Germany’s Holocaust memorials confront a new struggle over remembrance

A new exhibition in Bonn is confronting what its organisers describe as growing pressure on Holocaust remembrance, amid more frequent incidents of Nazi symbolism, attacks on memorial sites and the approaching end of the era in which survivors can personally testify to the crimes of the Nazi regime. “Never Again! Against Forgetting the Crimes of the Nazi Regime” has opened at the Bundeskunsthalle, Germany’s federal art and exhibition hall.

Jens-Christian Wagner, director of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation and part of the exhibition’s curatorial team, told DW that remembrance is facing intensifying attacks as right-wing populism and historical revisionism become more common. Wagner cited an incident in which young people posed inside a crematorium at the Buchenwald memorial while laughing and giving the Nazi salute. He said such photographs can become trophies shared online and that similar incidents have increased in recent years.

Memorial trees planted in honour of concentration-camp victims have also been cut down, he said, calling such acts a further killing of those already murdered. The exhibition includes artworks and historical objects intended to address how the crimes should be remembered after the last survivors have died. Wagner said critics have attacked remembrance as a “cult of guilt” or “national masochism”, and linked the debate to wider concerns about the future of German democracy.

Eva Umlauf, an 83-year-old Holocaust survivor and patron of the exhibition, embodies the personal history that memorial institutions are trying to preserve. In November 1944, when she was two, the Nazis deported her, her pregnant mother and her father from a labour camp in Slovakia to Auschwitz-Birkenau. She survived severe illness and starvation, but her father, grandparents and her mother’s siblings were murdered.

Umlauf has no conscious memories of Auschwitz. Her family rarely named the camp, referring instead to relatives who had “stayed there”. The number tattooed on her arm, A26959, remained a physical reminder.

Her mother also taught her daughters not to draw attention to their Jewish identity because antisemitism remained widespread in postwar Czechoslovakia. Umlauf later studied medicine, moved to Germany and married another Holocaust survivor. Wagner said conventional compulsory visits and two-hour lectures often fail to engage pupils, for whom the Nazi period can seem remote.

At Buchenwald, he said, full-day programmes allow students to work with historical sources and reach their own understanding. He also wants educators to show that the history is not sealed off from current affairs, including debates about migration. He argued that presenting migration mainly through public-safety and crime narratives can marginalise groups, describing that as a mechanism that also operated under National Socialism.

The exhibition’s purpose, he said, is to reach not only people already convinced of the importance of confronting Nazi crimes, but also those who are not.