Looking at Berlin Memory Politics: In What Ways Does It Succeed?

By Hannah Pierce

When my class and I visited Berlin, I was surprised to see monuments to the city’s past wrongs everywhere. Everywhere I looked, there were stepping stones to commemorate the deportation of the city’s Jewish residents, signs about historical discriminatory laws, and monuments to past atrocities. I also found Berlin to be a vibrant, culturally diverse city that had managed to strike a good balance between atoning for past sins while building a better future for its residents. The ways that Berlin commemorated and marked its tragedies stood out to me amidst the background of the other Central European cities I have visited this semester. While many cities like Budapest, Warsaw, and Prague are all trying to atone for past wrongs and move forward, I think that Berlin manages to strike this balance especially well. In my paper, I will look at three contentious periods in Berlin’s history: the period where Germany became a colonial power starting at the end of the 19^th century, WWII when Berlin was the center of Nazi power, and the communist era when Berlin was the capital of East Germany and a Soviet satellite state, to find out what Berlin is doing well in cultivating public memory. I will also look at how modern-day Berlin does not get bogged down by its past, but also moves forward to create a place where many different kinds of people can feel safe and welcome.

The first period that Berlin atones for in the monuments that I visited was the colonial period. During the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, Germany established colonies in Africa, including present-day Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, Cameroon, Togo, Ghana, and Namibia (German Federal Foreign Office). These colonies had numerous human rights violations, including the Namibian genocide. In Monuments to the Unthinkable, Clint Smith writes, “An estimated 80,000 people were exterminated through forced labor, starvation, and disease in concentration camps there.” (Smith 31). The scale of suffering in German colonies was extreme, and Germany is just now starting to account for it.

One of the groups in Berlin that is trying to bring awareness to and create conversations around Germany’s colonial past is the nonprofit Berlin Postkolonial. The organization is one of a group of nonprofits that collaborated to put together “Dekolonial Memory Culture and the City”. This project included historical and artistic exhibitions, event series, city mapping, as well as other public initiatives to make visible Berlin’s colonial past (Erinnerungskultur in Der Stadt). I was introduced to the Dekolonial initiative when I visited Treptower Park in Berlin. Otherwise, my visit to the park would have gone differently. The park bears no physical references to its colonial past. Dekolonial worked to research and raise awareness about Treptower Park being used as a human zoo in 1896. The First German Colonial Exhibition brought men, women, and children from Germany’s African colonies to Treptower Park to raise support for Germany’s colonial endeavors. These people were exploited and put on display for German audiences to gawk at (The Human Zoo at Treptower Park – Decolonial City Tour). Without the work of Dekolonial, I would have simply thought that I was just visiting the Berlin Soviet War Memorial on a sunny fall day. Another lasting contribution of Dekolonial is the establishment of the “first permanent exhibition on colonialism, racism, and black resistance in a Berlin museum” which is housed near Treptower Park (Looking Back – the First German Colonial Exhibition of 1896 in Berlin-Treptow).

Today, the Berlin government funds groups like Berlin Postkolonial to continue to lead discussions with the public, create art exhibits, and publish findings about Berlin’s colonial past (Erinnerungskultur in Der Stadt). In this way, the Berlin government is showing that it is willing to recognize and atone for its legacy of genocide and colonialism in East Africa. However, this willingness to recognize the legacy of genocide and colonialism came after extensive grassroots efforts from individuals and nonprofits like Dekolonial. Some people argue that reparations also need to be made to African nations on the part of Berlin and Germany in general. While I agree with this, I believe that raising awareness is an important first step.

In addition to accounting for its colonial past, Berlin has also done a good job of addressing its role in the Holocaust and the tragedies that it caused during World War II. When I was visiting Berlin, I was impressed by how thorough the monuments to the victims of the Nazi government were. Many groups that I did not even read about in school were represented. My class and I visited monuments to the murdered Jews of Europe, the Sinti and Romani, the LGBTQ+ community, and the victims of the T4 program. All of these monuments were created between 2005-2014, and while some were more robust and included information centers, and some, in the minds of my classmates and me, “needed some work”, I thought that all of the monuments made an intentional effort to remember the victims of Nazi rule during World War II.

An especially moving monument to the Jewish victims of the Nazi regime is found in the Grunewald train station in Berlin titled the “Memorial to the Deported Jews in Berlin”. One of three found at the train station site, the memorial consists of a large wall of reinforced concrete with the silhouettes of people carved into it. These imposing stone cutouts represent the Jewish people who were forced to depart Grunewald train station to be taken to death camps. The cutouts appear to depict something surreal and haunting. The figures look like ghosts who exist in a liminal space, something between our world and another. Like the shadows left behind by the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, their physical bodies may be gone, but their essence lingers. This monument is located in the heart of a wealthy, residential neighborhood, forcing its inhabitants to interact with it every time they want to take a train or walk their dog. Many of the memorials to the victims of the Nazi regime are like the Grunewald train station memorial in that they demand that people look at them. However, they are not too convoluted as to be unreadable by the regular passerby. The other memorials at the site include the Track 17 memorial funded by the Deutsche Bahn, and the final one is a collection of birch trees transplanted by a Polish artist from the area of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Many other Central European cities have memorials to the victims of the Nazi regime, especially to Jews murdered during the Holocaust. But I think one way that Berlin stands out in its commemoration efforts is by making its memorials easy for everyone to interact with. The decentralized “Places of Remembrance” memorial in Berlin’s Schöneberg district serves as a good example. This memorial consists of signs that each contains the text of a different discriminatory law that was enacted by the Nazis between 1933 to 1945. These laws were the mechanisms that led to the genocide of the Jewish people. At first, the Jews were removed from their communities and ostracized, and then they lost citizenship. Finally, these steps culminated in the deportations and mass murders in the death camps. By representing these laws with colorful pictures on lamp posts, Berlin created a memorial that is easily accessible to the public, including children who are often excluded from learning about tragedies. Similarly, the memorial to the victims of T4, part of the Nazi’s eugenics campaign, had many accessibility features that made it possible to be experienced by people with a variety of physical and mental disabilities. These features include braille, sign language, the slant of the slab of concrete where the content of the exhibition was presented, making it readable for people in wheelchairs, the multiple language options, and raised lines on the ground designed to help blind people find braille and navigate the monument. These choices served the purpose of enhancing accessibility for this memorial because it means that people with disabilities, the same group targeted in the T4 program, can interact with it.

I was overall very impressed with the memorials to the victims of the Nazi regime in Berlin. The city of Berlin has done a lot to discuss and make amends for its Nazi past. This also includes reparations to some of the families of the victims of those who were killed during the Holocaust. The work is ongoing, and some memorials can be expanded and corrected, but the desire to represent all victims is admirable and something that other Central European cities could also engage in.

A final period that Berlin is trying to make amends for is the period of communist rule in East Berlin. From 1947 to 1989, the eastern half of Germany, including the eastern half of Berlin, was established as a satellite state of the Soviet Union (Hohensee). A communist government that would remain loyal to the Soviet Union’s interests was installed, and for decades, the people of East Germany and East Berlin lived under a repressive regime that committed multiple human rights violations. When the regime toppled in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall, Berlin and the rest of eastern Germany began the process of opening the state and Stasi archives and atoning for the wrongs committed against its citizens (Bilker 5).

One of the things that the German government has done to try to alleviate the harmful atmosphere of surveillance cultivated during the communist era is to open the Stasi archives to regular Berliners. Now, anyone who lived in East Germany during communism can come to the old Stasi headquarters and ask to see their Stasi file. What this does for the citizens of former East Germany is it allows them to finally have closure on their past. While it is a personal decision for those who choose to view their files, the people who do choose to view them express a feeling that the missing puzzle piece of their past has been found, and they can finally see the whole picture of their history (Bilker 16). The Stasi archives also allow the public to find out about the past lives of politicians and public-facing figures. This comes with the downside of politicians’ entire careers being ruined by the discovery of their names in the Stasi files, even though many of these cases hold more complexity than the public may believe (Bilker 9).

The Berlin Wall Memorial in East Berlin, in my opinion, explained and atoned for Berlin’s communist past well. The Berlin Wall served as a physical barrier that separated people in communist East Berlin from those in capitalist West Berlin. The government of East Germany claimed that the wall was made to keep Western saboteurs out, but many living in East Berlin believed that it was to keep them in. This created a situation in which East Berliners who were desperate to cross over to West Berlin would sometimes risk crossing the wall and be shot by snipers or die in the process (Merriman). The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 also marked the death of the communist regime in Germany. Nowadays, a memorial sits at the site where a portion of the wall used to stand. The memorial features remnants of the wall and the militarized zone, as well as photos of the people who died trying to cross this wall. By showing photos of those who died crossing, the Berlin Wall Memorial goes above and beyond in its commemoration efforts. Seeing the actual faces of the victims of the communist regime allows visitors to have a more personal connection to these people. Knowing their stories and why they were so desperate to cross also helps those who visit the museum gain empathy for them and their fates. This empathy for others and their circumstances is how we prevent tragedies like the shooting of civilians from happening again. In this way, the memorial not only owns up to the past sins of Berlin’s former communist government but also brilliantly attempts to prevent it from happening in the future.

The empathy that the photos at the Berlin Wall memorial evoke in visitors also touches on an important thing that Berlin is doing to reckon with and not be bogged down by its past. This is to move forward with opening itself up to immigration and rejecting cultural, religious, and sexual homogeneity. When I was in Berlin, I found it to be a lively, diverse city. I spoke to many residents who were Syrian, Turkish, and North African. After the fall of communism, Berlin, as a fully reunited city, opened itself to immigration from around the world. This is a way of righting past wrongs around the historical deportations and exclusions of certain ethnic groups. I also noticed many pride flags. Before the war, Berlin had a notable gay scene, and after the fall of communism, Berlin again has a lively LGBTQ+ community, something that the city has intentionally cultivated with friendly laws and policies.

The memory politics that I experienced Berlin engaging in stood out to me when I visited. I saw monuments to victims of the Nazi genocide as well as crimes committed in the communist era. I also learned more about Germany’s colonial past through a discussion about Treptower Park and German colonies in Africa. None of these monuments or discussions would have been possible without the grassroots efforts of community members and nonprofits who challenged the Berlin government to acknowledge Berlin’s role in the suffering that people endured during these periods in German history. However, healing from past wrongs does not just mean Berlin’s government admitting what it did in the past; it means trying to rectify these past wrongs and create a society that includes everyone. This final part is something that I believe Berlin is still in the process of doing, but so far has impressed me.

Work Cited

1. Bilker, Burkhard. “Piecing Together the Secrets of the Stasi.” The New Yorker, 2024, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/06/03/piecing-together-the-secrets-of-the-stasi
2. “Erinnerungskultur in Der Stadt.” Dekoloniale, 2024, dekoloniale.de/en/about#Structure_of_the_Project.
3. German Federal Foreign Office. “Colonialism as Shared History: Exploring Germany’s colonial past.” 2020. https://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/en/aussenpolitik/regionaleschwerpunkte/afrika/shared-history-conference-2402998
4. Hohensee, Naraelle. “Negotiating the Past in Berlin: The Palast Der Republik.” Smarthistory: The Center for Public Art History, 2018, smarthistory.org/palast-der-republik/.
5. “Looking Back – the First German Colonial Exhibition of 1896 in Berlin-Treptow.” Museumsportal Berlin, 2025, www.museumsportal-berlin.de/en/events/oeffentliche-fuehrung-durch-die-ausstellung-zurueckgeschaut-looking-back-die-erste-deutsche-kolonialausstellung-von-1896-in-berlin-treptow/.
6. Merriman, Helena. “The Story of the Tunnel 29.” The BBC, 2021, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/extra/Od4dL9Lip2/tunnel_29
7. Smith, Clint. “Monuments to the Unthinkable.” The Atlantic, 2022, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/12/holocaust-remembrance-lessons-america/671893/
8. “The Human Zoo at Treptower Park – Decolonial City Tour.” Decolonial City Tour – One Step into the Past, Two Steps into the Future., 12 June 2025, www.dekolonialestadtfuehrung.de/en/2025/02/the-human-zoo-at-treptower-park/.
9. Yoon, Jack. Monuments of Berlin. 2025, Berlin, Germany.