In search of the right questions. Dresden and February 13.

Barbara Lubich

A forgotten place is now entering the city's collective consciousness – The Judenlager Hellerberg (in English: “The Jewish Camp at Hellerberg”). In 2011, after a short walk past speeding trucks, we reached the site on the busy Radeburger Strasse, not far from the access road to the highway. In this overgrown wooded area that once housed the camp, we interviewed Hildegart Stellmacher, an activist from the Gesellschaft für Christlich-Jüdische Zusammenarbeit (Society for Christian-Jewish Collaboration). “I can understand it,” she said, looking in the camera, “history like this has a heavy weight.” She was referring to the Jewish forced laborers who were interned here between 1942 and 1943. Out of the 293 people, only ten survived the holocaust. She also referred to the “silence that spoke volumes” during the post-war period, which perpetuated the narrative successfully instilled by the Nazis during the war of an innocent city bombed by British and American ‘air force thugs’.

In the 1960s and 1970s, an official remembrance of the bombing of Dresden was not particularly prominent. This was only revived in 1983 by a pacifist movement led by young dissidents against the militarization of society in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The candlelight vigil they initiated at the Frauenkirche church became a symbol of peace. Opponents of war from all over the GDR traveled to participate. However, this ritual unintentionally skewed the focus from the bombing of Dresden and affirmed the representation of the city as a victim of war. But in 1987, the peace movement gave rise to the idea of an exhibition on Dresden under the National Socialist regime in the Kreuzkirche church. The initiators of the first silent remembrance were also involved and used photos from their own family albums. The peace movement needed four years to “learn from history.” The city of Dresden would need longer. And soon, newly emerging right-wing radicalism in the GDR would lead to the first deaths.

In order to understand how the biggest neo-nazi marches of Europe's recent history could take place in Dresden each February 13, our documentary film Come Together. Dresden und der 13. Februar (Come Together. Dresden and February 13) addressed the myth surrounding Dresden's history. It concluded in Dresden-Nickern, where, back then (in 2011), far-right activists had organized a small torchlight march by a small memorial commemorating the bombing. Today, the city is making official efforts to redesign places of contested memory. The Heidefriedhof (Heath Cemetary) and even that small obelisk in Nickern are to become places of learning. Places memorializing the persecution of Jewish people and forced labor should likewise offer new learning opportunities in the urban landscape.

But what should we learn there? What perspectives should arise beyond those of victim and perpetrator when it comes to shaping the memory of a contemporary, post-migrant society? And this in Eastern Germany?

In 2011, the British architect, painter and dancer Saranjit Birdi created a work on the German military’s bombing of Coventry, titled Bombed – A Moonlight Sonata. For this performance, which combined live painting, interview material from survivors of the blitz and urban dance, the artist wanted to do a continuation in Dresden. In 2017, the time had come; Birdi was awarded a grant by the British Council’s Artists' International Development Fund to visit and research Dresden. He interviewed survivors of the February 13^th bombing and invited three dancers from Dresden to join the original performing trio from England[1]. In 2019 in the hall of the former Zentralwerk factory in Dresden, Birdi himself took to the stage along with two of his colleagues, Christopher Foster and Winston Nelson from the Birmingham club scene, and young Dresden artists Cindy Hammer (go plastic), Alexander Miller (The Saxonz) and Rika Yotsumoto.  

The performance, organized by the Societaetstheater as part of the Szene Europa festival, was followed by a discussion in which Birdi spoke about his own motivation, stating, “War comes and goes and at some point everything is normal.” Conflict is a recurring theme in his artwork. Birdi was born into the Sikh community, a religious group which emerged in Northern India in the 15^th century as an alternative to the hostility between Islam and Hinduism. The Sikh ethos is a humanistic holism with militant accents. Birdi touched on the background of this apparent contradiction:

The tenth Sikh Guru, Guru Govind, who is said to have died as a martyr, said, “When all has been tried, yet justice is not in sight, it is then right to pick up the sword, it is then right to fight.” In Sikhism, this is not about protecting the Sikh, but rather about something more fundamental: “If someone is in chains or oppressed, it's our duty to stand up and protect them.”

© Robert Lohse

Birdi did not elaborate, but in conversation it became apparent that from a victim-oriented stance, he had developed the drive to help shape the discourse on remembrance culture. As an Asian man in England in the 1970s and 1980s, it was difficult for Saranjit Birdi to even gain entrance to night clubs. On weekends it was impossible. Christopher Foster, an elementary school teacher and dancer in Birdi's performance added that the situation in the United Kingdom has since improved, even if racism has not disappeared.

When considering the past and the present, we must ask ourselves: What is the spotlight focused on? For example, we often say there are not enough men teaching in elementary schools instead of focusing on the fact that there are some. Is this motivating to the men teaching in elementary schools? Or is it rather counterproductive to highlight the problem? A constant barrage of negativity misses the mark – Instead of making an underrepresented group of people more visible, they instead make it smaller. As a person of color, Christopher addressed a central issue – to prevent victim statuses from being perpetuated over generations in our society, we need to look at the empowering moments of each one. Too much emphasis on victim status prevents people from establishing a positive sense of identity.

Today, Dresden has a vibrant Jewish community. This community does not want Judaism to exist solely in the context of holocaust remembrance, but rather to be firmly rooted in everyday life. Other groups such as the Sinti and Romani peoples and the queer community, by contrast, have a need to cultivate the memory of their predecessors' persecution and to embed this in the collective memory. There is much that the local remembrance culture must address in parallel as the period of suppressing the city's National Socialist past comes to an end.

During the right extremists’ rally on February 13, 2009, demonstrators made themselves heard via slogans and chants, claiming that their movement was akin to the peaceful Monday demonstrations that led to the revolution of 1989. “It’s about restoring democracy,” two elderly men said into my microphone on February 13, 2011, as they took part in a right extremist demonstration at Dresden’s main station. There was no talk of PEGIDA yet, but the streets on February 13, as two years later, were simply a stage fulfilling the urge of some to be seen, to celebrate a political self-confidence, and to do so in opposition to the democratic “establishment.”

These expressions of social unease are also seen an a consequence of the reunification of Germany. As Aleida Assmann discusses in her 2016 book Das Unbehagen der Erinnerungskultur (The Unease of Remembrance Culture), memories of the GDR demonstrate Germany’s fissured self-perception. The victims' right to societal recognition, information and counseling has a place in the memorials of GDR state terror, but beyond its former borders, the GDR citizens' history of victimization does not yet have the status of shared memory. The perpetrators’ perspective remains anonymous and the victims’ perspective privatized. Only the Peaceful Revolution has a place in shared memory (Assmann, 2016 121). While a culture of remembrance oriented towards preserving the past calls on National Socialism to claim responsibility, the approach of coming to terms with the past, such as that implemented for reflection on the history of the GDR in this country, does not make space for memorializing. The suppressed history of violence should be processed so that we can step into the future together. Thus, Assmann points out the asymmetry in Western and Eastern German remembrance discourse. She argues that the history of the GDR should be transferred from the memory of experience to national or European memory.

Recognizing trauma, rebuilding trust and listening, including new perspectives – these are the goals of constructive remembrance.

But how does remembrance work as a practice of encounter?

In order to enable practice in shifting perspectives in our society, it is frequently insufficient to provide opportunities for conversation. The situations themselves in which exchanges take place are mostly shaped in such a way that the course of conversation only offers limited opportunities for variation, for the discovery of particularistic perspectives. These perspectives often go unvoiced, for example, due to a self-perceived insignificance.

This is why artists like Dana Caspersen conceptualize forms of dialog where people can speak with one another in spaces where the rules differ from the norm. Democratic education also seeks new methods. To facilitate reconciliation in conflict zones, Yariv Lapid, the director of the William Levine Family Institute for Holocaust Education at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, took the approach of asking questions and listening without expecting any speedy solutions. When people with their various points of view are heard and their fears are seen, they gain a sense of self-worth that allows them to show interest in others, instead of falling into a perpetual rhythm of mutual segregation and othering. This reduces the potential for conflict amongst people and situations.

Engaging with the past, and situations where active recourse is no longer possible, can strengthen empathy. And this is best done when it succeeds in encouraging a curiosity about the different motivations and identities of each individual instead of indignant retrospection and a quite refusing inability to relate. It is not a matter of justifying actions historically, but rather of clearing the view to the question of responsibility. After all, we cannot know who we would have been in the past, but in the present we could use some guidance.

The Author

Dr. Barbara Lubich is an Italian filmmaker. She studied Sociology at TU Dresden and the University of Trento (double degree program) and received her PhD in Modern and Contemporary History at the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main and University of Trento. She was a research assistant at the Institute of Sociology at TU Dresden within the European research project ‘CRIC – Cultural Heritage and Identity after Conflict’ when she started working on the documentary film ‘Come Together. Dresden und der 13. Februar’ ([Come Together. Dresden and February 13], hechtfilm 2012). She is on the board of the cooperative association Zentralwerk Kultur- und Wohngenossenschaft eG, which combines living, work, art and culture in one location.

[1]As the leading artist, Birdi composed the music and designed the set as a single piece of art where painting, dance, music and dialog collide – a concept influenced by his studies of Bauhaus ideology.