The Berlin Republic

On the occasion of the JMB’s 25th anniversary, they look back on the years surrounding the museum’s founding, from the post-reunification years of the 1990s through the early 2000s. The heated and at times bitter debates surrounding National Socialism and the Holocaust ranged from Martin Walser’s “Auschwitz as a moral cudgel” to Daniel Goldhagen’s “willing executioners” and the crimes of the Wehrmacht, from restitution and compensation to remembrance in public spaces. While Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List (German premiere in 1994) brought about a shift in the nature of eyewitness testimony, the trial of Holocaust denier David Irving, which concluded in April 2000, set new legal precedents.

Looking back at these debates, it becomes clear that the culture of remembrance—criticized today as hegemonic and ritualized—has not long been taken for granted in German society. Since the end of World War II, it has been hard-won by various victim groups against significant political resistance. In the years of reunification in the 1990s, the approach to National Socialism, the Holocaust, and Jewish history was finally institutionalized and anchored in federal policy—though it remained politically contested—a process to which we also owe the founding of the JMB.

In a panel discussion with protagonists and observers of the debates on remembrance policy in the 1990s and 2000s, they look back on the turbulent years surrounding the opening of the Jewish Museum Berlin.

With:

Heinrich Wefing, journalist, head of the politics department at DIE ZEIT

Inka Bertz, former director of the JMB’s art collection

Michael Brenner (TBD), historian, since 1997 at the newly established Chair of Jewish History and Culture at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich

Moderator: Shelly Kupferberg