art. Securing their action with crowd funding suggests that private citizens take the commitments to Holocaust memory seriously (Widmann 2017). It is a model used by the ZPS for all of what it dubs its “operations.” Those who donate become “accomplices” in what the art collective terms “aggressive humanism” (Political Beauty 2022).

Deine Stele as reaffirmation of national memory culture: Re-seeing Eisenman

Alongside combining formal and informal elements that co-exist within DIY-practices of informal creative place-making identified by Douglas, Deine Stele is also a suitable case to further discuss the “ambiguity to the idea of a formal-informal binary” (Douglas 2015, 131). As stated above, reproducing, albeit reduced in size and numbers, Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the ZPS purposefully replicated the central object of German Holocaust commemoration in order to work against those who attack the officially sanctioned memory culture: the AfD and specifically Höcke. Strikingly, this act of consolidation of national, albeit fragile, memory culture was realized by an art collective that is, since its founding in 2008, otherwise known for its disruptive confrontation and questioning of official politics, especially vis-à-vis immigration policy (Merrill 2017). The significance of the work therefore lies in considering the complex relationship between the “informal” guerrilla-like action of Deine Stele and the state-sanctioned memory represented by Eisenman’s Berlin memorial.

The ZPS was not the first to replicate the form of Eisenman’s Holocaust memorial. In 2008, only a short walk away, the same-same-but-different Memorial to the Homosexuals Persecuted under Nazism by Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset was unveiled in Berlin’s Tiergarten. The artist duo created a single large, grey concrete stelae which received its uniqueness through the integration of a film playing a loop that showed a same-sex kiss. The aesthetic similarities were intentional and is something that visitors notice (Oettler 2021, 339–341). Their work was followed by memorials of different shapes to other victim groups of Nazi persecution: the Roma and Sinti (2012) and those murdered during the so-called T4-“euthanasia”-programme because of perceived “disabilities” (2014). Reminiscent of the National Mall in Washington, DC, these four monuments establish a national narrative within walking distance of key buildings that represent the nation, but instead of national glory and military success this recently added memorial landscape in the country’s capital focuses on the crimes committed by the German nation during the Nazi era (for the National Mall see Benton-Short 2016; for central Berlin’s complex memory landscape see; Girßmann 2020).

While the re-use of Eisenman’s memorial is not unique, Deine Stele had a very different function from Elmgreen and Dragset’s work. Instead of broadening the representation, and thereby acknowledging further victim groups, it became an active tool to fight those who oppose the dominant and hard-won memory culture represented by this quartet of memorials in central Berlin: chief amongst them Eisenman’s monument. By initially demanding that Höcke kneel down at either the replica or the original (Reinsch 2017), the ZPS connected Bornhagen and Berlin with other times and places by replaying an earlier iconic moment of official performativity: the moment when the German Chancellor Willy Brandt knelt at Nathan Rapoport’s monument in the former Warsaw ghetto in 1970. This demand was later withdrawn but it was a reminder, as the action replicating part of the Berlin memorial itself was, that German Aufarbeitung (coming to terms with the nation’s shameful past) was a long and contested process. This process, that started in the late 1980s, led eventually to the Bundestag decision to go ahead with Eisenman’s proposal in the late 1990s. The formal inauguration in May 2005, by the German Chancellor, coincided with the 60^th anniversary of the ending of the Second World War (Kirsch 2003; Young 2000). Having seen the centrality of the Holocaust materially established within the centre of the German capital, the ZPS sought to safeguard this position within broader German memory culture by confronting its opponents. The duplicate in Bornhagen serves as a kind of trigger-warning to the German nation of the fragility of memory culture: a warning which was not officially sanctioned but rather admonished official actors to act upon what they had – through the erection of the Eisenman memorial – accepted as Germany’s raison d’être.

By moving Eisenman’s memorial to Bornhagen, the ZPS reminded Germans of the high hopes as well as the commitments that the erection of this central monument had implied. Reproducing an existing monument through a scaled-down replica in a new setting in an action that garnered national and international press interest, contributed to Eisenman’s monument being re-seen. This action renewed what this monument stands for and what it demands. Deine Stele enables Eisenman’s memorial once again to fulfil the monument genre’s fundamental function: to create a connection between the past and the present (Erőss 2017, 28). Moreover, it emphasises the capacity of Eisenman’s memorial to incite social practice, leading to replications (cp. Erőss 2017, 19–20). The informal reuse makes the original even more meaningful and restates its significance as a placeholder in the capital. Its monumental presence acts as gatekeeper and guarantor of the Holocaust imperatives to “never forget” and “never again” (Popescu and Schult 2019). In turn, the formal, legally and normatively bestowed official memorial in Berlin is revived by the informal, unauthorized intervention in Bornhagen, which serves Germans as a renewed reminder of the commitment to remember the Holocaust. As the Berlin memorial is partially replicated in physical space in Bornhagen and the Bornhagen memorial is replicated visually in digital media space, the Eisenman memorial, and what it fundamentally represents, is brought back into focus. Through replication, there is a restating that the original, stubbornly holding prominent public place, is there for a reason. The fact that it simply does not so easily go away remains important. However, it needs constant reactivation. No single memorial, however large or impressive, is capable of ever reaching the goal of memory work alone (Schult 2020).

Deine Stele shows both the fragility of hegemonic memory culture as well as reviving what characterised it: Aufarbeitung as a never ceasing struggle whose continuation is the obligation of each and every one living in Germany. Importantly, through their act of redistribution by reusing the Berlin memorial in Bornhagen, Deine Stele did not only refer to what the nation at a certain time agreed upon, but continued an approach that has characterized German memory culture since at least the 1980s: the diversified engagement of a variety of local players which has insisted upon the ongoing engagement of each and every individual (best illustrated by Jochen and Esther Shalev-Gerz counter-monument, Monument to Fascism from 1986, which slowly sunk into the ground as a consequence of citizen participation (Young 1994), supported by official institutions.

Discussion

Deine Stele as playful antagonistic place-taking and agonistic memory practice

Deine Stele sits intentionally between multiple physical places – Berlin and Bornhagen, as well as its online appearance in social media and press reports. As discussed above, the work entailed reproducing the central national memorial to victims of the Holocaust in Bornhagen as a way of taking on this place that threatened to diverge from the long-fought-for consensus on the national memory landscape. By constructing a fragment of the Berlin memorial in Bornhagen, the ZPS sought to reinstate and extend that national memory landscape to this aberrant locality. However, describing this as act of “informal creative place-making” does not do justice to this intervention from outside that was more an act of place-transfer or place-taking. While creative place-making interventions tend to share the goal of bringing new meaning to abstract space by unlocking historical place-specific stories (Pollock and Paddison 2014), Deine Stele does not seek to unlock the meaning of Bornhagen or engage with its inhabitants in a meaningful way. In fact, Deine Stele caused much frustration among some inhabitants who disliked the fact that their village was being perceived as a “brown [right-wing] nest” (Reinsch 2017).

Thus, rather than an act of creative place-making, we regard Deine Stele as a provocative act of creative place-taking, although not in the way that this term is commonly deployed. Within the existing literature, the concept of “place-taking” and “displace-taking” has been used as critique of formal creative place-making and its assumption that public art projects can make post-industrial cities more attractive to those who live there, work there and, critically, might invest there. As those coining the terms “displace-making” and “place-taking” suggest, negative impacts of gentrification are experienced by local populations in the wake of creative place-making initiatives directed at attracting investment (Douglas 2021; Meek 2018). We do not use the term place-making in this specific way. The ZPS was not engaged in an act of beautification or gentrification driven by an economic agenda. Rather, they were engaged in an act of confrontation which operated in highly spatially-specific ways.

Although very much an object out of place, this is not to suggest that Deine Stele is placeless. When the ZPS chose where to locate a partial replica of the Eisenman memorial, they chose a very specific site: the adjoining property to Höcke’s home. Playfully responding to his call for a 180-degree turnaround in German memory culture, the ZPS positioned Deine Stele at a 180-degree angle towards the politician’s estate (Widmann 2017). While the pillars remain invisible from the street, they are highly visible to Höcke. He cannot fail to see them from his house and garden (Reinsch 2017). This visual intrusion into domestic space is significant, given that Höcke talks so much of home, or “Heimat.” In this context, Deine Stele is intended as a haunting disruption to Höcke’s cosy haven in the former East-German Thuringia. Thuringia goes against the global trend of growing urbanization (Friedman 2010, 149). This is a place where most still live in small towns and villages. 20% of the population hold extreme right-wing positions (Debes 2019), among them the trained history teacher Björn Höcke who had moved from adjacent Hessen (formerly West Germany), to the small hamlet Bornhagen with its 270 inhabitants. Together with his wife and four children, Höcke lives in the old rectory in a village where the ruins of the Hanstein castle overlook timber-framed houses. Here, Höcke “recovers from the stresses and strains from agitation. Here, he rests before he spreads disturbance in the rest of the country,” as Philipp Ruch phrased it (Widmann 2017). Bringing Höcke the foremost symbol of Aufarbeitung as never ceasing engagement with the national criminal past from Berlin to Bornhagen, the ZPS sought to underline that his flight into privacy and ignorance was not tolerated.

However, their idea of ironically offering neighbourly aid and a private lesson in memory culture was never really aimed at Höcke alone, but at the forgetful and disengaged nation and all those who do not consider the AfD as a threat to democracy (Widmann 2017). For the ZPS, it was and always will be a mistake to underestimate the extreme right (Ruch 2019). By going to Bornhagen and physically erecting a part of Eisenman’s memorial next to Höcke’s house, the ZPS followed the recommendations established by the Amadeu Antonio Foundation to publicly address extreme right-wing neighbours in the open in order to promote the reinforcement of a democratic civil society (Gogos 2018). By practicing these recommendations in a creative intervention, the ZPS succeeds in making others realize what is going on through social media and press reporting, thereby inspiring others to act as well (cf. Douglas 2015, 128).

The art collective is convinced that conflict is essential to nurture democratic principles and Deine Stele is designed to be highly confrontational. Their intervention attracted legal scrutiny. While all court cases ended in favour of the ZPS or were dropped, one meant that the ZPS was investigated for 17 months (Frank 2019). Given the ZPS’s reliance on the status of art and the protection it is offered by German law (Ruch 2019, 154), this came as a rude awakening. When unveiling Deine Stele, the ZPS claimed to have kept Höcke under surveillance during the prior months. They withdrew this statement within a week, but by then Höcke had already claimed that surveillance was an attack on his right to privacy, accusing the ZPS of being terrorists (Höcke 2017a). The ZPS was accused of breaching Paragraph 129 – a law that had never been used against an artist as it is directed at those consciously planning a severe criminal act. When it became public that the ZPS was investigated for 17 months without being informed, legal practitioners (from across the political spectrum) challenged this use of the law, and artists and media personalities wrote an open letter of support for the ZPS (Langhoff 2019). Although unintended, Deine Stele exposed not only a fragile memory culture but also an eroded juridical system in Germany and shined a spotlight on the proximity between far-right politics and public services, given that the surveillance could take place as the judge in charge sympathized with the AfD (Oltermann 2017; Prantl 2019).

However, even if the ZPS never monitored Höcke, their move to his village and the renting of the neighbouring property where they erected Deine Stele was a confrontational act of casting a spotlight on this politician. Indeed, such a move can be seen as an attempt “to silence [Höcke] in an antagonistic fashion as an enemy” (Cento Bull & Clarke 2020, 201). Contra an agonistic struggle where all adversaries agree on fundamental principles such as freedom and equality (Mouffe 2016, 29, 31), the ZPS positions the AfD as a political enemy who stands beyond democratic principles and therefore also possible debate (Ruch 2019, 65, 77). Höcke’s response to the ZPS’s action and his accusation of terrorism shows that he shares the same viewpoint that they are mutual enemies who lack common ground. Rather than opening up space for consensus or agonistic dialogue through Deine Stele, the ZPS uses it to confront and expose the AfD, and especially its ultra-right wing represented by Höcke, as the enemies of democracy who need to be defeated in an antagonistic struggle.

This shows, as with the notions of formal-informal, that the ZPS action cannot be grasped by one term alone. Cento Bull and Clarke rightfully point out that Deine Stele produces agonistic effects (2020, 203). We argue however that the work itself is clearly an antagonistic confrontation. The ZPS has understood that the media is one important arena where the agonistic battle needs to take place (Mouffe 2016, 210–11), and they have become skilful in using media creatively (Merrill 2017, 160, 170, 174). While the work itself is an antagonistic confrontation, it is the media reception of Deine Stele that contributes to producing the form of agonistic memory practice that seeks “to repoliticize the past and the relation of the past to the present” (Cento Bull and Clarke 2020, 195). Thus, although their actions are highly confrontational and indeed antagonistic, the agonistic effects stem from the fact that their action is directed via (social) media towards a wider audience.

As can be seen, Deine Stele encapsulates a profound paradox: an otherwise highly critical art collective replicates an official sanctioned memorial in order to defend and enforce the so painfully won hegemonic memory culture. This act of place-taking in enemy terrain represents an antagonistic struggle over what kind of memory culture should be dominant. Still, in their antagonistic struggle with the AfD, the ZPS nevertheless pursues the agonistic struggle – primarily through activating the media – that Chantal Mouffe is looking for in order to fight the far-right and defend democracy (cf. Mouffe 2016, 202). According to Mouffe, agonistic conflict is constitutive for democracy, and is its core principle (Mouffe 2016, 29, 38–9, 200). The confrontation between competing projects in their aim to gain power is what characterizes democratic politics, with conciliation between these positions impossible (Mouffe 2016, 42). The strength of Deine Stele is that it visualizes the irreconcilability of the positions Mouffe described in theory. Deine Stele has drawn, literally and physically, a demarcation line connecting Höcke “for all eternity” with Eisenman’s Holocaust memorial that lies on the other side of his garden (Ruch 2019, 176). Since 2017, Höcke is daily confronted with what he questions should be part of German national identity: the responsibility for the genocide of the European Jews. There cannot be a negotiated end to an antagonistic battle. Only one can prevail. Will it be Höcke in his rural home serving as a base to prepare a shift of power in the capital, or will it be the ZPS with the replica standing in for all those who insist on the relevance of Holocaust memory commitments for a democratic Germany?

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This article was financed by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) under Grant 2022-02267.